Not for one moment does the idea strike John Lewis that ‘philosophy is as close to politics as the lips are to the teeth’, that, ‘in the last instance’, what is at stake – indirectly, but also very directly – where philosophical Theses are concerned is always a number of political problems or arguments of real history, and that every philosophical text (including his own) is ‘in the last instance’ also a political intervention in the theoretical conjuncture as well as, through one of its effects, today the main effect, a theoretical intervention in the political conjuncture. Not for a moment does the idea strike him of wondering about the political conjuncture in which my texts (and his own) were written, about what theoretical-political ‘effects’ I had in mind when thinking them out and publishing them, about the framework of theoretical argument and political conflicts in which the enterprise was undertaken, or about the reactions it caused.
I am not expecting John Lewis to have a detailed knowledge of French political and philosophical history, of the struggle of ideas (even unimportant or erroneous ideas) within the French Communist Party since the war, and especially between 1960 and 1965. But all the same! Communists have a history in common: a long, difficult, happy and unhappy history, one which to a large extent in linked to the Third International, itself dominated since the thirties by Stalin’s political ‘line’ and leadership. We have a common past, as Communists, in the Popular Fronts, the Spanish War, the Second War and the anti-fascist resistance, and the Chinese Revolution. But we also have Lysenko’s ‘science’, which was no more than ideology, and a few formulae and slogans which were claimed to be ‘scientific’ but were no more than ‘ideological’, and which concealed very strange practices.1 We all share, as Communists, a past which includes Khrushchev’s ‘criticism of the personality cult’ at the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Party, and the ordeal of the split in the International Communist Movement. We have the Chinese Cultural Revolution in common, whatever we think of it, and May ’68 in France. A few ups and downs, in short, from which one ought to be able to abstract so as to ‘talk philosophy’ between Communists in 1972 …
It is not too serious a matter. Because one day we really shall have to try and call things by their name, and to do that, as Marxists, we have to look for that name; I mean the right concept (even if we have to do it while we advance), so that we can come to understand our own history. Our history is not like a peaceful stream flowing between secure banks, its course marked out in advance, any more than Marx’s own history was, or the tragic and glorious history of the first two decades of the century. Even if we do not go back so far, even if we only speak of the recent past – whose memory, whose shadow even, still reaches over us today – no one can deny that for thirty years we lived through a period of ordeals, heroism and dramas under the domination of a political line and political practices which, for lack of a concept, we have to call by a proper name: that of Stalin. Do we quite simply leave all this behind as a consequence of Stalin’s death and on the strength (and through the effects) of a little phrase: ‘the personality cult,’ pronounced at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union as the ‘last word’ (in every possible sense) in the affair? I wrote, during the 1960s, in a philosophical text which John Lewis has right in front of him, that the concept of the ‘personality cult’ was a concept which ‘cannot be found in Marxist theory’, that it had no value in terms of knowledge, that it explained nothing and left us in the dark. This was quite clear: it still is.
‘A concept which cannot be found in Marxist theory.’ This must be recognized. In the form in which it was put forward and used, both theoretically and politically, the concept of the ‘personality cult’ was not simply the name of something: it did not satisfy itself with simply pointing out the facts (the ‘abuses’, the ‘violations of Soviet legality’). It claimed at the same time – this was openly stated – theoretical pretensions: it was supposed to give an account of the ‘essence’ of the facts which it revealed. And this is how it was used politically.
Now this pseudo-concept, the circumstances of whose solemn and dramatic pronouncements are well known, did indeed expose certain practices: ‘abuses’, ‘errors’, and in certain cases ‘crimes’. But it explained nothing of their conditions, of their causes, in short of their internal determination, and therefore of their forms.2 Yet since it claimed to explain what in fact it did not explain, this pseudo-concept could only mislead those whom it was supposed to instruct. Must we be even more explicit? To reduce the grave events of thirty years of Soviet and Communist history to this pseudo-explanation by the ‘cult’ was not and could not have been a simple mistake, an oversight of an intellectual hostile to the practice of divine worship: it was, as we all know, a political act of responsible leaders, a certain one-sided way of putting forward the problems, not of what is vulgarly called ‘Stalinism’, but of what must, I think, be called (unless one objects to thinking about it) by the name of a concept: provisionally, the ‘Stalinian’ deviation.3 And, at the same time, it was a certain way of not posing the problems. More precisely, it was (and still is) a way of seeking the causes of grave events and of their forms in certain defects of the functioning of the legal superstructure (‘violations of socialist legality’), without (even in the form of a hypothesis!) looking into the whole of the State Apparatuses constituting the Superstructure (the Repressive Apparatus, the Ideological Apparatuses, including the Party), and above all without getting to the root of the problem (one which was so serious and lasted so long): the contradictions of the construction of socialism and of its line, that is, without dealing with the existing forms of production relations, class relations and the class struggle, the last of which is then said – in a formula which has not yet been withdrawn – to have been ‘transcended’ in the USSR. Yet this is where the internal causes of the facts of the ‘cult’ must be sought – at the risk of finding other facts.
Of course, it is not true that everything is always connected with everything else – this is not a Marxist thesis – and one does not need to invoke the whole infrastructure and superstructure to sort out a simple legal detail, if it is only a detail, and only legal. But is the ‘Stalin’ deviation a detail? A simple legal detail?! Of course, one cannot, at any and every moment, in a moment, remake what many years have unmade – this is not a Marxist thesis. There are of course historical constructions which are so interconnected with neighbouring buildings, which are so much propped up by these latter that one cannot simply and brutally chop down their surroundings to give them some air: one must sometimes proceed ‘cautiously’. But the precautions of the Twentieth Congress…!
The ‘Stalinian’ deviation, in the form revealed to us by the terms of the official declarations, pointed out certain facts, without – for lack of Marxist explanations – avoiding the trap of repeating much earlier denunciations: those of the most anti-Communist bourgeois ideology, and those of the ‘anti-Stalinist’ theory of Trotskyism. As it was revealed to us, limited in its scope to ‘violations of socialist legality’ alone – while the Communists of the USSR and of the world had an infinitely more ‘extensive’ experience of it – this deviation could, finally, only provoke two possible reactions (leaving aside its ‘classical’ exploitation by anti-Communist and anti-Soviet elements). Either a left-wing critique, which accepts the term ‘deviation’, even if in a very contradictory sense, and which, in order, to account for it, undertakes serious research into its basic historical causes: that is, if John Lewis will excuse me, not into Man (or Personality), but into the Superstructure, relations of production, and therefore the state of class relations and the class struggle in the USSR. Such a critique may then, but only then, be justified in talking not only about a violation of the law but also about the reasons for this violation. Or a right-wing critique, which attacks only certain aspects of the legal superstructure, and of course can then invoke Man and his Rights, and oppose Man to the violation of his Rights (or simple ‘workers’ councils’ to the ‘bureaucracy’).
The fact is: one practically never hears anything but the second critique. And the official formulation of the critique of the ‘cult’, of the ‘violations of socialist legality’, far from keeping the most violent bourgeois anti-Communism and Trotskyist anti-Stalinism at arm’s length, actually provides them with a historical argument they could hardly have hoped for: it gives them a justification, a second wind, a second life. Which explains, let it be said in passing, a good number of apparently paradoxical phenomena: for example, the resurgence fifty years after the October Revolution and twenty years after the Chinese Revolution of Organizations which have lasted forty years without winning a single historical victory (because, unlike some of the present-day ‘ultra-left’, they are organizations, and they also have a theory): the Trotskyist Organizations. And that is not to speak of the ‘effectiveness’ of bourgeois anti-Sovietism, thirty years after Stalingrad!
However that may be, we did not need to wait long before seeing the official critique of the ‘Stalinian’ deviation, that of the ‘personality cult’, produce – in the special circumstances – its inevitable ideological effects. After the Twentieth Congress an openly rightist wave carried off (to speak only of them) many Marxist and Communist ‘intellectuals’, not only in the capitalist countries, but also in the socialist countries. It is not of course a question of putting the intellectuals of the socialist countries and Western Marxists into the same bag – and especially not of confusing the mass political protest of our comrades in Prague, known as ‘socialism with a human face’, with Garaudy’s ‘integral humanism’, etc. In Prague they did not have the same choice of words (the words did not have the same sense) nor the same choice of roads. But here…! Here we see Communists following the Social-Democrats and even religious thinkers (who used to have an almost guaranteed monopoly in these things) in the practice of exploiting the works of Marx’s youth in order to draw out of them an ideology of Man, Liberty, Alienation, Transcendence, etc. – without asking whether the system of these notions with idealist or materialist, whether this ideology was petty-bourgeois or proletarian. ‘Orthodoxy’, as John Lewis says, was almost submerged: not Stalin’s ‘thought’, which continued and continues to hold itself comfortably above the uproar, in its bases, its ‘line’ and certain of its practices – but quite simply the theory of Marx and Lenin.
It was in these conditions that I came to intervene, let us say ‘accidentally’, in the form of a critical review I wrote of a number of Soviet and East German articles which had been translated into French. This review, ‘On the Young Marx’, appeared in the magazine La Pensée in 1960.* I was trying to the best of my ability and with the makeshift tools at my disposal, by criticizing a few received ideas and asking a few questions, to combat the contagion which was ‘menacing’ us. That is how it was. At the beginning there were not very many of us, and John Lewis is right: ‘we’ were crying ‘in the wilderness’. But one must be very wary of this kind of ‘wilderness’; or rather, know how not to be frightened by it. In reality ‘we’ have never been alone. Communists are never alone.
So, against the rightist-idealist interpretations of Marxist theory as a ‘philosophy of man’, of Marxism as a theoretical humanism; against the tendentious confusion – whether positivist or subjectivist – of science and Marxist ‘philosophy; against the evolutionist reduction of the materialist dialectic to the ‘Hegelian’ dialectic; and in general against bourgeois and petty-bourgeois positions, I have tried to defend, we have tried to defend, come what may, at the cost of rash actions and errors, a few vital ideas which can be summed up in a single idea: that which is special and specific to Marx, which is revolutionary in both the theoretical and political senses, and this in the face of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois ideology, with which he had to break in order to become a Communist and found the science of history, the same ideology with which even today we must still and always will have to break, to become, remain or become again Marxists.
The forms may have changed: but the root of the question has remained, for 150 years or so, substantially the same. This bourgeois ideology, which is the dominant ideology, and which weighs so heavily on the labour movement and threatens its most vital functions – unless the movement fights resolutely back on the basis of its own positions, quite exterior to bourgeois ideology because proletarian – this bourgeois ideology is actually, in its deepest essence, constituted by the ideological pair economism/humanism. Behind the abstract categories of the philosophy which provides it with titles and airs, it was this pair of notions which I was aiming at when I made a joint attack, both on theoretical humanism (I repeat: theoretical; not on a word, or a few phrases, or even an inspired idea of the future, but on a philosophical language in which ‘man’ is a category with a theoretical function) and, passing by the vulgar forms of Hegelianism or evolutionism which join with it, on economism.
For no one (at least, no revolutionary Marxist) can fail to see that when, in the midst of the class struggle, the litanies of humanism hold the theoretical and ideological stage, it is economism which is quietly winning. Even under feudalism, when humanist ideology was revolutionary, it was still profoundly bourgeois. In a bourgeois class society it always has played and still does play the role of hiding the class-determined economic and economistic practices governed by the relations of production, exploitation and exchange, and by bourgeois law. In a bourgeois class society there is always the risk that humanist ideology – when it is not just a slip of the pen or an image of political rhetoric, when it is of a lasting and organic character – serves as a cover for an economistic deviation in the workers’ organizations, which are not immune to the contagion of the dominant ideology. This deviation is in principled contradiction to proletarian class positions. The whole history of the Rights of Man proves it: behind Man, it is Bentham who comes out the victor.4 Much of the history of the Second International, whose dominant tendency Lenin denounced, also goes to prove it: behind Bernstein’s neo-Kantian idealism, it is the economist current which comes out on top. Who can seriously claim that the whole of this long history, with all its conflicts and dangers, is behind us, and that it will never again menace us, that we shall never again be at risk?
I am talking about the ideological pair economism/humanism. It is a pair in which the two terms are complementary. It is not an accidental link, but an organic and consubstantial one. It is born spontaneously, that is to say necessarily, of the bourgeois practices of production and exploitation, and at the same time of the legal practices of bourgeois law and its ideology, which provide a sanction for the capitalist relations of production and exploitation and their reproduction.
And it is quite true that bourgeois ideology is fundamentally economist, that the capitalist sees everything from the point of view of commodity relations and from the point of view of the material conditions (means of production are also commodities) which allow him to exploit that very special ‘commodity’, the labour power of the workers. Thus, he sees things from the point of view of the techniques of the extortion of surplus-value (which are linked together with capitalist organization and division of labour), from the point of view of the technology of exploitation, of economic ‘performance’ and development: from the point of view of capitalist accumulation. And what does the Bourgeois Economist do? Marx showed that, even when he raised himself to the point of thinking in terms of capitalism, he did no more than theorize the economistic viewpoint of the capitalist. Marx criticized the very project of ‘Political Economy’, as such, because it was economistic.
But at the same time it is true that the reverse side of the same coin, the necessary ‘cover’, the alibi, the ‘point of honour’ of this economism is humanism or bourgeois liberalism. This is because ideas find their foundations in the categories of Bourgeois Law and the legal ideology materially indispensable to the functioning of Bourgeois Law: liberty of the Person, that is, in principle, his right freely to dispose of himself, his right to his property, his free will and his body (the proletarian: a Person ‘free’ to sell himself!), and his other goods (private property: real property – which abolishes others – that of the means of production).
This is the breeding ground of economism/humanism: the capitalist mode of production and exploitation. And this is the precise link by which, the precise place in which these two ideologies join together as a pair: Bourgeois Law, which at the same time both provides a real support for capitalist relations of production, and lends its categories to liberal and humanist ideology, including bourgeois philosophy.
The question then arises: when this bourgeois ideological pair penetrates into Marxism, ‘when it pursues the struggle, not on its own terrain but on the general terrain of Marxism, as revisionism’ (Lenin), what does it become? It remains what it was before: a bourgeois point of view, but this time ‘functioning’ within Marxism. As astonishing as this may seem, the whole history of the Labour Movement and Lenin’s theses are witness to it:5 Marxism itself can, in certain circumstances, be considered and treated as, even practiced as a bourgeois point of view. Not only by ‘armchair Marxists’, who reduce it to academic bourgeois sociology, and who are never anything but ‘functionaries of the dominant ideology’ – but also by sections of the Labour Movement, and their leaders.
This is something which depends on the relations of power in the class struggle, and, at the same time, on class position in the class struggle, in the ‘line’, the organization and the functioning of the class struggle fought by the Labour Movement. That is to say that it is a historical form in which the fusion between the Labour Movement and Marxist theory – which alone can assure the objectively ‘revolutionary’ character of the ‘movement’ (Lenin) – is held up or reversed, in the face of what must perhaps, for purposes of understanding, also be called a ‘fusion’: but quite another kind of ‘fusion’, that between the Labour Movement and bourgeois ideology.
The economism/humanism pair, when it is introduced into Marxism, does not really change in form, even if it is forced to make some changes (only some) in its vocabulary. Humanism remains humanism: it takes on a Social-Democratic accent, one which raises not the question of the class struggle and its abolition, through the emancipation of the working class, but that of the defence of Human Rights, of liberty and justice, even of the liberation and free development of the ‘personality’ or the ‘integral personality’. Economism remains economism: for example, in the exaltation of the development of the Productive Forces, of their ‘socialization’ (what kind of socialization?), of the ‘scientific and technical revolution’, of ‘productivity’, etc.
Can we make a comparison? Yes, we can. And we discover the factor which permits us to identify the ideological pair economism/humanism and its practices as bourgeois: it is the elimination of something which never figures in economism or humanism, the elimination of the relations of production and of the class struggle.
The fact that the bourgeoisie, in its own ideology, keeps silent about the relations of production and the class struggle, in order to exalt not only ‘expansion’ and ‘productivity’ but also Man and his liberty – that is its own affair, and it is quite in order, in bourgeois order: because it needs this silence, which allows economism/humanism, expressing the bourgeois point of view, to work at the concealment of the relations of production while helping to guarantee and reproduce them. But when the Workers’ Parties, before the revolution, or even after, themselves keep silent (or semi-silent) about the relations of production, the class struggle, and their concrete forms,6 while exalting both the Productive Forces and Man – this is quite a different matter! Because unless it is only a question of words or of a few speeches, if it is really a question of a consistent political line and practice, then you can bet – as Lenin did, when he spoke about the pre-1914 Second International – that this bourgeois point of view is a contaminating agent which can threaten or even overcome the proletarian point of view within Marxism itself.
And since we have been talking about the Second International, let us say a brief word about the Third, about the last ten years of its existence. After all, why be silent about a question which is burning to be expressed? Why meet the official silence with nothing but another silence, and thus give it sanction? For an official silence does still reign – beneath a facade of feigned or embarrassed ‘explanations’ – over this period, one whose heroism, whose greatness, whose dramas we have lived through or known. Why should we not try to understand, whatever the risks of what we say, not only the merits of the International but also the inevitable contradictions of its positions and its line (and how could it have avoided them, especially given the tragic times with which it had to deal)? I am rather afraid that we may one day have to recognize the existence within it of a certain tendency which, held in bounds by Lenin’s efforts, could not finally be mastered, and ended up by quietly taking over the leading role. I am rather afraid that a long time might be allowed to go by – for apparently pragmatic reasons, which doubtless have deeper roots – before a ‘hypothesis’ such as that which I want to put forward today could hope to be stated in black and white, and put to the test of a genuine Marxist analysis. I shall take the personal risk of advancing this hypothesis now, in the form of necessarily schematic propositions:
1. The International Communist Movement has been affected since the 1930s, to different degrees and in very different ways in different countries and organizations, by the effects of a single deviation, which can provisionally be called the ‘Stalinian deviation’.
2. Keeping things well in proportion, that is to say, respecting essential distinctions, but nevertheless going beyond the most obvious phenomena – which are, in spite of their extremely serious character, historically secondary: I mean those which are generally grouped together in Communist Parties under the heading ‘personality cult’ and ‘dogmatism’ – the Stalinian deviation can be considered as a form (a special form, converted by the state of the world class struggle, the existence of a single socialist State, and the State power held by the Bolshevik Party) of the posthumous revenge of the Second International: as a revival of its main tendency.
3. This main tendency was, as we know, basically an economistic one.
This is only a hypothesis, and I am simply laying down its reference points. It naturally poses very great problems. The most obvious of these problems can be stated in the following way: how could a basically economistic tendency have combined with the superstructural effects we know so well, effects which it produced as the transformation of its own forms? What were the material forms of existence of this tendency, which enabled it to produce these effects in the existing conjuncture? How did this tendency, centred from a certain time onwards on the USSR, spread through the whole International Communist Movement, and what special – and sometimes differing – forms did it take?
If some readers are disconcerted by the comparison between the economism of the Second International and that of the ‘Stalinian deviation’, I will first of all reply: you must look and see what is the first principle of analysis recommended and used by Lenin at the beginning of Chapter 7 of The Collapse of the Second International to help understand a deviation in the history of the Labour Movement. The first thing you have to do is to see if this deviation is not ‘linked with some former current of socialism’. Not because of some vulgar ‘historicism’, but because there exists a continuity, in the history of the Labour Movement, of its difficulties, its problems, its contradictions, of correct solutions and therefore also of its deviations, because of the continuity of a single class struggle against the bourgeoisie, and of a single class struggle (economic, political and ideological-theoretical) of the bourgeoisie against the Labour Movement. The possibility of cases of ‘posthumous revenge’, of ‘revivals’, is based on this continuity.
But I would like to add something else. There are of course serious political questions at stake in the summary and schematic hypotheses which I am proposing – but, above all, there exists the possibility of serious ambiguities which must at all costs be guarded against. Look how Lenin – who was uncompromising in his denunciation of the idealist-economist tendency of the Second International – treated this very organization: he never reduced the Second International to its deviation. He recognized the different periods in its history, he distinguished the main question from the secondary one – and, for example, he always gave the International credit for having developed the organizations of the proletarian class struggle, the trade unions and workers’ parties; nor did he ever refuse to cite Kautsky, or to defend Plekhanov’s philosophical work. In the same way, and for infinitely more obvious and powerful reasons, Stalin cannot be reduced to the deviation which we have linked to his name; even less can this be done with the Third International which he came in the thirties to dominate. He had other historical merits. He understood that it was necessary to abandon the miraculous idea of an imminent ‘world revolution’ and to undertake instead the ‘construction of socialism’ in one country. And he drew the consequences: it must be defended at any cost as the foundation and last line of defence of socialism throughout the world, it must be made into an impregnable fortress capable of withstanding the imperialist siege; and, to that end, it must be provided with a heavy industry. It was this very industry that turned out the Stalingrad tanks which served the heroic struggle of the Soviet people in their fight to the death to liberate the world from Nazism. Our history also passed in that direction. And in spite of the deformations, caricatures and tragedies for which this period is responsible, it must be recalled that millions of Communists also learned, even if Stalin ‘taught’ them in dogmatic form, that there existed Principles of Leninism.
Thus, if it seems possible, keeping everything in proportion, to talk about the posthumous revenge of the Second International, it must be added that it is a revenge which took place in other times, in other circumstances, and of course in other forms, which cannot be the subject of a literal comparison. But in spite of these considerable differences one can talk about the revenge, or the revival, or the resurgence of a tendency which is basically the same: of an economistic conception and ‘line’, even when these were hidden by declarations which were, in their own way, cruelly ‘humanist’ (the slogan ‘Man, the most precious capital’, the measures and dispositions, which remained a dead letter, of the Soviet Constitution of 1936).
If this is true, if the ‘Stalinian’ deviation cannot be reduced to ‘violations of Soviet legality’ alone; if it is related to more profound causes in history and in the conception of the class struggle and of class position; and even supposing that the Soviet people are now protected from all violations of legality – it does not follow that either they or we have completely overcome the ‘Stalinian’ deviation (neither the causes, nor the mechanisms, nor the effects of which have been the object of a ‘concrete analysis’ in the Leninist sense, that is to say, of a scientific Marxist analysis) simply on account of the denunciation of the ‘personality cult’, or by a patient work of rectification unenlightened by any analysis. In these conditions, with all the information, past and present, available to us (including the official silence, which refuses to pronounce against these facts), we can bet that the Stalinian ‘line’, purged of ‘violations of legality’ and therefore ‘liberalized’ – with economism and humaninism working together – has, for better or worse, survived Stalin and – it should not be astonishing! – the Twentieth Congress. One is even justified in supposing that, behind the talk about the different varieties of ‘humanism’, whether restrained or not, this ‘line’ continues to pursue an honourable career, in a peculiar kind of silence, a sometimes talkative and sometimes mute silence, which is now and again broken by the noise of an explosion or a split.
So that I do not have to leave anything out of consideration, I will advance one more risky hypothesis which will certainly ‘say something’ to John Lewis, specialist of Chinese politics. If we look back over our whole history of the last forty years or more, it seems to me that, in reckoning up the account (which is not an easy thing to do), the only historically existing (left) ‘critique’ of the fundamentals of the ‘Stalinian deviation’ to be found – and which, moreover, is contemporary with this very deviation, and thus for the most part precedes the Twentieth Congress – is a concrete critique, one which exists in the facts, in the struggle, in the line, in the practices, their principles and their forms, of the Chinese Revolution. A silent critique, which speaks through its actions, the result of the political and ideological struggles of the Revolution, from the Long March to the Cultural Revolution and its results. A critique from afar. A critique ‘from behind the scenes’. To be looked at more closely, to be interpreted. A contradictory critique, moreover – if only because of the disproportion between acts and texts. Whatever you like: but a critique from which one can learn, which can help us to test our hypotheses, that is, help us to see our own history more clearly. But here too, of course, we have to speak in terms of a tendency and of specific forms – without letting the forms mask the tendency and its contradictions.
If I have been able – with the means at my disposal, and from afar – even very feebly to echo these historic struggles and to indicate, behind their ideological effects, the existence of some real problems: this, for a Communist philosopher, is no more than his duty.
These, to go no further, are some of the very concrete ‘questions’ – where politics stares you in the face – which haunt the margins of the simple philosophical work undertaken by me, for better or worse, more than ten years ago.
As far as John Lewis is concerned, it seems that it never occurred to him to ask such questions! From our point of view I hope that it is so. Because the matter would be that much more serious if, having understood what was at stake, he had kept silent about it: so as not to get his fingers burned.
June 1972