Humanism and Terror An Essay on the Communist Problem by Maurice Merleau-Ponty Translated and with Notes by John O'Neill BEACON PRESS I BOSTON First published in French as Humamsme et Terreur, Essat sur le Problime Communtstt © 1947, Editions Gallimard English translation copyright © 1969 by Beacon Press All rights reserved Beacon Press books are published under the auspices of the Unitarian Universalis! Association Printed in the United States of America 898887 98 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 1908-1961. Humanism and terror. Translation of: Humanisme et terreur. Includes bibliographical references. 1. Communism. 2. Terrorism, 3. Communism- Soviet Union. I. Title. HX40JM4213 1985 335.43'0947 71-84796 ISBN 0-8070-0277-1 Contents TRANSLATORS NOTE Vll AUTHOR'S PREFACE xiU PART ONE! TERROR i. Koestier's Dilemmas i ii. Bukjiarin and the Ambiguity of History 25 HI. Trotsky's Rationalism 7/ PART TWO: THE HUMANIST PERSPECTIVE iv. From the Proletarian to the Commissar 101 v. The Yogi and the Proletarian 149 CONCLUSION 178 Translator's Note Humanism and Terror first appeared in 1947. It is the trans­ lator's belief that Merleau-Ponty's argument, as well as that of Koestler in Darkness at Noon (1946) raises questions that are still relevant to the fateful connection between revolu­ tion and violence. All the same, it may be useful to con­ temporary readers to recall some of the background to the dispute between Roestler and Merleau-Ponty and the way it involved intellectuals on the French left whether Commu­ nist or non-Communist. I shall not attempt to trace in any detail the postwar de­ velopments which are the setting for Humanism and Terror. To do this would involve a knowledge of the history of the French Communist Party and the spectrum of French so­ cialism or left thought which is beyond the translator's com­ petence. Fortunately, there are a number of such studies to which the reader may be referred.1 1 David Cautc, Communism and the French Intfilntimh, Nrw Ymk, Tlir Macmillan Company, 1964, has an excellent bibliography, ('luilrx A. Muauil, Communism and the French Left, London, Wcidcntclil and NuiiUmi, H)(t\; Al­ fred J. Rieber, Stalin and the French Communist Party. Nrw Ymk and I^>ndon, viii Humanism and Terror Merleau-Ponty's argument is especially difficult to under­ stand if the radical alternatives forced upon French politics by the Cold War split between America and the Soviet Union is accepted without question. In 1947 there was still a chance, at least in the mind of a non-Communist left intellectual like Merleau-Ponty, that France and Europe would not have to become a satellite either to America or the Soviet Union. The hopes of the Resistance for immedi­ ate revolutionary change after the war had withered away in the tripartist tangles of the Communists, Socialists, and Christian Democrats. In March 1947, the Truman doctrine was initiated and in April the Big Four discussions on Ger­ many failed. The introduction of the Marshall Plan in June of the same year, condemned by Molotov's walkout on the Paris Conference in July, hastened the breakdown of tri- partism. Suspicion of the anti-Soviet implications of the Marshall Plan caused many of the Left to look toward a neutralist position for Europe, but made them uncertain whether to build this position around the Socialist Party, which had failed so far to take any independent line, or the Communist Party, which could be expected to follow a Soviet line. But the drift was toward a pro-Western, anti- Soviet European integration led by the center and right elements of the French Third Forte, including the Gaullists. Within two years, the formation of the Brussels Treaty Or­ ganization, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and Columbia University Press, 1962; George Lichtheim, Marxism in Modern France, New York and London, Columbia University Press, 1966; Frederick F. Ritsch, The French Left and the European Idea, 7947-/949, New York, Pageant Press, 1966; B. D. Graham, The French Socialists and Tripartisme, 1944-1947, Toronto, The University of Toronto Press, 1965. Translator's Note ix the Soviet Cominform brought down the iron curtain of which Winston Churchill had spoken in his Fulton Speech in March of 1946. The intellectual French Left was in an impossible situa­ tion which no combination of Marxism or existentialism seemed capable of remedying. French capitalism was bad, but American capitalism was even more anathema to the left, if only because it was in the rudest of health interna­ tionally, though perhaps not at home. At the same time, French socialism was anything but independent and its chances looked no better with Communist help. In such a situation it was impossible to be an anti-Communist if this meant being pro-American, witnessing the Americanization of Europe, and foreswearing the Communists who had fought bravely in the Resistance. On the other hand, it was not possible to be a Communist if this meant being blind to the hardening of the Soviet regime and becoming a wit­ ness to the Communist brand of imperialism which broke so many Marxist minds. It is not surprising that many on the Left as well as the Right were unable to bear such ambiguity and therefore welcomed any sign to show clearly which side to support, even if it meant a "conversion" to the most extreme left and right positions. The attention drawn to those whose god had failed them is thus understandable.2 Koestler's Darkness at Noon reveals in its very title the gift of antithesis which generates a bad conversion for the lack of a genuine synthesis, which might have been achieved if Koestler had known how to grasp the lived relation bc- 2 The God That Failed, edited by Richard Crossman, New York, Harper, 1949. x Humanism and Terror twcen the senses and ideology in a man's character. This is not the place to engage in a criticism of the literary quali­ ties of Koestler's novel. It certainly has its truly great mo­ ments. But ultimately it fails to come to grips with its central problem: to create characters who inhabit their own history and live through choices within it rather than to present characters who operate by means of simplistic moral alternatives, decided upon before their story begins.3 In any case, Merleau-Ponty's criticism of Darkness at Noon eschews its literary qualities, even though these are not independent of its political and moral logic, which is the focus of Merleau-Ponty's own essay. The nature of the relation between communism and the French intellectuals has not been exhausted by any of the political, psychological, or sociological studies which have tackled it. Darkness at Noon may have killed communism for many people, but it also produced converts. But the issue that concerned Merleau-Ponty was not the life of commu­ nism as an institution. He was well aware of the changes in Communist institutions. He understood that the Revolution was learning to live with history. What he wanted to get at was how it had happened that theoretical Marxism had hardened into the dogma that made the views on history and politics of Koestler's Commissar a plausible account of Marxism. Insofar as Soviet communism was represented in Koestler's portrait and in the revelations that came with the 3 John O'Neill, "Situation and Temporality," Philosophy and Phenomeno- logical Research, Vol. XXVIII, No. 3, March 1968, pp. 413-422; Irving Howe, Politics and the Novel, Cleveland and New York, The World Publishing G>m- pany, 1957. Translator's Note xi Cominform campaign against Tito, the Rajk-Kosov trials, and the Soviet labor camps, Merleau-Ponty was also a wit­ ness to the disenchantment of European Communists. Yet at the same time in Humanism and Terror he is engaged in the creative interpretation of theoretical Marxism which was taking hold in France just when communism was begin­ ning to lose its grip on the intellectuals. Thus, as George Lichtheim points out in his study Marx­ ism in Modern France, unless we are able to keep these two developments clear, we shall run the risk of confusing Merleau-Ponty's elaboration of Marxist philosophy of his­ tory and revolution with an apologia for the Soviet Union and the Moscow Trials. This is the error made by the hard­ line French Communists who attacked Merleau-Ponty, fail­ ing to see that what they regarded as an anti-Communist argument was simply the destruction of their obsolete Marx­ ist dogmas in a creative interpretation of the kind of Marxist thought that might live in history without the need to be protected from it.4 Toronto, Spring ig6g * John O'Neill, "Revolution and Responsibility," Syin|>osiiin>. I'tirnomenolo^y and Historical Understanding, Conference on the Philosophy ol History and the Social Sciences, York University, Toronto, April 10-1.2, i<)f><>. Author's Preface COMMUNISM is often discussed in terms of the contrast be­ tween deception, cunning, violence, propaganda, and the respect for truth, law, and individual consciousness—in short, the opposition between political realism and liberal values. Communists reply that in democracies cunning, violence, propaganda, and realpoliti\ in the guise of liberal principles are the substance of foreign or colonial politics and even of domestic politics. Respect for law and liberty has served to justify police suppression of strikes in America; today1 it serves even to justify military suppression in Indochina or in Palestine and the development of an American empire in the Middle East. The material and moral culture of England presupposes the exploitation of the colonies.