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TOTALITARIANISM and PARTISAN REVIEW Benli ABSTRACT Title of Document: DIALECTICS OF DISENCHANTMENT: TOTALITARIANISM AND PARTISAN REVIEW Benli Moshe Shechter, Ph.D., 2011 Directed By: Professor Vladimir Tismaneanu, Department of Government and Politics This dissertation takes the literary and culturally modern magazine, Partisan Review (1934-2003), as its case study, specifically recounting its early intellectual history from 1934 to 1941. During this formative period, its contributing editors broke from their initial engagement with political radicalism and extremism to re-embrace the demo-liberalism of America's foundational principles during, and in the wake of, the Second World War. Indeed, Partisan Review 's history is the history of thinking and re-thinking “totalitarianism” as its editors journeyed through the dialectics of disenchantment. Following their early (mis)adventures pursuant of the radical politics of literature, their break in the history of social and political thought, sounding pragmatic calls for an end to ideological fanaticism, was one that then required courage, integrity, and a belief in the moral responsibility of humanity. Intellectuals long affiliated with the journal thus provide us with models of eclectic intellectual life in pursuit of the open society, as does, indeed, the Partisan Review . DIALECTICS OF DISENCHANTMENT: TOTALITARIANISM AND PARTISAN REVIEW. By BENLI MOSHE SHECHTER Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2011 Advisory Committee: Professor Vladimir Tismaneanu, Chair Professor C. Fred Alford Professor Charles E. Butterworth Professor James M. Glass Professor Roberto Patricio Korzeniewicz © Copyright by Benli M. Shechter 2011 Preface What steered me in the direction of this dissertation topic—beyond my supervisor— was my interest in what seems to be a perennial battle: intellectuals versus anti- intellectuals. Perhaps the signature event in this epic confrontation came with the anti-intellectual purges of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China (1966- 1976) whose excesses would spill into the excesses of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia (1975-1979). For Mao, intellectuals expressed their “general outlook through their way of looking at knowledge. Is it privately owned or publicly owned.” Those intellectuals attempting to maintain a liberalism of the mind rather than its collectivization he deemed mere “experts” and not “reds.”1 Despite Deng Xiaoping’s economic liberalism and market-reform that followed in the wake of the overthrow of the Gang of Four in 1976, bringing to a close a traumatic chapter in Chinese history, anti-intellectualism in post-totalitarian China still persists. One need only mention the continued incarceration of Nobel Peace Laureate Liu Xiaobo and the recent detention—and release this past June—of dissident artist Ai Weiwei. But in the history of ideas, this sometimes (and all-too-often) fatal confrontation stretches back even further. My unconventional entry into the story was in learning of the factional struggle over control of the First International (1864- 1876), a struggle pitting two giants of modern revolutionary history, the socialist Karl Marx against the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin. The gist of the Marx-Bakunin polemic—the polemic that would ultimately lay the seeds for the future “red” 1 See section 11, on “The Transformation of Intellectuals,” in Mao’s A Critique of Soviet Economics (New York: Monthly Review, 1977). ii (Marxist) and “black” (anarchist) divide and that led in 1872 to Marx’s immediate decision both to have Bakunin purged from the International and to have its headquarters moved to New York City, effectively thereby scuttling it rather than have it remain in the hands of Bakunin’s followers—has mistakenly been attributed to strategic differences regarding the role of the state in the future socialist revolution, rather than to the far more fundamental theoretical abyss that separated the two class fractions. Thus, we have inherited a caricaturized account of authoritarian Marxists angling to seize totalitarian control of the state, on the one hand, pitted against anti- authoritarian anarchists set on the destruction of state, on the other; and while the Marxists would employ a proletarian class dictatorship to nationalize all of industry and to then redistribute the wealth accordingly, the anarchists would rely on the free association of federated communes to collectivize and pool all wealth. Admittedly, as in most caricatures, there might be some truth to these exaggerated oversimplifications. The problem, however, is that it glosses right over the fundamental issue separating the two camps, i.e., “the question of the meaning of exploitation and the composition of the exploited class.” 2 It was disagreement over these two theoretical issues that led to differences in strategy, and not the other way around. Therefore, it is the theoretical concerns that merit consideration, for the state/non-state and political/apolitical issues are second order in this regard, and so are largely derivative of the former. 2 Hodges, Donald C. “Bakunin’s Controversy With Marx: An Analysis of the Tensions Within Modern Socialism,” American Journal of Economics and Sociology (October 1961), 262. iii The Marxist utopia projects that after the proletarian revolution the existence of class antagonisms and of classes, generally, will be swept away. No more social classes, thus no more social exploitation, either. Instead, “In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.” 3 This was decidedly not how Bakunin foresaw reality on the morrow of the revolution. What Bakunin did see in Marx’s brave new world was only the future prospect of “bourgeois Socialism . a new, more hypocritical and more skillful, but no less oppressive, exploitation of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie.” 4 For once the state becomes the sole “banker, capitalist, organizer, and director of all national labor, and the distributor of all its products,” such being the fundamental principle of Marxian communism, 5 manual workers deprived thereby of access to seats of power will be just as dependent upon the new class of workers made ex-workers —meaning that labor will be just as dependent upon the new class of scientist-savants and bureau-politicos—as they had all been under the capitalists’ previous tenure. What Bakunin intuited therefore was “that the labor theory of value could be used to justify the exploitation of a proletariat of manual wage earners by a salariat of professional and administrative employers.” 6 And thereby, Bakunin had stumbled upon a case for 3 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in Robert C. Tucker’s The Marx-Engels Reader, 2 nd Edition (New York: Norton, 1978), 490-491. 4 Michael Bakunin, in G. P. Maximoff, ed., The Political Philosophy of Bakunin: Scientific Anarchism . (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1953), 289. 5 Michael Bakunin, “Letters to a Frenchman on the Present Crisis,” in Sam Dolgoff, ed., Bakunin on Anarchism (Montreal: Black Rose Books. 2002), 217. 6 In volume one of Capital , Marx writes, “All labour of a higher or more complicated character than average labour is expenditure of labour-power of a more costly kind, labour-power whose production has cost more time and labour, and which therefore has a higher value, than unskilled or simple labour- iv redefining the proletariat; a redefinition all the more consistent with Marx’s alleged goal of abolishing exploitation. 7 When Bakunin read in the Communist Manifesto that the “first step in the revolution of the working class, is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class,” he immediately wondered: which proletariat? 8 And, under whose dead body! He thus came to see that Marx and the authoritarian Marxists were representatives of “the intellectual proletariat,” the upper layer, most cultured, privileged and educated sector of its wage-earners; while he saw his self and the anti-authoritarian anarchists as representatives of “the flower of the proletariat,” the bottom layer, most uncultivated, disinherited, miserable and illiterate of its wage-earners. 9 His was therefore a fundamental reformulation of the two basic classes of modern society; so that rather than seeing the increasing polarization of society into two hostile blocs of bourgeois and proletarians, generally, Bakunin depicted the narrative as one pegging “the privileged classes ,” including those in possession only of bourgeois education against “the working classes ” deprived of all education, instruction and power.10 Bakunin thus saw that the coming struggle, rather than pinning the “haves” against the “have-nots,” would more fundamentally pin “knows” against “know-nots.” (Though, to be sure, as Max Nomad has amply documented, the “knows” will then power. This power being of a higher value, its consumption is labour of a higher class , labour that created in equal times proportionally higher values than unskilled labour does” (Marx 1978, 360, emphasis mine). 7 Hodges, Donald C. “Bakunin’s Controversy With Marx,” 263; Donald Clark Hodges, The Literate Communist: 150 Years of the Communist Manifesto (New York: Peter Lang 1999), 119-121. 8 Marx and Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” 490; Bakunin, The Political Philosophy
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