Overthrow

Long time no post. I’ve been chronically busy with school, but I feel like I’ve been productive with learning and expanding my intellectual horizons. I’ll be posting a series of summaries and comments on Ludwig Feuerbach’s Lectures on the Essence of Religion fairly soon. In my opinion Feuerbach’s philosophical anthropology is infinitely more valuable than most of the arguments coming from the “New Atheists” today (Dawkins, Dennet, Hitchens, et al.). This isn’t to say there is nothing of value in the “New Atheist” thinkers, but as I’ll hopefully be able to prove, Feuerbach provides us with a much more robust, rational, and defensible position for Atheism. I would even argue that Feuerbach’s atheism manages to outdo Nietszche’s (but that’s a topic for another time).

I may also post summaries of Foucault’s History of Sexuality Vol 2., and Andy Clark’s Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence. I was also contemplating doing some writings on early Christian thinkers. We’ll see.

I’m pretty tired right now. But I just spewed this out in ten minutes (mainly to act as fuel for thinking about this more systematically in a few days.) I was watching some lectures by Badiou on love and wanted to get some thoughts down. I don’t actually expect anyone to find this comprehensible, but you can try if you want.

For Badiou, there is a gap between the “Event” and “Being” (what “is”). The event is outside of ontology. Having an extrinsic relation to ontology, the event is an indiscernible element existing outside of a given set. The event is the opening of something distinct and new, the event can’t be reduced to its causes or conditions; thus it is a complete “break” or “rupture”– a radical discontinuity. The event transforms the whole given parameters of a society or field– it introduces a crack in the foundations, so to speak. Badiou seems to differ here from traditional Marxists or Hegelians in that there is not a dialectical relation between quantity(the process) and quality (the event). The event for Badiou appears like a divine intervention. (Thus perhaps leading to a quietist brand of politics where one waits by obediently “waiting for Godot”). We can delineate the general features leading up to a revolutionary event, but the revolution can’t happen if there isn’t a revolutionary subject to carry out the task. Or as Badiou writes, “Only if there is a subject, can an even occur within an eventual site.” Note the word “eventual”– the event is a “potential,” not a necessary, automatic process independent of the working class.

Love, for Badiou, is a supplement to a lack of sexual connection….

For some reason, I am reminded of the way “break ups” or divorces often seem to occur. Or perhaps this is just what I’ve experienced: we have an event (love) which proceeds through to its negation, where one subject (the other) engages in an act of self-erasure of love’s “eventual” dimension– once the necessary job (say, merely gaining experience on the ‘dating market,’ etc.) is complete, the subject not only liquidates and overthrows the other (metaphorically, I hope), they even retroactively starve the ex-lover of their “eventual” status, reducing the “other” (object petit a) to an accident, a meaningless aleatory encounter, a monstrous abomination, a freakish excess of libidinal development. Once normal, mundane life returns, the traumatic origins of the event are disavowed or purged. This uncanny contingency – the possibility of a sequence of events reaching its end (finitude of love relationships) — haunts every encounter. There always hums the chance that your lover can up and leave you, disavow every experience you perceived as authentic, erase the traces, However, despite these attempts at self-erasure, the event paradoxically succeeds. There is no repression, without a return of the repressed.

What are the various attitudes one could accept after failed love? Perhaps melancholic attachment to the past (silent, inward, unyielding in its intensity)? Or to quote Zizek, “what if, however, the future one should be faithful to is the future of the past itself, in other words, the emancipatory potential that was not realized due to the failure of the past attempts and for this reason continues to haunt us?” Do we not all feel that love will “set us free” when we are initially seduced?

For Badiou there are four responses to the love event: The obscure subject, the reactive subject, resurrection, and the faithful subject. Zizek argues contra Badiou that there are six different modalities of subjectivity in response to the love-event (and other events, too):
1)Fidelity
2)Normalization, reintegration (marriage)
3)Outright rejection of the eventual status (libertinage, the transformation of the event into sexual adventure
4)Thoroughgoing rejection of sexual love (abstinence)
5)Obscurantist suicidal mortal passion a la tristan
6)Resurrected love (reencounter).

I must admit, I’ve acted in all of these ways at one time or another. What attitude should we adopt on the failure of the event (or rather, what I mean by this question is, “what attitude should “I” adopt)? I believe we should reject the melancholic attachment to the past. It doesn’t seem that the tragic ending of a “love-event” is in some way the “truth” of what love signifies: the ideals of connection, warmth, companionship, completion, intellectual/sexual stimulation, atonement, freedom, etc. We should make the choice to see love as set of possible outcomes– the key here is that possibility trumps actuality – where there exists a surplus in it beyond its actualization, the smoldering ember that burns underneath the dead and dessicated facade of complete indifference after the event fails. What then? What do we do? Love harder (trite, I know). Mhmm. The failure of the event, the collapse of “previous world” signifies to those who still keep their aspirations locked deep down that we repeat the act more radically, more systematically, more comprehensively. But, remember, we should keep fidelity as the bearers of certain questions (made in the spirit of the initial love-event in the sequence).

Hegel presupposed that the readers of his day were familiar with what he calls the “method of science” which was developed in his works Logic and Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences (Hegel 1; 36). One cannot understand Hegel’s Philosophy of Right without first understanding the method that guides the work. In Hegel’s view, the nature of reality is contradictory, dynamic, and fluid. But from the chaos and flux of reality, the underlying laws can be discovered and understood. There are an extraordinary amount of places where this can be seen. One such example of this is the economic sphere. Hegel writes, “Political economy is the science that starts from this standpoint; it’s task is to exhibit the mass-relationships and mass-movements in their qualitative and quantitative determinacy and complexity” (Hegel 152). Hegel attempts to explain the developments of mediations (the resolving of tensions, differences, and conflicts), which are absolutely essential for an individual consciousness to identify itself within the totality of civil society. Within the Philosophy of Right, Hegel is concerned with freedom in the realm of what he calls “objective Geist,” or the sphere of abstract right, morality, civil society, and the state. One of Hegel’s goals, among many, is to develop a conception of freedom which pays proper attention to the structure of the will. What lies at the heart of Hegel’s thought and binds the extremely broad range of topics discussed in the Philosophy of Right is the concept of freedom. But what precisely is freedom?

Hegel does not adopt a single procedure when dealing with concepts and for this reason it is hard to pin down a distinct, concise definition of the word “freedom”. Indeed, Hegel rejects this manner of proceeding. Speculative thought (the name Hegel gives his own philosophy), though it may make use of, does not proceed by setting up definitions or propositions and defending them through formal argument or supporting evidence (Hegel 12). Instead it seeks to understand and express the immanent development of the concepts which it investigates. Therefore when dealing with political and social freedom, the goal of speculative thought is not to argue for or against definite accounts of freedom, or critique them from an external perspective (for instance, from the perspective of the state), but rather to simply develop the idea of freedom, or as Hegel puts it, “it must observe the subject matter’s own immanent development” (Hegel 12).

Hegel’s system of dialectical thought attempts to grasp the inherent process of development of concepts on its own terms. There is an inner evolution and an inner content that follows its own logic. Each philosophical position can be shown as incoherent on its own terms and by its own standards simply by thinking through the matter. Hegel states, “dialectic then is not the external doing of subjective thinking, but rather the content’s very soul organically putting forth its branches and fruit” (Hegel 36). The dialectical method is not merely a matter of subjective critique, nor is it merely a matter of pasting our own rationality onto the way things are, but rather of understanding a theory’s own laws as they develop like a seedling becoming a plant or DNA becoming a living organism. For this reason, Hegel does not attempt to discredit adverse philosophical positions by using his own external terms and standards – which would not be recognized by the opponent – but rather the key to refuting a position lies in revealing the inner criteria by which the truth of a position is judged and then showing how that very position fails measure up to its own standards. Dialectical thought is concerned with explicating what is actually rational within the movement of things as they are in themselves, i.e. the dialectical method is one of internal refutation and expansion.

However, merely positing contradictions, dichotomies, and antimonies does not go deep or far enough– it is a negative critique, a half-measure. Hegel contrasts his method to Plato’s dialectic (the Socratic method), which would often take an opponent’s immediate, unthought out proposition or statement and twist it around until it imploded. Hegel states that his method is contrary to the one which takes a viewpoint and “dissolves it, confuses it, pursues it this way and that, and has as its sole task the deduction of the contrary from what it starts with” (Hegel 36). Hegel’s “higher” dialectic goes beyond simply pointing out tensions and contradictions by showing the way contradictions get resolved, by showing the immanent results and positive content of a concept. Thought, for Hegel, must think through the contradictions in its categories and revolve them. Unlike other philosophers, Hegel does not merely present arguments, counter-arguments and conclusions, but rather attempts to uncover the emergence of the tensions and limitations within an explanation or theory until it gives way to a deeper understanding which is able to overcome contradictions by both preserving and canceling what is negative within a concept. Hegel’s speculative method can be seen in his discussion of the will, which unfolds in three essential stages or moments. The will, and with it the development of freedom, moves from the universal, into the particular, and finally the individual.

The universal will is characterized by the capacity to abstract from all desires, impulses, and inclinations and satisfy none of them. This first moment of the will tarrying towards its freedom involves what Hegel calls “pure indeterminacy” of the self, or as Hegel explains, the “absolute possibility of my abstracting from every determination within which I find myself or which I may have posited within myself, the flight from all content as restrictive” (Hegel 20). This type of freedom is completely negative and primitive, but it also distinguishes humans from animals; it entails not being tied down to any particular frame of mind or desire, but rather having the ability to sever oneself from any particular engagement and remain free from the constraints and limitations of definite activities and particular courses of action. The universal will posits the infinite; thus it does not make choices because it would then be stuck in finitude. Hegel identified this form of freedom in the examples of suicide, mysticism, and the Terror of the French Revolution.

The particular will not only abstracts, but reflects on desires, impulses, and inclinations to figure out which one it will choose in order to determine, clarify, or orient itself towards a particular course of action. Even in the common, everyday understanding, freedom does not solely mean not being weighed down or restricted; it also involves the positive ability to engage in particular actions if one wants to do so. The second stage of freedom (particular will) also contains the ability to accede into a definite state of mind or activity and to concern oneself with something particular. The ability to abstract from one’s desires is an essential component in higher forms of freedom. Since the particular will can abstract from all of its desires, it’s not fettered (like an animal) to act on anyone of them (even the strongest desires)– thus the particular will is free to pick and choose between them. Hegel argues that this is usually what is meant by “freedom of the will” (as found Kant and Fitche, for instance). This stage of the will is immediate and natural, but it is also unsatisfactory for the following reasons: first, the will is dependent for its content on a rang of options that are simply given to it, that it is “thrown” into. For instance, I am free to choose which of my desires to fulfill or act upon, but I do not choose what desires I have in the first place. Second, none of these options is an appropriate object of the will, since while the will is universal each of its potential objects is merely particular– if the will is content and satisfied with just one of them, the will won’t fulfill its concept. Even if the will aims, not at the satisfaction of a current desire, but at its long term happiness, the content of its happiness still depends on the content of particular desires that are simply given to it.

The individual will is the auhfeben or sublation of both previous stages of the will. In exercising its freedom to partake in particular endeavors, the will must still preserve its freedom to withdraw from them, if the will is to remain free in the initial, negative sense. The individual will overcomes the problems and contradictions by willing itself or willing freedom, thus generating from its own resources (immanently) an object that is, like itself, universal. The individual will is conceived as a combination of the first and second stages of freedom; in other words, the third moment of freedom is a unity of opposites (of the first two moments): the freedom to choose and engage in some particular end, while simultaneously preserving the awareness that one is not irreversibly bound to that end, because one has chosen it oneself and so could remove oneself from it and engage in some other activity is one felt inclined to do so. The individual will is a restoration of universality out of particularity. When constructed in this manner, freedom involves the ability to make commitments, while also keeping one’s options open. In this final stage, the will is entirely free because it has itself as its object and is wholly self-contained. This is a fairly common notion of freedom held by most people: freedom as the protecting of one’s possibilities and capacities when confronted by whatever commitments one may make, freedom as the ability to choose and do as one pleases (Hegel 21-3).

Hegel is highly critical of this view of view of freedom. He, however, does not criticize it from a presupposed view of the good or of what designates a just, ethical, or responsible life. Instead, he thinks through the implications of this conception of freedom and comes across a contradiction within it. The aforementioned mode of freedom lies, as Hegel explains, not in being “bound to this or that specific content”, in not being required to choose or do anything (Hegel 27). Individuals may be confronted by seemingly unavoidable needs (for instance, the need to eat, rest, or work for a living), but they may believe themselves to be free if they are not actually coerced into any particular course of activity, but could, for instance, refuse to sleep or eat. When looking at freedom from this perspective, the fact that an individual is free does not bring with it any necessary commitments or obligations of its own. An individual must certainly choose something if his freedom is to be a real freedom to choose, but he does not consider that he is committed to any specific course of activity simply by virtue of the fact that he is free– because he considers his freedom to be nothing other than the ability to withdraw or disengage himself from any particular commitment which he has made.

An individual can thus only maintain his freedom of choice if he considers the options which he is able to choose, or reject, to be distinct and external from him, i.e. to be activities or interests which do not follow from his freedom itself. In Hegel’s understanding, this is where the inherent contradiction in this account of freedom becomes obvious. For if one wishes to maintain the sense that one’s freedom lies in facing a set of options to which, as a free individual, one is not necessarily committed, then the following question needs to be asked: if it is not from one’s own freedom itself, then what determines the options among which one has choose from? The only answer seems to be that those options are determined by factors other than one’s free will (chance, nature, etc.), and that they are given to an individual to choose from or reject. But if this is the situation, then one’s freedom is subsistent upon what is available to be chosen. Furthermore, by insisting that freedom lies in being able to choose whatever one wants, one limits oneself to and makes oneself dependent on whatever one happens to want or wish for at that moment (a subjective basis), i.e. whatever one’s particular desires happen to be or whatever one’s circumstances lead one to desire. Hegel is pointing out that what is perceived as autonomous is actually heteronomous. It is obvious, therefore, that when one lays claim to unbridled freedom of choice, one is not actually a free as one thinks they are, since one’s commitments are not derived from one’s free will itself, and thus are not determined by one’s own free will. Hegel writes, “Typical human beings believe that they are free when they are allowed to act willfully [based on subjective whim – P.G.], but it follows from their willfulness that they are not free” (Hegel 28). This is the case because the content of my will – what I will – is not “determined to be mine by the nature of my will, but rather by some contingency” and is not “adequate to me; it is therefore separate from me” (Hegel 28). Freedom of this kind is therefore “dependence on a content and material given either from within or from without” (Hegel 27).

It is only when the will is no longer dependent on something given to it that this contradiction can be resolved. The will gains independence when what it wills is determined by itself– not by external or internal contingencies. But what content does the free will determine by itself? What commitments or duties become apparent simply by the fact that one is– and is self-aware that one is– a free will? We can see the answer to this question if we think about what the will is attempting to uphold and realize by exercising its freedom. When one chooses a specific course of activity one obviously wills whatever it is that one chooses; yet, by holding the view that one is not irreversibly bound to the choice, it becomes clear that one is not interested solely in a specific option, but more fundamentally in preserving one’s freedom to choose. Whatever particular commitments one makes a primary concern – insofar as one seeks to uphold the possibility of other, different options or choices – is to protect and exercise one’s freedom itself. The content that any free will wills simply by virtue of being free is therefore nothing other than its own freedom.

To the extent that the free will wills its own freedom, it is a truly free will. This is because it wills a content which is inherent in autonomous activities itself, and thus is not subservient on a group of contents which are given to it to choose between. Hegel explains, “the absolute determination or, if you like, the absolute drive of free spirit is to make its freedom its object” (Hegel 34). Therefore, real freedom is found not merely in doing or choosing what one wishes, but in being “the free will that wills the free will” (Hegel 34).

When Hegel uses the phrase “the free will that wills itself” he does not mean the exact same thing as Kant: that the will generates rules for its content by a priori rational thinking. Instead, Hegel means the following: the will – like Kant’s thinking self — is essentially rational. However, a better counter part to this rationality is found, not in impulses and inclinations which come and go as they please, but in the structure of ethical life, which imbues the system of rationality that forms the core (the content) of the self. The institutions of ethical life overcome the disparity between reason and inclinations postulated by Kant. Inclinations are transformed into the rights and duties connected to social roles and are therefore imbued with rationality. For instance, sexual urges are channeled into marriage, hunger is satisfied at organized meals, and intellectual curiosity is channeled into universities. In this sense, we win liberation from our desires and inclinations not by repressing or disregarding them, but by satisfying them in a cultivated, socially acceptable manner. We are then not simply fulfilling our subjective whims, but working for the maintenance of the whole of the state and its society, and its subsidiary institutions. To use an analogy, it is not that each of us is playing our own tune, rather each of us is part of an orchestra. The key to solving the contradiction of the will, between reason and desire, is the sociality of our being. Moreover, the will and its freedom form a bridge between society and the individual.

Like Kant, Hegel believes the truly free will to be the will that wills itself and its own freedom. He explicates this conception of true freedom from the structure of freedom of choice. As we have seen, Hegel’s analysis developed immanently, dialectically from choice into a new conception of freedom. The will that wants to be able to choose whatever it wants must aim to preserve its own freedom to choose, even though it thinks of its freedom as the lack of necessity or constraint. Nonetheless, the will that is explicitly and consciously free notes that freedom is something which it must will because it is free, and thus ceases to insist on the priority of its own freedom to choose. This kind of will is no longer dependent for its content or object upon external, contingent factors, but wills a content (freedom) which is derived from the self and is thus completely its own. But, oddly enough, it only gains its freedom through its conformability and willingness to give up its unlimited ability to choose, and let itself become determined by the nature of its own freedom.

The truly free will conceives of freedom as something to which it is necessarily invested in and committed to, something which therefore commands the recognition of any free will by necessity. When looked at in this sense, freedom is an issue of simple and immediate right (Hegel 34-5). Hegel’s conception of freedom turns out to be a philosophy of right, an exposition of what the will must enforce if it is to be truly free.

Hegel’s conception of freedom, at first glance, might not appear to be much better than the view of freedom as choice– especially when reflecting on the notion that one can insist on one’s right to make a choice as much as any other right. What is decisive for Hegel, though, is the distinction between the will which views freedom merely in terms of choice and the will which views freedom as a matter of right in itself, importantly that the latter understands that freedom itself entails necessary commitments, obligations, and responsibilities that develop immanently from the nature of freedom itself, and from which, as a free will, it cannot choose to withdraw itself without denying its own freedom. In Hegel’s philosophy of freedom then there is put forward a view where the distinction between necessity and constraint melts away. The truly free will does not acknowledge the requirement that it recognize rights and laws as a restriction on its freedom, but rather as a necessary condition for its freedom. The free will is self-aware that its obligations are derived from itself, i.e. it is a self-determining, self-legislating, autonomous being. The free will is both determined and self-determining.

Works Cited:

Hegel, GWF. Philosophy of Right. Newburyport, MA: Focus, 2002.

I wonder why we obsess over certain themes, images, and people? We return to the same themes throughout our personal lives again and again, each time experiencing events as completely new, but at the same time as familiar. Ever since I was a little child, I’ve consistently pondered the theme of loss, of being torn away, and longing for a return to the things of the past. Is it that we are constituted in such a way – at the level of how our emotions function — that we can’t help but feel concern and care even when it causes immense psychological suffering, even when we know our deepest feelings won’t be reciprocated? Undoubtedly, there are biological and evolutionary explanations for this phenomena, explanations for our “infinite interest” directed in various ways (in ways both harmful and beneficial). But I don’t want to discuss that, I would like to think about love and despair on their own terms, how we experience these phenomena.

This spring break has left me a bit depressed. I don’t know why. Perhaps it is seeing poverty (in spirit and material conditions) no matter where I go. Perhaps it is that something has shifted in my personal life (either who I am, or who others are). Perhaps it’s that I can’t see everyone I want to. Perhaps it’s that being home for the first time in 3 or 4 months has made me sensitive to that which I forgot. I can’t pinpoint it. Oddly, I don’t feel sad, just disconnected from everything and everyone. Maybe it is that I’m now self-aware of the things that have changed. Hegel once wrote, “the owl of Minerva only takes flight at dusk.” What he means is that our understanding of things lags behind events. Take, for instance, the trite saying “you never know what you have until it’s gone.” Same principle, I think. It’s always too late. Perhaps I am entering into the first stages of understanding, but this understanding is soaked in ambiguity and confusion; it has yet to achieve clarity. Anyway, I can’t seem to find a desire to do anything. I never read as much as I want to. I don’t feel any reason to do anything. Nothing interests me and everything leaves me feeling cold and negative. I can’t draw the connections between things I normally do. Am I resisting drawing these connections because I have a pre-understanding of their conclusions? Is it that I know the truth deep down, that I will be crushed beneath the weight of never having my hopes and desires met, by being rejected again and again and again? The only things I do are those I have to (school matters, and whatnot).

The past is inescapable, always asserting itself with shotgun-force no matter how much we try to kill it, to repress it, to put it in a jar, shelve it, and forget it. I find myself constantly thinking of the people of my past, of friends, lovers, and family members. Self-reflecting and remembering is an immensely painful process, and if I could, I would forget my past, I would wipe it away. When picking up the pieces, when sorting through the fragments, one almost always gets sliced, one’s soul bleeds. But despite the harm, I find myself, every-so-often, — seemingly without control — mediating, sorting, and trying to make sense of events and actions. What keeps me attached (in thought) to the past though? In one sense, it’s a refusal to stop loving. But what do I mean? Why is love here portrayed in a negative manner? Doesn’t love sustain you? Isn’t it something which gives us immense pleasure?

I sometimes divide the “movements” of love into various phases, here are some:

1) The time before you meet the “object of desire” the “other.” When reflecting, life is experienced as cold, empty, and mediocre. But, more often than not, very little reflection takes place here. The way we perceive ourselves in this moment is selfish: we simply do not care about anything but the “self.” We act without regard to to opinion of an “other.” Our identity is superficial and shallow, and we seek pleasurable things. Our days are filled with sitting in front of screens, eating, shitting, and sleeping. The emptiness is felt in some vague way and, I suspect, is filled with any sort of hedonistic excess. Great causes, possibilities, a good happy life are invisible or perceived to be dead. There are no ideals but those of appetite. This is a juvenile, idiotic stage, and we’re glad when it ends.

2) Madness. This is when you fall in love, after there has been recognition of the other and relations have developed, and bonds are established. Everything is beautiful. At the same time though, this stage is hateful though. You want to separate yourself from the world and be alone with the “other.” The other becomes more “you” than you are yourself. You essentially decide, “this person whom I love is more important than anything; everything else is ugly.” You are swept away. Your stomach fills with acid when you think about the other person, which is all the time. The future is bright, and we speculate about it constantly. The “other” is always central to this vision, they provide the framework and glue. During this stage, there is a profound desire to destroy everything else for love. We go to great lengths for the other, and we are genuinely compassionate in this stage. We always have time for the lover. Small pleasures cease to matter. We seek greatness and virtue, generally.

3) The relationship ends. And you revert to the first moment, but on a higher level. The scars of the other stain your soul. This is the stage where you become apathetic, creepy, dumb and paranoid. You long for the other, but meet dead echoes. You give way to despair. You walk around like a zombie.

When the relationship dies, you still love, but the love is dead, abstract. Well, I don’t really know where I’m going with this. Let’s put on the mask, pretend to be alive, and “shut up.”

Being home from school is a bit too much. I feel like I don’t know anyone in this town anymore. I twaddle aimlessly around this empty house. The cat and dog stare at me as I stand perplexed remembering the space around me, the pictures on the wall, the trash on the floor, the dead tv– as I remember my pets. There’s nothing to do. I check the fridge for the millionth time: there’s still just crusty, generic ketchup and old American cheese. Time stretches on forever. I can’t bring myself to do anything but think and reflect. I would like to read books, to finish this essay for school, to write a blog about my “camping experience.” I would like to be productive, but the apathy and boredom is pervasive. I would like to escape. I can’t stop my brain from churning; it runs at a constant fever pitch, shitting inexpressible movements and processes (worthless and interesting to no one).

The boredom leads me to my room, where I find a box of stored away artifacts: letters, pictures, movie stubs (12/4/05, 6/6/06, etc.), pressed flowers, sea shells, and the cards handed out at funerals with the dates of those who have passed. I fumble through. There it is: my small life caught in still frames. My mom, my lovers, me as a child, my brothers, my friends, people who I haven’t talked to in half a decade. Do they remember me? Do they remember these moments? None of it seems to matter. There it is: those eyes, that smile, that embrace. There we are. I start cracking as soon as I cradle a memory.

A receding wave drops the heaviest stones first, the pebbles next, and carries the sand a little farther. To deserters from Marxism, the heaviest stone is the heart of the doctrine itself—its method, the dialectic. That is what they abandon first. The list is long of tired revolutionaries, who, for nearly three-quarters of a century now, have denounced the hated dialectic while they still continued for a time to recognize “economic determinism” in history or even the “historic necessity” of socialism.

In an opposite rush of the current, the same phenomenon is observable. The incoming tide washes the sand along before budging the stones. A person who comes to Marxism—especially if he has passed his intellectual youth—grasps successively the different isolated and abstract aspects of it before he penetrates to its method in its entirety—not rarely stopping short of this.

Marxism is thus subjected to incessant attempts at dismemberment. The dialectic is the point of concentration of the resistance which petty-bourgeois thought opposes to Marxism.

This resistance assumes various social, political, or philosophical shadings, but expresses itself through arguments which remain within a fairly narrow scope: “Marx took over the dialectic from Hegel the idealist. It retains the mysticism of its origin and sullies Marxist thought.” To the severest critics, it is the basic defect of the edifice, a “metaphysics” which led Marx into making unfounded assertions, exaggerated affirmations, specious paradoxes, all of which obscure his “economic” work and threaten to ruin its “scientific” conclusions. To the more amiable critics, if the dialectic is not quite that detrimental it is nonetheless useless; it is claptrap inherited from the past which must be eliminated—in another century Marx would have linked his doctrine to another philosophy (pragmatism?) and the problem of the dialectic would not have arisen. The dialectic in Marxism is nothing but a historic accident. It is in accordance with the “true” spirit of the doctrine to remove this vestige of another epoch. Do not hesitate, let us cut out this useless appendix which may at any time become the seat of a new infection of mysticism.

This accusation of mysticism—the most widely propagated of all—launched against the Marxist dialectic is not encumbered with numerous proofs. It is not very easy, in fact, to produce any. To refute them it would be enough to point to all the passages where Marx counterposes his rational method to the mystical method of idealism. By uncovering the social roots of all the mystic baggage which philosophy carted for centuries, has not Marxism placed a cross over mysticism forever?

Lacking even the smallest particle of a quotation from Marx, our critics remind those who have supposedly forgotten it that Marx as a youth passed through the school of Hegelian idealism and that this “could not fail” to leave its imprint upon his mind. All that remains necessary is an explanation as to why Marx developed the most fundamental negation of idealism that mankind has yet formulated.

Mysticism demands essentially that the mind set itself free from logical categories. Impelled by the wish, the unification of subject with object is immediately accomplished, with the “fusion” taking place outside all logical discourse. The dialectic does not reject these categories but reveals their interconnections and their development. It does not deny logic but gives it in this way, with new tools, a new power. Its increased power broadens its domain and consequently narrows that of the mystic. Formal logic, only too often obliged to capitulate before reality, leaves the field open to mysticism. The dialectic is revealed as the mortal—and victorious—enemy of mysticism in the unfolding of all the power of human reason.

Before Marx, the social sciences consisted of nothing but platitudes, testifying to the impotence of contemporary logic to master a complex reality—an impotence which reflected the existing social conditions. This “science” was not rational knowledge, but the projection of desires and aspirations, that is, in great part a tendency toward mysticism. The dialectic puts an end to all this.

Another illustration. The deep-rooted aversion of the Anglo-Saxon mind for the dialectic is well known; its source lies in the historical development of English society. Empiricism and agnosticism, so well suited to this mind, led it towards the middle of the last century into profound contradictions which could be resolved only by dialectical materialism. How far from understanding this were the British professors! They swerved from the rut of empiricism by heading toward the absolute. They appropriated in particular the system of Hegel, that is, its husk, without even noticing the living kernel, and for several decades the British and American universities indulged in orgies of absolute idealism. Pragmatism was in part a reaction against these waves of mysticism but in no way a solution of the difficulties, which only the dialectic could surmount.

Among the “defects” of the dialectic, the charge that it is metaphysics alternates with the accusation that it is mysticism. The contention itself is not easy to formulate. Metaphysics originally was the search for “First Causes.” Hegel used the term in a different and well-defined sense to characterize the anti-dialectical thought of the 18th century, above all, French rationalism. It is in this sense that the founders of scientific socialism introduced it into the Marxist vocabulary. In commonly accepted thought the term “metaphysical” depreciated throughout the 19th century and to each critic it seemed sufficient merely to hurl it at his adversary. Finally, following the positivism of Comte, the scientists labelled as metaphysical everything that went beyond their thinly sliced morsel of science and in particular anything that brought up the obligation, so distasteful to bourgeois scientists, of choosing between materialism and idealism.

The critics of the dialectic apply the sufficiently compromised label of metaphysical upon it without so much as taking the trouble to indicate what they mean by it. Why bother over a mere relic! The Marxist dialectic, we confess, is “metaphysical,” in the sense that it participates boldly in the struggle of materialism against idealism. In this respect materialism itself is metaphysical in the sense that it transcends one or more immediate experiences and that it is impossible to demonstrate it like a simple theorem of geometry. It is hardly correct to say even that materialism is proved by the state of science in a given epoch. It finds its truth in the general development of science, in the movement which unceasingly increases the power of reason, in the ever-broadening possibility of going beyond the hypothesis of a god.

It would be far too compromising for the critics to reject materialism as metaphysical. They have not as a rule yet reached this stage when we occupy ourselves with them. Hence, they limit themselves to the dialectic and their principal argument in qualifying it as metaphysical consists in the fact that they can live very well and act without it and that the dialectic, moreover, is not subject to verification. In its most outspoken form, the argument is converted into a denial, pure and simple, of the dialectic: “It is nothing but a myth, a fiction—nobody knows exactly what it is.” Or some view it as a mere literary ornament with which Marx decorated his too arid dissertations and from which he extracted brilliant metaphors. “But all this has nothing to do with science. Moreover, no Marxist has ever systematically formulated the laws of the dialectic.” That, it appears, is what the critics mean by metaphysics.

Marxism, it must be recognized, lacks a perfected treatise on the dialectic. Marx on various occasions indicated (in letters to Engels, Kugelmann, Dietzgen) his intention of writing a brief theoretical exposition of his method. He died while still working on “Capital.” Engels, after his “Anti-DŸhring,” undertook systematic research on the dialectic, especially in relation to the natural sciences. He soon had to abandon it in order to take up the arduous task of deciphering and publishing the second and third volumes of “Capital.” Lenin, in the isolation of the first months of the war, annotated Hegel and Aristotle preliminary to a study upon the dialectic, but the whirlwind of events decided otherwise.

It is doubtful that Marxism will ever have, before the advent of socialism, a manual of the dialectic. The more the workers’ movement develops, all the more do political, strategic, and tactical questions take first place. And that is fortunate—it is the sign that problems are reaching a solution in deeds. To those who may lament this, we can only say that one no more chooses his epoch than he does his parents. The methodological study of the dialectic, which will also be the preparation for its replacement by still more powerful methods of thought, is one of the tasks for the socialist society. This study will be part of the general inventory which the new society will take of the heritage received from the preceding generations.

The situation as regards the dialectic is not so very different from that of culture in general. Just as it is not possible to envisage a “proletarian” culture, so it is impossible to envisage a systematically developed proletarian philosophy. The truth is that the dialectic does not pretend to be more than a method, the expression of the movement of thought that seeks to transcend immediate experience. With Marx it found its practical application in the domain to which scientific knowledge was most foreign: sociology. In any society divided into classes, the “sciences of man” lag considerably behind the natural sciences—the possessing class has no interest whatever in revealing the mechanism of its domination. The bourgeois epoch constitutes the most striking illustration of this fact. But a method is an instrument for arriving at the truth, and where the social brakes are the tightest, a method far more powerful than the relativism of the natural sciences is required. The dialectic coincides with the revolutionary role of Marxism: the object imposed its method and, at the same time, could not be realized through anything else.

The most authentic product so far of the dialectic method, consciously applied, is “Capital.” The great themes of Hegelian logic are there directly transposed—the mode of exposition itself with its movement from the abstract to the concrete, the development of the categories, the opposition of profound reality to immediate existence, the notion of concrete totality, etc., ideas all of them foreign equally to Cartesian rationalism and Anglo-Saxon empiricism. To those who clamor for a manual of the dialectic, we can boldly reply: Take “Capital” by Karl Marx.

But this book is not solely a treatise on logic. It reveals the movement of a reality singularly difficult to penetrate—modern capitalist society—and does so with astonishing accuracy. Here the method is judged by its own results. We had to wait for the Anglo-Saxon critics to hear this surprising demand: that the Marxists say what test[1] can be made to verify the dialectic. This is nothing but a “modern” version of the accusation of metaphysics. To these also the answer must be made: Take “Capital.” If one can speak of a “test” in such a domain, here is a real and crucial test. Can our critics cite a single book-I shall not say in sociology alone, it would be no risk, but in any science—which has for seventy-five years retained equal timeliness and validity? Does the method mean nothing in this respect? It would be crediting “mysticism” and “metaphysics” with strange power to believe them capable of such prowess.

The first question to pose to those who deny the scientific character of the dialectic is to ask them what they mean by scientific method. They generally forget to define this detail. What the manuals repeat on this subject is more often ethical rules rather than methodological principles. The scientists themselves do not begin dissertating on their methods until they hope to depreciate the value of science by showing its relativity. This movement has been observable for some forty years. If the work of these same scientists is examined, one can say that it is compounded of a melange of common sense, that is, formal logic converted into small change, and the dialectic in a fragmentary and unconscious form. The practice of the dialectic begins precisely where thought truly progresses, and imposes itself more each time the mind goes beyond the immediate data. The great unifying theories—the electro-magnetic theory of light, to take one example—are beautiful works of the dialectic. But the act of eating is far removed from the formulation of the laws of digestion. As an epigraph on all the works of Marx, one could well inscribe: “More consciousness!” The dialectic is situated precisely in this movement. It enunciates and seeks to systematize the modes of thinking that follow intelligence at its various levels from the time intelligence begins to exercise its rights, that is, to transcend what is presented immediately before it, and in those cases where the mind does not turn upon itself (as in formal logic) but moves forward.

A particularly resistant reality, the development of society, required the conscious use of the most powerful processes of thought; hence the appearance of precisely the materialist dialectic. Thus sociology at once acquired, under penalty of extinction, the most highly perfected method so far developed for the human intelligence, and in this sense it blazes the way for the other sciences. Need it be added that the latter, making conscious use of the dialectic, will sharpen and enrich it? Carried by the whole current of human knowledge, the dialectic itself will be surpassed. But that, as we have seen, is the task of the coming epoch.

* * *

The physicist Henri PoincarŽ once observed that you cannot experiment with war. This is still more true of the politics of the proletariat. Just as medicine is based on physiology, Marxist politics rests on sociology. But the latter, unfortunately, has no laboratories at its disposal. The Marxist party can carry out experiments only on an extremely restricted scale: to “test” such and such a partial slogan in a factory, a city, before launching it on a national scale. In the decisive questions, it does not have the right to enter into experimentation. Because of this, observation becomes of singularly important value. Marxists scrupulously study the past, above all the traditions of their class and its struggles.

It is from this that the accusation of conservatism is derived, often repeated by the innovators of the hour against the doctrine of scientific socialism. Hundreds and thousands of artistic, literary, philosophic, and sometimes political parlor-pink circles flourish unceasingly among the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia. They grasp in flight this or that idea, build a “theory” out of it and live off it for a few years or months. The Marxists have nothing in common with these “adventurers of thought.” The revolutionary Socialists are at the apex of an entire historic class, the proletariat. They know the value of a dearly won tradition.

So far as the dialectic is concerned, this tradition speaks with a voice singularly clear and strong. To the extent that they gave theoretical expression to their headlong plunge—one obviously cannot speak of the Millerands and Briands—virtually all the renegades from the revolution preluded their denial of the social and economic and political tenets of socialism by rejecting the dialectic. At the beginning of this century, the German social democrat Bernstein published a book against Marxism which can be regarded as the classic expression of reformism. The same chapter in which the author attempts to demolish the dialectic as mystic and anti-scientific ends with the affirmation that the politics of Marx is nothing but Blanquism…. These are the lessons that no revolutionary socialist dare forget.

The Russian revolutionist Hertzen called the dialectic the “algebra of revolution.” It is really much more than that and its value extends to all of human knowledge, of society, of nature. But it is at least that. All of scientific socialism demands it. If Marx had not found in Hegel the essential forms of the dialectic, he would have produced them, more or less completely, just as the working class movement, if Marx had not lived, would have produced a scientific socialism basically identical with Marxism, although undoubtedly much inferior to it in form. To try now to disconnect the dialectic from Marxism is a task as reactionary as to want to “purify” the working class movement of Marxism. In attempting one or the other, the critics will break their necks and succeed only in bringing judgment upon themselves. February 18, 1940.

[1] James Burnham, “A Belated Dialectician,” Partisan Review, Spring 1939

By J. Gerland

I’ve been reading poetry by Thomas Hardy tonight. I’d really like to read Jude the Obscure and A Pair of Blue Eyes. My only reservation is about the emotional difficulty that comes with reading books evincing the same kinds of existential despair I’ve been going through lately. (Thomas Hardy isn’t particularly uplifting or restorative). 

Here is a poem entitled “Between Us Now.”

Between us now and here–
Two thrown together
Who are not wont to wear
Life’s flushest feather–

Who see the scenes slide past,
The daytimes dimming fast,
Let there be truth at last,
Even if despair.

So thoroughly and long
Have you now known me,
So real in faith and strong
Have I now shown me,
That nothing needs disguise
Further in any wise,
Or asks or justifies
A guarded tongue.

Face unto face, then, say,
Eyes my own meeting,
Is your heart far away,
Or with mine beating?
When false things are brought low,
And swift things have grown slow,
Feigning like froth shall go,
Faith be for aye.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/dec2008/grep-d16.shtml

The students and workers in Greece give me immense amounts of strength and hope. This is a sign of life. The working class is hardly dead. Hang tight, keep your head up, and your fists clenched.

“Why don’t I keep sleeping for a little while longer and forget all this foolishness”
–Gregor Samsa, from Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis”

A sea-change is underway. Our generation, dubbed “the Y generation,” is so unambitious, so complacent, so indifferent. The situation we confront – characterized by deepening poverty, war, and repression – is only getting worse. The situation is intolerable and must jolt us from our stupor. Only those who are dead won’t be moved. The dead will lay the thick paste of scorn on the absolute “other” in order to verify and affirm their own identities. They don’t fully understand why they do what they do when they’re doing it, but they do it anyway. They drift through life in a dream-state, buying into and selling the de facto vision of hopelessness and cynicism like zombies transmitting disease. They accept the dream that “capitalism is here to stay, that resistance is futile, that the king cannot be dethroned, nor devoured.”

Normalcy, the status quo is taken as a given. To rub against established protocols, to disregard established laws whether in action or thought is the ultimate taboo. These cadavers resist questioning their presuppositions about the meaning of normality, about the validity of established right, lest they find themselves cast out and ridiculed, branded insane and eccentric, naively utopian, or worse, an apologist for ideas which “inevitably lead to totalitarianism.”

For the crackbrained, the issue is settled, immune to investigation. They unwittingly accept and reciprocate the attitudes which have been handed down from generation to generation through the family, the school system, the church, the state, and the media. Common sense imposes its pitiful ideals of worthy goals upon our brains: materialistic excesses gained by “hard work,” and vapid indifference towards anything not base and superficial. Mistakenly they perceive temporary rest for eternal and static truth, failing to understand the historically determined and transitory nature of what gets passed off as “natural”. They never ask why, and they don’t care to know.

We who are dedicated to replacing capitalism with socialism can no longer afford to remain quiet and apathetic. Those who think about the plight of society are dubbed “intellectuals,” drawing attention to the ivory-towers many place themselves upon. As Nietzsche once said “philosophy is a voluntary living in ice and high mountains.” Though Nietzsche is no revolutionary, his observation is pointed. Intellectuals are often cut off from those they claim to speak for. We, normal people, often harbor attitudes deeply resistant to critical thinking – this is not to say this can’t be changed. The task today is to forge a path from our “high mountains” to the masses. We must aid in creating students, workers, and intellectuals who are free, who are not just props of ideology, cultural cliches, and superstition, and who are capable of imagining a world other than the one we live in, and struggling for that vision. Reforging socialist culture is indispensable to achieving this task.

Our struggle is a struggle to produce and reproduce the weapons (theory) to question the cultures, ideologies, and economic structures which shape our lives. Our task is to distribute these weapons, knowing full well that weapons are for killing. Paternal condescension is alien to our task; it is contrary to the task of  instilling the realization that our being, our fate is tied with others, and only through acting with others can this fate be redirected. We say, “this is how we experience the world, this is how we think the world is. We have no problem laying our principles and opinions before you. We think we are both walking on common ground; we inhabit the same sinking ship. We’d like you to examine what we have to say more fully, and if you agree join our movement.” Our aim is not to dogmatically force our views down throats, but to give an impetus to the popular imagination, to offer tools and concepts that might allow one to no longer see the world as self-evident, natural, or obvious, to offer concepts which allow one to undermine the terms of the otiose game we’ve been born into.

As much as clean desks and standardized routines, as much as haphazardly scrubbed motels and transport, as much as business luncheons filled with mind numbing chatter and empty gestures, as much as steel and concrete, as much as the constant gaze tranquilizes our critical faculties, forcefully lambasting with a toxic flurry any pause in belief back into frenzied, unthinking sensory overload, soothing and comforting any qualm which arises in the course of breakdown with machine gun speed, reigning in our souls, there simultaneously lies beneficial bacteria, the germs (the working class, technology) of a future society free from the stifling oppression of capitalism. Beneath the gleaming surface lies stinking rot, fermenting, waiting to burst the perceived stability of the status quo asunder. When material conditions and modes of production change, so do ideas.

Our task is to produce a world where human flourishing is the norm, not the exception. This entails a rejection of fragmentation, a rejection of views which see no way out, which see no solutions to the problems which plague society today, which reject  the validity of “totalizing projects” only to posit their own infantile impressions as the one true way. We seek a regeneration of the human spirit. A regeneration of life-affirming culture can only be won by not only biting the hand that feeds, but by breaking it off. (In this sense, our task entails a self-abdication. Could we ever win great things without some risk?) Though capitalism crushes our souls, turns human relations into relations between objects, and alienates our species-being, though capitalism appears as a juggernaut destroying all in its path, absorbing any challenge, we should not be so naïve as to mistake semblance for fact, to mistake appearances for truth. Global capitalism is going through death pangs; the system teeters on the brink of collapse. The recession, which will only get worse, has shattered the myth that the magic of the market can only bring prosperity, that capitalism is infallible. We can no longer let ourselves wallow in despair and disillusionment like children. It’s time to face the harsh winds of reality with a sober face; to stake our lives on our beliefs, to organize and study, to prepare. The dream is dead. It’s time to wake up.

Comments on “Leon Trotsky, Soviet Historiography, and the Fate of Classical Marxism”

By Andrew River

(This blog was originally posted here: http://www.permanent-revolution.org/forum/blogger.html)

It has long been the case that David North is engaged in a systematic campaign to blur the distinction between Marxism and objectivism. North’s latest foray in this endeavor was a speech he recently presented to the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS) at its 2008 National Convention in Philadelphia on November 20-23. The speech, with the title “Leon Trotsky, Soviet Historiography, and the Fate of Classical Marxism” was subsequently published on the World Socialist Web Site. [1]

Before examining what North said, we must note that the venue itself is of some interest. The AAASS is a typical academic association that includes representatives from various political and theoretical orientations, undoubtedly including some very right wing individuals. Founded in 1938, the AAASS’ website reveals that “its representatives serve on such bodies as the U.S. State Department’s Advisory Committee for Studies of Eastern Europe and the Independent States of the former Soviet Union, and the International Council for Central and East European Studies.” [2] Such organizations during the Cold War years were heavily infiltrated and financed by the CIA. (Indeed, when the past president of the AAASS, James R. Millar, died recently, it was noted in his obituary in the Washington Post that he had been a resident academic scholar employed by the CIA. [3])

That being said, there is nothing wrong with North addressing this conference. Indeed, he has a responsibility to defend the perspective of Trotskyism, even in such venues, when the opportunity presents itself. However, it is somewhat curious that whereas North has no problem attending forums sponsored by mainstream bourgeois academic organizations, he has never bothered to defend Trotskyism at any self-professed left wing forum. North has never presented the views of the Socialist Equality Party at any of the annual Left Forums held in New York or its predecessor, the Socialist Scholars Conference. Nor did North or any representative from the SEP make a presentation at a well publicized conference devoted to the topic of the Legacy of Leon Trotsky held at Fordham University this past summer.

Furthermore, it is rather incredible that North has no problem participating in conferences sponsored by an organization that has ties to the U.S. government, but in the WSWS smear campaign against Alex Steiner, North attacked Steiner for his educational activities with a left-wing alternative educational institution that has no government ties whatsoever, claiming this as proof of Steiner’s supposed “political associations” with middle class radicalism and the Frankfurt School [4]. By this same standard, one could accuse North himself of “political associations” with the AAASS and consequently with the US government. No doubt North would be outraged at such a flagrant use of guilt-by-association, but he has no trouble in resorting to the very same method when it comes to smearing Steiner.

In his presentation North bemoans the fate of Trotsky scholarship, which he sees as “drying up” after the publication Baruch Knei-Paz study of Trotsky’s thought, The Social and Political Thought of Leon Trotsky, first published in 1978. He contrasts the period since the publication of that book with the 1950s and 1960s when Deutscher’s classic biography of Trotsky appeared amidst a renewed interest in the life and work of Trotsky and of the Russian Revolution coinciding with the revelations of Khrushchev and the beginning of the decades long unraveling of Stalinism.

“This drying up of Trotsky scholarship after 1978 is a curious phenomenon. After all, the deepening crisis of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe throughout the 1980s certainly justified a more intensive review of the work of Trotsky…”

North has a tale to tell and he is not one to let facts get in his way. He states that,

“The only notable and original contribution to Trotsky studies that appeared in the 1980s—such a tumultuous decade in Soviet history—was a small monograph, entitled Leon Trotsky and the Art of Insurrection, that focused on Trotsky’s achievements as a military strategist.”

While I can wholeheartedly agree that there has been a neglect of Trotsky scholarship in the past 30 years, North’s narrative overlooks an exception to this assessment, namely, that the most important contribution to Trotsky scholarship in the 1980s was not the minor work on military affairs cited by North, but the publication in 1986 of Trotsky’s Philosophical Notebooks. The discovery of the Notebooks by Philip Pomper in the Harvard Archives and their subsequent publication under the title Trotsky’s Notebooks, 1933-1935: Writings on Lenin, Dialectics, and Evolutionism, dwarfs anything else in the field of Trotsky scholarship for the past 40 years, Knei-Paz’s book included [5].

That North does not even mention the Trotsky Notebooks in a forum devoted to Trotsky scholarship is noteworthy but not surprising. For as was noted in an appreciation published earlier this year devoted to the Trotsky Notebooks,

“One would have thought that the publication of Trotsky’s Notebooks more than twenty years ago would have elicited renewed interest in the theoretical side of Trotsky’s work. However such has not been the case. While Trotsky is justifiably remembered as a supreme man of action, the co-leader with Lenin of the Russian Revolution and the architect of the Red Army, there is little recognition of his importance as a Marxist theoretician. Unfortunately, the publication of the Notebooks has done little to dispel that viewpoint. In sharp contrast to the excitement caused by the publication of Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks (Volume 38 of his Collected Works) in English in the early 1960’s, there has been virtually no commentary on Trotsky’s Notebooks. This silence facilitates the prejudices of contemporary left wing intellectuals who continue to minimize Trotsky’s theoretical contributions.” [6]

One may add that notable among those authors who have been conspicuous by their silence about Trotsky’s Notebooks has been David North himself. Up till now the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) has not devoted a single article or even a reference to this most seminal event in Trotsky scholarship since the Harvard Archives were opened. What accounts for the silence about this work that provides a glimpse into Trotsky’s views on Hegel, Lenin, Dialectics, Evolution and Freud, topics that Trotsky normally kept behind the scenes in his published writings? In North’s case, the Trotsky Notebooks must be made to disappear because the topics they cover do not conform to his version of Marxism, one that closes the door to a serious exploration of these issues.

Were one to ask why North’s version of Marxism finds such topics anathema, we would find a clue in examining North’s explanation of the causes for the lacunae in Trotsky scholarship. Let us then turn to that topic.

According to North, a major cause of the neglect of Trotsky scholarship has been the conservative political climate of the past two decades, particularly the period after the fall of the Soviet Union, when it seemed to many that Marxism was a failed 19th century doctrine that had little relevance to the contemporary world. And there is certainly a great deal of truth to this. But North doesn’t stop there. He provides a supplementary explanation for the neglect of Trotsky scholarship – one that is the real focus of his talk. He claims that the type of Marxism espoused by Trotsky has gone out of fashion among left intellectuals. According to North, Trotsky was the last great representative of what he calls “classical Marxism”, which he identifies as follows,

“It is not possible at this time to offer an exposition of Trotsky’s philosophical worldview and his conception of politics and human culture. But it must be said, for the sake of the argument being presented here, that crucial elements of this world view included an irreconcilable commitment to philosophical materialism, belief in the law-governed character of the historical process, confidence in the power of human reason (to the extent that this faculty is understood materialistically) and its ability to discover objective truth, and, associated with this, belief in the progressive role of science. Trotsky was a determinist, an optimist, and an internationalist, convinced that the socialist revolution arose necessarily out of the insoluble contradictions of the world capitalist system. Above all, he insisted that there existed a revolutionary force within society, the working class, that would overthrow the capitalist system and lay the foundations for world socialism.”

Now one can agree that Trotsky was indeed the last great representative of “classical Marxism”. But what North means by this term is very different than how this term has been understood traditionally in the Trotskyist movement. “Classical Marxism” is the Marxism of Marx and Engels and later of Luxemburg and Lenin, whereas for North it really means the Marxism of Second International orthodoxy, i.e. the Marxism of Kautsky and Plekhanov. Second International orthodoxy however was not a form of classical Marxism but in many ways its opposite. Second International orthodoxy conceived of Marxism as a form of economic determinism that upheld a “stages” view of history and considered socialism to be inevitable. The belief in the inevitability of socialism naturally took the teeth out of revolutionary struggle and in fact peacefully coexisted with a reformist day to day practice. Trotsky, like Lenin, resurrected the traditions of classical Marxism by breaking from Second International orthodoxy and stressing the decisive role of conscious leadership in forging the transition from capitalism to the socialist future of mankind. Trotsky also decisively broke from the “stages” theory of history in developing his ground-breaking theory of permanent revolution.

What North consistently does, in this speech as elsewhere, is to blur the distinction between the reductive economic determinism of the Second International and the standpoint of classical Marxism, as embodied in Bolshevism and Trotskyism. Thus North describes Trotsky here as a “determinist” who was “convinced that the socialist revolution arose necessarily out of the insoluble contradictions of the world capitalist system” – a description that applies just as well to a Kautsky or a Plekhanov. To describe Trotsky as this kind of a “determinist”, without any qualification, is to conflate classical Marxism with vulgar materialism. Trotsky’s entire career as a revolutionary was built on a break with this kind of determinism, as the following characteristic quote (from one of his speeches to the Communist International) makes clear:

“History has provided the basic premise for the success of the revolution – in the sense that society cannot any longer develop its productive forces on bourgeois foundations. But history does not at all assume upon itself – in place of the working class, in place of the politicians of the working class, in place of the Communists, the solution of this entire task. No, History seems to say to the proletarian vanguard (let us imagine for a moment that history is a figure looming above us), History says to the working class, ‘You must know that unless you cast down the bourgeoisie, you will perish beneath the ruins of civilization. Try, solve this task!’ Such is the state of affairs today.” [7]

What Trotsky is saying is that while the conditions for socialism are indeed “determined” through the internal dynamic of capitalism and its crisis, the resolution of that crisis is entirely contingent on the theoretical and political maturity of the working class and especially its revolutionary leadership. This is a fundamentally different conception of determinism than the inevitabilism of Second International orthodoxy as expressed by Kautsky and Plekhanov.

Indeed, if one were to accept North’s exposition of Trotsky’s thought, one would be hard-pressed to understand what the philosophical differences are between Trotsky and the old mechanistic materialism Marx attacked, or between Trotsky and the leading theoreticians of the Second International. There is no room for revolutionary dialectics in North’s treatment. Trotsky’s philosophy is presented as a clock that runs without a spring, a blind inevitabilism that cuts out all mediating factors (including the subjective dialectic of human consciousness) from history.

Yet according to North, this brand of Second International orthodoxy that he falsely portrays as the legacy of Trotsky has fallen into disfavor among academics. The chief culprit for this state of affairs in North’s indictment will come as a surprise to some readers. After taking on right wing opponents of Marxism such as Richard Pipes and Robert Conquest, and pro-Stalinist academics such as Robert Thurston, North comes to the real target of his ire, the Frankfurt School. North has been using the Frankfurt School for some time as a kind of ideological bogeyman to explain everything from the rise of postmodernism to the celebration of the irrational by fascists. And now according to North, it is the pervasive influence of the Frankfurt School in academia that is responsible for the demise of Trotsky scholarship in the last three decades.

North’s blanket indictment of the Frankfurt School as being responsible for all the ills of contemporary culture has already been refuted and will be explored in more detail on another occasion. [8] Aside from the fact that North’s explanation conveniently sidesteps his own share of responsibility for the neglect of Trotsky scholarship, North’s invectives against the Frankfurt School are so historically inaccurate that virtually no one who knows anything about this piece of intellectual history could take them seriously.

It is worth noting that for all that invective, North has no compunction about citing Walter Benjamin’s high opinion of Trotsky as a writer, even though Benjamin was himself associated with the Frankfurt School. [9] North also conflates the work of Adorno and Horkheimer with Hendrick de Man. North’s bogus attempt to link de Man with the Frankfurt School was exposed in Chapter 9 of Marxism Without Its Head or Heart. [10] The Frankfurters opposed de Man politically and philosophically. For instance, in 1932 Erich Fromm attacked de Man and accused him of reifying character traits of bourgeois society into human nature. [11] Again, the point here isn’t to defend the Frankfurt School against Marxist criticism, but to “treat history with a basic degree of honesty”. It is apparent that North only cites de Man as part of his ideological police action, to smear those who critique his version of Marxism as “irrationalist” and “anti-materialist”. Knowing this North could not have countenanced Trotsky’s Notebooks, which deal with the “subjective dialectic” of human consciousness, something that cannot be reduced to the crude formulas North advances.

It is significant to note that Lars Lih headed the panel where North gave his presentation at the AAASS conference. Lih, in his scholarly output on the relationship between Lenin and social democracy, denies that Lenin ever broke from the Second International orthodoxy of Plekhanov and Kautsky, and tries to depict Lenin as an unadulterated defender of their philosophical and political legacy. For Lih, Lenin defended the legacy of the Second International while Kautsky and the rest betrayed it. [12] Lih like North totally ignores Lenin’s theoretical development amidst the background of the betrayal of the Second International in 1914, an event that impelled him to break from Second International orthodoxy via a turn to a study of dialectics in his 1914-15 Conspectus on Hegel’s Logic. North and Lih all have an interest in collapsing the purportedly “good” days of the Second International with Lenin and Trotsky’s Third. They simply ignore the fact that the construction of the Third (Communist) International had to be laid on new theoretical foundations. In the words of Lenin, writing in anticipation of the New International during the dark days of World War I,

“It would be a very deplorable thing, of course, if the “Lefts” began to be careless in their treatment of Marxian theory, considering that the Third International can be established only on the basis of Marxism, unvulgarised Marxism.” [13]

[1] http://wsws.org/articles/2008/dec2008/aaas-d01.shtml
[2] Quoted from the AAASS about us: http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~aaass/about.html

[3] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/03/AR2008120303714.html?wprss=rss_metro%2Fobituaries
[4] See The Intellectual and Political Odyssey of Alex Steiner, Part-3, http://wsws.org/articles/2008/oct2008/fran-o24.shtml . The following is the relevant section of North’s document:
“At about the same time, Steiner was entering into new political relations of which he has made no mention in any of his attacks on the ICFI. It obviously has been his intention to conceal his present political associations from those who are reading his documents. Steiner became a lecturer on philosophy at The New School for Pluralistic Anti-Capitalist Education, also known as The New SPACE. In its literature, the New SPACE describes itself as “Resolutely anti-authoritarian and non-sectarian,” bringing together “anarchists, humanist Marxists, and others.” It is, to be more precise, a conglomeration of middle-class radical tendencies that are hostile to Trotskyism. Among its “Teachers, Speakers and Organizers” are individuals closely associated with the Frankfurt School, such as Kevin Anderson (whose writing is highly praised by Steiner), Stanley Aronowitz, Eric Bronner and Bertell Ollman. The faculty also includes individuals active in the Green Party and other brands of petty-bourgeois protest politics.”

[5] It should also be noted that North completely fails to mention that Knei-Paz’s study has been challenged and in large part superseded by a very recent work, The Marxism of Leon Trotsky, by Kunal Chattopadhyay, Progress Publishers, Kolkata, India, October, 2006.
[6] http://www.permanent-revolution.org/archives/trotsky_notebooks.pdf

[7] The First Five Years of the Communist International , Volume 2, New Park Publications, p. 6
[8] A critique of North’s analysis of the Frankfurt School can be found in Chapter 6 of Marxism Without its Head or its Heart: The Real Dialectic of the Enlightenment, http://www.permanent-revolution.org/polemics/mwhh_ch06.pdf , as well as in the essay, The Vulgar Critique of Vulgar Materialism, http://www.permanent-revolution.org/polemics/vulgar_critique.pdf
[9] From North’s essay: “Trotsky, quite clearly, played a decisive role in the Russian Revolution, one of the key events of the 20th century. He was also, as it so happens, one of this century’s most brilliant literary figures. Walter Benjamin noted in his diary that Bertolt Brecht in 1931 “maintained that there were good reasons for thinking that Trotsky was the greatest living European writer.””
[10] See Chapter 9 of Marxism Without its Head or Heart “Remarks on Bernstein, ‘Neo-Utopianism’ and Political Amalgams” http://permanent-revolution.org/polemics/mwhh_ch09.pdf pages 242-243.

[11] See Fromm’s “The Method and Function of an Analytic Social Psychology” Reprinted in The Crisis of Psychoanalysis
[12] See Lih’s Lenin Rediscovered: What is to be Done? in Context. (Brill Academic Publishers, 2005)
[13] The Junius Pamphlet , Collected Works, Volume 22 . This is available online at http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/jul/junius-pamphlet.htm