Splenetic Libertarian Spirit
Where is the Left? It is an appropriate question, but there is something more fundamental about it. When was it born? How do we find it? What defines it? What battles does it pick? What does its history look like? Who are its great figures? What are its watershed events? What are its failures, limits, and blind spots? Of course there is Socialism, Communism, Stalinism, Trotskyism, Maoism, and Bolshevism, but what is there in common between Jaurès and Lenin? Stalin and Trotsky? Mao and Mitterrand? Saint-Just and François Hollande? Theoretically, they share a desire to eliminate poverty, wretchedness, injustice, and the exploitation of the many by a handful of the wealthy. Practically, we have the French Revolution, 1848, the Commune, 1917, the Popular Front, May 1968, and Paris from 1981 to 1983.1 Yet, also under the auspices of the “Left” were the Terror of 1793, the Gulag, the Kolyma, and Pol Pot. There is its history—a mixture of death drives and life drives.
What is the spirit of the Left? If you look only at its manifestations in the history of France, you would find the legal equality of citizens in 1789, including Jews and non-Jews, men and women, blacks and whites, rich and poor, Parisians and provincials, nobles and commoners, men of letters and artisans; the social fraternity of workers, such as public housing and universal employment in 1848, and the forty-hour workweek and paid leave in 1936; and expanded liberties for the great number of people who once tended the barricades of May 1968. The energy that runs through these three centuries makes up what I call a mystique of the Left. It’s an architectonic force that either you feel in yourself or you don’t, and to which either you adhere or you don’t. It comes less from a rational deduction than from an epidermal self-orientation. Here again, existential psychoanalysis can make some sense of the presence of this wind in oneself or its absence.
Leftist Nietzscheism
I take leftist Nietzscheism as the high point of the splenetic spirit of the twentieth century. The religious establishment has always associated Nietzscheism with right-wing thinking. Many of the uninformed assume that Zarathustra must appear as a blond Aryan with blue eyes, taking at face value the texts that were tampered with by his Nazi sister. Read his body of work and you will never again be mistaken about this slayer of the State, this frenzied anti-anti-Semite, he who shit on the Reich, this enemy of military violence. A Nazi? He’s not even a traveling companion on the path of National Socialism.
From the very start, historiography has ignored the existence of a leftist Nietzscheism. But it is there in The Birth of Tragedy, Human, All Too Human, and in The Dawn, which lay out his surprising connection to leftist thinking. In them we find a radical critique of every Judeo-Christian ascetic ideal, and violent attacks on the Catholic Church—this is good news to advocates of anticlerical freethinking. We find a fundamental critique of work itself—labor as a social construct that inhibits the will to freedom that is consubstantial with man—which should please those who fight for the shortening of the workweek and those who refuse to turn the compulsion to labor into a virtue. We find a critique of the family and the bias toward monogamy, and thus of the logic of engendering, which should please those who want a more encompassing freedom. We find, already, a critique of that which was not yet called “consumerist society,” but which already showed signs of fetishization and object-religion, which should delight militant supporters of Zero Growth.2 We find a critique of the State, along with a praise of the power of individuals, which should please the individualist tradition of libertarian leftism. We find a critique of nationalism, which should win the votes of internationalists. We find a critique of anti-Semitism and a praise of the Jewish spirit, which will please the supporters of Dreyfus,3 then and now. We find a critique of capitalism, liberalism, and the bourgeoisie, to please the leftist voter. We find a criticism of enrichment through capital and the suggestion to nationalize all sectors, such as transport and commerce so as not to produce profits that are too large or too rapid and that would harm public security and the good of the poor—a decisive rallying point.
Gystrow initiated leftist Nietzscheism in Germany, Eugène de Roberty in Russia, and Bracke-Desrousseaux, Daniel Halévy, and Charles Andler in France. Jaurès wasted no time jumping on board. In Geneva in 1902, the socialist tribune drew on Thus Spoke Zarathustra to celebrate the aristocratization of the masses and the identity of the proletariat with the overman. Nothing became of those conferences, except the press that they garnered. This was the first generation—before World War I, when Nietzsche was transformed into the Super-German.
During the abattoir of 1914–1918, a second generation purged the philosophy of all hints of responsibility. The College of Sociology returned to the texts and interrogated Nietzsche to make sense of the times and to fight against European fascism—Roger Caillois, Michel Leiris, and Georges Bataille, who, after World War II, led a superb rehabilitation of Nietzsche, the once hated author of Ecce Homo.4 In 1937 the Marxist and Nietzschean loose cannon Henri Lefebvre wrote an unfortunately ignored synthesis of these two philosophies, titled Nietzsche, which was published two years later. A third generation put Nietzsche back on the scene in Royaumont:5 Deleuze, author of Nietzsche and Philosophy in 1962, and Foucault. The work of those two and others after May 1968 did not exhaust the Nietzschean spirit. There is room for a fourth generation.
Some structures seem necessary for applying this leftist Nietzschean logic in today’s world. I believe these structures should be libertarian. We take little notice of the leftist libertarian tradition in the history of political thought. When it comes up, we appeal to a historiography that has frozen the history of anarchism into a series of negligible clichés. Its chronology, great figures, books, acts, stories, and heroic positions—all of these are like the catechism in the hands of militants: they employ it religiously and immoderately.
Is William Godwin a founding father?6 That remains to be seen…Did Proudhon invent it? His thought goes well beyond it, but it is also inferior to it since it does not do away with a number of things that contradict the libertarian spirit: misogyny, anti-Semitism, warmongering, and deism. Stirner? Really? He whose Ego and Its Own served as Mussolini’s breviary? And who can, with book in hand, claim that this was due to a misinterpretation? Do we look to Bakuninian anti-Marxism? On the surface, and judging from personal quarrels, it seems to dominate the current political climate, but its roots are not so deep. Outside of these, what link is there between Ravachol’s murders and the gentle pedagogical communities of Sébastian Faure?7 These disparate anarchists need a red thread to connect them.
Here again, we should think dialectically when taking lessons from history and readjusting theory in light of practice. Of course, Kropotkin meant something to candle-lit czarist Russia, but not necessarily to digital postmodern Europe.8 These days, militant liberals look to the anarchist corpus like a Christian looks to the Church Fathers: they look at them like a child looks upon their grandfather with veneration and respect. They want the candles of the nineteenth century to illuminate our present era.
I hope to connect my work to what is still missing in the pages of anarchist history published these days—those that integrate May 1968 and after. I’m not necessarily concerned with the acts themselves, but rather with the ideas that produce them, accompany them, and result from them: hence, the need to reconsider Henri Lefebvre’s Critique of Everyday Life, Raoul Vaneigem’s Treatise on the Good-Life: For the Use of Younger Generations, Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire. These writers do not necessarily stake out a libertarian position, but their work helps us analyze contemporary anarchism better than the archives of Jean Grave, Han Ryner, or Lacaze-Duthiers.
Finishing May 1968
What is the aim of such libertarian thinking? It is to finish May 1968. But not like one would with a sick animal. Rather, in the sense of completing it: to complete a piece of work not yet accomplished. Because May’s spirit provides us with an important and necessary moment of negativity: the metaphysical revolution that happened—not the political one—radically changed the relationship between beings. They swept clean the places where the hierarchy located all intersubjectivity: the power of divine right crumbled out of the relationship between parent and child, husband and wife, professor and student, young and old, boss and workman, head of State and citizens. Everyone was put on an equal ontological footing.
The destruction struck many areas without distinction: schools, factories, offices, studios, bedrooms, households, universities, and many others. The negativity indiscriminately conquered those things that structured the ancient world: authority, order, hierarchy, power. Coercion was dispelled, prohibitions abolished, and desire liberated. But for what? To produce what? Without alternative values, the will to dismantle the old world only manifests as negativity, which paradoxically feeds contemporary nihilism.
Political power has killed the Father—ancestors, old republican law, History incarnate in the person of General de Gaulle—but only to offer its power to a creature of a lesser order. Pompidolism united the Right, reassured investors, restored order for the sake of the banks, for progress, and for modernity.9 We left a metaphysical shambles to the ’68ers, and then we built Beaubourg out of concrete on the banks of the river and prepared a place for Giscardism, soon to be reincarnated in Mitterrand, who would just recycle all the old leftists.10 The adventure ended.
Since May 1968, no new value has seen the light of day. It seems like twilight has fallen on morality. We have rejected the morality of our daddies and the civic instructions of our granddaddies. We have mocked many pillars of ethics and criticized old principles like obedience, learning, reputation, and law. We have laughed in the presence of old jewels like the Nation, State, Republic, Right, and France. And one day, while watching television, we discovered that our era has the haggard look of a hangover.
Let’s be done with this miserable state of affairs. Let’s aim for a Gramscian reconquest of the Left—the Left that died from renouncing its ideas and selling itself to the highest bidders who could help it enjoy presidents’ palaces and positions of power within the Republic. There are ideas out there to help us resolve contemporary problems that face the Left in the areas of ethics, politics, and economics.