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WSWS : History : 2005 SEP/WSWS Summer School

Lecture one: The Russian Revolution and the unresolved historical problems of the 20th century

Part 2

By David North
30 August 2005

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This is the second part of the lecture “The Russian Revolution and the unresolved historical problems of the 20th century” delivered by World Socialist Web Site Editorial Board Chairman David North at the Socialist Equality Party/WSWS summer school held August 14 to August 20, 2005 in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The lecture was posted in four parts. (See Part 1, Part 3 and Part 4).

Historical consciousness versus postmodernism

The conception of history that we uphold, which assigns to the knowledge and theoretical assimilation of historical experience such a critical and decisive role in the struggle for human liberation, is irreconcilably hostile to all prevailing trends of bourgeois thought. The political, economic and social decay of bourgeois society is mirrored, if not spearheaded, by its intellectual degradation. In a period of political reaction, Trotsky once noted, ignorance bares its teeth.

The specific and peculiar form of ignorance championed today by the most skilled and cynical academic representatives of bourgeois thought, the postmodernists, is ignorance of and contempt for history. The postmodernists’ extreme rejection of the validity of history and the central role assigned to it by all genuine progressive trends of social thought is inextricably linked with another essential element of their theoretical conceptions—the denial and explicit repudiation of objective truth as a significant, let alone central, goal of philosophical inquiry.

What, then, is postmodernism? Permit me to quote, as an explanation, a passage written by a prominent academic defender of this tendency, Professor Keith Jenkins:

“Today we live within the general condition of postmodernity. We do not have a choice about this. For postmodernity is not an ‘ideology’ or a position we can choose to subscribe to or not; postmodernity is precisely our condition: it is our fate. And this condition has arguably been caused by the general failure—a general failure which can now be picked out very clearly as the dust settles over the twentieth century—of that experiment in social living that we call modernity. It is a general failure, as measured in its own terms, of the attempt, from around the eighteenth century in Europe, to bring about through the application of reason, science and technology, a level of personal and social wellbeing within social formations, which, legislating for an increasingly generous emancipation of their citizens/subjects, we might characterize by saying that they were trying, at best, to become ‘human rights communities.’

“... [T]here are not now—nor have there ever been—any ‘real’ foundations of the kind alleged to underpin the experiment of the modern.” [3]

Permit me, if I may use the language of the postmodernists, to “deconstruct” this passage. For more than two hundred years, stretching back into the eighteenth century, there were people, inspired by the science and philosophy of the Enlightenment, who believed in progress, in the possibility of human perfectibility, and who sought the revolutionary transformation of society on the basis of what they believed to be a scientific insight into the objective laws of history.

Such people believed in History (with a capital H) as a law-governed process, determined by socio-economic forces existing independently of the subjective consciousness of individuals, but which men could discover, understand and act upon in the interests of human progress.

But all such conceptions, declare the postmodernists, have been shown to be naïve illusions. We now know better: there is no History (with a capital H). There is not even history (with a small h), understood merely as an objective process. There are merely subjective “narratives,” or “discourses,” with shifting vocabularies employed to achieve one or another subjectively-determined useful purpose, whatever that purpose might be.

From this standpoint, the very idea of deriving “lessons” from “history” is an illegitimate project. There is really nothing to be studied and nothing to be learned. As Jenkins insists, “[W]e now just have to understand that we live amidst social formations which have no legitimizing ontological or epistemological or ethical grounds for our beliefs beyond the status of an ultimately self-referencing (rhetorical) conversation... Consequently, we recognize today that there never has been, and there never will be, any such thing as a past which is expressive of some sort of essence.” [4]

Translated into comprehensible English, what Jenkins is saying is that 1) the functioning of human societies, either past or present, cannot be understood in terms of objective laws that can be or are waiting to be discovered; and 2) there is no objective foundation underlying what people may think, say, or do about the society in which they live. People who call themselves historians may advance one or another interpretation of the past, but replacement of one interpretation with another does not express an advance toward something objectively truer than what was previously written—for there is no objective truth to get closer to. It is merely the replacement of one way of talking about the past with another way of talking about the past—for reasons suited to the subjectively-perceived uses of the historian.

The proponents of this outlook assert the demise of modernity, but refuse to examine the whole complex of historical and political judgments upon which their conclusions are premised. They do, of course, hold political positions which both underlie and find expression in their theoretical views. Professor Hayden White, one of the leading exponents of postmodernism, has stated explicitly, “Now I am against revolutions, whether launched from ‘above’ or ‘below’ in the social hierarchy and whether directed by leaders who profess to possess a science of society and history or be celebrators of political ‘spontaneity’”[5]

The legitimacy of a given philosophical conception is not automatically refuted by the politics of the individual by whom it is advanced. But the anti-Marxist and anti-socialist trajectory of postmodernism is so evident that it is virtually impossible to disentangle its theoretical conceptions from its political perspective.

This connection finds its most explicit expression in the writings of the French philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard and the American philosopher Richard Rorty. I will begin with the former. Lyotard was directly involved in socialist politics. In 1954, he joined the group Socialisme ou Barbarie, an organization that had emerged in 1949 out of a split with the PCI (Parti Communiste Internationaliste), the French section of the Fourth International. The basis of that split was the group’s rejection of Trotsky’s definition of the USSR as a degenerated workers’ state. The Socialisme ou Barbarie group, whose leading theoreticians were Cornelius Castoriadis and Claude Lefort, developed the position that the bureaucracy was not a parasitic social stratum but a new exploiting social class.

Lyotard remained in this group until the mid-1960s, by which time he broke completely with Marxism.

Lyotard is most identified with the repudiation of the “grand narratives” of human emancipation, whose legitimacy, he claims, had been refuted by the events of the twentieth century. He argues that

“the very basis of each of the great narratives of emancipation has, so to speak, been invalidated over the last fifty years. All that is real is rational, all that is rational is real: ‘Auschwitz’ refutes speculative doctrine. At least that crime, which was real, was not rational. All that is proletarian is communist, all that is communist is proletarian: ‘Berlin 1953, Budapest 1956, Czechoslovakia 1968, Poland 1980’ (to mention the most obvious examples) refute the doctrine of historical materialism: the workers rise up against the Party. All that is democratic exists through and for the people, and not vice versa: ‘May 1968’ refutes the doctrine of parliamentary liberalism. If left to themselves, the laws of supply and demand will result in universal prosperity, and vice versa: ‘The crises of 1911 and 1929’ refute the doctrine of economic liberalism.” [6]

The combination of disorientation, demoralization, pessimism and confusion that underlies the entire theoretical project of Lyotard’s postmodernism is summed up in this passage. One could devote an entire lecture, if not a book, to its refutation. Here, I must confine myself to just a few points.

The argument that Auschwitz refutes all attempts at a scientific understanding of history was by no means original to Lyotard. A similar idea forms the basis of the post-World War II writings of Adorno and Horkheimer, the fathers of the Frankfurt School. Lyotard’s declaration that Auschwitz was both real and irrational is a simplistic distortion of Hegel’s dialectical revolutionary conception. Lyotard’s supposed refutation is based on a vulgar identification of the real, as a philosophical concept, with that which exists. But as Engels explained, reality, as understood by Hegel, is “in no way an attribute predicable of any given state of affairs, social or political, in all circumstances and at all times.” [7] That which exists can be so utterly in conflict with the objective development of human society as to be socially and historically irrational, and therefore unreal, unviable and doomed. In this profound sense, German imperialism—out of which Nazism and Auschwitz arose—demonstrated the truth of Hegel’s philosophical dictum.

The working class uprisings against Stalinism did not refute historical materialism. Rather, they refuted the politics of Socialisme ou Barbarie which Lyotard had espoused. Trotsky, on the basis of the historical materialist method of analysis, had predicted such uprisings. The Socialisme ou Barbarie group had attributed to the Stalinist bureaucracies a degree of power and stability that they, as a parasitic caste, lacked. Moreover, Lyotard implies an identity between communism as a revolutionary movement and the Communist parties, which were, in fact, the political organizations of the Stalinist bureaucracies.

As for the refutation of economic and parliamentary liberalism, this was accomplished by Marxists long before the events cited by Lyotard. His reference to May 1968 as the downfall of parliamentary liberalism is particularly grotesque. What about the Spanish Civil War? The collapse of the Weimar Republic? The betrayal of the French Popular Front? All these events occurred more than 30 years before May-June 1968. What Lyotard presents as great philosophical innovations are little more than the expression of the pessimism and cynicism of the disappointed ex-left (or rightward-moving) academic petty bourgeoisie.

Richard Rorty is unabashed in connecting his rejection of the concept of objective truth with the repudiation of revolutionary socialist politics. For Rorty, the collapse of the Stalinist regimes in eastern Europe and the dissolution of the Soviet Union provided leftish intellectuals with the long-awaited opportunity to renounce, for once and for all, any sort of intellectual (or even emotional) commitment to a revolutionary socialist perspective. In his essay “The End of Leninism, Havel and Social Hope,” Rorty declared:

“... I hope that intellectuals will use the death of Leninism as an occasion to rid themselves of the idea that they know, or ought to know, something about deep, underlying forces—forces that determine the fate of human communities.

“We intellectuals have been making claims to such knowledge ever since we set up shop. Once we claimed to know that justice could not reign until kings became philosophers or philosophers kings; we claimed to know this on the basis of a grasp of the shape and movement of History. I would hope that we have reached a time at which we can finally get rid of the conviction common to Plato and Marx that there must be large theoretical ways of finding out how to end injustice, as opposed to small experimental ways.”[8]

What would follow from such a theoretical renunciation? Rorty offers his proposals for the reorientation of “left” politics:

“... I think the time has come to drop the terms ‘capitalism’ and ‘socialism’ from the political vocabulary of the Left. It would be a good idea to stop talking about ‘the anticapitalist struggle’ and to substitute something banal and untheoretical—something like ‘the struggle against avoidable human misery.’ More generally, I hope we can banalize the entire vocabulary of leftist political deliberation. I suggest we start talking about greed and selfishness rather than about bourgeois ideology, about starvation wages and layoffs rather than about commodification of labor, and about differential per-pupil expenditure on schools and differential access to health care rather than about the division of society into classes.”[9]

And this is called “philosophy?” What Rorty calls “banalization” would be better described as intellectual and political castration. He proposes to banish from discussion the product of more than 200 years of social thought. Underlying this proposal is the conception that the development of thought itself is a purely arbitrary and largely subjective process. Words, theoretical concepts, logical categories and philosophical systems are merely verbal constructs, pragmatically conjured up in the interest of various subjective ends. The claim that the development of theoretical thought is an objective process, expressing man’s evolving, deepening, and ever-more complex and precise understanding of nature and society is, as far as Rorty is concerned, nothing more than a Hegelian-Marxian shibboleth. As he asserts in another passage, “There is no activity called ‘knowing’ which has a nature to be discovered, and at which natural scientists are particularly skilled. There is simply the process of justifying beliefs to audiences.” [10]

And so, terms such as “capitalism,” “working class,” “socialist,” “surplus value,” “wage-labor,” “exploitation,” and “imperialism” are not concepts which express and denote an objective reality. They should be replaced with other, presumably less emotive, language—what most of us, though not Rorty, would call “euphemisms.”

Rorty, as I have already quoted, suggests that we talk about “the struggle against avoidable human misery.” Let us, for a moment, accept this brilliant suggestion. But we are almost immediately confronted with a problem. How should we determine what form and degree of human misery are avoidable? On what basis are we to claim that misery is avoidable, or even that it should be avoided? What response should be given to those who argue that misery is man’s lot, the consequence of the fall from grace? And even if we somehow evade the arguments of theologians, and conceive of misery in secular terms, as a social problem, we would still confront the problem of analyzing the causes of misery.

A program for abolishing “avoidable human misery” would be compelled to analyze the economic structure of society. To the extent that such an investigation was carried out with any notable degree of honesty, the crusaders against “avoidable human misery” would encounter the problems of “ownership,” “property,” “profit” and “class.” They could invent new words to describe these social phenomena, but—with or without Rorty’s permission—they would exist none the less.

Rorty’s theoretical conceptions abound with the most blatant inconsistencies and contradictions. He categorically insists that there is no “truth” to be discovered and known. Presumably, he holds his discovery of the non-existence of truth to be “true,” as it forms the foundation of his philosophy. But if he is asked to explain this gross inconsistency, Rorty evades the problem by proclaiming that he will not submit to the terms of the question, which is rooted in traditional philosophical discourse, dating all the way back to Plato. Truth, Rorty insists, is one of those old issues which are now out of date and about which one simply cannot have an interesting philosophical discussion. When the issue arises, Rorty, as he has noted rather cynically, “would simply like to change the subject.”[11]

The key to an understanding of the philosophical conceptions of Rorty is to be found in his political positions. While Rorty has sought on various occasions to downplay the link between philosophy and politics, it would be hard to find another contemporary philosopher whose theoretical conceptions are so directly embedded in a political position—that is, in his rejection of and opposition to Marxist revolutionary politics. Rorty does not attempt a systematic analysis and refutation of Marxism. Whether or not Marxism is correct is, for Rorty, beside the point. The socialist project (which Rorty largely identifies with the fate of the Soviet Union) failed, and there is, as far as Rorty is concerned, little hope for it to be successful in the future. From the wreckage of the Old Marxian Left, there is nothing to be salvaged. Rather than engaging in new doctrinal struggles over history, principles, programs, and, worst of all, objective truth, it is better to retreat to a much more modest politics of the lowest common denominator. This is what Rorty’s philosophy—and, indeed, much of American academic postmodernist discourse—is really all about.

For Rorty (and, as we shall see, so many others) the “events of 1989 have convinced those who were trying to hold on to Marxism that we need a way of holding our time in thought, and a plan for making the future better than the present, which drops reference to capitalism, bourgeois ways of life, bourgeois ideology, and the working class.”[12] The time has come, he argues, to “stop using ‘History’ as the name of an object around which to weave our fantasies of diminished misery. We should concede Francis Fukuyama’s point (in his celebrated essay, The End of History) that if you still long for total revolution, for the Radical Other on a world-historical scale, the events of 1989 show that you are out of luck.”[13]

This sort of cynical and heavy-handed irony is expressive of the prostration and demoralization that swept over the milieu of left academics and radicals in the face of the political reaction that followed the collapse of the Stalinist regimes. Rather than attempting a serious analysis of the historical, political, economic and social roots of the break-up of the Stalinist regimes, these tendencies quickly adapted themselves to the prevailing climate of reaction, confusion and pessimism.

To be continued

Notes:
[3] On “What Is History?” (London and New York, 1995), pp. 6-7.
[4] Ibid, p. 7.
[5] The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore, 1990), p. 63.
[6] Quoted in Jean-François Lyotard, by Simon Malpas (London and New York, Routledge, 2003), pp. 75-76.
[7] Marx Engels Collected Works, Volume 26 (Moscow, Progress Publishers, 1990), p. 358.
[8] Truth and Progress (Cambridge, 1998) p. 228.
[9] Ibid, p. 229.
10] Philosophy and Social Hope (London and New York, 1999), p. 36.
[11] Cited in Jenkins, p. 103.
[12] Truth and Progress, p. 233.
[13] Ibid.