I kept working the night shift at the news desk, and I had also begun to study economics. In my spare time, I worked with the Maoist magazine. My life with Cecilia went on a routine, but we had now been living together for over four years. I was 28 and she was 27. One would think that we were thinking about having children and really starting a family, but we were still living for the cause. Cecilia had taken a job at an accounting firm and got up early in the morning, while I often came home late at night, and was at work when she got home. We didn't have much of a shared life, and living in a drab concrete suburb didn't help.
It was at this point, almost ten years after I first started keeping a diary, that I resumed my writing, tentatively and sporadically at first, but gradually more intensely. I wrote by hand and carried the diary with me to work, to libraries, and cafés. Over time, I had a box full of diaries.
*
The 1980s were in many ways the opposite of the 1960s. It was the era of Reagan and Thatcher, a time of privatization and welfare cutbacks while the rich got richer and saw their taxes reduced. Even France's socialist president François Mitterrand launched a program to privatize parts of the state-owned sector. While the decade that followed 1968 had stressed collective action, the 1980s prioritized private solutions.
During a lecture in the spring of 1981, a teacher handed out a thick booklet that he said came straight from the White House. It described Reagan's "supply-side economics."
The idea was that radical tax cuts should stimulate investment, make people work more and harder, which would make the economy grow, and raise incomes, resulting in higher tax revenues. The teacher was as enthusiastic as I was skeptical, especially since I had just read Lester C. Thurow's critique of Reagan's new budget in the New York Review of Books (How to Wreck the Economy, May 14, 1981). When it was time for discussion, I said that Reagan's economic policy was in fact a kind of Keynesianism, but that the government was pumping huge sums into the military instead of stimulating civilian consumption. The teacher looked annoyed and when he saw that I was quoting from an article, asked who I was quoting. He probably expected me to come up with some lefty, but I told him it was Lester Thurow from MIT.
"Lester Thurow?" he said, looking surprised.
January 27, 1982
I finished André Glucksmann's The Cook and the Cannibal. His arrogance is annoying, but it is hard to get past his criticism which goes much further than we are used to. I'm inclined to think that he's basically right, but I'm pretty much alone in that.
It is hardly a coincidence that Glucksmann and the other French “new philosophers” are irritating to many of us leftists. He too had been a Marxist and Maoist but changed his mind under the influence of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and the French philosopher Michel Foucault. He raises difficult questions. Kalle Ståhl wrote in his review that Glucksmann’s criticism doesn’t damage the Marxist theory since he misinterprets it. However, to me it seems that he and the others who recently would find answers to almost every conceivable question in the collected works of Marx and Engels, now feel that they are free to pick-and-chose from the Marxist pantry. They have become pragmatists.
January 29
What makes Glucksmann's book so difficult to digest is of course that he blames the Gulag Archipelago on the ideology behind the oppression, i.e., Marxism.
He asks how it came to be that the terror described by Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago was carried out by people who claimed to be Marxists, and whom Marxists around the world recognized as such?
Were they evil people that had disguised their evil in Marxist garb? That’s a plausible explanation in individual cases, but hardly a general explanation, and certainly not a materialistic one.
Could they have been good people that were ignorant or stupid? But nothing points in either direction.
The third possible explanation Glucksmann borrowed from Solzhenitsyn:
"No, the collective crimes of the 20th century would never have reached the magnitude we ascribe to them on the physical plane if the executioners had not been armed with an ideology." (Kokerskan och kannibalen, 1979, p 73)
Marxism makes us blind to human suffering, according to Glucksmann. It rationalizes away all sacrifices as necessary, a mode of reasoning that he links to a tradition of "master thinking," of "master thinkers" that goes back to Plato. At the heart of this is "the idea of a political science, based on reason, organized by competence and producing the happiness of ordinary citizens without consulting them." (p 84)
The Marxists think they know what the people needs since Marxism is a science about history’s development. It then becomes a secondary issue whether people understand and appreciate this development. It is in their objective interest, perhaps not the farmers (for example in Stalin’s Soviet Union), but in the interest of the working class, and as all good Marxist know, its emancipation holds the key to the emancipation of mankind.
"These are the highlights of the Western rulers’ culture: Platonism (and its slaves), the enlightened reason of the classical era (and its prisoners), Marxism (and its camps). There the power of science is tied to the science of power, and the art of ruling is developed." (p 177)
Against this, Ståhl says that Marxism is not at all a philosophy of history, but an "empirical theory" that "leaves lots of crucial questions unresolved." The fault lies not with Marxism but with followers who take it as a dogma which has prevented its further development. And since Marxism has been resting like the Sleeping Beauty, waiting for her prince, it is not to be blamed!
This is of course not an argument that Glucksmann is prepared to swallow. Anyone who has taken an introductory course in Marxism has heard over and over again that the theory is a "guide to action," and in that case we do need more than an "empirical science." The Capital was hardly an objective study of poor living conditions since the British factory inspectors Marx frequently quoted had already done that.
No, the revolutionary aspect of The Capital was Marx's analysis of the capitalist economic system as being historical, i.e., a system with both a beginning and an end. Unlike earlier socialists, Marx did not seek to build a utopia on an idealistic foundation but believed that a new and better society would be born out of the contradictions that capitalism itself produced. Socialism could now be based on a scientific analysis of the laws of development of history, and capitalism in particular. Hence the term 'scientific socialism.'
If Marx had merely explained the world in The Capital without pointing out that this system was not necessary once it had produced the forces that would give rise to the next system (socialism) — then his work would not have been remotely revolutionary.
Marxism is therefore much more than an "empirical theory," and we must recognize this when we take up the gauntlet. Glucksmann's central thesis is that the concentration camps in both Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union were unnecessary, and that resistance to them was always possible. He gives the example of Himmler, who in 1943 tried to curb the use of gas chambers at Auschwitz fearing the reaction if the extermination of Jews became known. In the Soviet Union, the revelation of forced forest labor in 1930 threatened to put an end to Soviet’s timber exports.
Glucksmann asks: Why was there no resistance to the Soviet Gulag, especially by those who claimed to fight for the emancipation of humanity, the Marxists? (There was of course resistance in the camps!) Marxism bears responsibility for this as it doesn’t provide any barrier to the camps, since both the "construction and consolidation of the Soviet Union and The Gulag Archipelago" could be declared Marxist by their designers.
In short, why did Stalin and Brezhnev not spit out their Marxism, but ruminate on it? (In 1950, Le Temps Modernes wrote about the "10 million slaves" in the Soviet Union.)
Glucksmann comments:
"Marxism depends not only on convictions, but on the will to not see." (p 41)
"There is no Russell tribunal for the Russian camps. The cry of horror gets stuck in the throat. And Marxism has nothing to do with this silence? If it is deaf and dumb here, what role does it play over there?" (p 71)
Even if Marxism doesn’t have to make you blind, this blindness, this refusal to see, is a historical fact. Other comrades say that the problem was in fact that the new society was so new that they had not yet learned from experience that a socialist society can create a new bourgeoisie. Only Mao realized this, which is why he started the Cultural Revolution. Stalin's terror and the Gulag Archipelago were necessary since that was before Mao had perfected "Marxism-Leninism"! That’s why we can’t condemn Stalin for his crimes, only criticize theoretical deficiencies! Glucksmann's attribution of this blindness to an elitist tradition of contempt for the people is, I believe, entirely correct. His criticism is accurate, regardless of whether his own alternative is right or wrong.
Glucksmann is also attacked for being hostile to knowledge and science, but it is the state and political elites he rejects. The problem with Marxism is not that it is too scientific, but that it is an expression of raison d'etat, state reason.
Ståhl claims that "the Enlightenment was the ideological spearhead of the popular opposition of the time." However, the representatives of the Enlightenment were not people in the usual sense, but what was called the Third Estate. They were on the side of “the people" in a Mao-style principal contradiction between “the people" and “the enemies of the people," but that doesn’t mean that they were of the people. Hartvig Frisch writes about the Enlightenment in his book Europe’s Cultural History, and his is hardly a controversial position:
"Just as Plato claimed that the ideal state was one in which the philosophers ruled, so most of the philosophers of the Enlightenment saw autocracy as the form of government most likely to lead to the happiness of the people, provided the monarch was advised by enlightened and knowledgeable men." (Europas kulturhistoria, Part IV, p. 48)
Voltaire wrote in 1768 that "the people will always be stupid and barbaric." The motto of the enlightened autocracy was also “All for the people, nothing through the people!”
The criticism of the Enlightenment was therefore not about science, but about the belief that an elite could use the newfound science to govern everything for the good of the people without consulting the people. And since the enlightened despot considered his rule to be based on science, rebellion against the state was seen as rebellion against reason — i.e., a folly. The 17th century turned out to be the century of incarceration.
"The Hopital général", writes Glucksmann, "is the pinnacle of the age of reason, the Enlightenment. They are the forerunners of the concentration camps." (p 111)
Similarly, the practitioners of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" have usually imagined that their decisions are scientific and correct and have regarded criticism as a rebellion against science. From there, it is a short step to locking up opponents in asylums.
In the young Soviet Union, Marx's Capital was used to justify "a primitive socialist accumulation," i.e., plundering the peasants to accumulate capital for industrialization.
That this development was contrary to the interests and opinions of 90 percent of the population — the peasants — was rationalized away. Which was of course not Karl Marx's fault, but neither does Glucksmann say so.
"Did he perhaps suspect what would be done in his name? No, no more than the first political thinker of the young European bourgeoisie, its giant Machiavelli, suspected what some of his readers and compatriots would do: these Italians became secretaries of an absolutist state that this republican and patriot had fought all his life." (p 53)
Marx's famous statement — "All I know is that I am not a Marxist" — is perhaps his most important statement, but also the least applied. That is why Marxism in its first century has been a movement full of gods, demigods, and priests, of revivals and inquisitions.
Unlike Glucksmann, I do not see institutionalized power as an eternal evil hydra. At the same time, Glucksmann is right (and it is a materialistic explanation he gives) that it is the state that has taken Marxism into its service rather than the other way around.
"How to explain to a theorist that it is not just a simple false thesis (for Bettelheim economism) that blocks the 'practical activity of the masses' but instead the police?" (p 60)
Marxist theory has facilitated this by replacing the question of the control of the state from below with the question of the abolition of the state. It is understandable that the question of governance could be neglected when it was believed that the dictatorship of the proletariat was a relatively short-lived revolutionary transition period, and that the state would soon begin to die out. But even after this transition period became an epoch, democratic rights and freedoms, i.e., the limitation of state power, have been seen as tactical issues.
The communist parties have monopolized power in the belief that only they possess the truth and that only they represent the interests of the masses. The theory of the abolition of the state has become what legitimizes the growth and arbitrary power of the state.
Glucksmann is wrong to reject any attempt to use the state. Nor does his reasoning show that this must be the case. On the contrary, he shows that anyone who sets out to rule through the state and believes that they possess an absolute truth about development also becomes a tyrant. Indeed, even a democratic government can become tyrannical if it starts believing in absolute truths (majorities can tyrannize minorities!) It is therefore not the demand for more science that leads to political democracy, but the recognition of the limitations of science that makes democracy necessary.
Firstly, science is constantly evolving, and we need to be aware that today's scientific theories may be completely or partially wrong. Heads fallen in the name of science are hard to put back, even if science later changes its mind.
Secondly, science can describe and explain the world, but it cannot solve political and moral problems. It can establish a certain relationship between environmental degradation and economic growth, between the income of different classes and strata, etc., but it cannot say what is fair. There are objective contradictions between people and groups in every society, but there is no objective solution to these contradictions. However, there are solutions that objectively benefit certain groups.
If we acknowledge that these contradictions exist and will exist (perhaps forever,) we realize that we need ways to deal with them. Perhaps the state will eventually wither away as an exclusive apparatus of violence, and be replaced by a highly decentralized decision-making structure, but even then some rules and norms for decision-making will be needed.
Glucksmann stands there with his NO to all power. He advises us to turn away from politics, so as not to risk becoming complicit in oppression. Here his anarchism leads him completely astray. The "neoliberal" writer Henri Lepage notes in his book Capitalism Tomorrow that the "libertarians," the anarcho-capitalists, "have much in common with the French 'new philosophers'." (Lepage: Tomorrow, Capitalism.)
This Glucksman's own willingness not to see the positive things made possible by the popular struggle to influence the state (where possible,) and to overthrow it (under dictatorship, or limited democracy) is a new dogmatism. Thus, he cuts his ties with science, and slips into anti-rationalism.
However, we owe him the recognition that he has made a healthy criticism which, properly understood, helps in the development of social science and political thought.
February 10
Five to one in the morning. The upstairs neighbors are making so much noise that we can't sleep. Cecilia moved into the study. She must get up in five hours. I finished Samuel's book before I fell asleep. It was a great reading experience.
Love without a Compass is the second part of draft novel with the working title Shifting Passions.
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