Rejoinder to David Black

On Karl Korsch’s Marxism and Philosophy

Chris Cutrone

Police photo of Vladimir Il’ich Lenin, taken after his arrest in 1895 for participation in the St. Petersberg Union of Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class.

DAVID BLACK’S VALUABLE COMMENTS and further historical exposition (in Platypus Review 18, December 2009) of my review of Karl Korsch’s Marxism and Philosophy (Platypus Review 15, September 2009) have at their core an issue with Korsch’s account of the different historical phases of the question of “philosophy” for Marx and Marxism. Black questions Korsch’s differentiation of Marx’s relationship to philosophy into three distinct periods: pre-1848, circa 1848, and post-1848. But attempting to defeat Korsch’s historical account of such changes in Marx’s approaches to relating theory and practice means avoiding Korsch’s principal point. It also means defending Marx on mistaken ground. Black considers that Korsch’s periodization—his recognition of changes—opens the door to criticizing Marx for inconsistency in his relation of theory to practice. But that is not so.

What makes Korsch’s essay “Marxism and Philosophy” (1923) important, to Benjamin and Adorno’s work for instance, and what relates it intrinsically to Lukács’s contemporaneous treatment of the question of the “Hegelian” dimension of Marxism in History and Class Consciousness, is Korsch’s discovery of the historically changing relation of theory and practice, and the self-consciousness of this problem, in the history of Marxism. This meant that the matter was, from a Marxian perspective, as Adorno put it in Negative Dialectics, “not settled once and for all, but fluctuates historically.”[1] Indeed, as Adorno put it in a late essay,

If, to make an exception for once, one risks what is called a grand perspective, beyond the historical differences in which the concepts of theory and praxis have their life, one discovers the infinitely progressive aspect of the separation of theory and praxis, which was deplored by the Romantics and denounced by the Socialists in their wake—except for the mature Marx.[2]

However one may wish to question the nuances Korsch’s specific historiographic periodization of the problem of Marxism as that of the relation of theory and practice, both during Marx’s lifetime and after, this should not be with an eye to either disputing or defending Marx or a Marxian approach’s consistency on the matter. One may perhaps attempt a more fine-grained approach to the historical “fluctuations” of what Adorno called the “constitutive” and indeed “progressive” aspect of the “separation of theory and praxis.” Korsch’s point in the 1923 “Marxism and Philosophy,” followed by Benjamin and Adorno, was that we must attend to this “separation,” or, as Adorno put it, “non-identity,” if we are to have a properly Marxian self-consciousness of the problem of “Marxism” in theory and practice. For this problem of the separation of theory and practice is not to be deplored, but calls for critical awareness. Marx was consistent in his own awareness of the relation of theory and practice. This meant that at different times Marx found them related in different ways.

By contrast, what has waylaid the sectarian “Marxist Left” has been the freezing of the theory-practice problem, which then continued to elude a progressive-emancipatory solution at any given moment. Particular historical moments in the theory-practice problem have become dogmatized by various sects, thus dooming them to irrelevance. So generations of ostensibly revolutionary “Marxists” have failed to heed the nature of Rosa Luxemburg’s praise of Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolsheviks in the October Revolution:

All of us are subject to the laws of history….The Bolsheviks have shown that they are capable of everything that a genuine revolutionary party can contribute within the limits of historical possibilities….What is in order is to distinguish the essential from the non-essential, the kernel from the accidental excrescencies in the politics of the Bolsheviks. In the present period, when we face decisive final struggles in all the world, the most important problem of socialism was and is the burning question of our time. It is not a matter of this or that secondary question of tactics, but of the capacity for action of the proletariat, the strength to act, the will to power of socialism as such. In this, Lenin and Trotsky and their friends were the first, those who went ahead as an example to the proletariat of the world; they are still the only ones up to now who can cry with Hutten: “I have dared!” This is the essential and enduring in Bolshevik policy. In this sense theirs is the immortal historical service of having marched at the head of the international proletariat with the conquest of political power and the practical placing of the problem of the realization of socialism, and of having advanced mightily the settlement of the score between capital and labor in the entire world….And in this sense, the future everywhere belongs to “Bolshevism.”[3]

The Bolshevik Revolution was not itself the achievement of socialism and the overcoming of capitalism, but it did nevertheless squarely address itself to the problem of grasping history so as to make possible revolutionary practice. The Bolsheviks recognized, in other words, that we are tasked, by the very nature of capital, in Marx’s sense, to struggle within and through the separation of theory and practice. The Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917 was the occasion and context for Korsch’s rumination on the theory and practice of Marxism in his seminal 1923 essay on “Marxism and Philosophy.”

In the extended aftermath of the failed revolution of 1917–19, the crisis of the Stalinization of Third International Communism and the looming political victory of fascism, Horkheimer, in an aphorism titled “A Discussion About Revolution,” addressed himself to the same subject Luxemburg and Korsch had discussed, from the other side of historical experience:

[A] proletarian party cannot be made the object of contemplative criticism….Bourgeois criticism of the proletarian struggle is a logical impossibility….At times such as the present, revolutionary belief may not really be compatible with great clear-sightedness about the realities.[4]

This is because, for Horkheimer, from a Marxian “proletarian” perspective, as opposed to a (historically) “bourgeois” one (including that of pre- or non-Marxian “socialism”), the problem is not a matter of formulating a correct theory and then implementing it in practice. It is rather a question of what Lukács called “historical consciousness.” We should note well how Horkheimer posed the theory-practice problem here, as the contradiction between “revolutionary belief” and “clear-sightedness about the realities.”

Horkheimer elaborated further that proletarian revolutionary politics cannot be conceived on the model of capitalist enterprise, and not only for socioeconomic class-hierarchical reasons, but rather because of the differing relation of theory and practice in the two instances; it is the absence of any “historical consciousness” of the theory and practice problem that makes “bourgeois criticism of the proletarian struggle” a logical “impossibility.” As Lukács put it, in “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat” (1923), “a radical change in outlook is not feasible on the soil of bourgeois society.” Rather, one must radically deepen—render “dialectical”—the outlook of the present historical moment. The point is that a Marxian perspective can find—and indeed has often found—itself far removed from the practical politics and (entirely “bourgeois”) ideological consciousness of the working class. This has not invalidated Marxism, but rather called for a further Marxian critical reflection on its own condition.

In a letter of February 22, 1881 to the Dutch anarchist Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis, Marx wrote,

It is my conviction that the critical juncture for a new International Working Men’s Association has not yet arrived and for that reason I regard all workers’ congresses or socialist congresses, in so far as they are not directly related to the conditions existing in this or that particular nation, as not merely useless but actually harmful. They will always ineffectually end in endlessly repeated general banalities.[5]

How much more is this criticism applicable to the “Left” today! But, more directly, what it points to is that Marx recognized no fixed relation of theory and practice that he pursued throughout his life. Instead, he very self-consciously exercised judgment respecting the changing relation of theory and practice, and considered this consciousness the hallmark of his politics. Marx’s 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852) excoriated “bourgeois” democratic politics, including that of contemporary socialists, for its inability to simultaneously learn from history and face the challenge of the new.[6] How else could one judge that a moment has “not yet arrived” while calling for something other than “endlessly repeated banalities?”

Marx had a critical theory of the relation of theory and practice—recognizing it as a historically specific and not merely “philosophical” problem, or, a problem that called for the critical theory of the philosophy of history—and a political practice of the relation of theory and practice. There is not simply a theoretical or practical problem, but also and more profoundly a problem of relating theory and practice.

We are neither going to think our way out ahead of time, nor somehow work our way through, in the process of acting. We do not need to dissolve the theory-practice distinction that seems to paralyze us, but rather achieve both good theory and good practice in the struggle to relate them properly. It is not a matter of finding either a correct theory or correct practice, but of trying to judge and affect their changing relation and recognizing this as a problem of history.

Marx overcame the political pitfalls and historical blindness of his “revolutionary” contemporaries, such as the pre-Marxian socialism of Proudhon et al. leading to 1848, anarchism in the First International, and the Lassallean trend of the German Social-Democratic Party. It is significant that Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875) critiqued the residual Lassallean politics of the Social Democrats for being to the Right of the liberals on international free trade, etc., thus exposing the problem of this first “Marxist” party from the outset.[7]

Lenin, Luxemburg, and Trotsky, following Marx, recovered and struggled through the problem of theory and practice for their time, precipitating a crisis in Marxism, and thus advancing it. They overcame the “vulgar Marxist” ossification of theory and practice in the Second International, as Korsch and Lukács explained. It meant the Marxist critique of Marxism, or, an emancipatory critique of emancipatory politics—a Left critique of the Left. This is not a finished task. We need to attain this ability again, for our time. |P

[2] Adorno, “Marginalia to Theory and Praxis,” in Critical Models, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 266. This essay, a “dialectical epilegomenon” to his book Negative Dialectics that Adorno said intended to bring together “philosophical speculation and drastic experience” (Critical Models, 126), was one of the last writings he finished for publication before he died in 1969. It reflected his dispute with fellow Frankfurt School critical theorist Hebert Marcuse over the student protests of the Vietnam War (see Adorno and Marcuse, “Correspondence on the German Student Movement,” trans. Esther Leslie, New Left Review I/233, Jan.–Feb. 1999, 123–136). As Adorno put it in his May 5, 1969 letter to Marcuse, “[T]here are moments in which theory is pushed on further by practice. But such a situation neither exists objectively today, nor does the barren and brutal practicism that confronts us here have the slightest thing to do with theory anyhow” (“Correspondence,” 127).

[3] Rosa Luxemburg, “The Russian Revolution,” in The Russian Revolution and Leninism or Marxism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961), 80.

[4] Max Horkheimer, Dawn and Decline, trans. Michael Shaw (New York: Seabury Press, 1978), 40–41.

[5] Karl Marx to Domela Nieuwenhuis, 22 February 1881, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: Selected Correspondence, 1846-1895, trans. Dona Torr (New York: International Publishers, 1942), 387, <www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1881/letters/81_02_22.htm>.

[6] As Luxemburg put it in 1915 in The Crisis of German Social Democracy (aka The Junius Pamphlet, available online at <www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1915/junius/>),

Marx says [in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852)]: “[T]he democrat (that is, the petty bourgeois revolutionary) [comes] out of the most shameful defeats as unmarked as he naively went into them; he comes away with the newly gained conviction that he must be victorious, not that he or his party ought to give up the old principles, but that conditions ought to accommodate him.” The modern proletariat comes out of historical tests differently. Its tasks and its errors are both gigantic: no prescription, no schema valid for every case, no infallible leader to show it the path to follow. Historical experience is its only school mistress. Its thorny way to self-emancipation is paved not only with immeasurable suffering but also with countless errors. The aim of its journey—its emancipation depends on this—is whether the proletariat can learn from its own errors. Self-criticism, remorseless, cruel, and going to the core of things is the life’s breath and light of the proletarian movement. The fall of the socialist proletariat in the present world war [WWI] is unprecedented. It is a misfortune for humanity. But socialism will be lost only if the international proletariat fails to measure the depth of this fall, if it refuses to learn from it.

[7] Karl Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Program,” in Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker, 2nd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 533–534, <www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/>. Marx wrote, “In fact, the internationalism of the program stands even infinitely below that of the Free Trade party. The latter also asserts that the result of its efforts will be ‘the international brotherhood of peoples.’ But it also does something to make trade international…The international activity of the working classes does not in any way depend on the existence of the International Working Men’s Association.”

Given the recent election crisis and continuing protests in Iran and in light of the 30th anniversary of the Islamic Revolution, The Platypus Affiliated Society on November 5, 2009 hosted a panel discussion at the University of Chicago entitled 30 Years of the Islamic Revolution: The Tragedy of the Left. Panel participants included Danny Postel, journalist and author of Reading Legitimation Crisis in Tehran: Iran and the Future of Liberalism; Kaveh Ehsani, editor of The Middle East Report (MERIP); Maziar Behrooz, historian and author of Rebels with a Cause: The Failure of the Left in Iran; and Chris Cutrone of Platypus. This supplement to issue #20 of the Platypus Review consists of an edited transcript of the discussion, beginning with the panelists’ prepared remarks, followed by their responses to each other, and ending with a series of questions and answers.

Opening Remarks

Panelists’ Responses

Q&A

Closing Remarks

Opening Remarks

Danny Postel: The central question, which I will approach indirectly, is whether the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran was a tragedy for the Left.

In the conventional narrative of the Iranian Left the answer to our question has long been, “Yes.” The 1979 Revolution was a failure insofar as it was hijacked by one faction of a broader coalition that included the Iranian revolutionary Left. The faction in question was the Islamist or Khomeinite faction, which, once it gained control, proceeded to decimate, destroy, murder, imprison, and drive into exile its erstwhile comrades. There is a lot of truth to this leftist narrative, but it is only part of the story. It is largely self-exculpatory and elides the role the Iranian Left played in its own immolation. An account of this self-defeat can be found in Maziar Behrooz’s book, Rebels with a Cause: The Failure of the Left in Iran, a salutary and, indeed, definitive reconsideration of the history of the pre-revolutionary Iranian Left.

As Maziar explains, the Iranian Left, or at least certain key fractions of it, helped fashion the noose the Islamists ultimately hung them with. According to Behrooz, the Khomeinites were able to do this in large part because the Tudeh party, the Fadaiyan Majority, and many other Iranian Marxist parties, whatever their differences with the Islamists, shared with them a profound hostility toward liberalism. Like [Ruhollah al-Musavi] Khomeini’s followers, dominant trends on the Iranian Left viewed democratic rights, civil liberties, and women’s rights as no more than elements of what they described interchangeably as “western,” “colonial,” or “bourgeois” ideology.

On the basis of Behrooz’s analysis of the critical failings of the Iranian Left, I would say we must revise the Iranian Left’s usual answer to the question and answer it instead in the negative. No, the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran was not a tragedy for the Left, for tragedies befall innocence; they happen to people who have no idea of, and are not responsible for, the fate that awaits them.

This raises another question: Is it in fact a tragedy that the Stalinists and Maoists who made up the great majority of the left in Iran in the 1960s and 1970s did not take power? After all, virtually all Iranian leftists of the 1960s and 1970s were either Stalinist or Maoist. In light of this, I would argue that what followed in the wake of the 1979 Revolution was not so much a tragedy for the Iranian Marxist “Left” then in existence, as it was a tragedy for the project of the Left per se. For the genuinely leftist project of internationalism and human emancipation, the profoundly authoritarian, repressive, reactionary, and proto-fascist regime that emerged out of the Revolution and has ruled Iran ever since is certainly tragic but also, and more accurately, catastrophic. But what are the lessons to be learned?

There are both external and internal factors in the destruction of the Iranian Left. The external factors are obviously the brutality of the Islamists who took over and Iran’s strategic position in the Cold War rivalry between the U.S. and USSR. These factors are certainly important, but Behrooz’s book rightly zeroes in on the internal factors. Of these, he considers the Left’s tunnel-vision anti-imperialism most essential. Khomeini’s gang may have disdained professedly secular, rational socialists, but on the Left the argument went that, because they were anti-American and anti-imperialist, the Khomeinites were “objectively progressive.”

We now know that the Left’s was a demented, disfigured, ultimately catastrophic argument, one that had lethal consequences for those who propounded it. There was nothing progressive about Khomeini’s anti-imperialism. It was authoritarian and regressive, as is [Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad’s anti-imperialism today. Whether Khomeini’s rhetoric was truly anti-imperialist is open to debate—but to the extent it was, it amounted to no more than an anti-imperialism of fools.

What were some of the consequences of the Iranian Marxist Left’s view that the anti-imperialist, anti-American rhetoric of the Khomeinites was “objectively progressive”? As mentioned earlier, it led to a rejection of the demands for human rights advanced by feminists, democratic liberals, and nationalists. Rather than sympathizing with and advancing their demands, many on the Left in Iran in 1979 regarded feminism as a bourgeois colonial ideology. Because of this many Iranian Marxists sided with extreme reactionary forces within the new Islamic government as they repressed feminism, beating women and suppressing their demands. Similarly, when newspapers were shut down, many Iranian Marxists defended not their right to publish their views, but the regime’s supposed responsibility to close them down! Here again the logic was the same: Liberal and nationalist newspapers were neo-colonial and bourgeois. Such actions, justified in the name of anti-imperialism, constituted a catastrophic turn down the dark ally of anti-liberalism. The Left mistakenly viewed liberalism as part of a toxic, global, colonial project rather than viewing it, as Marx himself did, as being necessary but insufficient—or, better, insufficient but bloody necessary—to the project of socialism and liberation.

The anti-liberal “radicalism” the Iranian Marxists shared with the Khomeinites was reactionary. But what can this teach us today, as we watch the protests in the streets of Tehran? After all, less than 24 hours ago, we witnessed the largest protests since the fall of the Shah. Clearly, we are again living in a historic moment, and so we should discuss some of the parallels and discontinuities between 1978–79 and today, the most obvious similarity being that, once again, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of Iranians have taken to the streets to voice their demands.

Where there has been some affinity between Platypus’s perspective and my own is in our shared critique of the authoritarian Left, the myopic anti-imperialism of those like MRzine, the online organ of Monthly Review magazine, or an organization like international ANSWER, which held a demonstration in solidarity with the Islamic Republic of Iran in June here in Chicago, defending Hugo Chavez and his position that the demonstrations in Iran are tools for imperial intervention, that the elections were wholly legitimate, and that Ahmadinejad is a revolutionary comrade that deserves the Left’s support.

Where my perspective diverges from Platypus’s is in our respective angles on what is happening in Iran today, particularly with respect to the Green or democratic movement that has developed in response to the June election results. As Chris Cutrone made clear already in his article in the August 2009 issue of the Platypus Review, he dismisses the Green Movement in Iran as still too…something. Actually I do not think Chris developed any definite criticism, but made only rhetorical gestures. So, I hope to hear an argument about where he stands now on the Green Movement in Iran. But from what I have heard so far from him, he shares the tunnel-vision anti-imperialism of the Left that supports Ahmadinejad and rejects the Green Movement. No doubt, be has reasons of his own for rejecting the Green Movement, but what he shares with the defenders of Ahmadinejad is a hostility to the pluralistic, democratic liberalism already articulated by the Green Movement. Though it is true that this movement remains somewhat inchoate, a work-in-progress, and is even now still forming its platform or agenda, the broad ideological outlines are clear.

I think there is a real danger in failing to recognize the emancipatory potential—not the fully articulated emancipatory program, granted, but the clear emancipatory promise and potential—in the Green Movement. It is a mistake to blind oneself to this promise or to reject it simply because it is articulated within the logic and framework of the Islamic Republic, or because it does not speak the anti-capitalist language of the Western Left and lacks a developed critique of neoliberalism. This latter point, which I take to be Platypus’s position, represents a species of left imperialism. To decline to sign on and support the Green Movement because they do not speak the language of socialist revolution is to cram the complex and fluctuating on-the-ground reality in Iran today into the preconceived categories of the Western Left. Such an attempt to fit that movement into our agenda constitutes a disfigured left imperialism that fundamentally misunderstands Iran today.

Kaveh Ehsani: Another question we are here to debate is whether the creation of the Islamic Republic was revolutionary and, if so, what aspects of society were transformed, and how. The Iranian Revolution was the largest political event of the 20^th century. After a mass strike lasting more than a year and a half, mass revolution suffused the fabric of Iranian society. A major regime in the region was brought down and another one put in its place. By any standard this was revolutionary, but the question we on the Left debated at the time was this: Is the Iranian Revolution merely a political, or was it a real social revolution? By Lenin’s standards a real revolution smashes the state, creates a new one, and transforms the relations of production. By these criteria, I think this revolution was a hybrid, as is the regime that derived from it.

This said, I do not think we gain much by adducing abstract criteria by which to judge historical reality. This was not the kind of revolution the Left and the secular forces expected or wanted, but it was a revolution. If we reexamine the slogans of the revolutionaries in 1978 to 1979—“Independence! Freedom! Islamic Republic!”—they evidently have little to do with anything we might consider “left.” But, beyond this, the question remains, What do these slogans actually mean?

Time and again Iran has been in the vanguard of major social transformations in that part of the world—the developing world, if you will—first in 1906, then in 1953, and again in 1979. As with the French tradition of public protest, challenging the authority of the state is now woven into the fabric of modern Iranian society. In a profound way, Iranian society is still fighting the Constitutional Revolution of 1906, still fighting to limit the power of the state and render it accountable to society.

Beyond those that came as a result of the 1979 Revolution or the 1906 Constitutional Revolution, there have been other important social transformations. Indeed, perhaps the biggest social transformation of Iran’s history was brought about by the White Revolution instituted in the 1960s by the monarchy with the support of the United States. A revolution from above, the White Revolution programs nevertheless profoundly transformed rural Iranian society. Through them, the state eliminated the rural landowner class, turned their tenants into small peasant proprietors, and transformed the old aristocracy and landlords into an urban bourgeoisie deeply beholden to the comprador state. This opened the road to 1979.

So we risk losing sight of the complexity of Iranian history if we insist upon simplistic questions such as
“Was this a revolution or not?” and “Was it leftist or not?” Instead we ought to be asking, Was there an Islamic Left and, if so, where did it stand in 1979 and where does it stand today? For all practical purposes, in 1979 the Marxist Left was in competition not only with right-wing Islamism but with the Islamic Left. Both the Marxists and the Islamic Left believed in violence as a midwife of history, both sought to capture state power, and both sought to engineer society in accordance with abstract principles. Opposition candidate and leader of the Green Movement Mir-Hossein Mousavi is a product of the Islamic Left, as is Ahmadinejad.

As for the slogans of 1979, “Independence” was fairly straightforward. It meant independence from imperial powers that had long interfered in Iranian affairs. More particularly, it meant independence from the United States whose influence had grown steadily since the 1950s. But what did “Freedom” mean? Did it mean individual freedom, or something else? I think, more than anything, it meant freedom from censorship, freedom from the police state then controlling and stifling civic and public life. Of course, this is not the same thing as political freedom in the sense we mean today. In that sense, the Left was not being hypocritical by calling for freedom. Nor were the Islamists when they denied individual freedom, because that was never what they intended either.

Comparing Islamism in Iran and in Egypt, Asaf Bayat has recently shown how, in Iran, what one finds is really a revolution with an Islamic movement. In 1979, for the first time in Iran’s history, more then 50 percent of the population became urbanized, literate, and integrated into the market economy, that is, they became “modernized” in the Weberian sense of the word. But there was no Islamic movement to speak of. The Revolution resulted from a confluence of various forces, of which Khomeini’s uniquely charismatic leadership is only one. The Left participated in the movement together with nationalists, the urban working class, and provincial populations. This was not a particularly “Islamic” movement. In Egypt, by contrast, there has long been an Islamic movement with deep roots in society, yet no revolution ever came of it.

Prior to the Revolution, Iranian society was a typical case of uneven development, which was then subject to what Ervand Abrahamian has described as a kind of hyper-modernization. There was rapid capitalist development, but without the political freedoms accompanying it. Because the Shah choked off the political articulation of demands arising from society, politics gravitated toward violence. That is the reason for the guerrilla warfare that occurred during the lead-up to the Revolution.

The old Iranian Left was basically a spin-off of the old nationalists. But with so many of them in exile or underground, the younger generation took a new course in the 1960s, adopting Guevarist and Maoist tactics. This came back to haunt us in the post-revolutionary period, by which time violence was accepted as a way to obtain political goals.

A revolution is a bizarre process. You feel completely empowered and powerless at the same time. No doubt, few of you have had this experience, but some of us on this platform have. We have become exiles, our lives have been in danger, and we have felt very empowered by it. It is a unique experience and allows for a sense that history is being made. Michel Foucault was accurate about this aspect of what he saw going on in Iran. A profound transformation was taking place, history was changing, and nobody held the reins.

My analysis is that 1979 was a revolution of the periphery. It was a provincial revolution, not an Islamic Revolution, because if you look at the new elite, the new population that eventually captured and refashioned the state, these were people coming out of what had been the periphery of the society: provincial, uneducated migrants who had been left out of the uneven modernization that took place under the monarchy. This is not the social revolution that the Left might have wanted, but it was nonetheless a social revolution in that it socially integrated the majority of Iranians who, since the 1940s, had been on the receiving end of authoritarian social engineering. The 1979 Revolution gave them a voice, and that voice proved deafening. In the economic sphere, a vast amount of public land and public housing was privatized. People simply squatted, took over public land, and constructed their homes on it. After the Revolution, the stock of housing doubled from what it had been before. Millions captured some private property in the process. So, to revert to the old terms, underlying 1979 was a petit-bourgeois process, one that empowered a large swath of the population. That is why the regime has its own legitimacy, rooted in its own claim to social justice. It has been tremendously successful in bringing about certain social welfare and developmental changes.

So what is happening in Iran now? Since the end of the war with Iraq in 1988, the leaders of the Islamic Republic have had to face an exhausted economy and population. The regime has not realized the revolutionary ideals of justice for all, equality, and the Islamic Republic as a godly community on Earth. The leaders had to improvise an alternative model. The one they came up with has two pillars: First, create a middle class that, being the product of the regime, will be loyal to it. Expand the university system, shape the curriculum, and create a professional class that will comprise our experts, run our economy, and allow us to rebuild. Second, allow the existing propertied class to accumulate wealth in the cities unmolested. This was the strategy pursued under [Akbar Hashemi] Rafsanjani in the 1990s and by [Seyed Mohammad] Khatami and the reformers until 2005.

What we are seeing now is the byproduct of provincial people, rural people, sending their kids to school in the post-Revolution period; or, if they had a small house, suddenly gaining the right to break the zoning laws, build multiple stories, and, with the money they make, send the next generation to university. In other words, what we are witnessing is an emerging middle class demanding a voice in politics through the Green Movement. This is one of the reasons why the international Left criticizes it. But these people are not middle class in the American, global sense of the world. They come together to make a very different sort of animal. The result is very much more organic than, for instance, a movement of American university students would be.

Let me conclude by saying that if the Left wants to assemble any sort of project in Iran, if it wants to challenge the hegemony of the market and allow working class people a way to envision their future, it can do so only in a more democratic space. It cannot do so by monopolizing political power, because the society is too diverse and complex for that. Right now, there is a predominantly middle class popular movement. At some point soon, it will come to incorporate elements of the commercial and working classes as well. But to have a chance it needs greater freedom of movement. Without an expansion of democratic space, a space that is lacking under the existing police state, the movement cannot grow.

Maziar Behrooz: Before addressing the issue of the Left in Iran today, I would like to add just a bit to what Ehsani said about the 1979 Revolution.

The Revolution of 1979 was not a revolution in the sense that the ruling class was completely displaced. The ruling class moved to Los Angeles. It left the country and its property was confiscated. In that sense the Revolution witnessed a major displacement of the haute bourgeoisie. The highly educated accents of the pre-revolutionary period are gone. Nowadays there is not a single member of the Parliament of Iran who does not speak with some slight rural accent. This is because, as Ehsani pointed out, a movement of villagers from the countryside to the city accompanied the expulsion of the haute bourgeoisie. The population of Iran has doubled in the past 30 years, and the vast majority of this population growth has taken place in the cities. This brings me to another point that bears stressing: 1979 was definitely a cultural revolution. The Islamists, the leaders of the Revolution, more than anything else point to this aspect of the Revolution, because they were intent on preserving a culture they thought to be under assault from the Shah. So religion comes back; the ceremonies, get-togethers, associated values, and other aspects of cultural life closely linked with religion all make a major comeback after 1979.

Regarding the Iranian Left, in my assessment it was the largest in the Middle East. It had both the deepest roots and the widest appeal. Also, rather than being rooted mainly in the peasantry, in Iran the Left was composed primarily of workers, the urban poor, and the middle class. Taken together and compared to Communist movements in Arab countries or in neighboring Pakistan, the Iranian Left can only be described as enormous.

But this movement was effectively uprooted three times. First in 1920, then in the repression of the early 1950s, and then for a third time in the early 1980s. The first two times, the movement suffered very considerable and violent repression, yet it still managed to recover. But the last time it did not. So one question we must ask is, Why was the Left not able to recover a third time? But before I go into that, let me say a few words about the Left’s impact on the Iranian Revolution.

The Left in Iran had only a modest influence on the Revolution as it unfolded in 1978–1979. Of all the Marxist and revolutionary groups in Iran, only one can be said to have been effectively functioning at that time, and it had only a small number of guerrillas. These Fadaiyan were active, but their impact was modest. However, in the period between the collapse of the regime and 11 February 1979, the Left certainly grew.

The rest of the leftist groups in Iran, from the pro-Soviet Tudeh party to Maoist groups to Trotskyites, were really groups in exile, whether in Western or Eastern Europe. They made an impact by working against the Shah in news and propaganda, highlighting the dictatorship’s abuse of human rights. In fact, they were quite effective in doing this and thus formed a crucial voice for the Iranian opposition. But, as I say, inside Iran there was little in the way of real organization. Only the most hardcore, underground organizations were capable of evading the political police. The Fadaiyan were the only such group and they had been largely contained by 1979.

So the impact of the Left was not just in street battles, but also in maintaining steady pressure on the Shah from the outside. In that sense, it was very important. The Tudeh Party, or Iranian Communist Party, succeeded in mobilizing the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc resources against the Shah. Such propaganda helped to sustain the Iranian opposition’s morale. Resistance needs morale, and the Left kept it from flagging. When we were teenagers growing up, and the Shah claimed to be the all-powerful, benevolent ruler, guiding Iran to its civilizational destiny, we knew, “This is not the whole truth.” We also knew that the people resisting his rule were not what he said they were. They were not saboteurs, but were Robin Hood-type figures who gave up their lives and livelihood to struggle against the Shah.

The most famous of these figures was, of course, Khosrow Golesorkhi, who was put on trial on national television. Golesorkhi, alongside Karamat Daneshian, was defiant, and used the occasion to put the regime on trial, accusing it of torture and human rights violations. He said, “You animals, you have tortured me, I accuse you” of this and that. So, here was this character on live television. Seeing him when I was fourteen or fifteen years old shook me to my foundation. Before that time, I did not believe such a person could exist in Iran. I thought nobody could challenge the Shah. Thus, as I say, the Left kept up morale. At the same time, it set the terms of what would become the debate inside the Revolution. In crucial respects, it provided the vocabulary and set the agenda, though not the outcome, of that debate.

As Postel has noted, one discursive element the Left supplied was anti-liberalism: “These liberals need to be isolated, we cannot work with them. They are crooks. If they are democrats, they are at best bourgeois democrats.” Such rhetoric was invented by the Left and picked up by the Islamists. The same is true of women’s rights, the loss of which was the most palpable consequence of the Revolution. After 1979 the veil was increasingly mandated, before finally becoming law in 1982. Though, of course, the Left opposed the forced veiling of women, here again the issue was marginalized as being, at best, liberal and therefore secondary. The Left was unwilling to break with the Islamists over what they took to be merely a women’s issue.

So, what are some of the lasting social and political consequences of the 1979 Revolution for the Left today? As has been noted already, in the 1980s the Left paid a very steep price for its alliance with the Islamists, as thousands of comrades were killed or forced into exile. This crushing defeat of the Iranian Left was followed by another historical event, one that crucially shapes the future not just of an Iranian Left, but of the international Left as a whole. I mean, of course, the collapse of the Soviet Union, marking the failure of the Bolshevik project. Once the Bolshevik Revolution failed, revolutions that saw themselves as rooted in that Revolution—the Vietnamese, Chinese, and Cuban Revolutions—collapsed like dominoes. Today, there is nothing of Marxism left in China—a lot of Leninism, but no Marxism. So by the end of the 1980s the whole thing collapses. The collapse of the Iranian Left and its failure to regroup are, therefore, rooted both in the repressive character of the Islamic Republic and in a much wider history.

To my mind, this raises the question of the definition of “Left” today. What are you talking about when you say “Left”? Are you talking about a Marxist Left or a Marxian Left? A Marxian Left takes Marx, applies it selectively, and tries to understand where it has utility. A Marxist Left makes out of Marx a totalizing ideology. Whatever else it was, the collapse of Bolshevism was the collapse of the Marxist Left, at least in the second sense.

Chris Cutrone: I would like to pose the question: What can the history of the Islamic Revolution in Iran teach the Left?

The 30^th anniversary of the toppling of the Shah of Iran witnesses the controversy over the election results in the Islamic Republic, in which the incumbent Ahmadinejad claimed victory over his opponent Mir-Hossein Mousavi, and mass protests against this result were subject to brutal, violent repression.

These two historic moments, those of the birth and of the potentially fatal crisis of the Islamic Republic, communicate over time, and can tell us a great deal about the nature and trajectory of the contemporary world, and the role of the demise of the Left in it.

We in Platypus approach the history of the Islamic Revolution in Iran as a specific story in the overall history of the death of the Left—its historical decline and disappearance. The self-destruction of the Left in Iran is a good entry into an investigation of the death of the Left internationally, over the course of at least the past generation.

It is instructive that, where once the Left in Iran was the most vital and potentially significant in the Middle East or Muslim world, today the Left has been completely eradicated in Iran. Whereas the Shah simultaneously sought to repress and co-opt the Left, the Islamic Republic has brought about its entire elimination in Iran (and has sought to do so elsewhere, for instance in the Lebanese civil war, through proxies like Hezbollah). It is in this sense that one can meaningfully talk about the reactionary, right-wing character of the Islamic Republic, relative to what came before it under the Pahlavi dynasty. There are fewer possibilities for Iranian society today than there were 30 years ago. This bitter fact is something most try to avoid confronting, but is where I want to focus attention in my presentation.

The Left is defined by potential and possibility, the right by its foreclosure. The Left expresses and reveals potential possibilities, while the right represses and obscures these.

For this reason, the role of the Iranian and international Left in repressing and obscuring the true character of social possibilities in Iran, during the period leading up to the Islamic Revolution, is crucial for grasping, not only how the Left destroyed itself, but also, and more importantly, how it destroyed itself as a Left, and thus contributed to the construction of a new right. Only justice for past crimes committed by the Left can recover old and open new possibilities in the present. Only by confronting its problematic historical legacy can the Left today be a Left at all. But this is something virtually no one wants to do.

Slavoj Žižek, in his recent book In Defense of Lost Causes, cites Heidegger’s embrace of Nazism and Foucault’s embrace of the Islamic Revolution in Iran to demonstrate the importance and necessity of what Žižek calls “taking the right step in the wrong direction.” Žižek is eager, as he expressed in his writing on the recent election crisis in Iran, to find the “emancipatory potential” of “good Islam.” He thinks that a more radical emancipatory potential was grasped, however uncertainly, by Foucault in 1979 (and by Heidegger in 1933!) I wish to argue the contrary, that Foucault’s—and the rest of the “Left’s”—embrace of Islamism was and continues to be a conservative move, thinly veiled by claims to more radical bona fides. They have lied.

This phenomenon of seeking the “emancipatory potential” of “good Islam” can be traced all the way through the recent election crisis in Iran, if we examine the trajectory of supposedly “Left” Islamist discontents and opposition to the Shah’s regime leading up to the Islamic Revolution, and how this plays out for the continuers of such politics in the Islamic Republic in the present.

The New Left Islamist figure Ali Shariati is key to understanding the relation of the Left to Islamism, both around the 1979 toppling of the Shah and the political divisions in the Islamic Republic today. For instance, opposition presidential candidate Mousavi, and especially his wife Zahra Rahnavard, were students of Shariati who worked closely with him politically in the 1960s and 1970s. The largest political organization on the Left in the 1979 Revolution was the MEK (Mujahedin-e-Khalq, or People’s Mujahedin of Iran), who found inspiration in Shariati’s approach to Islam.

The fact that Mousavi and Rahnavard eventually joined the Khomeini faction, and that there is a significant likelihood that Khomeini’s agents were responsible for Shariati’s untimely death in 1977 at age 44, should not obscure the New Left Islamist roots of the Khomeinite Islamic Republic, of which Mousavi was Prime Minister from 1981–89, under Khomeini’s “supreme” leadership. The present controversy in the Islamic Republic establishment is not to be understood in terms of new wine in old bottles, but rather the old in the new. The Islamist politics on both sides is a right-wing phenomenon, now as before. Mousavi as standard-bearer for discontents in the Islamic Republic is a phenomenon of political confusion, to which any Left must attend. There are significant problems to be addressed in the relation of ideology to social and political reality. The point is that Khomeini’s supremacy in the Islamic Revolution is not to be explained by his superior insight and grasp of realities, but rather his successful navigation of them, which is a different matter. The present dispute between Ahmadinejad and Mousavi amounts to this.

Khomeini did not lead a revolutionary transformation of Iranian society, but rather the reconsolidation of Iran after the crisis and fall of the Shah. The phenomenon of the so-called “Left,” for the most part, calling black white, does not change the fact that Khomeini represented a right-wing response to the discontents and crisis of Iranian society in the 1970s. The Left’s support of Khomeini expresses its disorientation and confusion theoretically, and its right-wing role practically. There is no mystery here: Telling women to cover themselves is not an emancipatory act!

The collapse of the Shah’s regime did not increase but ultimately decreased the possibilities for Iranian society. The Khomeinite Islamic Republic was not the expression but the repression of potential, in the context of diminished possibilities. To understand how this was so, it is useful to consider the historical trajectory of Iran in global context. The developmental states of the post-colonial world underwent a severe crisis starting with the global downturn of the 1970s. The 1970s were the period in which so-called “Third World debt” manifested itself as a serious problem for these states. This also manifested in the so-called “Second World,” as the IMF called in its loans to countries such as Poland and Yugoslavia, setting the ground for the long-term crisis and disintegration of these states.

Oil revenues could provide no remedy in the case of Iran, because what was encountered throughout the world in the 1970s was the crisis of the transformations that went on under the mantle of “modernization.” In Iran, this was carried out through the Shah’s White Revolution, in which he had been goaded, beginning in the early 1960s, by the U.S. Kennedy Administration, and continued to be by those subsequent. Khomeini’s rise as a politician originated in protest against the policies of modernization—and liberalization—implemented by the Shah, under pressure from the United States. Khomeini was always clear about this in ways the “Left” has not been. The Left abdicated from providing an emancipatory response to the changes in Iranian society. The Shah stood between right- and left-wing discontents, but the Left steadily liquidated its own concerns.

Indeed, despite the fact that discontents with the Shah were channeled into New Left “anti-imperialist” politics, the Shah indeed was bucking the “Great Satan” on his own accord. Not only was the Shah’s regime prompted to transform Iranian society through the White Revolution reforms of the 1960s–70s, exacerbating social and political discontents, but indeed responsibility for the ultimate demise of the Shah can also be laid at the door of U.S. policy, for President Carter refused to support the Shah against the tumult of protests that broke out in 1978. The U.S. not only supported the Shah’s regime but significantly undermined it as well. This was not a mistake on the part of the U.S., but expressed the differing interests of U.S. policy as against the Shah. A salient example of this was the U.S. attitude towards the Shah’s acquisition of nuclear weapons, which he pursued. The U.S. firmly opposed this—as it opposes the IR’s pursuit of nuclear weapons technology today.

So much for “anti-imperialism.” So, what happened in Iran? Certainly, the close if not always happy relationship between the Shah’s regime and the U.S. became symbolic for discontents in Iran. But symbolic in what sense? The New Left conception of “imperialism” got in the way of a sober perception of the problems facing Iranian society in the 1970s. Iran was not suffering from U.S. imperial oppression. Rather, Iran faced a crossroads in its development in which an insurgent Islamist politics found purchase. The nature of this Islamist politics was obscured by the Left’s conceptions of the potential social-political divisions in Iranian society and in its greater global context.

Iran was the site for the most significant political Left in the Middle East and Muslim world. Many thousands of Iranian students with leftist inclinations studied abroad in Europe and North America. In their encounter with the metropolitan New Left, they were encouraged to embrace the supposed Muslim roots of Iranian society and find potential there for emancipatory politics. But emancipation from what, for whom?

The issue of Islamist politics looms. Already in 1965, the Communist Party of Indonesia was completely wiped out, with hundreds of thousands of its members and those associated with it (such as ethnic Chinese) butchered, by Islamist political groups in a popular movement. Communists were hacked to death by enraged masses, in numbers sufficient to clog rivers. In the 1970s, Pakistan under Bhutto charted a so-called socialist Islamism that paved the way for the U.S.-supported Islamist military dictatorship of Zia and Pakistan’s sponsorship of the Mujahedin in Afghanistan and cultivation of the Taliban to the present. What all of these phenomena have in common is the repression—the slaughter—of the Left. This is the political significance of Islamism, and nothing other than this.

The New Left Islamist Shariati considered himself a follower of Frantz Fanon. Others, including Khomeini, also found resonance with Fanon’s writings (on Algeria and Africa), on what they considered to be the problem of “cultural imperialism.” So, according to this view, Iran suffered, not from structural and political problems in modern historical context, so much as from cultural problems, of so-called “Westernization,” which was pathologized. The problems of modernization became the problem of Westernization, which thus needed to be eradicated. Islamist politics was the means by which the cure for this “disease” has been attempted, all the way to banning kite flying in Afghanistan.

To this day, the Islamic Republic is premised on a culturalist conception of politics. Ahmadinejad and others speak of Iran’s “political frontiers” as if they were just lines on a map. Their “Islamic Revolution” is civilizational and global in reach. It is not about Iran. Ahmadinejad wrote an “open letter” to President Bush chastising the failure of “liberal democracy” and urging the embrace of the principles of Islamist politics instead.

Khomeini’s Islamic Republic, whose legitimate mantle was in dispute between Mousavi and Ahmadinejad in the recent election, is premised on the idea that the entire Iranian population, suffering from the illness of “cultural imperialism” by the West, needed to be held as minority wards of the mullahs. This is why there is a Guardian Council and a Supreme Leader above all elected officials. When Ahmadinejad referred to the election protesters as “shit,” this was the social imagination behind it: he considered them to be religiously fallen, culturally corrupted, and hence evil, in a disqualifying, dehumanizing sense. The powers-that-be of the Islamic Republic, still pursuing the Islamic Revolution, have moral contempt for the people of Iran—as any right-wingers do for their subalterns.

This is why it is worse than tragic, indeed, I would argue, criminal, for the Left to continue to embrace today, in whatever form, the presuppositions of such right-wing politics of Islamism—as the Left did in the Islamic Revolution 30 years ago. It was worse than a mistake then, and it continues to be so today. It is part of the deliberate obscuring of social realities behind bad ideology and worse politics. The history of the past 30 years proves that when European and North American political activists and professors on the so-called “Left” in the 1970s encouraged their Iranian students that Islamism was a way to address their discontents and ameliorate the problems of Iranian and indeed Muslim society, this was not only a lie, but a crime. It remains so today.

Panelists’ Responses

Postel: I would like to address something Chris said about Foucault. What you are saying is that the Left itself, in embracing Islamism, was making an objectively right-wing move. That is what I want to take issue with. Foucault’s particular relation to Islamism and the Iranian Revolution was quite different from most contemporary leftists.

Most leftists supported the Iranian Revolution writ large, but not specifically the Islamic fraction. They made a variety of arguments about needing to support the regime once the Islamists solidified their hegemony, and there was a lot of pretzel logic on the Left about how to relate to the new Islamic Republic. But during the Revolution itself most international leftists did not specifically support the Islamists. They either supported the Marxists, or they simply held some vague notion of the Iranian Revolution as a blow to the American Empire. Foucault is distinctive in this respect. He not only supported the Islamists but he was hostile to the secular forces in the Iranian Revolution. When Foucault was writing about the Iranian Revolution he was writing against the secular Western Left. What he loved about the Iranian Revolution is that it was no mere national liberation movement cum Marxist-Leninist revolution, but that it had a religious dimension. In one of his more poetic flights of fancy, he wrote that what the Iranian Revolution promised was not a new regime or new set of constitutional arrangements but a “new regime of truth.” Precisely because the Western Left was so secular, according to Foucault, it was blind to the Iranian Revolution’s emancipatory potential.

Janet Afary and Kevin Anderson have dissected what was wrong with Foucault’s arguments. But it does bear repeating here that, in supporting the Islamist wing of the Revolution against the secular forces, Foucault was not in fact emblematic of the international Left, the Western Left. He got into all sorts of hissing matches with French Marxists like Simone de Beauvoir and Maxime Rodinson on account of his bizarre and problematic position. This is not to exculpate in any way the majority of the international Left, which did indeed get all sorts of things wrong about the Iranian Revolution, but not the way Foucault did. The international Left saw it purely through the prism of anti-imperialism and, for this reason, it failed to identify the Revolution’s reactionary, authoritarian elements, as expressed in its hostility to liberalism, feminism, human rights, and democratic values.

Chris, you still have not laid out an argument against the Green Movement in Iran today. You hint at it, but I would like us to get into this matter in greater detail. To the extent you make an argument, you shut Mousavi up into an ahistorical time warp as Khomeini’s Prime Minister and a reactionary Islamist in the 1980s. But we are now in 2009. Mousavi today is not the same Mousavi of the 1980s. This is not to say that I am an uncritical supporter of Mousavi, but I think we must also be clear as to what we are talking about. The Mousavi of 2009, particularly post-June 12, 2009, is a very different creature. Anyway, the Green Movement itself is not all about Mousavi. It may have been generated through his presidential campaign, but it has now transcended Mousavi the individual. In many ways Mousavi is following rather than leading the Green Movement.

Ehsani: Let me say, first, that I really welcome this unexpected gathering. For many of us on the Iranian Left, both inside and outside Iran—and for the past decade I have mostly worked in Iran—contact, interaction, and dialogue with the American and global Left has not been part of our experience. Nobody cares about Iran. Nobody pays any attention to the Left there, to the extent that there is a Left. The Left internationally has been uninterested, uninvolved in issues having to do with Iran. Conversely, the Iranian intellectual community inside and outside Iran has been uninterested in what is going on globally, except to the extent that it involves its own interest. So I welcome this important dialogue.

On the other hand, if we want to be serious and lay claim to being of the Left, we need to take our subject seriously. Iran is a complex place. My main criticism of the majority of the Iranian Left is they have no idea of Iranian society. They start from a set of metaphysical ideas and ideological-theoretical criteria, and then see if reality fits it or not. You mentioned Janet Afary and Kevin Anderson. They are good friends of mine, but only one of them has been there, has been to Iran, in the past 30 years, and I do not think they have an adequate grasp of the complexities of that society. Let me give you an example.

We keep speaking of it but never ask ourselves, what is Islamism? Islamism is not Stalinism. Stalinism was a totalitarian ideology with the machinery of the Party controlling the state and society, engineering it according to a set of teleological formulas. It left no room for debate. Soviet planning set out to shape and mold society. Eventually, it collapsed in the face of reality and realpolitik. But Islamism is different. In terms of economic, social, and cultural policies, the Iranian regime is a spectrum spanning from arch-left to arch-right. It has been constantly changing over time. Look at the issue of the hijab for women. It is rather more complex than what Cutrone said. When, in 1979, the arch-right faction of the coalition that had brought Khomeini to power wanted to ban women from public life, Khomeini himself said, “Look, they are already there.”

The entire population was in the streets in 1979. It was never a matter of Islamism simply imposing its will. Khomeini rode atop a very cacophonous, anarchic situation in Iran. The takeover of the American Embassy and, later, the Iran-Iraq War came to his rescue, but still Khomeini was never completely able to impose his own agenda, to take control over state and society. And things have stayed in flux ever since. If you look at the range of debate over and within Islam in Iran, you will find it is quite remarkable. One must see how far the Islamists have come, how they are changing.

Now to return to the issue of women: When I was doing my fieldwork, I lived in rural Iran in 1988 for two years in a war zone, right by the Iraqi border. It transformed me. Before that, I thought a little bit like Cutrone. But this village did not fit any of my criteria. It was a small village of 300 people, quite poor. All women were either working in the market or traveling to the city. They were completely present in public life. When they traveled to the city, where the black chador was obligatory, for them it was great, because they did not seem like bumpkins. As a uniform, it made them look like urban people so they did not stand out. They could go to school in an Islamic society, high school, and some to university. Women are second-class citizens, but they are very much present in public life. What does this mean for a Left project? I am not certain, but I am trying to say it is a complex society. We need to understand Iran’s sociology before judging its ideology.

Behrooz: I would like to mention that Iran’s nuclear program is not weaponized, and so there is no evidence that it is a nuclear weapons program. As far as we know, it is a civilian nuclear program, as was the Shah’s. When the Shah ruled, Iran was a member of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, as it remains to this day. There is accusation but there is no proof.

Regarding Mousavi, I spent three months in Tehran last spring and did an interview on him for a major daily newspaper. I do not know where even to begin if the question is, Is the group around him leftist? What does that mean? These are people who are living in Iran who are confused. In what sense is it “Left?” Everything depends on what you mean by “Left.” I do not want to debate what “is” is, but you have to define “Left” in order to ask, “Is Mousavi leftist or not?”

What I told the interviewer in Tehran is this: In terms of his economic program, Mousavi has changed from a statist, state-capitalist, latter-day Nasserite in the 1980s to a kind of European-style social democrat today. Instead of the state owning the means of production, Mousavi would tax the owner to provide for society. That is the major change. Politically, he has actually turned away from being a Shariati type, a Shia-Bolshevik if you will, into somebody who believes that there is much greater scope for individual and artistic freedom within the framework of the Islamic Republic than what the people enjoy today. Of course, he does not speak of exceeding the confines of the Islamic Republic and it would be foolish for him to do so.

Because Mousavi stays within the context of the Islamic Republic, he cannot be considered a democrat per se, by any international definition of the word. Still, he is pulling that way. This guy is not a democrat such as one might find in Sweden, but he is much more of a democrat than the current president. So, being a democrat is relative.

Cutrone: I need to respond to Postel since he has addressed me directly twice now: I do not have an argument against the Green Movement. What I have is a critique of the perception that it is all right that the Green Movement is in flux and inchoate, that this is good because being inchoate is a kind of pluralism. I also emphasize the ideological impoverishment of having to pose discontents within the framework of the Islamic Republic, just as I would challenge how the issue has been framed by commentators outside Iran like Žižek. So, I am interested in highlighting the issue of confusion. I am sympathetic to the protests, but I am critical of what I take to be their ideological problems.

As regards to what Ehsani and Behrooz just put forth in terms of complexity and ideological criteria, it is not a matter of ideological criteria being imposed on a complex reality. Rather, I do not think anyone either in 1979 or in the present is thinking about the problems in Iranian society that a Left could articulate. If we are talking about democratization in the Islamic Republic, we are already breaking with Left politics to accept something much more impoverished. Finally, to say, “Mousavi has moved” and, at the same time, “Mousavi is not leading but following the movement,” is simply to restate the question. Mousavi will move the degree to which he is trying to take advantage of discontents and articulate them through the framework of the Islamic Republic. I am concerned that the discontents remain within the restraints of the Islamic Republic. I think that the Islamic Republic, especially in this crisis, needs to be seen as an obstacle, not as a framework.

Q & A

1) I’m affiliated with the Spartacist League. To say that the international Left uncritically supported those seeking to overthrow the Shah is not true. We said at the time, “Down with the Shah, and no support for the Mullahs!” and “No to the Veil! For Worker’s Revolution!” We understood that only the proletariat could break the chains of reactionary traditionalism in the Middle East. But the workers were led into the arms of the Ayatollah as the Left cheered. So today the Spartacist League defends Iran’s right to nuclear weapons, especially given the threats made by imperialist armies like the US and Israel. So, my question is, do you believe Iran should have nuclear weapons to defend itself?

2) My question is more a request for clarification. Professor Ehsani, you mentioned that you thought the events of this past June were in fact a repetition of the 1905–1906 flare up. Could you explain further what the issue was in 1905, and how you see 2009 as a continuation of that Revolution?

Ehsani: Yes. I meant the following: The 1906 Constitutional Revolution did not seek to overthrow the Qajar monarchy, but to subject it to the rule of law. It was a liberal-democratic revolution. Though initially defeated, it eventually succeeded in winning its aims. But these were again lost when the country collapsed around the time of World War I. A new autocratic dynasty, the Pahlavis, emerged to replace the Qajars in the 1920s.

What the Green Movement is demanding is an end to public space being colonized by the state. At present, it is very difficult to organize and mobilize. The movement’s success so far has been due to its fragmentary nature. It is a movement based on a rejection of the elections. Many people in the movement do not accept the legitimacy of this government, and some may even seek to go beyond the regime of the Islamic Republic itself. But, apparently, many in the movement do not want to go beyond this regime. Some are religious, and others are not. We have no way of knowing the precise anatomy of the movement because the numbers are not there. There is no way to determine who is in the majority, who is in the minority, or even to hold sustained democratic debate under present conditions. The only common denominator of the movement—and this has been its greatest strength and the most palpable sign of its tremendous political maturity—is that it is a minimalist movement. Despite all the differences of opinion, it coalesced around this issue of demanding that votes be counted.

The reason I compare this to the Constitutional Revolution is because it is a demand for rule of law. It says,
“Look, we have this Islamic Constitution that many of us reject. Still, we came out and voted under it and this is not being respected.” In this sense the Green Movement is constitutionalist.

Postel: I would also like to address this question. As Ehsani just mentioned, the Constitutional Revolution was principally liberal, democratic, constitutionalist, and therefore, in some Marxian sense, “bourgeois.”

But it also contained strong elements of feminism and social democracy. The aforementioned historian Janet Afary has written an entire book on this subject, entitled The Iranian Constitutional Revolution, 1906–1911: Grassroots Democracy, Social Democracy, and the Origins of Feminism. I think this connection between liberal democracy and feminism remains relevant today. And this gets to part of the problem I have with Cutrone’s analysis.

It is true that the Green Movement at present situates itself within the parameters of the Islamic Republic. This is all that what you are calling the Green Movement’s “ideological limitations” actually amount to. But the fact is simply that, as Ehsani mentioned, we do not know. We do not know exactly what the full-blown ideological spectrum within the Green Movement really is. What we do know is that one of the most recent slogans coming out of this movement is “Iranian republic, not Islamic Republic.” Now, how can you argue against a slogan like that? Is this constrained or trapped by the logic of the Islamic Republic? How can leftists around the world not see millions of Iranians taking to the streets—trade unionists, women’s rights activists, dissident intellectuals, and civil society actors, particularly the trade union movement, which is at the core of left internationalism and has been for over 150 years—how can we as leftists see trade unionists in the streets of Iran participating in the Green Movement and not support them?

1) I take issue with both the trivializing and romanticizing view of the chador, and also with the notion that liberalism can ever deliver the liberation of women. I think the greatest advancement of women’s liberation occurred during the Communist revolutions, particularly in China under Chairman Mao. How can you speak of the emancipation of women, in the past or the present, without talking about the history of these revolutions?

2) Might not the situation be like the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine, where a mass movement was exploited by pro-Western politicians to achieve a shuffle at the top, without very much actually changing? In Iran there are people who want to get rid of the more theocratic elements of the regime. But others are upset that Ahmadinejad subsidizes fuel and runs social programs in the countryside. So Mousavi might pull back.

3) How does one have a vibrant public sphere that, at the same time, does not respect individual autonomy of thought? The Islamists first demanded the expansion of debate within the public sphere, only to clamp down, in many respects even more brutally than the Shah, after they came into power.

Cutrone: First of all, I want to respond to Postel’s claim that the Green Movement is already stepping outside the framework of the Islamic Republic, or is somehow only superficially Islamist. I do not oppose the Green Movement. Rather, I’m pointing to the necessity for ideological clarification. The role of the Left should be provocation to clarification, to move the conversation forward and more fully politicize it.

The second question brings up the issue of different interests and how those might play out in the Movement. To state my concern polemically: There is every likelihood of a replay of the 1979 moment. While Foucault is an extreme example of the Western Left on the Iranian Revolution, he condensed the idea that what is happening is outside the framework of the Left, and that this, in itself, is good. What I have heard here is that, if the Left brings any criteria of judgment to bear or provokes any issue of clarification, then ideology is being imposed on a complex reality and we have a case of “left imperialism.” It is not true that, if you paint things in a negative light or raise issues, the movement will scatter to the winds. I take for granted that there are discontents in the Islamic Republic and that there is a movement that has broken out against the election result. The question for me is whether there is a need for ideological clarification, not from a set of prescriptive criteria, but rather are there issues the Left can raise in light of this movement?

Postel: As to female liberation, the on-the-ground reality is that the main expression of the struggle for gender equality in Iran is a campaign called the Million Signatures Campaign. If you want to be a Marxist feminist and say that this campaign is only presenting liberal demands, and is therefore insufficient, you can do so. But this vibrant, promising, and profoundly emancipatory movement is the only game in town right now. Although they do not describe themselves in this way, it is a liberal campaign, in that they want to reform the legal architecture of the Islamic Republic so as to allow for greater gender equality and women’s rights. Is this enough? Will it lead to full emancipation and the end of capitalist exploitation and alienation? No. But to oppose it is reactionary.

This gets back to the question of liberalism more generally. I do not believe that liberalism is sufficient. However, I do believe it is necessary, and that anti-liberalism is reactionary. We do not need to struggle against liberalism, but against oppression and exploitation. We need to struggle for liberal-democratic, “bourgeois” rights, and, at the same time, go beyond them. But going beyond them does not mean struggling against them. I am what would be called here in America a “democratic socialist.”

Ehsani: The Million Signatures Campaign is not the only game in town. There are Islamic feminists who are quite active and in some ways more effective. It is a very rich scene. Some 70 different feminist groups mobilized women’s votes during the election.

In terms of women’s rights more generally, I was not romanticizing anything, but am talking about an experienced reality. Many women in Iran view the matter with reference to this question: Is the imposition of the hijab on women by the state the best way for women to fully interact with the rest of society, or not? What I was trying to get across is that, in at least some rural areas, the Islamicization of the state actually opens up a public space for women outside of family and community. Indeed, in some cases the state actually stepped in and made universal education for women obligatory. So what do we say about this? After all, this is the same state that imposes the hijab. So we cannot approach this complex reality with simplistic formulae. Women are being oppressed by the state while, at the same time, they are being empowered in unexpected ways. We need to be flexible in our understanding, in order to grasp how both are possible.

I welcome the question raised about what, if any, are the grounds for emancipation in the Islamic Republic. So, regarding the possibility of a Left, and being someone of the Left working in Iran under conditions of oppression and censorship, I still think the possibilities for opening up the political imaginary in a country like Iran are far greater than in a place like Egypt. For example, one main argument of the reformists in Iran has been to privatize public assets, in response to the nationalization that occurred in the wake of the 1979 Revolution. The issue is how to privatize. The reformers think the only way is to accept the neoliberal prescription and reduce the power of the state. In Iran, we on the Left have had the opportunity to say, this is not the way to go. We had an opportunity to say, privatizing all public assets is not the way to diminish the power of the state. If you want a private sector, fine, but the public sector is public and should remain so. This argument, which is essentially putting forward a socialist project, is possible in Iran. It can become part of the political agenda because the process of neoliberalization is still in its early stages. Neoliberalism is not an accepted dogma in Iran at this point, but remains an open question. The fact that the Islamic Republic remains an unfinished political, economic, ideological project opens up possibilities for debating what its content should be.

1) It was interesting to hear that the Left was marginalized at the beginning of the 1979 Revolution, but then grew exponentially after it. This occurs often historically, I believe. But what I would like to hear more about is what the panelists think the role of leftists outside of Iran should be today. How must the Left outside Iran change? What should we be doing, in light of the situation in Iran?

2) You guys are leading the working class into a dead end once again. What you all agree is that you reject the political independence of the working class and the socialist revolution.

Behrooz: Regarding the socialist revolution, I am not for it. I am not a political activist, but an academic. The best I can do is attempt to understand what is going on from my point of view. I am content to leave the revolution to the revolutionaries. I am halfway through my life, so I am not sure I would do it much good anyway.

Regarding what the role of the Left outside of Iran should be, I think we must first understand what the Left outside of Iran is. It seems to me that the Iranian Left in exile is divided into two camps: There are the ones who stick to their guns, saying, “Not much has changed, there has been a bump in the road, but it can be overcome, the working class can do it.” We might call this the classical approach. This camp is strong in Europe and America. The other group is the Left that, kind of like the reformers in the Islamic Republic, have come to conclusions similar to some expressed here. This portion of the Iranian Left has come to realize that they must be looking for other ways, that the old ways are not working.

About the Green Movement, what Ehsani said is true: It formed around minimalist demands. What Chris said is also true: It has divergent interests. Which is to say the movement remains inchoate at this stage. There is a Green mishmash in front of us, which we are trying to understand. One of its salient features is that it is here and it has resilience. We do not know if it is a majority, but we do know that it is a determined, angry movement. Mousavi is trying to provide this movement with leadership, in order to prevent it from committing suicide, and to help it build structure, leadership, and a programme. Mousavi is planning for the long term.

So when the Movement, either spontaneously or deliberately, says, “We want an Iranian Republic,” this means they are asking, whether they know it or not, for the toppling of the Islamic Republic. But you cannot topple the Islamic Republic without organization, leadership, and structure. Otherwise you are simply committing suicide. The same is true of the fledgling labor unions.

In the face of oppression, one needs to rein in and give the movement some direction, because right now it can easily destroy itself. This has happened again and again. On the one hand, the resilience of the supporters of the Green Movement is certainly very impressive, as is the coordination among Mousavi, Khatami, Karroubi, and even Rafsanjani. Without going for a head-on confrontation, they are trying to open up space. This would allow for the development of leadership, which would in turn allow for structure, and structure would mean endurance to fight to another round. This is all about the next round. This round is pretty much finished.

Postel: In response to the man who thought that the Green Movement was selling short the working class, I would ask why are there thousands of Iranian trade unionists in the streets supporting the democratic movement? The Iranian working class does not quite fit the ossified fantasy world that so many Marxist-Leninists inhabit. The Iranian trade movement sees itself and its interests as being intricately intertwined with the interests of other democratic struggles in Iran. So, for example, Iranian Trade-Unionists have very much embraced the slogan, “Workers’ rights are human rights.” When Iranian Trade Unions are organizing and articulating their demands, they often frame them in the language of rights: the right to organize trade unions independent of state sponsorship or supervision; freedom of assembly; the right to publish independent magazines, newspapers, websites, etc.; the right not to be abducted in the middle of the night, tortured, and subjected to mock show trials. These are democratic rights, and it is no accident that the Iranian Labor Movement has found common cause with other democratic struggles in Iran.

Now I want to respond to something Cutrone said earlier. It is not because the Green Movement is inchoate that I support it, but because the Green Movement has mobilized millions of Iranians, including trade unions, feminists, democratic intellectuals and writers, and student activists. It has brought them into the streets in order to set the stage, as Behrooz suggested, for a new democratic, secular Iran that I, personally, would very much like to see. We do not know where it is leading, but I resist the notion that somehow my solidarity with the Green Movement is uncritical. As you know, Fred Halliday has this notion of critical solidarity, of engaging in a dialogue with struggles around the world, by which one sees the need to support and participate, but also to engage in a critical dialogue. So, for example, when the Iranian dissident Akbar Ganji was in Chicago in 2006, one of the things I made a point of doing was to bring him to Loyola University to sit down for a three-and-a-half hour conversation with the Marxist political philosopher Prof. David Schweickart, who has written a series of books on the future of capitalism. The point of this dialogue was to get the Iranian dissident movement thinking about what kind of Iran might come next. Ehsani nailed it: If there is going to be socialism in Iran, it is going to have to come about as a result of democratic struggle in an open political space, which is the first step. Socialists in Iran have to be part of the democratic war of position that we see unfolding now. They have to argue for their positions in a democratic and pluralistic polity, and I hope they win: I would like to see a democratic socialist Iran. I think that is part of the role of the International Left, to engage in critical solidarity, not to accept the Green Movement as it is, nor to fetishize it, but to see the potential there and try to harness it.

1) Mousavi once said to the protesters, “The Basiji are your brothers.” This is not good. As long as that movement remains cast within, as Cutrone said, the framework of the Islamic Republic, it will only continue to come up against the same repression.

2) I would like the panelists to comment specifically on the diversity of the Green Movement, considering that it is led by three people: Khatami, Mousavi, and Karroubi. There are differences, ideologically, in terms of economic and social programs, among these three. We have people who come from more of a developmentalist wing, and others who represent more of a pro-privatization, neoliberal agenda. How are we to understand these differences?

Behrooz: If I understand Iran correctly, the country wants no more violence. Certainly, the Green Movement is not violent. Nor is it revolutionary. The young generation in Iran rarely talks about revolution. Vague as it may sound, their goal is to make the Islamic Republic more liberal by providing a breathing space for politics. This breathing space is necessary, because, although the supporters of Khomeini and Ahmadinejad are in the minority, and have been shown to be a minority consistently in elections, they are a consistently potent minority. They are 10–15 percent of the population, but they are armed, committed, and organized. They are willing to fight and die. The other side lacks all of these characteristics. If the Shah had 15 percent in 1979, we would not have had the Revolution, but by 1979 he barely had 15 people supporting him. The current regime has a small yet very powerful minority propping it up.

There are two ways to deal with this powerful minority. We could remove them through a massive civil war, a revolution. This would remove the tumor. But in order to treat surgically the cancer now afflicting Iranian society, you may also have to remove part of the liver, the heart, and the lung. If this occurs, the patient may not survive.

The other way to deal with the current regime is to open space so that there can be a dialogue among the 15 percent of the ruling regime, the 75 percent of the general public, and the 10 percent who simply do not care. This space could also include many Iranian exiles, people who are outside of Iran. These people all should talk to each other and do a lot of convincing. When Mousavi says that the Basiji are our brothers, he is addressing them, saying, “I am not your enemy, and you are not my enemy. I do not want to overthrow the Islamic Republic, but to make it more livable for us all.” Of course, he could say the Basiji are his enemy. Then he would be abducted and taken to prison, where they would beat him. Eventually, he would be forced to go on TV and say it was all part of a Stalinist or Zionist plot. I do not blame Mousavi for declining to adopt this course. The Green Movement is trying to be prudent, soberly navigating this hostile, mine-riddled terrain. The very attempt to do this, though it may not seem as radical as other political movements, is nonetheless a historic new stage in Iranian politics.

Ehsani: Is the Islamic Republic a theocracy? No—it is a theocracy and a republic. Moreover, it is a functioning republic, for political power is distributed among a political elite that has organic roots in the society, though this is only a small sector of the population. Power has been circulating among this elite for the last 30 years. These elites hold different political beliefs, and the way that power circulates among them depends on popular vote, which decides the presidency, the parliament, as well as local councils. Compare this to a country like Egypt, where you have a leader who is “President for Life,” and has been for the last 30 years. In Iran you have circulation of power among elites, a division of power that is generally determined by a rational voting process. This game has been undermined now by Khamenei and the military, who have stepped in and said, “Enough of this. We see where things are going. If we continue with this popular merry-go-round, this republican cycling of people through various positions of executive and legislative power, eventually a society that has been really empowered, that is becoming more diverse, and that has so far been putting up with this game, will start demanding more.” It is a matter of political survival. What has happened is that the theocratic element, which had been like a monarch standing above the fray of the political process, supposedly the neutral father of the nation, has now stepped overtly into the political process, saying, “I want all the power.” This has shattered his image. Part of what the Green Movement is about, then, is the demand that the Constitution, which is a very contradictory document, be implemented in full. Particularly, people want freedom of assembly and freedom of the press. There are both democratic and theocratic elements of the Constitution overlapping uneasily in many places. It is not a matter of people suddenly believing in the Constitution, but a question of along what lines and in what way does one support this Constitution?

The Green Movement is about mobilizing and changing the balance of actual political power. This is no more legalistic tussle, but a fight in the streets over rival interpretations of the Constitution. Ultimately, the movement aspires for the Supreme Leader, who happens to be a theocrat because of the system he heads, to cease holding executive power and instead become a figurehead, like the Queen of England or Sweden—someone irrelevant to politics.

Are these demands paltry? I do not think so. Iran was the place where political Islam won, bringing down a keystone regime in the Middle East and putting another in its place. It basically opened a chapter in history, which has, from Afghanistan to Egypt, Morocco, and Algeria, transformed the face of politics. What happens if, through a popular movement, that system shifts to a post-Islamist, democratic polity, which is what the population is increasingly demanding? I think this opens a range of possibilities, certainly in the realm of politics which, as I see it, is what Cutrone was asking for. Even 30 years ago, we did not have in Iran this range of discourse about equality for women and minorities—among leftists, among the religious, among anyone, really—the way we do now. In some ways, this discourse of equality is more advanced among the Islamists than among the secularists. This is because the secularists have been occupied with the fact that we were victims of history—and we were. But, on the other hand, these people have been engaged in this battle, and there are a lot of important debates and arguments about religion, God, politics, Islam, and what the future is going to be. Even in the recent past, this was not so. This is why the political situation is now open, not closed.

Cutrone: I wanted to say something about the issue of ideology and imposing ideological formulae. I do not think politics is a matter of formulae, or strict criteria, but a matter of judgment. Judging possibilities and pushing the envelope of possibilities is the work of the Left. There is a dangerous situation unfolding in the Islamic Republic that could escalate to the point of civil war. The Revolutionary Guards and Basiji are not simply the state power; they are not a group of people that can be neutralized by putting flowers in their rifle muzzles. Rather, they are an ideological-political movement, and have a vested interest in maintaining certain aspects of the status quo in the Islamic Republic. I am not sure it is possible to imagine a thoroughgoing crisis of the Islamic Republic that does not potentially lead to civil war. The question is, What is the role of Mousavi in terms of reining in the movement? I think what is necessary is precisely not to hold back the movement, but to prepare it and push it forward. This will necessarily entail risk, but the argument I have been hearing here tonight is that the risk is too great. Well, what if the risk is posed, regardless? What if the state loses legitimacy and unravels completely, anyway? The Left cannot be in a position arguing against any danger or risk that is posed. If Ahmadinejad and Khamenei have pushed the envelope too far in the other direction, what will result? The Basiji and Revolutionary Guards could get their way without the pretense of “parliamentary” mediation. We have to face that reality.

Postel: I think, of all the statements Chris has made tonight, those are the ones I most agree with. They are keen observations I find myself in broad sympathy with. The scenario you just conjured, of a very dark turn in which there is a theocratic structure without a republic, is a very real danger. But I think it would not last long in Iran, for reasons to do with the characteristics of Iranian civil society and history that Ehsani has invoked tonight regarding, for instance, the Constitutional Revolution in the early 1900s. Take the example of the Parliament. This institution predates the Islamic Republic. It was constituted more than one hundred years ago, precisely through the Constitutional Revolution, and it survived the Islamic Revolution, albeit in a tattered, besieged form. Iranian civil society always seems to find a way to reassert itself. On the Left, one argument that has been articulated against our position goes, “Why are you so worked up about the stolen elections in Iran, when there are so many places around the world, such as Egypt, where there are no elections to steal in the first place?” The difference is that with Iran, as Ehsani has pointed out, there is such a vibrant democratic history and civil society that millions of people took to the streets over the appearance of a fraudulent election.

Closing Remarks

Postel: I appreciate the opportunity to explore these issues tonight; it has opened some fertile ground for further debate. Although there are some serious differences among us, we share an opposition to the hegemonic, majority position of the international Left, particularly in the anti-war movement. There are a lot of people on the international Left who openly sympathize with Ahmadinejad, and thus with the most reactionary, authoritarian elements of the Islamic Republic. This is what we are up against. Our differences and disagreements are important, but we should not allow this to occlude the fact that all of us here actually represent a minority on the international Left, in terms of looking at the dynamics in the Islamic Republic in the way we have done tonight.

Ehsani: We on the Iranian Left who have been engaged deeply with what has been going on in Iran face a serious challenge. We must explain a lot of things, but also listen to criticism and consider the legitimate questions that have been raised tonight. We have been doing much of our work in isolation. But you also have your work cut out for you, if you want to be interlocutors. We are all involved in a political struggle that we may lose. But given what I have seen, even in the past 10 or 12 years in Iran, what makes me hopeful is how engaged people have become in this movement right now. I think this bodes very well for the future of politics in Iran, and in the Middle East generally.

Behrooz: I am assuming that we are looking at the Iranian case to better understand issues of revolution and social change in a very important part of the world. This audience tonight, as intellectuals, students, and political activists, should have interest in Iran. Rather than talking about Iran, though, in closing I would like to talk more broadly about the Left. We who care about the concept of the Left—in terms of social justice, accessibility, better division of wealth, standing up for people who are otherwise in misery—we need to have a serious dialogue over the meaning of the Left after the Bolshevik experience. It does us no good to stick to our guns and say, “We were right,” or “Trotsky was right.” We need to open up discussion over what it mean to be “Left” today, especially in a mega-capitalist country like the United States. How do we relate to a country like Rwanda, Iran, or South Africa? Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, everything was set, to the point that even those who cursed the Soviet Union are now ambivalent about its collapse. For, in the presence of the Soviet Union, everything seemed clear in terms of who one liked and did not like. At least the lines were clearly drawn. Now all that is gone. The Titanic has gone down, and it is unclear what to like or dislike. The Left needs to be redefined, or else it is in danger of becoming irrelevant. Because of this I have been trying to urge the younger generation in Iran to look to the successful examples of the Left, to moments the Left made a positive difference in the lives of people. I urge them to build on that, rather than looking at the unsuccessful examples of the Left, and romanticizing its failures. This is a more general discussion that I would like to see take place.

Cutrone: Regarding the question of the successful history of the Left versus the romanticization of failure, it is true that either poses a danger. On the other hand, to go back to the question of the inchoate character of political events, there is the matter of street protests as a model for political action. As the election protests unfolded, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets, but this may actually be a sign of weakness rather than strength. In the absence of the possibility of organization, you instead have this broad discontent being expressed in a way that is certainly impressive at the level of spectacle, but that may not have much political content or staying power. The year 1979 saw street protests and huge demonstrations, as did Europe in 1989, but they had in common a fundamentally inchoate political imagination, which opens itself up to opportunism, such that people like Khomeini come in and take advantage of the situation in order to cement themselves in a position of power. So my point is not to romanticize failure, but to consider the history of the Left in terms of when, in that history, there were moments of coherence—that is, a coherent view of social and political reality in a global context, a view that was not provincialized by geography or social sector. Speaking of the failure of the Left in 1979, the Tudeh Party in the 1950s was much better on the question of women’s emancipation than it was in the context of the Islamic Revolution. In the 1950s they had women’s organizations that posed politics very differently than in 1979. What does it mean that the political imagination of one moment may actually fall below that of a moment that came before? While we should not be deterred by failure, the history of the Left should be understood not in terms of “success,” but in terms of clarity of vision. |P

Transcribed by Watson Ladd and Nathan L. Smith

[Philosophy] is the scientific expression of a certain fundamental human attitude… toward being and beings in general, and through which a historical-social situation often can express itself more clearly and deeply than in the reified, practical spheres of life.
— Herbert Marcuse[1]

CHRIS CUTRONE WRITES, “What the usual interpretive emphasis on Lukács occludes is that the Frankfurt School writers grappled not only with the problem of Stalinism but with that of ‘anti-Stalinism’ as well.”[2] This statement is well founded, considering how Korsch’s troubled relationship with Adorno and Horkheimer was paralleled by Sohn-Rethel’s with those two during the same period; not to mention the later dialogues Dunayevskaya had with Marcuse and Fromm.

On the key question of “nonidentity” versus the “identity of effective theory and practice,” Cutrone says that, for the earlier Korsch, “constitutive non-identity” was “expressed symptomatically, in the subsistence of ‘philosophy’ as a distinct activity in the historical epoch of Marxism.” This was because it expressed a “genuine historical need… to transcend and supersede philosophy”; a “recognition of the actuality of the symptom of philosophical thinking, of the mutually constitutive separation of theory and practice.”[3] Cutrone relates this to Adorno’s reiteration almost half a century later in Negative Dialectics of Korsch’s statement in Marxism and Philosophy that “Philosophy cannot be abolished without being realized.” Cutrone says that “This side of emancipation, ‘theoretical’ self-reflection, thought’s reflecting on its own conditions of possibility, remains necessary, precisely because it expresses an unresolved social-historical problem.” He adds that the later Korsch, “by assuming the identity of theory and practice, or of social being and consciousness in the workers’ movement… sought their ‘reconciliation,’ instead of discerning and critically grasping their persistent antagonism, as would necessarily be articulated in any purported politics of emancipation.”[4]

The later Korsch’s abandonment of the theory and practice problem, which I will come to later, is however already present in the earlier writings, which raises the question, What remains that is of value in Korsch’s Marxism and Philosophy? In that work Korsch quotes Engels’s notorious statement about Marx’s philosophy: “That which survives independently of all earlier philosophies is the science of thought and its laws—formal logic and dialectics. Everything else is subsumed in the positive science of nature and history.”[5] (However, Korsch did make one criticism of Engels, that “In Hegel’s terms he retreats from the heights of the Concept [Notion] to its threshold to the categories of reacting and mutual interaction.”)[6] But if “Marxism” is “superseded and annihilated as a philosophical object,” then it might also be superseded as a “positive science” of society if its historical practice can be can be shown to have “failed,” and if the determinations based on its methodology can be “falsified” according to positivist method. This annihilation of Marxism as a “philosophical object” seems to me the basis for Korsch’s eventual downgrading of Marx to just another theoretician, no more important than Thomas More or Mikhail Bukunin.

But the important issue is the “problem of the philosophy of revolution, or of the ‘theory of social revolution’” for both Hegel and Marx, which Cutrone spells out as follows: “How is it possible, if however problematic, to be a self-conscious agent of change, if what is being transformed includes oneself, or, more precisely, an agency that transforms conditions both for one’s practical grounding and for one’s theoretical self-understanding in the process of acting?”

This question, as well as addressing the problem of consciousness for the proletariat, also conjures up the self-consciousness of Marx the Philosopher, as a self-described “disciple” of Hegel who, in Capital, did not so much “apply” the Hegelian dialectic as recreate it. Korsch describes Marx’s pre-1848 period as characterized by “a critique of philosophy calling for its simultaneous realization and self-abolition,” and describes the circa-1848 period as “the sublimation of philosophy in revolution.” Following this is the “curious blank spot or gap in the history of philosophy from the 1840s–60s, the period of Marxism’s emergence”; then there is everything in “Marxism” up to 1917.

Taking off from Raya Dunayevskaya’s unfinished critique of Korsch,[8] I have in my own research found the tripartite division Korsch applies to the history of “Marxism” to be highly questionable. As Cutrone points out, Korsch’s 1923 work was accomplished without benefit of Marx’s 1844 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts or the Grundrisse, or Lenin’s 1914 Hegel Notebooks. One might add that Korsch also did not have full knowledge of the debates within the Communist League in the early 1850s, now well documented.

George Lichtheim describes the original insight of Marx’s critical theory in 1843–44 as “the belief that a mere spark of critical self-awareness could ignite a revolutionary tinder heaped up by the inhuman conditions of life imposed on the early proletariat. In enabling the oppressed to attain an adequate consciousness of their true role, critical theory translates itself into revolutionary practice.” Consciousness was able to grasp “the total historical situation in which it is embedded… because at certain privileged moments a ‘revolution in thought’ acquired the character of a material force.”[9]

By 1850, following the defeat of the 1848–49 revolutions, Marx was developing the perspective of “Revolution in Permanence.” Marx argued that, although revolutionary workers parties could and would march with the petty bourgeois radicals against the class enemy, they would have to oppose all attempts by the bourgeois radicals to consolidate their position to the detriment of the workers. Dunayevskaya connects this concept with the “unchained dialectic” and “absolute negativity” of Hegel as appropriated by Marx in 1844. In my book, Helen Macfarlane, I have probed the connection of “Revolution in Permanence” to Blanquism. There was once a widespread myth that Blanqui actually coined the term “Revolution in Permanence.” Although this is long discredited, it is nonetheless true that the Marx–Blanqui relation was important. Blanqui was an implacable materialist, upholding, not the Hegelian dialectic, but the 18th-century French materialism of Holbach as the rightful inheritance of the proletariat, and as that which gave the proletarian body its head. Blanqui also saw revolutionary organization as a science as well as an art, requiring a “natural” hierarchy. But Blanqui was, like Marx, strongly anti-positivist, regarding the Comtean “equilibrium” theory of classes as counter-revolutionary. Sam Bernstein says that, in opposition to positivist equilibrium theory, Blanqui

thought of democracy as a process, with a history and a future. In practice it meant a series of acts which climaxed in what was then designated as the social republic. And being a process, it could neither ignore the past nor be mummified like revolutionary relics…. Democracy, from Blanqui’s viewpoint, had to become socialism, or it would be nothing more than a convenient cover for anyone, even for its enemies when they desire to disguise their intentions.[10]

At the very time Marx was writing about “Revolution in Permanence” in 1850, Louis Blanc, Giuseppe Mazzini, and Arnold Ruge issued a grandiose international program, which they hoped would reignite the defeated revolutions of 1848. Their program rejected “the cold and unfeeling travail of the intellect” in favour of the “instinct of the masses” as “the people in motion.” To Marx’s mind this was tantamount to demanding that the people “have no thought for the morrow and must strike all ideas from the mind” and that “the riddle of the future will be solved by a miracle.”[11] Within the German Communist League, August Willich and Karl Schapper argued that the counterrevolution in Europe would soon force the existing French bourgeois republic to fight against the anciens régimes of Europe and would thus re-open the floodgates of revolution. In practice this would mean the communists and Blanquists finding common cause with the petit-bourgeois democrats and nationalists of Europe, and the setting aside of the communist program of the dictatorship of the proletariat. According to Marx, Willich and Schapper “demanded, if not real conspiracies, at least the appearance of conspiracies, and accordingly favored an alliance with the heroes of the hour.”[12] Marx, who was studying the economic situation in Europe closely, knew that with industry booming, the old order of Europe re-stabilized, and the bourgeoisie newly confident in its ability to rule, Schapper’s perspective was a fantasy. As he said of Schapper’s proposals:

The revolution is not seen as a product of the realities of the situation but as the result of an effort of will. Whereas we say to the workers: you have 15, 20, 50 years of civil war to go through in order to alter the situation and to train yourselves for the exercise of power it is said: we must take power at once, or else we might as well take to our beds. Just as the democrats abused the word “people” so now the word “proletariat” has been used as a mere phrase.[13]

Marx’s position was consistent with what he actually was to do in the following years and decades: writing Capital, building the First International, etc. In 1850 Marx pointed out that, under present conditions in Europe, for the communists to make a revolution out of existing forces in the name of the proletariat they would have to describe the petty-bourgeoisie as proletarian and become their representatives. Schapper, in his reply, did not try to refute Marx’s arguments. Instead he drew a division between the “party of theory” and the “party of action.” Somewhat prefiguring the arguments of the “socialist” dictators of the underdeveloped world of the twentieth-century, Schapper said,

The people who represent the party in principle part company with those who organize the proletariat…. The question at issue is whether we ourselves chop off a few heads right at the start or whether it is our own heads that will fall. In France the workers will come to power and thereby in Germany too. Were this not the case I would indeed take to my bed…. If we come to power we can take such measures as are necessary to ensure the role of the proletariat. I am a fanatical supporter of this view.[14]

As far as Marx was concerned, it was not Schapper’s “hero of the hour,” Louis Blanc, but Auguste Blan­qui who was “true leader of the French proletariat.” Blanqui, in a statement smuggled out of prison, which was circulated by Marx and Engels, accused those in his own organization in favor of accommodation with the bourgeois radicals of “hiding its banner, giving ground to the bourgeois republicans and sacrificing the future for the morbid need of uncertain support in the present.” Blanqui declared, “Ideas are the standard of the masses. We must therefore be clear and blunt, and explain ev­erything on pain of being sorely let down. Secrecy is the preliminary of duplicity, and I shall never be party to it.”[15] None of this figures in Korsch’s potted history of “Marx­ism.” How then do we read Korsch’s 1950 thesis on the points he saw as “particularly critical for Marxism”?

(A) its dependence on the underdeveloped economic and political conditions in Germany and all the other countries of central and eastern Europe where it was to have political relevance; (B) its unconditional adherence to the political forms of the bourgeois revolution; (C) the unconditional acceptance of the advanced economic conditions of England as a model for the future development of all countries and as objective preconditions for the transition to social­ism; to which one should add, (D) the consequences of its repeated desperate and contradictory attempts to break out of these conditions.[16]

As I have indicated, Marx’s critique both of the revo­lutionaries’ failure to read the “economic and political conditions” and contemporary political forms of class collaboration (Blanc), terrorism (Mazzini), and con­spiracy (Schapper—and, implicitly, Blanqui), suggests otherwise. We now know, from Marx’s late writings on Russia, his Ethnological Notebooks, and later editions of Capital, that he did not see the “advanced economic con­ditions of England” as necessarily a “model for the future development of all countries.”[17] Also, it is clear that in the 1850 factional fight in the Communist League Marx was opposed to “desperate and contradictory attempts” by revolutionaries to break out of the social conditions.

As Cutrone points out, according to the later Korsch of the 1930 Anti-Critique, in the mid-19th century “Marx­ism” had grown ideological and even Marx’s Capital ex­pressed a certain “degeneration.” According to Korsch, quoted by Cutrone, “[T]he theory of Marx and Engels was progressing towards an ever higher level of theoretical perfection although it was no longer directly related to the practice of the worker’s movement.”

But inasmuch as “practice” found its representation in the practices of Lassalle, then perhaps it was a case of “so much the worse for the practice.” Marx’s attack on Lassalleanism in the 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program was as realistic and objective as the 1850 critique of Wil­lich/Schapper, except that the Critique was able to offer Capital, vol. I as a “theoretical victory for our party.”

The later Korsch’s opinion of the mature Marx’s work as “anachronistic” jars with his earlier view that Hegel’s concept of the world-as-totality informed Marx’s analysis in Capital, and therefore needed to be reclaimed from the social democrats, for whom it was a theory of ahistori­cal laws governing production, separate from politics. Korsch’s 1922 introduction to Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program sees an affinity between the reformism of Social Democracy and Hegel’s attempt to reconcile labor and society. The Lassalleans and social democrats saw the property issue as a juridical problem of distribu­tion solvable through changes in the form of the state, rather than a social problem of production which could only be solved by overthrowing the economic structure of society. (Korsch argued that, because during the “first phase” of communism bourgeois law and the bourgeois state will not have been totally superseded, the working class would need to control the whole economy, with workers’ councils playing a “constitutional” role to guard against any tendencies in management practices that might lead to capitalist restoration through bureaucracy.) Korsch’s writing on Marx’s 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program is thus a real insight, which indicates to me that the Critique was a continuation of the 1844 Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic.[18]

Oddly, whereas in 1923 Korsch praised Lenin for his Hegelian “critical reflection on the problem of relating theory and practice,” in 1938 he dismissed him for his Hegelianism. In 1922–23 Korsch had recognized that Hegel had regarded “revolution in the form of thought as an objective component of the total social process of a real revolution.” But for Korsch, Hegel, in his quest for reconciliation with the results of the French Revolu­tion, had preserved the position of thought as external to economic reality. By 1938 Korsch was stressing the “bourgeois,” rather than revolutionary character of Hegel’s philosophy. Having broken with Leninism, he dismissed the significance of Lenin’s Hegel Notebooks when they appeared in the 1930s. “Lenin’s apprecia­tion of the ‘intelligent idealism’ of Hegel” came about, Korsch argued, because “the whole circle not only of bourgeois materialist thought but of all bourgeois philo­sophical thought from Holbach to Hegel was actually repeated in the Russian dominated phase of the Marxist movement.”[19] If, as Patrick Goode says, Korsch viewed Leninism as “merely an ideological form assumed by the bourgeois revolution in an underdeveloped country,” then it would not have been surprising to him that Lenin was drawn to Hegel.[20]

Given what Cutrone tells us about the “Leninist” aspect of Horkheimer and Adorno’s agenda, and given Pannekoek’s disregard for the Hegelian dialectic, it is amazing that the later Korsch could seriously expect Horkheimer and Adorno to publish Pannekoek’s critique of Lenin, which contains the following:

The first problem in the science of human knowl­edge, the origin of ideas, was answered by Marx in the demonstration that they are produced by the surrounding world. The second adjoining problem, how the impressions of the surrounding world are transformed into ideas, was answered by Dietzgen… Marx pointed out what the world does to the mind, Dietzgen pointed out what the mind does itself.[21]

Dietzgen, a self-proclaimed “materialist,” had recog­nized that thinking as well as objects could be the object of thought. But in a somewhat neo-Kantian manner, he argued that whilst “our brains do not grasp the things themselves but only the concepts,” the concepts were quite adequate for “practical living” in a rational human society run by the workers.[22] This is another world from Adorno’s Lukácsian view expressed in his letter to Walter Benjamin quoted by Cutrone: “The fetish character of the commodity is not a fact of consciousness; rather it is dialectical, in the eminent sense that it produces con­sciousness…. [P]erfection of the commodity character in a Hegelian self-consciousness inaugurates the explosion of its phantasmagoria.”

As Walter Benjamin said of Dietzgen in his Theses on the Philosophy of History:

Josef Dietzgen announced: “Labor is the savior of modern times…. In the improvement… of labor… consists the wealth, which can now finally fulfill what no redeemer could hitherto achieve.” This vulgar-Marxist concept of what labor is, does not bother to ask the question of how its products affect workers, so long as these are no longer at their disposal. It wishes to perceive only the progression of the exploitation of nature, not the regression of society. It already bears the technocratic traces which would later be found in Fascism.[23]

Cutrone writes,

If Marxism continued to be subject to a “Hegelian dialectic,” thus requiring the “historical material­ist” analysis and explanation that Korsch sought to provide of it, this was because it was not itself the reconciled unity of theory and practice but remained, as theory, the critical reflection on the problem of relating theory and practice—which in turn prompted further theoretical development as well as practical political advances.

Korsch developed this view in 1923 whilst reflecting on the failure of German councilism and the contrast­ing achievements of the Bolsheviks. In other words he saw the connection between the “return” to “commu­nist practice” of Marxism and the reemergence of the Hegelian dialectic. After 1923, sans philosophy, his work regresses—although the influence it had was and is important.[24] |P

Notes:

[1] Quoted in Seyla Benhabib, introduction to Hegel’s Ontology and the Theory of Historicity, by Herbert Marcuse (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1989), xviii.

[2] Chris Cutrone, “Book Review: Karl Korsch, Marxism and Philosophy,” Platypus Review 15 (September 2009)

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25 (Lon­don: Lawrence and Wishart, 1987), 26.

[6] Karl Korsch, Marxism and Philosphy (New York: Monthly Review Press 1970), 40, quoted in Raya Dunayevskaya, The Power of Negativity (Lenham: Lexington Books 2002), 253.

[7] Karl Korsch, “Ten Theses on Marxism Today,” trans. Andrew Giles-Peters, Telos 26 (Winter 1975–76)

[8] Dunayevskaya, The Power of Negativity, 249–247.

[9] George Lichtheim, Lukács (London: Fontana Modern Masters, 1970), 64–5.

[10] Sam Bernstein, Auguste Blanqui and the Art of Insurrection (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971), 227.

[11] Marx and Engels, CW, vol. 10 (London: Lawrence and Wishart 1978), 529–31, quoted in David Black, Helen Macfarlane: A Feminist, Revolutionary Journalist and Philosopher in Mid-Nineteenth Century England (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2004), 114–5.

[12] Karl Marx, Herr Vogt (London: New Park, 1982), 28, quoted in ibid., 114.

[13] Marx and Engels, CW, vol. 10, 626–8, quoted in ibid., 116.

[14] Marx and Engels, CW, vol. 10, 628–9, quoted in ibid.

[15] Marx and Engels, CW, vol. 10, 587, quoted in ibid., 117.

[16] Korsch, “Ten Theses.”

[17] Raya Dunayevskaya, Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humani­ties Press, 1982), 175–91.

[18] Karl Korsch, introduction to Critique of the Gotha Programme, by Karl Marx, trans. Fred Halliday (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970).

[19] Karl Korsch, “Lenin’s Philosophy,” appendix to Anton Pan­nekoek, Lenin and Philosophy (London: Merlin, 1975) 114–5.

[20] Patrick Goode, Karl Korsch: A Study in Western Marxism (Lon­don: Macmillan, 1979), 135, quoted in Kevin B. Anderson, Lenin, Hegel and Western Marxism (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 175–80.

[21] Pannekoek, Lenin and Philosophy, 35

[22] Quoted in ibid., 36.

[23] Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” trans. Dennis Redmond.

[24] I discuss Korsch’s influence on the Situationists in my forth­coming essay, “Critique of the Situationist Dialectic.”

Toward a Theory of Historical Regression

On April 18, 2009, the Platypus Affiliated Society conducted the following panel discussion at the Left Forum Conference at Pace University in New York City. The panel was organized around four significant moments in the progressive diremption of theory and practice over the course of the 20th century: 2001 (Spencer A. Leonard), 1968 (Atiya Khan), 1933 (Richard Rubin), and 1917 (Chris Cutrone). The following is an edited transcript of the introduction to the panel by Benjamin Blumberg, the panelists’ prepared statements, and the Q&A session that followed. The Platypus Review encourages interested readers to view the complete video recording of the event.

1917

Chris Cutrone

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.
— Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx, Manifesto of the Communist Party [1848]

Hegel links the freedom of each to the freedom of all as something of equal value. But in doing so he regards the freedom of the individual only in terms of the freedom of the whole, through which it is realized. Marx, by contrast, makes the free development of each the precondition for the correlative freedom of all.
— Karl Korsch, Introduction to Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme [1922]

THE YEAR 1917 is the most enigmatic and hence controversial date in the history of the Left. It is therefore necessarily the focal point for the Platypus philosophy of history of the Left, which seeks to grasp problems in the present as those that had already manifested in the past, but have not yet been overcome. Until we make historical sense of the problems associated with the events and self-conscious actors of 1917, we will be haunted by their legacy. Therefore, whether we are aware of this or not, we are tasked with grappling with 1917, a year marked by the most profound attempt to change the world that has ever taken place.

Bolsheviks speaking at a meeting of workers and soldiers in Petrograd in 1917.

The two most important names associated with the revolution that broke out in 1917 in Russia and in 1918 in Germany are the Second International Marxist radicals Vladimir Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, each of whom played fateful roles in this revolutionary moment. Two Marxian critical theorists who sought to follow Luxemburg and Lenin to advance the historical consciousness and philosophical awareness of the problems of revolutionary politics, in the wake of 1917, are Georg Lukács and Karl Korsch.

While neither Lenin nor Luxemburg survived the revolutionary period that began in 1917, both Lukács and Korsch ended up disavowing and distancing themselves from their works, both published in 1923, that sought to elaborate a Marxian critical theory of the revolutionary proletarian socialist politics of Lenin and Luxemburg. Lukács adapted his perspective to the prevailing conditions of Stalinism in the international Communist movement and Korsch became a critic of “Marxist-Leninist” Bolshevism, and an important theorist of “Left” or “council communist” politics. Meanwhile, Luxemburg was pitted against Lenin in a similar degeneration and disintegration of the revolutionary consciousness that had informed the revolution of 1917.

The forms that this disintegration took involved the arraying of the principles of liberalism against those of socialism, or libertarianism against authoritarianism. Lenin and Lukács became emblems of authoritarian socialism, while Luxemburg and Korsch became associated with more libertarian, if not liberal, concerns.

But what remains buried under such a misapprehension of the disputed legacy of 1917 is the substance of agreement and collaboration, in the revolutionary Marxist politics of that moment, among all these figures. Behind the fact of Luxemburg’s close collaboration and practical political unity with Lenin lies the intrinsic relationship of liberalism with socialism, and emancipation with necessity. Rather than associating Lenin with revolutionary necessity and Luxemburg with desirable emancipation in such a one-sided manner, we need to grasp how necessity, possibility, and desirability were related, for both Luxemburg and Lenin, in ways that not only allowed for, but actually motivated their shared thought and action in the revolution that opened in 1917.

Both Lenin and Luxemburg sought to articulate and fulfill the concerns of liberalism with socialism—for instance in Lenin’s (qualified) endorsement of self-determination against national oppression.

György Lukács, 1919

Lukács and Korsch were among the first, and remain the best, to have rigorously explored the theoretical implications of the shared politics of Luxemburg and Lenin, in their works History and Class Consciousness and “Marxism and Philosophy,” respectively. Both Lukács and Korsch approached what they considered the practical and theoretical breakthrough of the Third International Marxist communism of Luxemburg and Lenin by returning to the “Hegelian” roots of Marxism, a reconsideration of its “idealist” dimension, as opposed to a “materialist” objectivistic metaphysics that lied behind “economism,” for example.

This involved, for Lukács and Korsch, an exploration of Lenin and Luxemburg’s break from the objectivistic “vulgar Marxism” of the politics and theory of the Second International, exemplified by Karl Kautsky. Lukács’s term for such objectivism was “reification”; Korsch addressed it by way of Marx’s approach to the philosophical problem of “theory and practice,” which, he argued, had become “separated out” in the Second International period, their “umbilical cord broken,” while Lenin and Luxemburg had tried to bring them back into productive tension and advance their relation through their revolutionary Marxism.

Ironically, while the title of Lukács’s work is History and Class Consciousness, it was concerned with a more “philosophical” exposition and categorial investigation of the problem of “reification” and the commodity form as socially mediating, following Marx in Capital. Meanwhile, Korsch’s “Marxism and Philosophy” actually addressed the historical vicissitudes of the theory-practice problem in Marx and Engels’s lifetime and in the subsequent history of the Marxism of the Second International. In both cases, there was an attempt to grasp the issue of subjectivity, or the “subjective” dimension of Marxism.

But it was this focus on subjectivity from which both Lukács and Korsch broke in their subsequent development: Lukács disavowed what he pejoratively called the attempt to “out-Hegel Hegel,” making his peace with Stalinist “dialectical materialism,” while (later) attempting to found a “Marxist ontology.” Korsch, on the other hand, distanced himself from what he came to call, pejoratively, the “metaphysical” presuppositions of Marxism—even and, perhaps, especially as practiced by Lenin, though also, if to a lesser extent, by Luxemburg and even by Marx himself—pushing him ultimately to call for “going beyond Marxism.”

In this complementary if divergent trajectory, Lukács and Korsch reflected, in their own ways, the return of the “vulgar Marxism” that they had sought to supersede in their theoretical digestion of 1917—a return marked by the Stalinization of the international Communist movement beginning in the 1920s. For example, Theodor W. Adorno was excited to meet Lukács in Vienna in 1925, only to be repulsed at Lukács’s disavowal of the work that had so strongly inspired Adorno and his colleagues in the Frankfurt School, such as Walter Benjamin and Max Horkheimer. Korsch, who had also, like Lukács, been associated with the Frankfurt School from its inception, had come by the end of the 1930s to scorn the Frankfurt critical theorists as “Marxist metaphysicians,” while in the 1960s Lukács wrote contemptuously of them as having taken up residence at the “Grand Hotel Abyss,” explicitly deriding them for following his early work. In such disavowals can be found evidence for the repression of the problems Lukács and Korsch had sought to address in elaborating Marxian theory from Lenin and Luxemburg’s revolutionary thought and action in 1917–19.

Rosa Luxemburg's funeral

Likewise, in subsequent history, the relation between “means” and “ends” for the Marxist radicals Lenin and Luxemburg in the moment of 1917 became obscured, Lenin being caricatured as believing, in some Machiavellian fashion, that the “ends justified the means,” or exemplifying “revolutionary will.” Luxemburg was equally caricatured as an upholder of principled emancipatory means in extolling the virtues of practical defeat, seemingly happy to remain a Cassandra of the revolution. Biographically, this is crudely reconciled in the image of Luxemburg’s quixotic martyrdom during the Spartacist uprising of 1919, and Lenin’s illness and subsequent removal from political power at the end of his life, condemned to watch, helpless, the dawn of the Stalinist authoritarianism to which his political ruthlessness and pursuit of revolutionary ends had supposedly led.

In either case, rather than serving as an impetus for a determined investigation of these revolutionary Marxists’ thought and action at the level of the basis for their self-understanding and political judgment—models from which we might be able to learn, elaborate, and build upon further—they have been regarded only as emblems of competing principles, in the abstract (e.g., on the question of the Constituent Assembly, over which they had differed only tactically, not principally). So Lenin’s writings and actions are scoured for any hint of authoritarian inhumanity, and Luxemburg’s for anything that can be framed for its supposedly more humane compassion. At the same time, the futility of both their politics has been naturalized: It is tacitly understood that neither what Lenin nor Luxemburg aspired to achieve was actually possible to accomplish—either in their time or in ours.

In the words of Adorno’s writing on the legacy of Lenin, Luxemburg, Korsch, and Lukács, in his last completed book, Negative Dialectics, this way of approaching 1917 and its significance evinced “dogmatization and thought-taboos.”[1] The thought and action of Lenin and Luxemburg are now approached dogmatically, and they and their critical-theoretical inheritors, Lukács, Korsch, Benjamin, and Adorno, are approached only with a powerful thought-taboo firmly in place: that the revolutionary moment of 1917 was doomed to failure, and that its fate was tragically played out in the character of the revolutionary Marxism of its time. Their Marxism is thus buried in an attempt to ward off the haunting accusation that it did not fail us, but rather that we have failed it—failed to learn what we might from it. But, like Lukács and Korsch in their subsequent development, after they convinced themselves of the “errors of their ways,” we have not recognized and understood, but only rationalized, the problematic legacy of 1917.

1917 remains a question—and it is the very same question that Lenin and Luxemburg went about trying address in theory and practice—whether we ask it explicitly of ourselves now or not. It is the great tabooed subject, even if that taboo has been enforced, either by a mountain of calumny heaped upon it, or the “praise” it earns in Stalinist—or “Trotskyist”—“adherence.”

For example, it remains unclear whether the “soviets” or “workers’ councils” that sprung up in the revolutions of 1917–19 could have ever been proven in practice to be an adequate social-political means (for beginning) to overcome capitalism. The Lukács of the revolutionary period recognized, in “The Standpoint of the Proletariat,” the third part of his essay on “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” the danger that

[As Hegel said,] directly before the emergence of something qualitatively new, the old state of affairs gathers itself up into its original, purely general, essence, into its simple totality, transcending and absorbing back into itself all those marked differences and peculiarities which it evinced when it was still viable…. [I]n the age of the dissolution of capitalism, the fetishistic categories collapse and it becomes necessary to have recourse to the “natural form” underlying them.[2]

Lukács recognized that the “producers’ democracy” of the “workers’ councils” in the revolutionary “dictatorship of the proletariat” was intrinsically related to, and indeed the political expression of, an intensification of the “reification” of the commodity form. Nevertheless, it seems that the attempt, by Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolsheviks, to bring “all power to the soviets” in the October Revolution of 1917, and by Luxemburg’s Spartacists in the German Revolution that followed, is something we can learn from, despite its failure. For this revolutionary moment raises all the questions, and at the most profound levels, of the problematic relationship between capitalism and democracy that still haunt us today.

Similarly, Korsch recognized that the revolutions of 1917–19 were the outcome of a “crisis of Marxism” that had previously manifested in the Second International, in the reformist “revisionist” dispute, in which the younger generation of radicals, Luxemburg, Lenin, and Trotsky, first cut their teeth at the turn of the century. But, according to Korsch in 1923, this “crisis of Marxism” remained unresolved. The unfolding of 1917 can thus be said to be the highest expression of the “crisis of Marxism” that Luxemburg, Lenin, and Trotsky—and Korsch and Lukács after them—recognized as manifesting the highest expression of the crisis of capitalism, in the period of war, revolution, counterrevolution, civil war, and reaction that set the stage for subsequent 20^th century history. Arguably, the world never really overcame or even recovered from this crisis of the early 20^th century, but has only continued to struggle with its still unresolved aftermath.

In this sense 1917 was not, in the self-understanding of its thinkers and actors, an attempt to leap from the realm of necessity, but rather the attempt to advance a necessity—the necessity of social revolution and transformation—to a higher stage, and thus open a new realm of possibility. The enigmatic silence surrounding the question of 1917 is masked by a deafening din of opprobrium meant to prevent our hearing it. It remains, as Benjamin put it, an “alarm clock that in each minute rings for sixty seconds,” whether we (choose to) hear it or not.[3] But the degree to which those who have come later have done so, the repression of 1917 has been achieved only at the cost of a regression that, as Benjamin put it, ceaselessly consumes the past and our ability to learn from it, ceding the meaning of history and its sacrifices to our enemies, and rendering those sacrifices in past struggles vain.

Recognizing the nature of the difficulty of 1917, that the problems we find in this moment comprise the essence of its potential pertinence for us, may be the first step in our recognizing the character of the regression the Left has undergone since then. Like a troubling memory in an individual’s life that impinges upon consciousness, the memory of 1917 that troubles our conceptions of social-political possibilities in the present might help us reveal the problems we seek to overcome, the same problems against which Lenin and Luxemburg struggled. Even if a failure, theirs was a brilliant failure from which we cannot afford to be disinherited. |P

Next: Questions and Answers

Toward a Theory of Historical Regression

On April 18, 2009, the Platypus Affiliated Society conducted the following panel discussion at the Left Forum Conference at Pace University in New York City. The panel was organized around four significant moments in the progressive diremption of theory and practice over the course of the 20th century: 2001 (Spencer A. Leonard), 1968 (Atiya Khan), 1933 (Richard Rubin), and 1917 (Chris Cutrone). The following is an edited transcript of the introduction to the panel by Benjamin Blumberg, the panelists’ prepared statements, and the Q&A session that followed. The Platypus Review encourages interested readers to view the complete video recording of the event.

Questions and Answers

Transcribed by Soren Whited

Question: What does “emancipation” entail? To what “beyond” does capitalism point? More particularly, in this beyond what would be the role of the state and how would the economy be organized? It seems to me that learning from the past is important, but unless there is some vision of what getting beyond capital looks like, then we are in trouble.

Richard Rubin: In some sense, this is a question about how a socialist economy might work. But I would want to defer that question, because the main problems with socialism in the 20th century were not economic but political. Again, it is a checkered and complicated history, but the Left’s main criticism of the Soviet Union was neither technical nor economic. Rather, it focused on the regime’s repressive and dictatorial character. As regards the state, I think that Lenin’s idea of its withering away remains valid. I mean, the reasons why you had a Stalinist dictatorship and not a genuinely democratic socialist polity are, of course, complex, but I would argue they are essentially contingent, historical questions, not intrinsic to the socialist project, per se. If they are intrinsic to it, then we are really wasting our time.

Chris Cutrone: To add one thing to Richard’s comments: We do not and cannot yet know what the technical problems of organizing a global economy on a socialist basis would be. When Lenin talks about the withering away of the state, what he means of course is the withering away of the dictatorship of the proletariat. He does not mean the withering away of a national state surrounded by capitalism. There is a sort of traditional Marxist ban on blueprints or images of a future society. The reason for this is that for freedom to be free it cannot be determined in advance. The point of Marxism is to clear the obstacles of capitalism so far as we understand them at this point, and we have only been able to understand them the degree to which we have struggled against them. Part of the thesis of regression is that the struggle against capitalism has ceased, and therefore we do not really understand the problem of capitalism as well as we did. We can only come to understand it, as a real problem, in the process of trying to overcome it. Establishing a global dictatorship of the proletariat would, in this sense, simply allow the problem of capitalism to be addressed.

Another way of getting at this would be to ask, What does it mean to politicize the economy? After all, that is what is raised by Obamaism, right? What kind of a political issue is the economy? Marx’s point was that the emergence of a modern worker’s movement, a historically new and potentially emancipatory politics, posed the question of the organization of the economy on a democratic basis. It poses the question. It has not been worked out by any means, nor does the Soviet experience particularly help in thinking about how it might work. All the Soviet experience points to is the revolution. It would be great if organizing the socialist economy were a technical problem. We lack the political means to render it a technical problem.

Q: What, to your mind, are the forms of political consciousness and practice that block the recognition of regression?

Rubin: I think people are afraid to acknowledge regression, because it is unpleasant to consider. It is much easier to fall into what one might call a naïve progressivism—telling oneself always that “the struggle continues”—than to think through the failure of the Left in the 20th century, a failure that really determined the course of the century and our own time. By contrast, the 19th century was a century of great historical progress, in ways that are hard for us to even imagine now.

Atiya Khan: We should attend to the ways in which political consciousness has actually adjusted itself to objective conditions. Instead of pushing against the limitations of the present, the Left today tends to adapt itself to present circumstances. In order to accommodate itself to defeat, the Left continually describes it as victory. Of course, the possibilities of revolution are always present, given the contradictory character of capital itself. The problem is that those who claim to be on the Left abdicate the task of thinking this contradiction through as a problem.

Spencer Leonard: I was suggesting some of these points when I brought up the continuous replaying of 1960s politics in the present, dancing on the grave of the administered world. Thus, for instance, modern anarchism does not really have anything that we would call a theoretical perspective. At best, it is a variety of liberalism, at worst, the heir to the worst of 1960s-era infantile leftism. At all events, anarchism fails to pose the problem of capital, except as one of oppression or exploitation. So, I guess I would turn the question around to ask if there is really any politics today that is not condemned to repeat the failures of the past?

Q: Does your regression thesis apply on a larger scale, on the global scale? It sounds like what is being discussed here is very much a European history.

Rubin: I think that the problem can be seen on a world scale. If you look at, for example, the “Third World”—leaving aside the problems with anti-colonial politics in the mid-century (which were numerous and by no means insignificant)—there was a much higher degree of political consciousness in the Third World in the 1950s and 1960s than there is today. This is a clear manifestation of one kind of regression. Moreover, it is a mistake to separate political developments in the Third World from political developments in the First World, particularly as they become more intertwined and reflect more and more off of each other. So, on the one hand, there was a kind of abdication by a large part of the New Left in favor of Third Worldism, the impulse behind which was a pessimism about transforming their own core metropolitan societies. This is the reason they invested their hope in societies that were supposedly outside of capitalism. Also, the New Left’s Third-Worldist politics—the dominant expression of the Left by the late 1960s—was a global politics. It was neither just metropolitan nor just peripheral, but a common politics.

Cutrone: The history of anti-imperialism, or, really, decolonization—since most decolonization took place in a highly administered way, not through social-political struggle—was, first of all, a disaster for the ex-colonial world. We can say that the conditions in the post-colonial world are, in many ways, considerably degraded and brutalized in comparison to the early 20th century. In addition to this, as Richard has suggested, the New Left’s adaptation to a Third World perspective of revolution was largely predicated on pessimism about revolution in the core. Fanon famously said, “Let’s take our leave of Europe,” which is essentially a resignation from politics. So, if you say that the world has become more politically integrated, and, in a sense, more inclusive over the course of the 20th century, that has to be matched by a narrative of the degradation and evacuation of politics itself. In other words, people can participate more in democratic politics only to the degree to which politics has become inconsequential.

Leonard: It is by no means the case that the colonial period is the non-political period and the post-colonial, or post-decolonization period is political. On the contrary, in many ways decolonization represented a vast defeat of an earlier and more robust politics. In many ways, then, it is because of the collapse, rather than the radicalization, of the kind of revolutionary networks and internationalist cosmopolitanism that the empires allowed for (or could not subdue), that it has become almost impossible for us to even imagine that past in any but the most caricatured ways.

Rubin: The part of the “non-Western” world that I probably know best is the Middle East, the Arab world. There the rise of Islamic politics is a direct consequence, first of all, of the collapse of the Arab nationalism that had been prevalent in the previous generation. That collapse of Arab nationalism itself has to do with the defeat of the actual Arab Left—mostly a Stalinist Arab Left—but a Leftist Arab politics nonetheless. So the reason you have right-wing Islamist politics is not because of some kind of atavistic impulse in the region. Rather, it has to do with the resounding defeat of the Left. It is both ironic and tragic that two of the places where you had the strongest leftist traditions in the Arab world were, number one, Iraq, and number two, Palestine.

Khan: I could follow-up on that in terms of what is happening in Pakistan these days, namely the Talibanization of the entire society. This results from the failure of the Left, specifically the defeats suffered between 1968–1971, culminating in the Bangladesh War, an event that split Pakistan into what are now the countries of Bangladesh and Pakistan. At that moment the possibility existed for Pakistan to institute a liberal democracy under socialists. And it is in that failure, or because of that failure, that Pakistan has taken the direction that it has.

Leonard: The last thing that I would want to add is that what we are talking about is the political history, so to speak, of global integration. To the extent that we actually live in a globally integrated world, it is the legacy not of anti-imperialist politics per se, but of revolutionary politics. Decolonization in the manner it took place is one form taken by the defeat of internationalist radical politics, though this is not at all how decolonization is generally understood.

Q: I am puzzled by the claim that over the last half-century the Third World has become depoliticized. I wonder if one of the reasons the panelists say this is because the politics that has emerged there is unrecognizable to them as politics. I could not help juxtaposing the themes of this talk—defeatism and regression—with some other, much more hopeful panels here at the Left Forum. I am referring in particular to panels treating developments in South America. The Left in South America is going beyond our notions of what it means to be Leftist, which is primarily rooted in western European theorizing about industrial societies. I would argue that the problems in Bolivia, for example, extend beyond these [traditional leftist] concerns.

Rubin: I think that, if you look at the world today, it is true that, at least in certain respects, Latin America is the least regressive part of the world, and the Middle East the most regressive. So they are sort of opposites. But I think that the fundamental problem is the same in both places. Obviously, Evo Morales is in some sense part of the Left. Certainly he is not part of the right, in the way the Taliban is. But really what you have with both Morales and Chavez (and I prefer Morales) is Left nationalism, and this is nothing new. Politics in Latin America are now, if anything, considerably less radical than they were in the 1980s with the Sandinistas and the FMLN, which in their turn were less radical than the Cuban Revolution. You can only really convince yourself that Latin America is a great beacon of revolutionary hope because the rest of the world looks so dismal.

Q: Well, I was not referring to revolution. I am just talking about hope in general, which might be part of the translation problem here. For instance, you mentioned things like the Cuban Revolution and the Sandinistas. Their basic idea was to take over state power in order to bring about what you call revolutionary changes. But, to me, it is not so much about Evo Morales as it is about the people who elected him, the movement. Morales sometimes trembles before their power. They are talking about things like changing the nature of what it means to be a citizen. One could argue that this is far more radical than anything the Castro or the Sandinistas ever attempted. Of course, it is not revolutionary in the way you define revolution. But I think that is part of the issue I am raising—maybe the idea of revolution has been expanded by people in South America.

Leonard: I think the question really turns on the question of whether an emancipatory politics is possible and desirable. But, I would also argue that it is implausible to speak of the world today—in which prevails poverty, degradation, limited life chances, unfree labor, extended workdays, not to mention the extreme desperation among agricultural workers in the large peasant societies and in the slums of the mega-cities across the global south—I think that to call all this (which characterizes South America as much as Asia or Africa) the realization of a new politics is really very contemptuous of the actual aspirations of people there. I would argue that their conditions do not reflect the world they want to live in. Rather, those conditions represent a terrible defeat of their core political aspirations. Following Richard, I would also argue that, at the level we are speaking here, there is no fundamental divergence between one part of the world and another. Also, it is not as if by analyzing the political and emancipatory potential concentrated in the first world, we are ignoring potentials in Latin America or sub-Saharan Africa or Asia. On the contrary, there is no potential in the core that is not inherently international, because we live in that kind of integrated world. And, as Chris and Richard have both implied, the New Left’s turn to the so-called peripheral world required them to misrecognize that world as “non-capitalist,” which is to say, non-reified, outside of the prevalence of instrumental reason and of the grey, administered society. This willingness to romanticize the Third World and its struggles was another expression of the New Left’s defeatism.

Cutrone: In his opening remarks, Spencer referred to the “worshipping of the accomplished fact.” The Left has become adept at calling defeat victory. Indeed, it has long made a practice of that. Today there is a whole industry devoted to it. Entire printing presses are dedicated to dressing up a miserable reality. Something Richard said also needs to be underlined. The idea that the struggle continues is itself the adaptation to defeat. Human beings will always struggle against oppression, they will always resist, but the real question is, are they doing anything that has any prospect of fundamentally altering their circumstances? Since it is assumed that we cannot do that, let’s look at where people are struggling, where they are asserting their dignity against horrific conditions, and let’s say, “That is beyond left and right.”

Q: I think the very facile dismissal of Maoism really gets in the way of being able to sum up the first stage of socialist revolution. There is a big debate in the international communist movement today regarding the nature of what Mao’s theoretical breakthroughs were, about what socialism is, and about the contradictions the Chinese are dealing with within socialism. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was not a big, democratic movement against the problem of bureaucracy or the dictatorship of a party. Rather, it was actually about dealing with the deeper underlying contradictions of socialism. In it, the Chinese Communists dealt with the fact that, while they were getting out of capitalism, they had not yet arrived at communism on a world scale and that, in consequence, the bourgeoisie kept regenerating itself. So I guess I wanted people to speak to that, because we do have to look scientifically at the experience of the Chinese Revolution. That is the only way we can go forward. It was, actually, profoundly liberating, even though there were very real secondary shortcomings. So I guess if people could speak to this, because I actually do think there is a Marxism that has already looked at this and moved forward.

Rubin: There are two ways in which Maoism, I think, represents a problem. One is the actual Maoism in China, and, the first thing to say about that is that Maoism is a variety of Stalinism, period. Indeed, Mao criticized de-Stalinization in the Soviet Union. But, leaving that aside, the real problem with Maoism that I want to emphasize is not actual Stalinism in China, that is, the dictatorial bureaucratic regime, but rather the effect Maoism had on the western Left in the 1960s and 1970s. The way it functioned in those years was to supply a way of dodging the Trotskyist critique of Stalinism. Now, the various Trotskyist groups all had their own problems, some more grave than others. But what I want to emphasize here is that there simply are no theoretical breakthroughs in Mao. In fact, much of postmodernism has its roots in Maoism.

Khan: I can speak to the case of Pakistan in 1968, and the kind of role that Mao’s regime played in suppressing and crushing the Left in Pakistan in that moment by actually arming the Pakistani army to crush the labor movement.

Cutrone: Atiya is referring to the support the Pakistani state received from China in isolating and then eliminating the Pakistani Left. This was in some ways a repeat of the history of Stalinism in the 1930s. But, rather than demonizing Stalinism, or demonizing Maoism, our point is to say, look at what it actually was, look at how it came to specialize in adapting to defeat. In other words, the defeat of the revolution that opened in 1917 led directly to the Stalinization of both the Soviet Union and the international communist movement, not to mention the defeat of 1927 in China, and so on. There is a history of defeats that one can talk about, and one can track these through the histories of the predominant forms of communism in the world. Now, Trotskyism served as a dissenting voice and a memory of 1917, but it itself is obviously inadequate to the project of advancing an emancipatory politics today. It has long since ceased to constitute a real alternative. As for the Cultural Revolution, people projected all sorts of fantasies onto it in the 1960s. But, in essence, the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” is simply the name the Chinese Communist bureaucracy gave to the process of “its” revolution falling into disarray. It called that disarray “revolution.” You have social chaos, and you say, “Well, it is the Cultural Revolution,” right? That is what happened. As for the disarray itself, it was barbaric. If you look at what actually happened, Mao essentially just rode it out in the same way that Stalin and the Bolsheviks rode out the social chaos of the first five-year plan and the forced collectivization in the Soviet Union.

Khan: One could also point to the form Maoism took in Cambodia…

Q: But that is a facile analogy.

Cutrone: I do not think it is. When society breaks down and people go crazy, you can call it a revolution if you like. The Right is, in essence, the adaptation to prevailing conditions. That is what defines it as a politics. In this sense, the Chinese Stalinists were the right.

Q: So this is the most optimistic panel here at the Left Forum?

Cutrone: Yes, because we are the only ones who are not going to lie to you.

Rubin: Can I respond a little more concretely to the question? Obviously, there are situations where the Left is defeated merely through superior force. There are military defeats. Having the right theoretical understanding cannot guarantee victory. And, certainly, there are aspects of the defeat of the Left, particularly in the early 20th century, that I would consider tragic. Hence my distinction between tragedy and farce. However, the story about the strength of the right and the resilience of capitalism is typically used to ill purpose. For instance, oftentimes in the late 1980s and early 1990s you would hear this story about how the Left in the 1960s were oppressed by COINTELPRO, and that is why there is no Left today. Now, the German Left was murdered by Hitler, but the collapse of Left in the United States in the 1960s was not really because of state repression. There was state repression and people were killed—I am not denying the existence of state repression—but the core problems were ideological. This is revealed by the fact that, for instance, when the economy collapsed in the early 1970s, the Left did not grow. Rather, it shrank in the 1970s and continued to shrink through the 1980s down to the present, to the point that there is nothing left. There have been four decades of growing conservatism in this country. Now, you cannot explain that just by reference to the shenanigans of the CIA or the FBI. You have to say, if you are honest, that the Left failed to make its case in a way that could be understood or could garner appeal. In some crucial way, the Left failed to understand historical reality.

In the 1990s, I got to know a lot of genuine, old leftists, people who had been radicals, communists—mostly Trotskyists, actually—in the 1930s. What struck me about them was how much more normal they were than the radicals of my generation. They were the sort of people I could hang out with. They were ordinary people who had ordinary working-class jobs. You did not feel that their radicalism was some kind of a sub-culture. It was not a sub-culture and it was not a psychological symptom. A lot of times I meet people nowadays, who are nice people, but I think they are radicals because they do not have a life. [Laughter] I am just trying to be honest, I am not saying that that is the only cause of radicalism; in fact, I hope that is not the case with me. [Laughter]

Q: It seems to me you have a very clear definition of what defeat is, but that you radically under-specify what victory would be. I would claim that this is because you identify problems as ideological, and thereby you inhabit the theory-practice divide and bracket off economic and material problems. It is as if politics were not a material problem, as if war, and black-ops, and all of that, did not entail material organization.

To say that going beyond left and right is essentially a right-wing statement is profoundly ignorant. I could point you to this book called Breaking with the Enlightenment, where the author Rajani Kanth argues that the Left and the right share much in common, while many radical movements express premodern ideologies, as in the case of the cocoa-growers movement. Their relationship to nature and their vision of ecology is not “leftist” or “green.” Just to point to a concrete example, Bhutan, which is a kingdom and a monarchy, has an index called “Gross National Happiness,” with which they are trying to radically redefine what the purpose of a state should be.

Leonard: The issue of the history of the Left is that the understanding of defeat elucidates what victory would mean. We can only recognize defeat in the light of possibility. It is not a defeat in the sense that there is some set of fixed criteria for it. Rather, it is defeat only in light of the potentialities being produced by capitalism. One of these potentialities is the overcoming of scarcity, the radical overcoming of the “economic.” This is at the very heart of Marx’s political and intellectual project, that capitalism is the chief limitation to both productivity and sustainability. Of course, capitalism unleashes this potential for overcoming scarcity, but ultimately it constrains that potential. Worker-organized production would precisely be both a more fulfilling and a more productive form of labor, in which the capacity of human knowledge would be harnessed to radically diminish drudgery while increasing productivity.

Cutrone: I want to get to the issue of the degree to which pre-modern cultural forms continue to exist under capitalism. They continue to exist only in the worst sense. Overcoming capital would allow the unlocking of the past in a different way. What remains of non-capitalist, pre-capitalist forms of life (even if they are only after-images and residues), would gain a completely different quality in the future. They would cease to appear, as they do now, to be a sort of outside or site of resistance to capitalism. Overcoming capitalism would allow the best features of non-capitalist social forms that have existed throughout history to find a new salience, such as they lack under present circumstances. That should not be left out. |P

Chris Cutrone

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[Marx wrote,] “[Humanity] always sets itself only such problems as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely it will always be found that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or are at least understood to be in the process of emergence.”[1] This dictum is not affected by the fact that a problem which supersedes present relations may have been formulated in an anterior epoch.

As scientific socialism, the Marxism of Marx and Engels remains the inclusive whole of a theory of social revolution . . . a materialism whose theory comprehended the totality of society and history, and whose practice overthrew it. . . . The difference [now] is that the various components of [what for Marx and Engels was] the unbreakable interconnection of theory and practice are further separated out. . . . The umbilical cord has been broken.

— Karl Korsch, “Marxism and Philosophy” (1923)

The problem of “Marxism and Philosophy” — Korsch and Adorno on theory and practice

KARL KORSCH’S SEMINAL ESSAY “Marxism and Philosophy” (1923) was first published in English, translated by Fred Halliday, in 1970 by Monthly Review Press. In 2008, they reprinted the volume, which also contains some important shorter essays, as part of their new “Classics” series.

The original publication of Korsch’s essay coincided with Georg Lukács’s 1923 landmark collection of essays, History and Class Consciousness (HCC). While Lukács’s book has the word “history” in its title, it follows Marx’s Capital in addressing the problem of social being and consciousness in a primarily “philosophical” and categorial manner, as the subjectivity of the commodity form. Korsch’s essay on philosophy in Marxism, by contrast, is actually a historical treatment of the problem from Marx and Engels’s time through the 2^nd International to the crisis of Marxism and the revolutions of 1917–19. More specifically, it takes up the development and vicissitudes of the relation between theory and practice in the history of Marxism, which is considered the “philosophical” problem of Marxism.

Independently of one another, both Korsch’s and Lukács’s 1923 works shared an interest in recovering the Hegelian or “idealist” dimension of Marx’s thought and politics. Both were motivated to establish the coherence of the Marxist revolutionaries Lenin and Luxemburg, and these 2^nd International-era radicals’ shared grounding in what Korsch called “Marx’s Marxism.” Their accomplishment of this is all the more impressive when it is recognized that it was made without benefit of either of the two most important texts in which Marx explicitly addressed the relation of his own thought to Hegel’s, the 1844 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (first published in 1932) or the notes for Capital posthumously published as the Grundrisse (1939), and also without access to Lenin’s 1914 notebooks on Hegel’s Science of Logic (1929). Due to a perceived shortcoming in the expounding of revolutionary Marxism, the problem for Korsch and Lukács was interpreting Marxism as both theory and practice, or how the politics of Lenin and Luxemburg (rightly) considered itself “dialectical.” Both Lukács and Korsch explicitly sought to provide this missing exposition and elaboration.

Lukács and Korsch were later denounced as “professors” in the Communist International, a controversy that erupted after the deaths of Luxemburg and Lenin. (Another important text of this moment was Lukács’s 1924 monograph in eulogy, Lenin: A Study on the Unity of his Thought.) In the face of this party criticism, Lukács acquiesced and made his peace with Stalinized “orthodoxy.” Eventually disavowing History and Class Consciousness as a misguided attempt to “out-Hegel Hegel,” Lukács even attempted to destroy all the existing copies of the unpublished “Tailism and the Dialectic,” his brilliant 1925 defense of HCC. (Apparently he failed, since a copy was eventually found in Soviet archives. This remarkable document was translated and published in 2000 as A Defence of History and Class Consciousness.)

Korsch responded differently to the party’s criticism. Quitting the 3^rd International Communist movement entirely, he became associated with the “Left” or “council” communism of Antonie Pannekoek, Paul Mattick, et al. Though making a choice very different from Lukács and distancing himself from official “Marxism-Leninism,” Korsch also came to disavow his earlier argument in “Marxism and Philosophy.” Specifically, he abandoned the attempt to establish the coherence of Lenin’s theory and practice with that of Marx, going so far as to critique Marx’s own Marxism. Thus, in “The Present State of the Problem of ‘Marxism and Philosophy:’ An Anti-Critique” (1930), included in Marxism and Philosophy, Korsch argues that, to the degree Marx shared a common basis with Lenin, this was an expression of limitations in Marx’s own critical theory and political practice. Indeed, for Korsch it was a problem of “Marxism” in general, including that of Kautsky and Luxemburg. Ultimately, Korsch called for “going beyond” Marxism.

The complementary, if divergent, trajectories of Korsch and Lukács are indicative of the historical disintegration of the perspective both shared in their writings of 1923. Both had understood the “subjective” aspect of Marxism to have been clarified by Lenin’s role in the October Revolution. The figure of Lenin was irreducible, and brought out dimensions of the Marxian project that otherwise lay unacknowledged. As Theodor W. Adorno put it in private discussion with Max Horkheimer in 1956,

I always wanted to produce a theory that would be faithful to Marx, Engels and Lenin. . . . Marx was too harmless; he probably imagined quite naïvely that human beings are basically the same in all essentials and will remain so. It would be a good idea, therefore, to deprive them of their second nature. He was not concerned with their subjectivity; he probably didn’t look into that too closely. The idea that human beings are the products of society down to their innermost core is an idea that he would have rejected as milieu theory. Lenin was the first person to assert this.[2]

In this discussion, Adorno also proposed to Horkheimer that they “should produce a reworked [version of Marx and Engels’s] Communist Manifesto that would be ‘strictly Leninist’.”[3]

No less than Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness, Korsch’s “Marxism and Philosophy” inspired the work of the Marxist critical theorists associated with the Frankfurt School — Horkheimer, Marcuse, Benjamin, and Adorno. But the reputation of Korsch’s work has been eclipsed by that of Lukács. What the usual interpretive emphasis on Lukács occludes is that the Frankfurt School writers grappled not only with the problem of Stalinism but “anti-Stalinism” as well.[4] Both Korsch’s and Lukács’s post-1923 trajectories were critiqued by the Frankfurt School writers.[5] As Adorno put it in Negative Dialectics (1966),

First Karl Korsch, later the functionaries of Diamat [Dialectical Materialism] have objected, that the turn to nonidentity would be, due to its immanent-critical and theoretical character, an insignificant nuance of neo-Hegelianism or of the historically obsolete Hegelian Left; as if the Marxist critique of philosophy had dispensed with this, while simultaneously the East cannot do without a statutory Marxist philosophy. The demand for the unity of theory and praxis has irresistibly debased the former to a mere underling; removing from it what it was supposed to have achieved in that unity. The practical visa-stamp demanded from all theory became the censor’s stamp. In the famed unity of theory-praxis, the former was vanquished and the latter became non-conceptual, a piece of the politics which it was supposed to lead beyond; delivered over to power. The liquidation of theory by dogmatization and the ban on thinking contributed to bad praxis; that theory wins back its independence, is the interest of praxis itself. The relationship of both moments to each other is not settled for once and for all, but changes historically. Today, since the hegemonic bustle cripples and denigrates theory, theory testifies in all its powerlessness against the former by its mere existence.[6]

In this passage Adorno was addressing, not the Korsch of the 1923 “Marxism and Philosophy,” but rather the later Korsch of the 1930 “Anti-Critique,” distanced from the problem Adorno sought to address, of the constitutive non-identity of theory and practice. Adorno thought, like Korsch and Lukács in the early 1920s, that Lenin and Luxemburg’s theoretical self-understanding, together with their revolutionary political practice, comprised the most advanced attempt yet to work through precisely this non-identity.[7]

In Adorno’s terms, both the later Korsch and official “Diamat” (including Lukács) assumed “identity thinking,” an identity of effective theory and practice, rather than their articulated non-identity, to which Korsch had drawn attention earlier in “Marxism and Philosophy.” Such constitutive non-identity was, according to Korsch’s earlier essay, expressed symptomatically, in the subsistence of “philosophy” as a distinct activity in the historical epoch of Marxism. This was because it expressed a genuine historical need. The continued practice of philosophy was symptomatic expression of the need to transcend and supersede philosophy. Instead of this recognition of the actuality of the symptom of philosophical thinking, of the mutually constitutive separation of theory and practice, Korsch, by embracing council communism and shunning Marxian theory in the years after writing his famously condemned work, succumbed to what Adorno termed “identity thinking.” By assuming the identity of theory and practice, or of social being and consciousness in the workers’ movement, Korsch sought their “reconciliation,” instead of discerning and critically grasping their persistent antagonism, as would necessarily be articulated in any purported politics of emancipation.

Just as Adorno tried to hold fast to the Lukács of History and Class Consciousness in the face of Lukács’s own subsequent disavowals, the first sentence of Adorno’s Negative Dialectics reiterated Korsch’s statement in “Marxism and Philosophy” that “Philosophy cannot be abolished without being realized” (97):

Philosophy, which once seemed outmoded, remains alive because the moment of its realization was missed. The summary judgment that it had merely interpreted the world is itself crippled by resignation before reality, and becomes a defeatism of reason after the transformation of the world failed.[8]

Philosophy’s end was its self-abolition. What Korsch prefaced to his statement helps to illuminate what Adorno meant. Korsch specified precisely what “the realization of philosophy” involves:

Just as political action is not rendered unnecessary by the economic action of a revolutionary class, so intellectual action is not rendered unnecessary by either political or economic action. On the contrary it must be carried through to the end in theory and practice, as revolutionary scientific criticism and agitational work before the seizure of state power by the working class, and as scientific organisation and ideological dictatorship after the seizure of state power. If this is valid for intellectual action against the forms of consciousness which define bourgeois society in general, it is especially true of philosophical action. Bourgeois consciousness necessarily sees itself as apart from the world and independent of it, as pure critical philosophy and impartial science, just as the bourgeois State and bourgeois Law appear to be above society. This consciousness must be philosophically fought by the revolutionary materialistic dialectic, which is the philosophy of the working class. This struggle will only end when the whole of existing society and its economic basis have been totally overthrown in practice, and this consciousness has been totally surpassed and abolished in theory. (97)

This was the original Marxist “defense” of philosophy that Adorno reiterated in Negative Dialectics. Over four decades previously, in 1923, Korsch had explicitly tied it to Lenin’s treatment of the problem of the state in The State and Revolution (1917). Just as, with the overcoming of capitalism, the necessity of the state would “wither,” and not be done away with at one stroke, so too the necessity of “philosophical” thinking as it appeared in the epoch of capital would dissolve. This side of emancipation, “theoretical” self-reflection, thought’s reflecting on its own conditions of possibility, remains necessary, precisely because it expresses an unresolved social-historical problem.

In “Marxism and Philosophy,” Korsch analyzed Marxism as emergent from and historically continuous with the “revolt of the Third Estate,” of the “bourgeois” liberal-democratic revolutionary epoch that preceded it. Korsch was concerned with Marx’s continuity with Kant and Hegel. A problem that occurred to them, namely, of theory and practice, repeated itself, if in a more acute way, for Marx. It is a problem of the philosophy of revolution, or of the “theory of social revolution.” This problem presents itself only insofar as it is conceived of as part and parcel of the social-historical process of transformation and not as contemplation from without. As it was for Hegel, Marx’s fundamental “philosophical” issue is this: How is it possible, if however problematic, to be a self-conscious agent of change, if what is being transformed includes oneself, or, more precisely, an agency that transforms conditions both for one’s practical grounding and for one’s theoretical self-understanding in the process of acting?

Korsch addressed the question of revolution as a problem indicated by the liquidation and reconstitution of “philosophy” itself after the crisis and “decay of Hegelianism” (“Marxism and Philosophy,” 29). Why did philosophical development take a hiatus by 1848 and only appear to resume afterwards? What changed about “philosophy” in the interim? For Korsch recognized there was a curious blank spot or gap in the history of philosophy from the 1840s–60s, the period of Marxism’s emergence. Korsch divided the relation of Marx’s thought to philosophy roughly into three periods: pre-1848, circa 1848, and post-1848. These periods were distinguished by the different ways they related theory and practice: the first period was the critique of philosophy calling for its simultaneous realization and self-abolition; the second, the sublimation of philosophy in revolution; and the third, the recrudescence of the problem of relating theory and practice.

Korsch’s third period in the history of Marxism extended into what he termed the “crisis of Marxism” beginning in the 1890s with the reformist “revisionist” dispute of Eduard Bernstein et al. against the “orthodox Marxism” of the 2^nd International — when the “revolutionary Marxism” of Luxemburg and Lenin originated — and continuing into the acutely revolutionary period of 1917–19, from the Russian Revolution of 1917 through the German Revolution and civil war of 1918–19, to the Hungarian Soviet Republic (in which Lukács participated) and the workers’ council movement in Italy (in which Antonio Gramsci participated) in 1919.

It was in this revolutionary period of the early 20^th century that “Marx’s Marxism” circa 1848 regained its saliency, but in ways that Korsch thought remained not entirely resolved as a matter of relating theory to practice. In “Marxism and Philosophy,” Korsch found that while Lenin and Luxemburg had tried to better relate Marxian theory and practice than 2^nd International Marxism had done, they had recognized this as an on-going task and aspiration and not already achieved in some finished sense. In the words of the epigraph from Lenin that introduces Korsch’s 1923 essay, “We must organize a systematic study of the Hegelian dialectic from a materialist standpoint” (“On the Significance of Militant Materialism,” 1922). If Marxism continued to be subject to a “Hegelian dialectic,” thus requiring the “historical materialist” analysis and explanation that Korsch sought to provide of it, this was because it was not itself the reconciled unity of theory and practice but remained, as theory, the critical reflection on the problem of relating theory and practice — which in turn prompted further theoretical development as well as practical political advances. As Adorno put it to Walter Benjamin in a letter of August 2, 1935,

The fetish character of the commodity is not a fact of consciousness; rather it is dialectical, in the eminent sense that it produces consciousness. . . . [P]erfection of the commodity character in a Hegelian self-consciousness inaugurates the explosion of its phantasmagoria.[9]

Marxism was caught in the “phantasmagoria” of capital, while “exploding” it from within.

For the Korsch of “Marxism and Philosophy,” Lenin and Luxemburg’s “revolutionary Marxism” was bound up in the “crisis of Marxism,” while advancing it to a new stage. As Korsch commented,

This transformation and development of Marxist theory has been effected under the peculiar ideological guise of a return to the pure teaching of original or true Marxism. Yet it is easy to understand both the reasons for this guise and the real character of the process which is concealed by it. What theoreticians like Rosa Luxemburg in Germany and Lenin in Russia have done, and are doing, in the field of Marxist theory is to liberate it from the inhibiting traditions of [Social Democracy]. They thereby answer the practical needs of the new revolutionary stage of proletarian class struggle, for these traditions weighed “like a nightmare” on the brain of the working masses whose objectively revolutionary socioeconomic position no longer corresponded to these [earlier] evolutionary doctrines. The apparent revival of original Marxist theory in the Third International is simply a result of the fact that in a new revolutionary period not only the workers’ movement itself, but the theoretical conceptions of communists which express it, must assume an explicitly revolutionary form. This is why large sections of the Marxist system, which seemed virtually forgotten in the final decades of the nineteenth century, have now come to life again. It also explains why the leader of the Russian Revolution [Lenin] could write a book a few months before October [The State and Revolution, 1917] in which he stated that his aim was “in the first place to restore the correct Marxist theory of the State.” . . . When Lenin placed the same question theoretically on the agenda at a decisive moment, this was an early indication that the internal connection of theory and practice within revolutionary Marxism had been consciously re-established. (67–68)

Korsch thus established the importance for what Adorno called the “historically changing” relation of theory and practice, making sense of their vicissitudes in the history of the politics of revolutionary Marxism. Furthermore, by establishing the character of the crisis of Marxism as a matter of theoretical reflection, Korsch re-established the role of consciousness in a Marxian conception of social revolution, why the abandonment or distancing of the practical perspective of revolution necessitates a degradation of theory.

Korsch and the 1960s “New Left” — the problem of “Leninism”

The 1970 publication of Korsch was an event for the Anglophone New Left. As Adolph Reed wrote,

Leninism’s elitism and denigration of consciousness had increasingly troubled me, but I feared I had no recourse without sacrificing a radical commitment. Korsch opened an entirely new vista, the “hidden dimension” of Western Marxism, and led to Lukács, a serious reading of Marcuse, and eventually the critical theoretical tradition.[10]

Reed’s brief comment is cryptic and can be taken in (at least) two opposed ways, either that Korsch provided the redemption of Lenin or an alternative to Leninism.

Such 1960s-era “New Left” ambivalence about “Leninism” can be found in attenuated form in Fred Halliday’s Translator’s Introduction. In it, Halliday sticks closely to a biographical narrative of Korsch’s work, seeking to bring out the coherence of Korsch’s early and later periods, before and after “Marxism and Philosophy,” while acknowledging the “erratic” character of Korsch’s thought over the course of his life, and calling Korsch’s tragic trajectory away from Lenin and Luxemburg’s revolutionary Marxism a “fatal consequence” of the failure of the revolution (26). By casting the issue of Korsch’s work as “interesting” (if “erratic”), Halliday remained somewhat equivocal about the relevance of Korsch’s key text, “Marxism and Philosophy,” and thus about the continued pertinence of the revolutionary Marxism that Lenin shared with Luxemburg. What remained unresolved?

Halliday also suggests that Korsch’s pre-1917 interests in the “syndicalist movement,” the “positive content and actively democratic aspects of socialism, by contrast with the orthodox Marxism of the 2^nd International which he thought defined itself merely negatively as the abolition of the capitalist mode of production” (7–8), came to be expressed some years after the October Revolution, which witnessed “the decline in activity and the need for more critical reflection.” At that time, Korsch returned to his earlier concerns, but with the tragic consequence of “lapsing into ultra-leftism and becoming cut off from the working class” (26).

Perhaps the motivation for Halliday’s 1970 translation and publication of Korsch’s “Marxism and Philosophy” was an affinity, after 1968, with Korsch’s moment of “critical reflection” circa 1923. It may have expressed Halliday’s hope that Korsch’s further trajectory and fate might be avoided by the 1960s “New Left.” In the wake of 1968, Halliday and others wanted to avoid the choice of either ultra-Leftism (“Luxemburgism”) and “becoming cut off from the working class,” or official “Leninism,” and the 1923 Korsch seemed to provide a way out, through specific reflection on the problem of revolutionary political means and ends, in terms of articulating theory and practice.

Forgetting the theory-practice problem — Korsch on spontaneity vs. organization and 1848 vs. 1917

In his 1930 “Anti-Critique” of the 1923 “Marxism and Philosophy,” Korsch wrote,

When the SPD became a “Marxist” party (a process completed with the Erfurt Programme written by Kautsky and Bernstein in 1891) a gap developed between its highly articulated revolutionary “Marxist” theory and a practice that was far behind this revolutionary theory; in some respects it directly contradicted it. This gap was in fact obvious, and it later came to be felt more and more acutely by all the vital forces in the Party (whether on the Left or Right) and its existence was denied only by the orthodox Marxists of the Centre. This gap can easily be explained by the fact that in this historical phase “Marxism,” while formally accepted by the workers’ movement, was from the start not a true theory, in the sense of being “nothing other than a general expression of the real historical movement” (Marx). On the contrary it was always an ideology that had been adopted “from outside” in a pre-established form. In this situation such “orthodox Marxists” as Kautsky and Lenin made a permanent virtue out of a temporary necessity. They energetically defended the idea that socialism can only be brought to the workers “from outside,” by bourgeois intellectuals who are allied to the workers’ movement. This was also true of Left radicals like Rosa Luxemburg. (113–115)

According to Korsch, the Revolution of 1848 and the role of the workers’ movement in it had provided “a rational solution for all the mysteries” of the contradiction between theory and practice that later 2^nd International Marxists tried to sidestep by simply adopting Marxism as an ideology. Korsch commented that,

[A]lthough [Second International Marxism’s] effective practice was now on a broader basis than before, it had in no way reached the heights of general and theoretical achievement earlier attained by the revolutionary movement and proletarian class struggle on a narrower basis. This height was attained during the final phase of the first major capitalist cycle that came to an end towards 1850. (116)

Since the mid-19^th century, Marxism, according to the Korsch of the “Anti-Critique,” had grown ideological. Even Marx’s Capital expressed a certain degeneration:

[T]he theory of Marx and Engels was progressing towards an ever higher level of theoretical perfection although it was no longer directly related to the practice of the worker’s movement. (117)

In other words, the mature theory of Marx (and its development by Engels and their epigones) was itself “anachronistic” and thus unassimilable by the resurgent workers’ movement of the last third of the 19^th century.

Korsch abandoned his 1923 conception of Lenin and Luxemburg’s rearticulation of 1848 in the theory and practice of 1917–19, the “transformation and development of Marxist theory . . . effected under the peculiar ideological guise of a return to the pure teaching of original or true Marxism.” Marx’s Marxism, especially in his mature writings, could only be the elaboration of 1848, in isolation from the workers’ subsequent actual political practice, to which it became ideologically blind and blinding. No adequate “theory,” that is, no “general expression of the real historical movement,” had emerged since. This non-identity and divergence of theory and practice that began in the period of Marx’s maturity and continued into the 20^th century meant, for the Korsch of the 1930s, that Marxism, even in its most revolutionary forms, as with Lenin and Luxemburg, had developed, not to express, but rather to constrain the workers’ movement. Marxism had become an ideology whose value could only be relative, not qualitatively superior to others.[11] When he died in 1961, Korsch was working on a study of Marx’s rival in the 1st International Workingmen’s Association, the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin.[12] |P

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1. Karl Marx’s Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859).

2. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, “Diskussion über Theorie und Praxis” (1956), in Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften (GAS) Vol. 19 (Nachträge, Verzeichnisse und Register) (S. Fischer, 1996), 69–71; quoted in Detlev Claussen, Theodor W. Adorno: One Last Genius (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), 233.

3. Claussen, 233; Horkheimer, GAS 19, 66. Furthermore, while “Marx wrote his critique of the [SPD, German Social-Democratic Party’s] Gotha Programme in 1875[,] Adorno had for some time planned to write a critique of the Godesberg Programme [in which the SPD formally renounced Marxism in 1959]” (Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995), 598).

4. From Phil Slater, Origin and Significance of the Frankfurt School: A Marxist Perspective (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977):

[Horkheimer wrote, in “The Authoritarian State” (1940),]

“The concept of a transitional revolutionary dictatorship was in no way intended to mean the monopoly of the means of production by some new elite. Such dangers can be countered by the energy and alertness of the people themselves. . . . [The revolution that ends domination is as far-reaching as the will of the liberated. Any resignation is already a regression into prehistory. . . . The recurrence of political reaction and a new destruction of the beginnings of freedom cannot theoretically be ruled out, and certainly not as long as a hostile environment exists. No patented system worked out in advance can preclude regressions. The modalities of the new society are first found in the process of social transformation.] The theoretical conception which, following its first trail-blazers [such as Lenin and Luxemburg], will show the new society its way — the system of workers’ councils — grows out of praxis. The roots of the council system go back to 1871, 1905, and other events. Revolutionary transformation has a tradition that must continue.” (66)

The Frankfurt School’s respect for [Lenin] was due in large measure to his ability to retain the dynamic unity of party, theory and class, a unity subsequently lost. Marcuse’s Soviet Marxism [1958] is here representative of the entire Frankfurt School:

“During the Revolution, it became clear to what degree Lenin had succeeded in basing his strategy on the actual class interests and aspirations of the workers and peasants. . . . Then, from 1923 on, the decisions of the leadership increasingly dissociated from the class interests of the proletariat. The former no longer presuppose the proletariat as a revolutionary agent but rather are imposed upon the proletariat and the rest of the underlying population.” (66–67)

Looking round for a possible practical exponent of [the] views of the Frankfurt School, one immediately encounters the figure of Trotsky. . . . [Trotsky maintained that the bureaucratism of the USSR] completely disregarded Lenin’s conception of the dialectical interaction of party and class. . . . [Trotsky wrote that] the Marxist theoretician must still retain the concrete historical perspective of class struggle:

“[The causes for the downfall of the Social Democracy and of official Communism must be sought not in Marxist theory and not in the bad qualities of those people who applied it, but in the concrete conditions of the historical process.] It is not a question of counterposing abstract principles, but rather of the struggle of living social forces, with its inevitable ups and downs, with the degeneration of organizations, with the passing of entire generations into discard, and with the necessity which therefore arises of mobilizing fresh forces on a new historical stage. No one has bothered to pave in advance the road of revolutionary upsurge for the proletariat. [With inevitable halts and partial retreats it is necessary to move forward on a road crisscrossed by countless obstacles and covered with the debris of the past.] Those who are frightened by this had better step aside” [Trotsky, “To Build Communist Parties and an International Anew,” July 1933].

The Frankfurt School, while upholding a number of principles (which became “abstract” in their passivity and isolation), did indeed, in this sense, step aside. (68–70)

One is not without some justification in asking whether Council Communism could perhaps be a concrete embodiment of many of the principles of the Frankfurt School. . . . [But] the Council Communists did not point out the soviets’ [workers’ councils’] own responsibility for the collapse of the revolutionary wave of 1918–19. (73)

5. The reverse was also true. Korsch, in distancing himself from his 1923 work that was so seminal for the Frankfurt School writers, also came to critique them:

[Korsch] intended to try and interest Horkheimer and the [Frankfurt] Institute [for Social Research] in Pannekoek’s book Lenin as Philosopher (1938) [which traced the bureaucratization of the USSR back to the supposedly crude materialism of Lenin’s 1909 book Materialism and Empirio-Criticism]. . . . [Either] Korsch [or, the Director of the Institute, Horkheimer himself] would write a review for [the Institute’s journal] the Zeitschrift. . . . Yet no such review appeared. . . . [Korsch suffered] total disillusionment with the Institute and their “impotent philosophy.” Korsch [was] particularly bitter about the “metaphysician Horkheimer” (Slater, 73–74).

The record for Korsch’s deteriorating relations with the Frankfurt Institute in exile is found in his private letters to Paul Mattick, editor of the journal Living Marxism: International Council Correspondence.

6. Translated by Dennis Redmond, 2001. The first sentence of this passage, mentioning Korsch, is inexplicably missing from the 1973 Continuum edition of Negative Dialectics translated by E. B. Ashton (see “Relation to Left-wing Hegelianism,” 143).

7. In a lecture of November 23, 1965, on “Theory and Practice,” Adorno said,

I should like to say that there is no intention here of advocating a relapse into contemplation, as was found in the great idealist philosophies and ultimately even in Hegel, despite the great importance of practice in the Hegelian system. . . . The late Karl Korsch . . . criticized Horkheimer and myself even more sharply, already in America and also later on, after the publication of Dialectic of Enlightenment. His objection was that we had regressed to the standpoint of Left Hegelianism. This does not seem right to me because the standpoint of pure contemplation can no longer be sustained. Though we should note, incidentally, that the polarity Marx constructs between pure contemplation on the one hand and his own political philosophy on the other does only partial justice to the intentions of Left Hegelianism. This is a difficult question . . . although we cannot deny the impressive political instincts which alerted Marx to the presence of the retrograde and, above all, nationalist potential in such thinkers as Bruno Bauer, Stirner and Ruge. (Adorno, Lectures on Negative Dialectics [Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, 2008], 52–53.)

8. Translated by Redmond.

9. Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings Vol. 3 (1935–38) (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 54–56; Adorno et al., Aesthetics and Politics (London: Verso, 1980), 111–113.

10. Reed, “Paths to Critical Theory,” in Sohnya Sayres, Social Text Staff, eds., The 60s Without Apology (University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 257–258; originally published in Social Text 9/10 (Spring–Summer 1984).

11. Such eclecticism on the Left has only deepened and become more compounded since Korsch’s time, especially since the 1960s. However Marx may come up for periodic reconsideration, certain questions central to the Marxian problematic remain obscured. As Fredric Jameson has written,

A Marx revival seems to be under way, predating the current [2007–09] disarray on Wall Street, even though no clear-cut political options yet seem to propose themselves. . . . The big ideological issues — anarchism, the party, economic planning, social classes — are still mainly avoided, on the grounds that they remind too many people of Communist propaganda. Such a reminder is unwanted, not so much because it is accompanied by the memory of deaths and violence . . . as simply and less dramatically because such topics now appear boring. (“Sandblasting Marx,” New Left Review 55 [January–February 2009].)

For further discussion of the fluctuating currency and fortunes of Marxian approaches as a feature of modern history, see my “Symptomology: Historical transformations in social-political context,” The Platypus Review 12 (May 2009).

12. A. R. Giles-Peter, “Karl Korsch: A Marxist Friend of Anarchism,” Red & Black (Australia) 5 (April 1973). (Available on-line at: http://www.geocities.com/capitolHill/Lobby/2379/korsh.htm.) According to Giles-Peter, Korsch came to believe that the “basis of the revolutionary attitude in the modern bourgeois epoch would be an ethic Marx would have rejected as ‘anarchist’,” and thus “explicitly rejected the elements of Marxism which separate it from anarchism.”

As Korsch himself put it, in “Ten Theses on Marxism Today” (1950), translated by Giles-Peter in Telos 26 (Winter 1975–76) and available on-line at: http://libcom.org/library/ten-theses-korsch,

Marx is today only one among the numerous precursors, founders and developers of the socialist movement of the working class. No less important are the so-called Utopian Socialists from Thomas More to the present. No less important are the great rivals of Marx, such as Blanqui, and his sworn enemies, such as Proudhon and Bakunin. No less important, in the final result, are the more recent developments such as German revisionism, French syndicalism, and Russian Bolshevism.

Whereas Korsch in 1923 had grasped the essential and vital if transformed continuity between Marx and his precursors in the “revolutionary movement of the Third Estate” of the bourgeois liberal-democratic revolutions, by 1950 he wrote,

The following points are particularly critical for Marxism: (a) its dependence on the underdeveloped economic and political conditions in Germany and all the other countries of central and eastern Europe where it was to have political relevance; (b) its unconditional adherence to the political forms of the bourgeois revolution; (c) the unconditional acceptance of the advanced economic conditions of England as a model for the future development of all countries and as objective preconditions for the transition to socialism; to which one should add; (d) the consequences of its repeated desperate and contradictory attempts to break out of these conditions.

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Chris Cutrone

THE ELECTION CRISIS THAT UNFOLDED after June 12 has exposed the vulnerability of the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI), a vulnerability that has been driving its ongoing confrontation with the U.S. and Europe, for instance on the question of acquiring nuclear technology and its weapons applications.

While the prior U.S. administration under Bush had called for “regime change” in Iran, President Obama has been more conciliatory, offering direct negotiations with Tehran. This opening met with ambivalence from the Islamic Republic establishment; some favored while others opposed accepting this olive branch offered by the newly elected American president. Like the recent coup in Honduras, the dispute in Iran has been conditioned, on both sides, by the “regime change” that has taken place in the United States. A certain testing of possibilities in the post-Bush II world order is being mounted by allies and opponents alike. One dangerous aspect of the mounting crisis in Iran has been the uncertainty over how the Obama administration might address it.

The U.S. Republican Party and neoconservatives, now in the opposition, and recently elected Israeli right-wing politicians have demanded that the U.S. keep up the pressure on the IRI and have expressed skepticism regarding Iranian “reform” candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi. European statesmen on both Right and Left have, for their part, made strident appeals for “democracy” in Iran. But Obama has tried to avoid the pitfalls of either exacerbating the confrontation with the IRI or undermining whatever hopes might be found with the Iranian dissidents, whether of the dominant institutions of the Islamic Republic such as Mousavi or of the more politically indeterminate mass protests. Obama is seeking to keep his options open, however events end up resolving in Iran. While to some this appears as an equivocation or even a betrayal of Iranian democratic aspirations, it is simply typical Obama realpolitik. A curious result of the Obama administration’s relatively taciturn response has been the IRI’s reciprocal reticence about any U.S. role in the present crisis, preferring instead, bizarrely, to demonize the British as somehow instigating the massive street protests.

The good faith or wisdom of the new realpolitik is not to be doubted, however, especially given that Obama wants neither retrenchment nor the unraveling of the Islamic Republic in Iran. As chief executive of what Marx called the “central committee” of the American and indeed global ruling class, Obama might not have much reasonable choice for alternative action. The truth is that the U.S. and European states can deal quite well with the IRI so long as it does not engage in particularly undesirable behaviors. Their problem is not with the IRI as such — but the Left’s ought to be.

The reigning confusion around the crisis in Iran has been expressed, on the one hand, in statements defending Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s claim to electoral victory by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and by individual writers in the supposedly leftist Monthly Review and its MRZine web publication (which also has republished without comment official Iranian statements on the crisis), and on the other hand by supporters of Iranian dissidents and election protesters such as Danny Postel, Fred Halliday, and the various Marxist-Humanist publications in the U.S.1

Slavoj Žižek has weighed in on the question with an interesting and sophisticated take of his own, questioning prevailing understandings of the nature of the Iranian regime and its Islamist character.2 Meanwhile, the indefatigable Christopher Hitchens has pursued his idiosyncratic brand of a quasi-neoconservative “anti-fascist” denunciation of the Islamic Republic, pointing out how the Islamic Republic itself is predicated on Khomeini’s “theological” finding of Velayat-e Faqui, that the entire Iranian population, as victims of Western “cultural imperialism,” needed to be treated as minority wards of the mullahs.3

Halliday addresses the current protests as if they are the result of a “return of the repressed” of the supposedly more revolutionary aspirations of the 1978–79 toppling of the Shah, characterizing the Islamic Republic as the result of a “counter-revolution.” In the interview published in this issue of the Platypus Review, historian of the Iranian Left Ervand Abrahamian characterizes the present crisis in terms of demands for greater freedoms that necessarily supersede the accomplished tasks of the 1979 revolution, which, according to Abrahamian, overthrew the tyranny of the Pahlavi ancien régime and established Iranian “independence” (from the U.S. and U.K.).

All told, this constellation of responses to the crisis has recapitulated problems on the Left in understanding the Islamic Revolution that took place in Iran from 1978–83, and the character and trajectory of the Islamic Republic of Iran since then. All share in the fallacy of attributing to Iran an autonomous historical rhythm or logic of its own. Iran is treated more or less as an entity, rather than as it might be, as a symptomatic effect of a greater history.4 Of all, Žižek has come closest to addressing this issue of greater context, but even he has failed to address the history of the Left.

Two issues bedevil the Left’s approach to the Islamic Republic and the present crisis in Iran: the general character of the recent historical phenomenon of Islamist politics, and the larger question of “revolution.” Among the responses to the present crisis one finds longstanding analytic and conceptual problems that are condensed in ways useful for critical consideration. It is precisely in its lack of potential emancipatory or even beneficial outcome that the present electoral crisis in Iran proves most instructive. So, what are the actual possibilities for the current crisis in Iran?

Perhaps perversely, it is helpful to begin with the well-reported statements of the Revolutionary Guards in Iran, who warned of the danger of a “velvet revolution” akin to those that toppled the Communist Party-dominated Democratic Republics of Eastern Europe in 1989. The Communist Party General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev sought to reform but only ended up undoing the Soviet Union. So it is not merely a matter of the intentions of the street protesters or establishment institutional dissidents such as Mousavi that will determine outcomes — as the Right, from Obama to the grim beards of the Revolutionary Guards and Basiji, do not hesitate to point out. By comparison with such eminently realistic practical perspectives of the powers-that-be, the Left reveals itself to be comprised of daydreams and wishful thinking. The Revolutionary Guards might be correct that the present crisis of protests against the election results can only end badly.

Perhaps Ahmadinejad and those behind him, along with the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, will prevail, and the protests against the election outcome will dissipate and those involved be punished, repressed, or eliminated. Or, perhaps, the protests will escalate, precipitating the demise of the Islamic Republic. But, were that to happen, maybe all that will be destroyed is the “republic” and not its Islamist politics, resulting in a rule of the mullahs without the accoutrements of “democracy.” Perhaps the protests will provoke a dictatorship by the Revolutionary Guards and Basiji militias. Or perhaps even these forces will weaken and dissolve under the pressure of the protesters. Perhaps a civil war will issue from the deepened splitting of the extant forces in Iran. In that case, it is difficult to imagine that the present backers of the protests among the Islamic Republic establishment would press to undermine the state or precipitate a civil war or a coup (one way or the other). Perhaps the present crisis will pressure a reconsolidated regime under Khamenei and Ahmadinejad to continue the confrontation with the U.S. and Europe, only more hysterically, in order to try to bolster their support in Iran. If so, this could easily result in military conflict. These are the potential practical stakes of the present crisis.

Žižek has balanced the merits of the protests against the drive to neo-liberalize Iran, in which not only American neoconservatives but also Ahmadinejad himself as well as the “reformers” such as Mousavi and his patron, the “pistachio king” and former president of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Rafsanjani, have all taken part. In so doing, however, Žižek rehearses illusions on the Left respecting the 1979 Islamic Revolution, as, for instance, when he points to the traditional Shia slogans of the protesters, “Death to the tyrant!” and “God is great!,” as evidence of the “emancipatory potential” of “good Islam,” as an alternative to the apparent inevitability of neoliberalism. But this concession to Islamist politics is gratuitous to the extent that it does not recognize the ideological limitations and practical constraints of the protest movement and its potential trajectory, especially in global context. The protests are treated as nothing more than an “event.”

But if the protests were to succeed, what would this mean? It could mean calling a new election in which Mousavi would win and begin reforming the IRI, curtailing the power of the Revolutionary Guards and Basiji, and perhaps even that of the clerical establishment. Or, if a more radical transformation were possible, perhaps a revolution would take place in which the IRI would be overthrown in favor of a newly constituted Iranian state. The most likely political outcome of such a scenario can be seen in neighboring Afghanistan and Iraq, a “soft” Islamist state more “open” to the rest of the world, i.e., more directly in-sync with the neoliberal norms prevailing in global capital, without the Revolutionary Guards, Inc., taking its cut (like the military in neighboring Pakistan, through its extensive holdings, the Revolutionary Guards comprise perhaps the largest capitalist entity in Iran). But how much better would such an outcome really be, from the perspective of the Left — for instance, in terms of individual and collective freedoms, such as women’s and sexual liberties, labor union organizing, etc.? Not much, if at all. Hence, even a less virulent or differently directed political Islamism needs to be seen as a core part of the problem confronted by people in Iran, rather than as an aspect of any potential solution.

Žižek has at least recognized that Islamism is not incompatible with, but rather shares in the essential historical moment of neoliberal capital. More than simply being two sides of the same coin, as Afghanistan and Iraq show, there is no discontinuity between neoliberalism and Islamism, despite what apologists for either may think.

Beyond Žižek, others on the Left have sought to capture for the election protests the historical mantle of the 1979 Revolution, as well as the precedents of the 1906 Constitutional Revolution and the “Left”-nationalist politics of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadeq, overthrown in a U.S.- and British-supported coup in 1953. For instance, the Tudeh (“Masses”) Party (Iranian Communist Party), the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK, “People’s Mujahedin of Iran”) and its associated National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCORI), and the Workers’ Communist Party of Iran (WCPI, sister organization of the Workers’ Communist Party of Iraq, the organizers of the largest labor union federation in post-U.S. invasion and occupation Iraq) have all issued statements claiming and thus simplifying, in national-celebratory terms, this complex and paradoxical historical legacy for the current protests. But some true democratic character of Iranian tradition should not be so demagogically posed.

The MEK, who were the greatest organizational participants on the Left in the Islamic Revolution of 1978–79 (helping to organize the massive street protests that brought down the Shah, and participating in the U.S. embassy takeover), were originally inspired by New Left Islamist Ali Shariati and developed a particular Islamo-Marxist approach that became more avowedly and self-consciously “Marxist” as they slipped into opposition with the rise to supremacy of Khomeini.5 Shariati considered himself a follower of Frantz Fanon; Jean-Paul Sartre once said, famously, “I have no religion, but if I were to choose one, it would be that of Shariati.” The 44-year-old Shariati died under mysterious circumstances in 1977 while in exile in London, perhaps murdered by Khomeini’s agents. Opposition presidential candidate Mousavi, and especially his wife Zahra Rahnavard, despite eventually having joined the Khomeini faction by 1979, were students of Shariati who worked closely with him politically in the 1960s–70s.

A Mujahidin-i-khalq demonstration in Tehran during the Revolution. To the left, the figure of Dr. Ali Shariati; to the right, Khomeini.

However disoriented and hence limited the MEK’s inspiration, Shariati’s critique of modern capitalism, from the supposed perspective of Islam, was, it had the virtue of questioning capitalist modernity’s fundamental assumptions more deeply than is typically attempted today, for instance by Žižek, whose take on the “emancipatory potential” of “good Islam” is limited to the rather narrow question of “democracy.” So the question of how adequate let alone well-advised the “democratic” demands such as those of the present Iranian election protesters cannot even be posed, let alone properly addressed. 2009 is not a reprise of 1979, having much less radical potential, and this is both for good and ill.

On the Left, the MEK has been among the more noisy opposition groups against the Islamic Republic, for instance using its deep-cover operatives within Iran to expose the regime’s nuclear weapons program. Most on the Left have shunned the MEK, however. For instance, Postel calls it a “Stalinist death cult.” But the MEK’s New Left Third Worldist and cultural-nationalist (Islamist) perspective, however colored by Marxism, and no matter how subsequently modified, remains incoherent, as does the ostensibly more orthodox Marxism of the Tudeh and WCPI, for instance in their politics of “anti-imperialism,” and thus also remains blind to how their political outlook, from the 1970s to today, is bound to (and hence responsible for) the regressive dynamic of the “revolution” — really, just the collapse of the Shah’s regime — that resulted in the present theocracy. All these groups on the Iranian Left are but faint shadows of their former selves.

Despite their otherwise vociferous opposition to the present Islamist regime, the position of the Left in the present crisis, for instance hanging on every utterance by this or that “progressive” mullah in Iran, reminds one of the unbecoming position of Maoists throughout the world enthralled by the purge of the Gang of Four after Mao’s death in the late 1970s. Except, of course, for those who seek to legitimize Ahmadinejad, everyone is eager if not desperate to find in the present crisis an “opening” to a potential “progressive” outcome. The present search for an “emancipatory” Islamist politics is a sad repetition of the Left’s take on the 1979 Revolution. This position of contemplative spectatorship avoids the tasks of what any purported Left can, should, and indeed must do. From opportunist wishful thinking and tailing after forces it accepts ahead of time as beyond its control, the so-called Left resembles the Monday quarterbacking that rationalizes a course of events for which it abdicates any true responsibility. The Left thus participates in and contributes to affirming the confused muddle from which phenomena such as the Iranian election protests suffer — and hence inevitably becomes part of the Right.

This is the irony. Since those such as Žižek, Halliday, Postel, the Marxist-Humanists, liberals, and others on the Left seem anxious to prove that the U.S. neoconservatives and others are wrong in their hawkish attitude towards the Islamic Republic, to prove that any U.S. intervention will only backfire and prevent the possibility of a progressive outcome, especially to the present crisis, they tacitly support the Obama approach, no matter how supposedly differently and less cynically motivated theirs is compared to official U.S. policy.

Like the Obama administration, the Left seems more afraid to queer the play of the election protesters than it is eager to weigh in against the Islamic Republic. This craven anxiety at all-too-evident powerlessness over events considers itself to be balancing the need to oppose the greater power and danger, “U.S. imperialism,” producing a strange emphasis in all this discourse. Only Hitchens, in the mania of his “anti-fascism,” has freed himself from this obsequious attitude of those on the Left that sounds so awkward in the context of the present unraveling of what former U.S. National Security Advisor and then Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice once, rightly, called a “loathsome regime” — a sentiment about the Islamic Republic that any purported Left should share, and more loudly and proudly than any U.S. official could.

Indeed, the supporters of the election protesters have trumpeted the rejection of any and all help that might be impugned as showing the nefarious hand of the U.S. government and its agencies.6 Instead, they focus on a supposed endemic dynamic for progressive-emancipatory change in Iranian history, eschewing how the present crisis of the Islamic Republic is related to greater global historical dynamics in which Iran is no less caught up than any other place. They thus repeat the mistake familiar from the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the reactionary dynamics of which were obscured behind supposed “anti-imperialism.” The problems facing the Left in Iran are the very same ones faced anywhere else. “Their” problems are precisely ours.

With the present crisis in Iran and its grim outlook we pay the price for the historical failures — really, the crimes — of the Left, going back at least to the period of the 1960s–70s New Left of which the Islamic Revolution was a product. The prospects for any positive, let alone progressive, outcome to the present crisis are quite dim. This is why it should be shocking that the Left so unthinkingly repeats today, if in a much attenuated form, precisely those mistakes that brought us to this point. The inescapable lesson of several generations of history is that only an entirely theoretically reformulated and practically reconstituted Left in places such as the U.S. and Europe would have any hope of giving even remotely adequate, let alone effective, form to the discontents that erupt from time to time anywhere in the world. Far from being able to take encouragement from phenomena such as the present election crisis and protests in Iran, the disturbing realization needs to be had, and at the deepest levels of conscious reflection, about just how much “they” need us.

A reformulated Left for the present and future must do better than the Left has done up to now in addressing — and opposing — problems such as political Islamism. The present manifest failure and unraveling of the Islamic Revolution in Iran is a good occasion for thinking through what it might mean to settle this more than thirty year old score of the betrayed and betraying Left. |P

Notes:

1. In particular, see Danny Postel’s Reading Legitimation Crisis in Tehran: Iran and the Future of Liberalism, 2006; Fred Halliday’s “Iran’s Tide of History: Counterrevolution and After,” OpenDemocracy.net, July 17; and the Marxist-Humanist periodical News & Letters, as well as the web sites of the U.S. Marxist-Humanists and the Marxist-Humanist Initiative.

2. See Žižek’s “Will the Cat above the Precipice Fall Down?,” June 24 (available at http://supportiran.blogspot.com), based on a June 18 lecture at Birkbeck College, London, on “Populism and Democracy,” and followed by the more extended treatment in “Berlusconi in Tehran,” London Review of Books, July 23.

3. See Hitchens, “Don’t Call What Happened in Iran Last Week an Election,” Slate, June 14.

4. For excellent historical treatments of the Islamic Revolution and its local and global context, please see: Ervand Abrahamian, Iran Between Two Revolutions (1982) and The Iranian Mojahedin (1992); Maziar Behrooz, Rebels with a Cause: The Failure of the Left in Iran (2000); Fred Halliday, “The Iranian Revolution: Uneven Development and Religious Populism” (Journal of International Affairs 36.2 Fall/Winter 1982/83); and David Greason, “Embracing Death: The Western Left and the Iranian Revolution, 1979–83” (Economy and Society 34.1, February 2005). The critically important insights of these works have been largely neglected, including subsequently by their own authors.

5. The MEK have been widely described as “cult-like,” but perhaps this is because, as former participants in the Islamic Revolution, in their state of betrayal they focus so much animus on the cult-like character of the Islamic Republic itself; the official term used by the Khomeiniite state for the MEK is “Hypocrites” (Monafeqin), expressing their shared Islamist roots in the 1979 Revolution. But the success of the MEK over Khomeini would have hardly been better, and might have indeed been much worse. Khomeini’s opportunism and practical cynicism in consolidating the Islamic Revolution might have not only produced but also prevented abominable excesses of “revolutionary” Islamism.

Of all the organized tendencies in the Iranian Revolution, the MEK perhaps most instantiated Michel Foucault’s vision of its more radical “non-Western” character (see Janet Afary and Kevin Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism, 2005). But just as Foucault’s enthusiasm for the Islamic Revolution in Iran ought to be a disturbing reminder of the inherent limitations and right-wing character of the Foucauldian critique of modernity, so should the MEK’s historical Shariati-inspired Islamism stand as a warning against all similar post-New Left valorizations of “culture.”

More recently, the MEK has found advocates among the far-Right politicians of the U.S. government such as Representative Tom Tancredo, Senators Sam Brownback and Kit Bond and former Senator and Attorney General John Ashcroft — precisely those who are most enchanted by the ideological cult of “America.” The MEK’s former patron, the Baathist Saddam Hussein, had unleashed the MEK on Iran in a final battle at the close of the Iran-Iraq war 1980–88, after which Khomeini ordered the slaughter of all remaining leftist political prisoners in Iran, as many as 30,000, mostly affiliated with the MEK and Tudeh, in what Abrahamian called “an act of violence unprecedented in Iranian history — unprecedented in form, content, and intensity” (Tortured Confessions, 1999, 210). After the 2003 invasion and occupation, the U.S. disarmed but protected the MEK in Iraq. However, since the U.S. military’s recent redeployment in the “status of forces” agreement with the al-Maliki government signed by Bush but implemented by Obama, the MEK has been subjected to brutal, murderous repression, as its refugee camp was raided by Iraqi forces on July 28–29, seemingly at the behest of the Iranian government, of which the dominant, ruling Shia constituency parties in Iraq have been longstanding beneficiaries.

The grotesque and ongoing tragedy of the MEK forms a shadow history of the Islamic Revolution and its aftermath, eclipsed by the Khomeiniite Islamic Republic, but is essential for grasping its dynamics and trajectory.

6. See, for instance, Sean Penn, Ross Mirkarimi and Reese Erlich, “Support Iranians, not U.S. Intervention,” CommonDreams.org, July 21.

http://platypus1917.org/2009/06/21/platypus-chicago-summer-2009-radical-bourgeois-philosophy/

We are moving somewhat non-chronologically, starting with Constant as a reading from 1819 that synthesizes Smith with Rousseau (as well as taking issue with a Rousseauian perspective that cannot address the growth of modern, capitalist society since Rousseau’s time). Constant is continuing and not critiquing let alone opposing Rousseau (he is distinguishing Rousseau from the supposedly Rousseauian Jacobins, et al.).

Constant should serve to put a finer point on Smith and bring out more emphatically what is only implied — or taken for granted — by Smith. As I pointed out in my previous post, Smith is most emphatically in dialogue with the Rousseau of The Social Contract. So one should not get bogged down in Smith vs. Rousseau on the conception of property, in, e.g., The Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, because Rousseau’s conception there is polemical in a way more easily recognizable to Smith than it might be for us barbarians! Smith is in dialogue not with Rousseau’s “negative” polemic in which is raised a radical image of individual freedom, but rather with Rousseau’s more “positive” theory of society, and first and foremost, social freedom, the possible coherence of society in and through its transformation in freedom, in The Social Contract.

Smith’s notion of modern society as exchange — increased breadth of trade and reciprocally increased depth of division of labor — and its self-regulating character (e.g., the “invisible hand”) must be seen as Smith’s interpretation and specification of what Rousseau called the “general will,” i.e., society as more than the sum of its parts, capitalism as social freedom — the freedom of society to transform and progress through transformation. Smith wants to know what makes the Rousseauian “general will” possible, and this is what drives his conception of capitalism.

– This involved for Smith the transformation of traditional relations of space and time, e.g., relations between town and country, and new and different purposes and forms of colonization, etc., which I would want to emphasize at least as much as, e.g., the “labor theory of value,” etc. Smith should not become merely a traditional Marxist avant la lettre in an analytic-categorial sense, but rather needs to be grasped as a philosopher of freedom, which is why Marx would take him seriously to begin with.

Constant, a liberal, interprets modern society in such Smithian cosmopolitan-commercial terms, as in that differences among nations were becoming more apparent than real, etc., bringing about a real cosmopolitanism of international fraternity (as against and despite the power games of statesmen, who are rightly viewed with suspicion as potential criminals against this emergent global society), and, on a more local level, the sublimation of Hobbes’s “war of all against all” into the mutually developmental process of competition, etc.

The most important aspect of Constant’s argument, of course, is the profound qualitative transformation of modern society, from the traditional/ancient, that he seeks to register and grasp in its implications for the transformation of politics. The transformation of the very ground for and concept of freedom is Constant’s ultimate point and should not be obscured or dodged (in terms of “how he understands capitalism,” etc., “ideologically” — again, we’re interested in Constant’s argument from the standpoint of the philosophy of freedom); Constant gives a very straightforward and prosaic argument that Hegel will make more apparently abstrusely. Both Hegel and Constant derive their thinking about modern freedom from Rousseau and Smith — with Hegel also coming from Kant.

Turning to Kant, the issue of freedom as transformation must be kept foremost in mind.

In “What is Enlightenment?” Kant is concerned with where freedom in this social-transformative sense is located. He is trying to specify its place and role.

Kant’s peculiar use of the public-private distinction, which is wholly counter-intuitive to our colloquial commonsensical use of these terms, needs emphasis, in order to bring out what Kant is trying to say. — As usual, one should never get hung up on the terms themselves but stay focused on how they are being used to make a specific argument, how they are serving that argument. So first we need to know what that argument actually is.

Kant is in dialogue with Rousseau at the level of the open-ended and profound, qualitative-transformative character of human freedom. (In working through this summer syllabus, when in doubt, always return to the James Miller epigraph on Rousseau I gave you as an initial guide, which will serve for all the readings this summer.)

The idea that the merely “private” use of reason is not the realm of freedom for Kant is quite difficult to wrap one’s mind around, because it means going against all our commonplace assumptions of psychological predispositions.

For Kant, e.g., Obama’s use of reason in exercising his duties as President counts only as the merely “private” use of reason. It is not in this capacity that Obama can act on behalf of the freedom of humanity. Rather, it is only in public discourse and debate, on behalf of further “enlightenment,” that Obama can affect positively the unfolding of human freedom — the freedom to transform humanity’s own conditions. It is thus indirect.

As President, and not only as husband to his wife and father of his children, or as employee in the private sector such as being a law professor at UChicago before entering politics, Obama is not free to act in such a way as to be able to contribute to the development of human freedom, because he is a mere cog in the machine of the social order, compelled to act in the service of interests, both his own as well as others’.

For Kant, it is only as a public citizen than Obama can exercise any possible influence on free humanity. In other words, it’s not in making policy decisions in his “public” role as President, but only in his speaking, as we would term it, as a “private citizen” that Obama could, for Kant, participate in the furthering of enlightenment, or what he describes as humanity’s emergence from self-incurred immaturity.

This is a tremendous if not preposterous idea of Kant’s, and it serves us well to consider where it comes from. It comes from Rousseau’s idea of the “general will” as something more than the sum of its parts in individual wills, in which the movement of human freedom — both individual and collective — manifests and unfolds.

Kant is taking Rousseau’s radically new conception of human freedom and specifying it as a matter of “enlightenment” and what is meant by this. The apparent peculiarity of Kant’s argument (its counter-intuitive use of categories of public and private, etc.) comes from the obscurity of the desideratum of free humanity as freedom in transformation with which our radical bourgeois philosophers were wrestling as an emergent property of their world (what we take for granted and to which we have thus dulled ourselves).

What is this “humanity?” It is not the sum total of human beings, but rather the human social (meaning, for moderns, global-cosmopolitan) collective’s transcendental character, or more than the sum of its parts (hence taking for granted Rousseau’s account of the “general will”).

Kant’s “Cosmopolitan History” is a great and wonderful precursor and point-for-point program for Hegel’s subsequent philosophy of history, which is also followed by Marx and by Marxist politics. — We seek to continue to pursue the “revolution” of which Kant speaks in his “Cosmopolitan History.”

The barbarism of our era can only read Kant with a debunking, jaundiced eye, and ignore what they can read right before them in this bracing text.

Kant is very clear here, for instance that if a world of a cosmopolitan civil society is not achieved then Rousseau’s negative opinion of civilization (as polemical mien) and relatively positive estimation of “noble savagery” would be (perversely, against Rousseau’s actual intentions) vindicated. This is what Benjamin will call the “go-for-broke game of history.” History has become a task, to make civilization worthwhile by transcending its history in freedom — in the freedom that civilization both evinces and whose open-ended possibilities it furthers.

We are back to Rousseau’s account of humanity’s unlimited “perfectibility” as that which ails us, but also what tasks us with transformation in freedom, and makes that task capable of fulfillment.

Smith, Kant and Constant, following Rousseau, want to know what about modern society allows this, and thus want to further our consciousness of it, as part and parcel of our practical achievement of it: theirs is the radical project of enlightenment in the service of freedom.

http://platypus1917.org/2009/06/21/platypus-chicago-summer-2009-radical-bourgeois-philosophy/

Platypus Marxist reading group summer 2009, June 28 – August 16

Radical bourgeois philosophy: Kant-Hegel-Nietzsche

We will address the greater context for Marx and Marxism through the issue of bourgeois radicalism in philosophy in the 18th and 19th Centuries. Discussion will emerge by working through the development from Kant and Hegel to Nietzsche, but also by reference to the Rousseauian aftermath, and the emergence of the modern society of capital, as registered by liberals such as Adam Smith and Benjamin Constant.

“The principle of freedom and its corollary, ‘perfectibility,’ . . . suggest that the possibilities for being human are both multiple and, literally, endless. . . . Contemporaries like Kant well understood the novelty and radical implications of Rousseau’s new principle of freedom [and] appreciated his unusual stress on history as the site where the true nature of our species is simultaneously realized and perverted, revealed and distorted. A new way of thinking about the human condition had appeared. . . . As Hegel put it, ‘The principle of freedom dawned on the world in Rousseau, and gave infinite strength to man, who thus apprehended himself as infinite.’ ”
– James Miller (author of The Passion of Michel Foucault, 2000), Introduction to Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (Hackett, 1992)

* * *

Book sources

The readings are mostly linked to HTML web text sources; a few are PDFs that I’ve scanned or are available on the web.

But I would encourage the following book purchases which will make matters much simpler:

- Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (Hackett: ISBN 0872201503)

- Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations (Univ. Chicago: ISBN 0226763749)

- Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals (Hackett: ISBN 087220166X)

- Kant, Perpetual Peace (etc.) (Hackett: ISBN 0915145472)

-or-

- Kant, Practical Philosophy (Cambridge: ISBN 0521654084)

- Hegel, Intro to Philosophy of History (Hackett: ISBN 0872200566)

- Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life (Hackett: ISBN: 0915144948)

- Nietzsche, Basic Writings (Modern Library: ISBN 0679783393)

* * *

Notes on the readings

I’d like to write some notes to you now about beginning this reading group mini-course with Rousseau.

The schedule is such that the reading for the 2nd week of Rousseau is much shorter than for the 1st. This will allow for a comprehensive discussion of both texts by Rousseau at the 2nd session. So I will address, first, Robert Pippin’s short 2003 essay in response to the forum in the journal Critical Inquiry “On Critical Theory,” and then address both Rousseau texts, the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, and The Social Contract.

Pippin

Pippin takes us through a history of modern philosophy, and distinguishes roughly 2 periods (though he does not explicitly do so): 1.) Kant-Hegel, the turn of the 18-19th Centuries; and 2.) 19th Century, post-Hegelian philosophy. He describes this turn as follows:

“the modern form of life coming into view after the middle of the nineteenth century or so was in some basic way unacceptable, unaffirmable, pathological even, certainly ugly. (A “recoil” most dramatically first obvious much earlier, in Rousseau.) To cut to the chase: it then became obvious how difficult it would be to theorize, as it is now put, this gap, or absence or lack in this new, comprehensive form of life. No appeal to an underlying, unrealized human nature (Feuerbach, the early Marx) was possible (if one truly took Kant’s critical results to heart and abstained from Marx’s neo-Aristotelian essentialism); no appeal to an independent moral criterion was possible (after the historicizing Hegel); and the idea of an underlying historical teleology, such that what was “missing” was what was “not yet actual,” but being realized, began to seem a metaphysical regression.”

Leaving aside Pippin’s misunderstanding of (the early) Marx (as “neo-Aristotelian essentialism”), obviously the question of 1848 is raised by Pippin (Pippin describes the crisis coming “after the middle of the 19th Century,” not only with Marx, but also Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, et al.).

So, we have, on the one hand, “Kant (or the Kantian moment), as the hinge on which something quite new in the history of philosophy and social and perhaps aesthetic theory swings open.” And we have the crisis of the 19th Century circa 1848. And Rousseau prefigures both (but, in Pippin’s account, Rousseau is more associated with the “recoil” or “revulsion” from modernity).

Pippin laments the fact that after 1848, “the idea of an underlying historical teleology, such that what was “missing” was what was “not yet actual,” but being realized, began to seem a metaphysical regression.” Obviously, he doesn’t think that Hegel really is subject to such a critique (of metaphysical regression). So, then the question becomes, what is meant by “what is missing” as something “not yet actual, but being realized?”

Here, I’d like to point to my essay on “Capital in History: the need for a Marxian philosophy of history of the Left” (2008), which addresses the issue of the broader historical context for capital as social modernity:

http://platypus1917.org/2008/10/01/capital-in-history-the-need-for-a-marxian-philosophy-of-history-of-the-left/

For, broadly speaking, in trying to address Kant-Hegel-Nietzsche, we are addressing the emergence and crisis of modern, “bourgeois” society, the preconditions of the constitution of capital in the bourgeois revolutions, which Rousseau, Smith, Kant, Hegel and Constant address, and the manifestation of the crisis of capital with the industrial revolution and the global crisis of the 1840s leading to the revolutions of 1848, from which Marx originates, and its aftermath, which Nietzsche addresses.

Understanding capital as a transitional condition of social history, the end of pre-history and the threshold of true human history as freedom, is paramount, here.

This understanding is largely missing in Pippin, of course (though it is indicated, however cryptically, in the last line from Pippin I highlighted, above). But it is indicated in Rousseau, with whom is inaugurated, paradoxically, both a radical conception of freedom (see the James Miller epigraph, above) and a negative “recoil” to the history of civilization.

Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality

The most important thing to emphasize and use to frame Rousseau is the issue of the history of civilization itself, what is motivating Rousseau’s imagination of an originary “state of nature” to which the “noble savage” (e.g., Native Americans) seem closer for Rousseau than their more “civilized” European brethren.

The question is, why is Rousseau motivated, as virtually no one before him, to imagine the “loss” involved in the birth of civilization, or the transition from nomadic hunter-gatherers to settled agricultural civilization? Why does the entire history of civilization come into such radical question for Rousseau?

– Because the emergence of the modern, “bourgeois” society Rousseau is registering in the 18th Century seems to be both the “perfection” of the civilization that preceded it, and to open radically new possibilities. This paradox and ambivalence is what is motivating Rousseau’s investigation of human nature and freedom.

Rousseau, The Social Contract

Rousseau’s Social Contract is a trickier text to tackle, because it appears in many respects to be the very opposite of the anarchic individualism Rousseau seems to champion in the Discourse on Inequality.

But this is only apparent, and is really an artifact of the 1960s New Left, which found the 2nd Discourse (on Inequality) more sympathetic in its “anarchist” negativity than The Social Contract, despite and indeed because the latter text was much more inspirational for the bourgeois radicals of the American and French Revolutions.

The key category for Rousseau’s Social Contract is the “general will.”

While it might appear to be some totalitarian collectivism, modeled after the ancient “democratic” polity of Athens, etc., it was actually Rousseau’s (admittedly obscure) attempt to grasp modern society’s dynamic of individual and collective freedom.

Rousseau’s radical idea was that the freedom of the individual member of society found its actual ground and possibility in the freedom of the social collectivity. The individual owes his freedom to society. (This seems radically opposed to his account of the loss of freedom due to civilization found in the 2nd Discourse.)

What Rousseau is trying to address is the phenomenon of social freedom. Rousseau’s category of the “general will,” which he explicitly emphasizes is not the mere sum of individual wills or their average, but is in fact more than the sum of its parts, is meant to do more than reconcile the individual and society, but rather demonstrate the actual transcending of both the individuals and the empirical social collective they comprise. The “more than the sum of its parts” aspect of society is for Rousseau key to grounding the collective efforts of social individuals as subject to change and progress in freedom. (What Rousseau is saying about society is of course really only about modern society, of which Rousseau himself might not have been so clear.) This is going to be very important to Adam Smith, whose Wealth of Nations can thus be considered in extended dialogue with Rousseau. — And for Hegel!

* * *

Philosophical constitution of modernity

I want to make a controversial claim, which is that capital (as Marx understood it) has a dimension of “philosophical” constitution. In other words, just as capital has a political constitution, through the liberal-democratic “bourgeois” revolutions, that, had they not taken place, would have prevented the constitution of capital, so it goes that without certain developments in the realm of “philosophy” capital would not have found its historical constitution. (This also goes for the “scientific revolution” and the Protestant Reformation, which might be considered important components of the philosophical revolution of the Enlightenment in the 17th-18th Centuries.)

The point is that ideas and intellectual production matter. The alternative is to too try to find, e.g., Rousseau and Kant already expressing the “commodity form” in thought, etc., which, while true to a certain degree, also begs the question of their importance, and tends to involve an impoverished notion of “ideology,” as merely “reflecting” social conditions, etc. But thinking should not be so disenchanted. Thinking is not secondary but (just as) primary (and consequential as physical action may be).

The point would be, rather, to find in canonical thinkers of modernity, e.g., Rousseau, Smith, Kant, Hegel, et al., forms of thought in which thinkers as subjects participate and act (thinking as doing) that are “bound up with” social-historical developments. Retrospectively, we can’t help but find these thinkers to be expressing something “ideological” about the modern society of capital. But, more importantly, we need to be able to recognize that the influence of their thought is part of what made modernity happen. These thinkers were themselves (in their thought, an active) part of the transformation in which they were bound up. Modernity took place in their thinking. — They were revolutionary thinkers.

Forms of thought matter. Failure to think is as important and consequential as thinking in certain ways can be complicit or compromised. Thinking is part of historical transformation. Thinking has the character of both a means of emancipation and an obstacle to this.

* * *

On postmodernism and regression

I would like to say something about the issue of “postmodernism” as raised by Pippin.

Although postmodernism still flies in sclerotic academia, its time is long since past.

What makes Platypus possible is the definite end of postmodernism (as well as the concomitant exhaustion of the 1960s “New Left”).

What that means is that it needs to be emphasized that certain problems have been with us a very long time, now. That is Pippin’s point. Postmodernism was the latest attempt to try to go beyond Kant (or “beyond Hegel and Nietzsche” as a book from the 1990s by a scholar of the Frankfurt School puts it), while clearly falling below Kant (and Rousseau!).

The point is that even if Marx were wrong, Hegel and Nietzsche would be right. And even if Hegel and Nietzsche were wrong, Kant would be right. And even if Kant were wrong, Rousseau would be right.

What this means is that the regression we diagnose has its positive dimension, which is the regained saliency of earlier thought’s ability to critique the present. Not only have we fallen below Marx and so need to revisit him, but we’ve fallen below the radical bourgeois philosophers of revolution, and so need to revisit them. We need to revisit what Marx took for granted in order to be able to grasp his attempt to critique and get beyond them.

So postmodernism is actually more dated than are Rousseau and Kant (let alone Marx!). Just because aged academics (or their younger sycophants) don’t realize this doesn’t change the fact that this is indeed the case. It’s not for nothing that towards the end of his life Foucault imagined that he had been trying to carry on the Kantian project all along (or, that Rosalind Krauss embraced Kant at the end, etc.). Kant is the beginning and the end, so to speak. The attempts to get beyond Kant have been of mixed success: Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche. Hegel is closest to Kant; as Adorno put it, Hegel is Kant “come into his own.” Marx and Nietzsche express the crisis of bourgeois society. Everything since them has either at best reiterated their problematic, or avoided it in a regression to a pre-Kantian perspective. That is Pippin’s point.

Reply to Chicago Political Workshop, Chris Cutrone, and Principia Dialectica

Posted: May 27th, 2009 | Author: Andrew Kliman | Filed under: Organization, Philosophy | Tags: concreteness, plagiarism, Postone |

On plagiarism, Postone, and “the” present

May 27, 2009

Dear Comrades,

1. First, I want to respond to the charge that I plagiarize Moishe Postone, by categorically denying it. When, last July, Sean of Principia Dialectica put forward the allegation of plagiarism (using somewhat different words), I tried to overlook it. I thought that the charge wouldn’t be taken seriously, given that Sean left it wholly unsubstantiated. But now I see that the charge has indeed been taken seriously, repeated, and perhaps implicitly endorsed, by the Chicago Political Workshop, in a posting two days ago.

[Principia Dialectica allegation of plagiarism of Postone by Kliman:]

http://www.principiadialectica.co.uk/blog/?p=176

[Chicago Political Workshop posting:]

http://chicagopoliticalworkshop.webs.com/apps/blog/show/1059848-the-new-anti-economism

That Sean first encounters some idea in Postone, and then encounters a somewhat similar idea when he hears Kliman, tells us something about the process of Sean’s intellectual development. It tells us nothing about the process of development of the ideas. It is not evidence of plagiarism.

But as far as I can see, when Sean alleges that “Postone’s book is having a much more profound effect on” Kliman than he is “prepared to admit,” and that at “Kliman’s talk in London it was evident that Postone’s influence had rubbed off … although … he was loathe to admit it,” the case against me rests wholly on the sequence in which Sean personally encountered the ideas.

For the record: My understanding of capital(ism) and Marx’s critique of it were pretty much fully formed by or before 1988, when I completed my Ph.D. at the age of 33. The key thinker who influenced my views on these matters was Marx himself. (It is strange, indeed, to allege that I appropriate Postone without acknowledgement when his Time, Labor, and Social Domination is not a primary text, but an interpretation of a work to which we both have access, Marx’s Capital!)

My views were also deeply influenced by the work of Raya Dunayevskaya, and there were lesser influences—such as I. I. Rubin and various authors of the 1970s and 1980s who discussed “abstract labor” and “value-form.”

I read Postone’s Time, Labor, and Social Domination in the mid 1990s, but it did not make a strong impression on me, for three reasons: (a) my views were already well formed; (b) much of Postone’s argument was not new to me, since it was quite similar to things developed in the “abstract labor” and “value-form” discussions of 10-20 years before (as Chris Arthur noted in his mid-1990s review of Postone’s book in Capital and Class); and (c) Postone’s view of abstract and concrete labor is so different from Marx’s, and his exegetical interpretation of Marx’s concepts of abstract and concrete labor is so wrong, that I didn’t find his book particularly helpful in order to further develop my own thinking.

But what have I said that sounds so Postone-like to Sean (and perhaps also the Chicago Political Workshop)? I’m guessing it is the following: “In his talk Kliman spelt out in a clear manner that value – as the mediator of human relations – is the subject that needs to be overcome if we are all to move towards creating a fully human society.”

Well, I arrived at this perspective by studying the work of Dunayevskaya (principally from Marxism and Freedom and from her writings of the 1940s which argued that the USSR was a state-capitalist society because the law of value operated there), and then from Marx himself, when I re-studied Capital in light of her interpretation. Here’s something Ted McGlone and I wrote about this issue that was published in 1988—i.e., well before the appearance of Postone’s book:

[R]adical economists’ views on value theory have seemingly crystallized into two main approaches, characterised by de Vroey (1982) as the `technological’ and `social’ paradigms. As students of a third, humanist problematic, we hope in this paper to create a dialogue with proponents of other approaches …. Our own view is neither ‘technicist’ nor market-oriented, but a production-centred value theory of labour . In short, we take capitalist technological relations themselves to be social relations, class relations of dead to living labour in production . `[L]abour is expressed in value’ because `the process of production has mastery over man, instead of the opposite’ (Marx, 1977 : 174-75) . We do not de-emphasise the quantitative aspect of Marx’s value theory, however; this paper, for instance, attaches great importance to the aggregate equalities which obtain in Marx’s transformation procedure.” [pp. 56-57 of Andrew Kliman and Ted McGlone, “The Transformation Non-Problem and the Non-Transformation Problem,” Capital and Class 35, Autumn 1988]

I request that a link to the above response be published wherever the allegation appears that I appropriate Postone without acknowledgement, and that the allegation itself be withdrawn.

2. I am pleased that the Chicago Political Workshop and I agree that “those on the left who treat all attempts to understand the political economy of capitalism as rank economism” should be taken to task. I hope that this can be the beginning of a fruitful dialogue.

3. The Chicago Political Workshop writes, “It is our sense that Kliman’s work thus far is inadequate to his own charge, but that he is right that understanding capitalism is essential to overcoming it.” Okay, I’ll bite: why is my work thus far inadequate to my own charge? (And what exactly does this mean—what charge, exactly?) I’m not trying to pick a fight here; I’m always seeking to improve my work. And maybe there are different views here about the kinds of things that need to be developed, which would then be a potentially fruitful topic for discussion.

4. In response to the Chicago Political Workshop post, Chris Cutrone engaged some of the issues yesterday. It is not clear to me whether Chris is criticizing me, and if so, why. But his posting can be read as one that links me to “traditional Marxism”—“Instead, it becomes a matter of one form of analysis (Postone) as better than another (Kliman, et al., or, as Postone puts it, ‘traditional Marxism’)”—and to an alleged call for “for some new empirical *economic* analysis of present-day capitalism” to the exclusion of other analyses and inquires.

[Chris Cutrone response to the Chicago Political Workshop:]

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/platypus1917/message/2929

Again, I’m not sure of Chris’s intent, so I’ll just discuss this possible reading. The “traditional Marxism” notion is strange and ill-informed. What is “traditional Marxism” about the Marxist-Humanism developed by Raya Dunayevskaya, which the Marxist-Humanist Initiative is now attempting to renew organizationally? She was no traditional Marxist in the eyes of the traditional Marxists who turned her into an un-person (the historical-literary allusion is intentional). What is “traditional Marxism” about the temporal single-system interpretation of Marx’s value theory, the proponents of which, myself included, have been turned into un-persons (the historical-literary allusion is intentional) by the traditional Marxist value theorists?

As for the alleged call for “for some new empirical *economic* analysis of present-day capitalism” to the exclusion of other analyses and inquiries, I have no affinity with it. I am not calling for people to come down on one side or the other of a rigid, binary, either/or choice between “economics” and everything else. I think the notion that we have to pick and choose is ridiculous.

Unfortunately, Chris doesn’t agree that it is ridiculous. For reasons that are unclear to me, he presents the options open to us as a rigid either/or choice: “As if the reproduction of capital is primarily a matter of *economics* (and not politics, culture, or ideology)!” Why do we have to choose? Can’t it be a matter of all four? And why the word “primarily”? This seems to suggest that there must be a hierarchy of determinants that’s the same in all cases, and that “economics” is separate from–if not indeed opposed to–politics, culture, and ideology, rather than all of them being mutually constituting moments of one total process.

The need to choose also seems to be implicit in the following phrases of Chris’s: “THE problem of capitalism” and “THE problem of capital” (my caps). I don’t really understand these phrases, but I’m skeptical of the reduction of a very complex set of processes to one “problem”—THE problem. But note that if there’s just one problem, then it’s more plausible that there’s just one best approach to THE problem, and thus it becomes more plausible that we have to choose THE best approach.

And then Chris says, “We do indeed need an adequate analysis of our contemporary situation. Platypus chooses, quite deliberately, to analyze the present in terms of history, the present as the accumulation of a history of unresolved problems on the Left.” I have no problem with analyzing “the present as the accumulation of a history of unresolved problems on the Left.” That’s also what Dunayevskaya did, again and again, and it’s what my comrades and I in Marxist-Humanist Initiative are trying to do today.
But here again, Chris burdens us with a dubious “the”: “analyze THE present in terms of history … a history of unresolved problems on the Left” (my caps). The only sense I can make of this is that Chris means that Platypus chooses, quite deliberately , to ignore any dimension of “the” present that can’t be sliced and diced so as to fit the Procrustean bed of “a history of unresolved problems on the Left.” For surely, to take just one key example, the current NON-reproduction of capital—the current economic (and therefore political, cultural, and ideological) crisis—is a significant aspect of “the problem of capital” today, an important aspect of “the present.” But there just ain’t no way that one can fruitfully discuss it “as the accumulation of a history of unresolved problems on the Left.” Unless one wants to just ignore this significant dimension of “the present,” I think it would be more useful to seriously study the theories of value and crisis in Capital and the daily news in the financial press.

Chris writes, “Whereas Marx critiqued the bourgeois philosophy and political-economy of the heroic period (of Kant and Hegel and Adam Smith and David Ricardo, et al.) and the ideology of his contemporary socialist “Left” (of Proudhon, et al.) … we in Platypus start with the problematic consciousness on the present-day “Left” and its historical roots, what the present “Left” has abandoned as being symptomatic of its fatal problems.” Again, I have no trouble with subjecting to scrutiny “the problematic consciousness” of the contemporary Left. But Chris’s historical analogy suffers, I think, from an insufficient appreciation of the Kantian sense in which Marx “critiqued” political economy. It was a critique not just of ideology and philosophy and economic thought, but a critique of the conditions needed for them to exist—a critique of the mode of production and corresponding social formation upon which this ideology and philosophy and economic thought arise, and which make them possible.

Now, I’m not saying that the consciousness of the Left needs to be understood by deriving it from the vicissitudes of the mode of production. I’m just saying that critique in the sense of Marx’s phrase “ruthless critique of all that exists” is not a critique of “consciousness” detached from all else.

Chris’s rigid binary emerges the most clearly, however, in the following: “The spirit of Marx today is not to be found in the immanent-ideology critique of the New York Times columns of Paul Krugman et al., let alone an analysis of ‘economic’ phenomena, BUT RATHER in the political and ‘philosophical,’ cultural and psychological critique of the supposed (but actually pseudo-) ‘Left,’ and its critical recognition as the product of a *regression* in theory and practice since the time of Marx and the best Marxists” (my caps). Again, I have nothing against looking at the issue that Chris wants to look at, but what’s this “but rather” about? Why do we need to choose? And is it really in “the spirit of Marx” to ignore the worst economic crisis of capitalism since the 1930s, possibly soon to become the worst slump since the 1930s—or maybe worse? No, of course it isn’t. That’s absurd. One matter “of consciousness” continues to intrigue and trouble me: the effort to declare that there’s one best way of looking and thinking, and that it is the same best way for everything. This effort, as I suggested above, goes hand in hand with a stringent reduction of complex processes and phenomena to single units—“the” problem of capital, “the” present.

Chris Cutrone did not invent this approach. I’ve encountered it again and again among critical-theory-type folks, Western Marxists, whatever. For instance, at a New York book party for my book, Reclaiming Marx’s “Capital”: A refutation of the myth of inconsistency, Bertell Ollman kept counterposing his way of approaching Capital (as a discussion of alienation) to mine (which is evidently to focus narrowly on the myth of inconsistency, or on “economics”—because, if I write a book about the myth of inconsistency, then, well, obviously, that’s how I approach Capital !). I just as insistently kept repeating that there was no need to choose—pointing out the cheese and focaccia that we had as refreshments at the event, I kept reminding the audience, “you can have cheese AND focaccia”—but Ollman would have none of it.

This got me to thinking: Why would anyone want to defend the importance of alienation to Capital by dismissing the issue of Capital’s internal inconsistency and by dismissing a defense of its internal consistency?

And how could anyone think that he was actually defending Marx’s discussion of alienation by projecting the attitude that the logical consistency of what Marx wrote is unimportant?!

So I came up with the following conjecture: The tendency toward rigid, totalizing either/or oppositions flows from a relativist or perspectivist position that has infected Western Marxism. As we all know, there are different ways of looking at and thinking about the world. But relativists and perspectivists go further. They claim that these different ways of looking and thinking are the ultimate determinants of the conclusions at which we arrive. In other words, they claim that, in the end, one’s perspective dominates over any input from logic and facts—or that what counts as facts and logic, too, is determined by one’s perspective.

If that is so, then there are no “external” facts and logic that determine the results of any inquiry. All results depend on the perspective one adopts, and the adoption of a perspective is just a matter of choice—no “external” facts or logic induce one choice rather than another. So what becomes paramount is not to investigate the phenomena and answer the questions, but to struggle over the choice of perspective. Since the perspective determines the results, the hegemony of THE RIGHT way of looking and thinking is all important. And since there are no “external” facts or logic that would allow us to say that this method might be helpful to answering this kind of question, while that method might be appropriate to the investigation of that problem, there’s a strong tendency to TOTALIZE the struggle for the hegemony of one’s perspective. If one accepts that one’s perspective is partial, one is accepting the legitimacy of a different perspective, and since there are no “external” facts and logic that would determine the boundaries of either perspective—this is appropriate for exploring the crisis of the Left, that’s appropriate for explaining the current economic crisis, etc.—there is just an interminable turf battle, ranging over the entire turf. So in order that one’s perspective not be globally defeated by an alien perspective, one must struggle for the global defeat of the alien perspective.

In the real world (and in intellectual endeavors where getting real results, not just panache, matters), no one thinks like this. We don’t wipe our butts with spatulas; we don’t cook with toilet paper; and we don’t ask which one we primarily need in order to grapple with “the” problem of daily living. Thank goodness.

[Chris Cutrone replied:]

1 comment: Chris Cutrone said at 11:15 pm on May 27th, 2009:

I agree that there is no question of plagiarism of Postone by Kliman. I think Principia Dialectica’s argument is tendentious, at best.

Similarly, I must admit to giving a rather one-sided polemical argument in my critique of the Chicago Political Workshop.

I was arguing against an economic-determinist approach. If I were to put it dialectically, I would say, following Marx, that one needs to inquire into the philosophical underpinnings of the economy as much as one might need to interrogate the political-economic conditions of thought.

I agree that a Kantian approach is appropriate, i.e., inquiring into conditions of possibility [inquiring into the conditions of possibility for capitalism].

So I would not want to be mistaken for giving an either/or view of economics vs. philosophy, etc.

On the other hand, I would stand by the formulation of a question of “the” problem of capital. For the totalizing process of capital is not a matter of an apparent static heterogeneity, as if there is no difference at any moment (there is), but rather how the concrete and particular play out over time (and this in a complicated way).

And so I would not chalk up emancipatory potential to such difference, which I see as potentially (and usually) contributing precisely to the reproduction of capital, rather than its overcoming over time.

I don’t think it’s a matter of adopting a (single) perspective, but rather, looking back over history, there was a trajectory from Marx to Luxemburg, Lenin and Trotsky that brought to a head the crisis (for humanity, in a historical sense) of capital, which has been abandoned since then. In other words, I think the contradiction of capital was manifested by historical revolutionary Marxism, rather than the latter just responding to it. I think — and it’s Platypus’s point of departure — that the history of the Left is the history of capital brought to its highest expression. This history offers us a potential perspective, perhaps not the only one, but the best one, or, more accurately, the most necessary one that is available.

In the words of Sebastian Haffner, author of Failure of a Revolution: Germany 1918-19, this history illuminates the present — reveals it in definite relief — like a piercing laser beam.

* * *

P.S. I would encourage everyone interested to review my exchange with the Marxist Humanist Peter Hudis in the Platypus Review on capital in history:

My original article:

http://platypus1917.org/2008/10/01/capital-in-history-the-need-for-a-marxian-philosophy-of-history-of-the-left/

Peter Hudis reply:

http://platypus1917.org/2008/11/01/re-thinking-the-crisis-of-capital-in-light-of-the-crisis-of-the-left/

My rejoinder:

http://platypus1917.org/2008/11/01/remember-the-future-a-rejoinder-to-peter-hudis-on-%E2%80%9Ccapital-in-history%E2%80%9D/

– Chris