Philosophical Battlefield

[CU for Tuesday, 10 November 2009]

This is the last of the ten parts of our CU Generic Course called “Philosophy, Religion, and Revolution”.

The question of the collective human subject has been most concisely and forcefully expressed in this series by Cyril Smith in the section of “The Communist Manifesto after 150 Years” called “The Subject of History”.

The first linked item to this final part is “Postmodernism & Hindu Nationalism” by Meera Nanda [pictured]. This work is given because it shows how several pathological, anti-human strands of philosophy can play out in concert, mutually reinforcing and amplifying each other.

In the case of India as shown in this article, these are Postmodernism, Hindu Nationalism (“Hindutva”), “Vedic Science” and reactionary feminism.

The Indian case is not altogether different to what was, and could again be, the situation in South Africa, where under President Thabo Mbeki we had Postmodernism (bourgeois “normality” following the liberation struggle); pseudo-science around HIV/AIDS (Virodene, African potato, beetroot et cetera); Africanism; and again, reactionary feminism.

What is common to all of these aspects, whether in India or in South Africa, is the evacuation of popular agency and refusal of the mass Subject of History following the liberation struggle, which in both cases promised this above all other things. In India the promise was Swaraj and in South Africa, “Power to the People”. Independence and national sovereignty were supposed to be inseparable from mass popular agency. In practice political independence co-existed with bourgeois dictatorship and neo-colonialism, but these latter factors trumped and negated mass popular power.

Revolutionary organs of people’s power were dismantled in each case. Golden Calfs were raised up in substitution for the slogans of popular power. The substitutes were the slogans of bourgeois nationalism and of national mystique.

Postmodernism is the hopeless, degenerate philosophy of the hopeless, degenerate thing called Imperialism. The fight for full freedom in a world dominated by Imperialism is unavoidably a fight against Postmodernism. It is a revolutionary necessity. The purpose of this CU Generic Course called

“Philosophy, Religion, and Revolution” has been to arm the communists for this battle. Above all what is needed is devotion to and priority for the human Subject. Power, to the People!

Epilogue

This Communist University has constantly upheld the central idea within Marx’s “Capital” and within Paulo Freire’s “Pedagogy of the Oppressed”. That idea is the full restoration of the human Subject as an individual, within human society, making humanity out of a material world.

The dialectic of the individual and the collective was most succinctly expressed by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels in the following famous words, which we have quoted more than once before, from the Communist Manifesto of 1848:

“… the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”

The Communist University has also upheld the SACP’s constitutional stricture to “Educate, Organise and Mobilise”. We do so in the conviction that our mission is not to Influence, or to Guide. Such words are used when education is abandoned by those who have no faith in it. “Influence” and “Guide” are only stalking-horses for “Command” and “Control” when the latter two tyrants are too ashamed to raise their heads in public.

In its Freirean educational practice, the Communist University has never sought

to preach. It has opened doors to dialogue and never closed them. The Communist University codifies, but it does not prescribe.

When education succeeds, and the working class is restored to its full humanity as a Subject of History, then why would any of these insecure and furtive options (Influence, Guiding, Command and Control) be required? None of them will be required.

Hence we say as Communist University: Education is the means by which organising and mobilising are done. Education is more than a preparation for politics. Education is the method of politics and the very substance of politics, which, when considered broadly, excludes all other substances. Education is the essence of humanism.

This message is simple, and the Freirean method of carrying it out is clear. For now, the best illustration of the idea of education as the substance of political practice is Cuba, a country that has become one big university - a “society of knowledge”. Please see the article linked below by Cliff DuRand for an exposition of this concept.

In addition, and to make the same point in a different way, we are going to conclude with an example and a warning of the manner in which a previous revolutionary upsurge faced the problem of the revolutionary Historical Subject, and failed to solve it, with disastrous consequences.

The All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), Short Course (a.k.a. simply “Short Course”) was an attempt to create, from the history of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union up to 1937, a totalised theory, free of error, for the Soviet Union itself and for the world communist movement as a whole. We came across it while studying Christopher Caudwell through Helena Sheehan, and finding material on J D Bernal and J B S Haldane on Sheehan’s web site. This material mentions the Short Course and the failure of these two otherwise outstandingly independent-minded communist scientists to oppose it.

The physical torture and elimination of comrades in the Soviet Union were shrouded in secrecy and obscurity, and even the “show trials” that took place were to the Western communist observer problematic because of the confessions of the accused. Yet the CPSU of the day did have to “lay out its stall” in public, as all political organisations are forced to do. The CPSU did so in the form of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), Short Course, and this document gave their game away completely, to anyone with eyes to see.

The Marxists Internet Archive in 2008 put up the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), Short Course in full for all to read. In addition it has Khrushchev’s 1956 speech to the 20^th Congress of the CPSU, denouncing both Stalin and the Short Course. An extract from that speech pertaining to the Short Course is linked below. [Image: Nikita Kruschev with Fidel Castro].

With the Short Course, the core reversal or perversion of the CPSU in the Stalin period is laid bare. For a quick grasp of this inversion of communism see the work’s Conclusion. Interrogate it with the Fundamental Question of Philosophy, with which we began this 10-part course: How stands the relation between Subject and Object? In the Short Course, the Subject of History is not educated, but is “guided”. Herein lies the whole disaster.

It is a practical certainty that the leadership of our South African Revolution will again at some point make the same error of attempting to demolish the popular Subject. Under President Mbeki, that is what happened. It is bound to be the case that another such revolutionary crisis will arrive, perhaps soon. This Communist University course, and the whole of the Communist University initiative, is dedicated to the victory of popular agency in that struggle, and in all such struggles thereafter. Amaaaaaandla!!!!!!

Click on these links:

Postmodernism & Hindu Nationalism, 2004, Nanda (9126 words)

Cuba - A Nation Becoming a University, DuRand, MRZine (2476 words)

Khrushchev, 20th CPSU Congress, 1956, Extracts re ‘Short Course’ (1398 words)

Liberation Theology

[CU for Monday, 9 November 2009]

In the last third of the 20^th Century a phenomenon arose that recalled Marx’s “Introduction to a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right”, where Marx said:

“…the criticism of religion is the prerequisite of all criticism.”

And:

“The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.”

In other words the criticism of religion was only a starting-point and not the main business. The main business is the restoration of humanity to itself, not so much from out of the clutches of the clerics, but more so from the under the boot of the bourgeoisie. The struggle begins, not so much against religion, but within religion.

And so it came to pass that in the 1960s arose, within and among the ranks of the religious, a movement which had all the essential aims that Marx had. This was Liberation Theology. The hierarchy of the Catholic Church in particular recognised it for what it was, and suppressed it. The hierarchy of the Protestant denominations saw it for what it was, and co-opted and neutered its remnants, revising the “base community” idea into the sectarian “basic Christian community”, and thereby reversing the liberation that Liberation Theology had brought. But in the mean time it had a life and it left a legacy.

Father Joe Falkiner used sometimes to attend the Communist University. The first attached/linked item begins with an article of his from 2006 on Liberation Theology and Scripture, and continues with a short history of Liberation Theology from two more of its well-known practitioners, Leonardo and Clodovis Boff.

Father Joe quickly mentions that Liberation Theology “often used the educational methods of Paulo Friere”, and that they used original scriptural texts, just as the Communist University uses mainly original texts, and preferably not second-hand commentary or analysis. Father Joe writes: “… the theology was done jointly by these people in the shantytowns and their priests, not solely by traditional theologians based in seminaries and universities.”

This is what we do with politics, using Paulo Freire’s methods.

Father Joe also mentions Gramsci, and organic intellectuals. The second, supporting, item in this penultimate part of our current course has the long title: Rethinking Critical Pedagogy and the Gramscian and Freirean Legacies: From Organic to Committed Intellectuals or Critical Pedagogy, Commitment, and Praxis. It is by Gustavo Fischman and Peter McLaren, who are present-day exponents of Critical Pedagogy, or in other words what is referred to above, by Joe Falkiner, as “the educational methods of Paulo Friere”.

The article immediately starts to grapple with “the notion of teachers as transformative intellectuals”. We are back with Cyril Smith’s problem with Lenin – the problem of the legitimacy or otherwise of “outside agitators” – and the problem of Marx's aim of “development of communist consciousness on a mass scale” (which Cyril Smith somehow managed to simultaneously approve of).

How are you going to make revolution, if the maker of revolution must be the masses, and not yourself? Alternatively, if you had a method of educating the masses, what else would you need in the way of revolution? Is there any difference between politics and political education? Or is it a trinity that is at the same time a unity, namely: Educate, Organise, Mobilise? Paulo Freire concentrated his intellectual fire on the single most practical priority, which at the same time requires the deepest philosophical clarity, and called it “The Pedagogy of the Oppressed”.

Fischman and McLaren make clear, by reference to Gramsci, that such a Pedagogy of the Oppressed is a direct form of class struggle. It is a direct confrontation with the interests of the bourgeois state. It is an open contradiction of the bourgeois class dictatorship as applied through state-led education as well as through the instructive function of the judiciary.

The authors note that Gramsci is often misappropriated (see also CU). They write: “Because Gramsci identified civil society as an arena used by the ruling class to exert its hegemony over the society, the struggle for Gramsci was not to transform civil society but rather, as Holst points out, ‘to build proletarian hegemony’ (p. 106).” That is, proletarian ascendancy, also known as the dictatorship of the proletariat. Fischman and McLaren are rejecting the view of hegemony as a “Third Way” that could by-pass revolutionary confrontation.

After discussing Gramsci’s organic intellectuals, and as if to answer Cyril Smith’s doubts, they quote Gramsci as follows:

“Critical self-consciousness means, historically and politically, the construction of an elite of intellectuals. A human mass does not ‘distinguish’ itself, does not become independent in its own right without, in the widest sense, organizing itself; and there is no organization without intellectuals, that is without organizers and leaders, in other words, without the theoretical aspect of the theory-practice nexus being distinguished concretely by the existence of a group of ‘specialized’ in conceptual and philosophical elaboration of ideas. (p. 334)"

Fischman and McLaren go on to argue for the “committed intellectual”, with “an unwavering commitment to the struggle against injustice”. What is the difference between a committed intellectual and a communist party member? None.

We do not have a good picture of Father Joe Falkiner. Instead, the second picture is of Bartolomé de las Casas, a member of the same orderas Father Joe. (Order of Preachers, also known as "Dominicans")

Click on these links:

Liberation Theology, 2006, Falkiner, L & C Boff (5590 words)

Organic Intellectuals, 2005, McLaren and Fischman (10053 words)

Pedagogy

[CU for Friday, 6 November 2009]

In the first sentence of Paulo Freire’s “Pedagogy of The Oppressed” (3 chapters are linked below, but take Chapter 1 for discussion), Freire “problematises” humanisation, immediately placing himself side-by-side with Marx, where Marx in the whole of “Capital” wanted to restore humanity to itself; or where in the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Marx wrote: “Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower.”

Here, on page 3, is Freire’s answer to “Dialectical Materialism”:

“… one cannot conceive of objectivity without subjectivity. Neither can exist without the other, nor can they be dichotomized. The separation of objectivity from subjectivity, the denial of the latter when analyzing reality or acting upon it, is objectivism. On the other hand, the denial of objectivity in analysis or action, resulting in a subjectivism which leads to solipsistic positions, denies action itself by denying objective reality. Neither objectivism nor subjectivism, nor yet psychologism is propounded here, but rather subjectivity and objectivity in constant dialectical relationship.

“To deny the importance of subjectivity in the process of transforming the world and history is naive and simplistic. It is to admit the impossible: a world without people. This objectivistic position is as ingenuous as that of subjectivism, which postulates people without a world. World and human beings do not exist apart from each other, they exist in constant interaction. Man does not espouse such a dichotomy; nor does any other critical, realistic thinker. What Marx criticized and scientifically destroyed was not subjectivity, but subjectivism and psychologism.”

The significance of the Subject in Freire’s theoretical scheme is clear all the way through and is demonstrated by these words from the last paragraph of his Chapter 1, for example:

“Teachers and students (leadership and people), co-intent on reality, are both Subjects, not only in the task of unveiling that reality and thereby coming to know it critically, but in the task of re-creating that knowledge. As they attain this knowledge of reality through common reflection and action, they discover themselves as its permanent re-creators.”

The Communists, in their own minds and in their explicit intentions, seek to educate, organise and mobilise, not so as to command the working class and the general masses, but to set them free. The problem of how to do so is exactly the problem that Freire addresses in “The Pedagogy of the Oppressed.” It requires the formulation quoted above: “World and human beings do not exist apart from each other, they exist in constant interaction.” Nowhere does he refer to materialism, dialectical or otherwise. He writes of leadership and people both being Subjects, co-intent on reality.

John Turner, author of “Housing by People” (see the linked chapters below), was preoccupied with the same problem. In his case he problematised it as a question of “paternalism and filialism”, which is immediately recognisable as the very opposite of the “co-intent Subjects” proposed by Freire. Turner writes:

“Paternalism and filialism, the modern descendents of attitudes more generally associated by Europeans with the Middle Ages, are still very common attitudes in Britain. These are especially evident in the common assumption that the 'ordinary' citizen or 'layman', is utterly dependent on the 'extraordinary' citizen or the 'professional', who cultivates the mystery of his or her activity in order to increase dependency and professional fees.”

Click on these links:

Pedagogy of The Oppressed, Chapter 1, 1970, Freire (9382 words)

Pedagogy of The Oppressed, Chapter 2, 1970, Freire (5218 words)

Pedagogy of The Oppressed, Chapter 3, 1970, Freire (13444 words)

Housing by People, C1 & 6, Who decides, 1976, Turner (7901 words)

Ron Press

This is not an obituary. Nor was it a planned part of our current Communist University series on Philosophy et cetera.

Ron Press passed away on 28 October 2009 in Bristol, England. His funeral will take place in England on 5 November 2009. He was born in 1929. Ron Press was a lovely man, and a hero. Here is how he described himself, in 2007, for the Internet:

“[Dr] Ronald Edwin Press was born 1929. He studied to become a Chemical engineer. Ron Press contributed to the struggle by providing much-needed technical expertise. Press was affiliated with the African National Congress (and the MK, ANC armed wing) and the South African Communist Party. He helped to smuggle equipment and weapons into South Africa and he was involved in the movement's 'Technical Committee' which created a variety of devices that were used in operations against the apartheid state. He also contributed to the setting up of secret communications networks (ANC & MK) that were operational in the late 'eighties.

“Press was one of those convicted in the Treason Trial (1956). Before the trial he was the Secretary of the Textile Workers' Industrial Union, but during the trial was served with an order banning him from all gatherings and confining him to Johannesburg for five years. He was Accused No. 60, however, the indictment was squashed in 1959 and after the trial Press went into exile in the UK. He continued to assist in operations against the Apartheid State (indicated above). Press is now living in Bristol in the UK. He was a secretary to the Bristol AAM at a stage and was made a life member of the Bristol Trades Union Council.”

There is a lot more that can be said about Ron Press. His autobiography is on the ANC web site (click here) and on the CU CD. Ron also left two CDs full of material compiled by himself, of which the CU has copies. Ron used to write poems for us and we carried all of them. All of the poems should be in the CU archives (click here for a list of links). Then there are the recollections of his friends and comrades. He was loved.

The document by the late Ron Press linked below is from the Internet, picked up in a Google search, at http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/10/013.html. It is about the philosophy of science, and the science of politics, so it fits right in with our current course.

Click on this link:

New Tools for Marxists, Ron Press, 1994 (5075 words)

Marx or Marxism?

[CU for Thursday, 5 November 2009]

Cyril Smith, late in life, and following the fall of the Soviet Union, felt himself free enough to challenge the principle Shibboleths of Marxism, including the word “Marxism” itself. Students may think that here and there, Smith did not quite succeed in resolving all his issues. For example, he approves Marx's aim of “development of communist consciousness on a mass scale” but disapproves, in another place, of what he considers to be Lenin’s determination to do the same thing “from outside” (This CU course will continue to examine that particular question). But otherwise, Cyril Smith succeeds admirably to hit and to knock down his targets, which are the dead wood and the rotten branches of 165 years and more of “theory”; and he does us a great service thereby.

We may quickly get close to the heart of the matter by first looking at Smith’s talk on “The Communist Manifesto After 150 Years” (linked below), and in particular at the section headed “The Subject of History”. In this section, the daily practice of communists (“to educate, organise and mobilise”) comes together with the most profound depths of philosophy. It begins:

“Marx's problem was to discover the possibility for humanity, individually and collectively, to take conscious charge of its own life, and to find this possibility within bourgeois society. Communism would mean that humans would cease to be prisoners of their social relations, and begin purposively to make their own history. In other words, we should cease to be mere objects and start to live as subjects.”

It is not unreasonable, nor is it an exaggeration, to say that this is the whole matter of Marx, Lenin, communism and the entire work of all the communists that have ever been. Therefore this section is suggested as the main reading and discussion text for this part, and the matter will be taken up again in the next part. Use the section on “The Subject of History” for discussion, because it is sufficient, but do also read the entire document, for the light that it sheds upon the Communist Manifesto of 1848.

Soon afterwards, in “Hegel, Economics, and Marx's Capital” (linked below) Smith took on Marx’s premier work, “Capital”, and showed how generations of Marxists have got it very wrong. In particular, Smith shows us how “Capital” is not about “economics” or about what even Great Lenin mistakenly called “Marx’s Economic Doctrine”, but is really what it says it is: “A Critique of Political Economy”. Equally mistaken, Smith shows, is the vulgar conception of the relation between Hegel’s work and Marx’s, and here Smith could have drawn support from E. V. Ilyenkov’s [Image, above] “The Dialectics of the Abstract and the Concrete in Marx’s Capital”, published in the Soviet Union in 1960. No doubt, Smith is not the first to rediscover the real Marx, and he will not have been the last. Apart from giving us a very good reminder to pay proper attention to what we are reading, Smith is also validating the CU policy of reading the original work more than the commentators and the analysts (see, e.g., the CU Generic Course on Capital, Volume 1)

Smith is very effective in dealing with the dead phrase with a zombie existence, “dialectical materialism”, never used by Marx, invented by Kautsky and Plekhanov, and used as a brand by Stalin. The third linked item is Chapter 2, “How the Marxists Buried Marx” (linked below), from Cyril Smith’s “Marx at the Millennium”, published in 1998. On the third page of that chapter, Smith wrote:

“… it is appropriate to begin with one of the most widely circulated philosophical statements of the twentieth century. It starts like this:

“Dialectical materialism is the outlook of the Marxist-Leninist party. It is called dialectical materialism because its approach to the phenomena of nature, its method of apprehending them is dialectical, while its interpretation of the phenomena of nature, its conception of these phenomena, its theory, is materialistic.

“Historical materialism is the extension of the principles of dialectical materialism to the study of social life, an application of the principles of dialectical materialism to the phenomena of the life of society, to the study of society and of its history.”

“This stuff appeared in 1939. In my view, its method, standpoint, dogmatic style and conclusions are all utterly opposed to everything that Marx stood for.”

The author was J. V. Stalin. A little later Smith writes (and he could have been writing about “Dialego”):

“Let us bring ourselves to look briefly at the way the Stalinist catechism of 1939 hitched up a highly mechanised materialism with something called ‘dialectics’. On the one hand, ‘Nature, being, the material world, is primary, and mind, thought, is secondary.’ What does this word ‘primary’ mean? Does it mean ‘first in time’ or ‘first in importance’? Or does it mean that matter ‘causes’ changes in ‘mind’? Nobody can tell, and precisely this ambiguity conferred mysterious power.”

Smith shows how even Lenin had been fooled by the catch-phrase:

“In the preface to his 1908 book Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, Lenin declared: ‘Marx and Engels scores of times termed their philosophical views dialectical materialism.’ He was so sure about this, that he felt no need to give any references.

“In fact, there is not one! Marx never employed the phrase in any of his writings. The term ‘dialectical materialism’ was introduced in 1891 by Plekhanov, in an article in Kautsky’s Neue Zeit. He thought wrongly, I believe — that he was merely adapting it from Engels’s usage in Anti-Duhring and Ludwig Feuerbach.”

Cyril Smith has done a good job. There are plenty of comrades who still cling to the thoughtless formula, “dialectical materialism”, and they give support and solidarity to each other. Smith can help those others who would wish to liberate themselves from the dead hands of Plekhanov, Kautsky and Stalin.

Cyril Smith also does not spare Trotsky, with whom he appears to have had some sympathy. The most serious deficiency he finds in Trotsky, however, is not any of Trotsky’s sins of omission or dissembling, but Trotsky’s lack of philosophy, and his failure to get any of his followers to make up his own deficiency. While Lenin made great progress in philosophy, Trotsky failed altogether, writes Smith.

What Smith is saying is that in the last analysis, it was the inability to overcome the Philistine, Stalin, through full command of philosophy, which led to the degradation of the Russian Revolution and its eventual reversal. Philosophy is the keystone. Without it, the other stones are bound to fall. Smith says of the Trotskyists:

“But they never had the theoretical resources to penetrate to its philosophical core. The best they could do was to show that Stalinist policies and distortions were contrary to the decisions of Lenin’s party and the teachings of ‘Marxism’.” The Trotskyists were trapped within the same hall of mirrors that they had helped Stalin to construct.

The practical work of philosophy is, crucially, to weed out, or clip off, the words, dead of meaning, that encumber and trip us in our work; or otherwise, if possible, to restore their freshness. Some of those words in our present time might be: “hegemony”, “accumulation”, and “elements of socialism”.

The fourth linked item is about “Marxism”, whether there ever was such a thing, and if so, whether Marx was a “Marxist”.

The full Cyril Smith archive on MIA can be found here.

Click on these links:

The Communist Manifesto after 150 years, 1998, Smith (8285 words)

Hegel, Economics, and Marx's Capital, 1999, Cyril Smith (7803 words)

How The Marxists Buried Marx, 1998, Smith (13629 words)

Karl Marx and the Origins of ‘Marxism’, 1998, Smith (4670 words)

Weapon of Theory

[CU for Wednesday, 4 November 2009]

The Tricontinental Conference of the Peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America was held in Havana in January, 1966, seven years after the Cuban Revolution and 46 years after the Baku Conference of the Peoples of the East. Forty-three years have now passed since the Tricontinental. A lot has been achieved in that time, including our South African democratic breakthrough. A lot still remains to be achieved. The full defeat of Imperialism has not yet occurred. What we can say is that the 20^th-Century agenda was set by the liberation movements. The great political change in the world in that century was the taking of sovereign independence by the formerly oppressed people of the former colonies, affecting the great majority of the population of the planet and opening their road of democracy.

This gigantic movement and huge change was achieved with the weapon of theory.

Amilcar Cabral [Image] in his speech to the Tricontinental that has always been known by that title, “Weapon of Theory” (linked below), also said the following, 43 years ago:

“It is often said that national liberation is based on the right of every people to freely control its own destiny and that the objective of this liberation is national independence. Although we do not disagree with this vague and subjective way of expressing a complex reality, we prefer to be objective, since for us the basis of national liberation, whatever the formulas adopted on the level of international law, is the inalienable right of every people to have its own history, and the objective of national liberation is to regain this right usurped by imperialism, that is to say, to free the process of development of the national productive forces.

“For this reason, in our opinion, any national liberation movement which does not take into consideration this basis and this objective may certainly struggle against imperialism, but will surely not be struggling for national liberation.

“This means that, bearing in mind the essential characteristics of the present world economy, as well as experiences already gained in the field of anti-imperialist struggle, the principal aspect of national liberation struggle is the struggle against neo-colonialism.”

Amilcar Cabral was a true vanguardist – both a great leader, and a great intellectual.

Ten years after the Tricontinental, in 1976, four articles were published in the African Communist, written by John Hoffman (who is still in 2009 teaching philosophy at Leicester University in England, but who is no longer a believer in Dialectical Materialism) under the pen-name Dialego. These were subsequently published more than once, all together, as a booklet. Two of the four parts are linked below. (Click here for Part 3 and Part 4 if required). The articles were popular and are still famous, and they certainly raised the flag of theory. But they contained major deficiencies, of which the principal one is Dialectical Materialism itself.

We are going to return to the history of “Dialectical Materialism” in the next part of this series, and then look again at the much more fruitful Subject-Object relation, with priority given to the free human Subject, in the following two parts, before summing up in the tenth and last part of the series.

Hoffman (in his Part 2) writes of “Materialism Vs. Idealism: the Basic Question of Philosophy”. Whereas the Progress Publishers Dictionary of Philosophy says that the Fundamental Question of Philosophy is the relation of the Subject to the Object. It is as if Hoffman thought that these two dialectics were the same. But they are not the same and the Dialego articles show the glaring errors that arise if and when these two formulations are conflated into one.

For example, in Part 1 under “Philosophy and Our ‘Experience’”, Hoffman describes a condition that he calls “stress[ing] the materialist component of our philosophy at the expense of the dialectical”. This is a muddle. The pathology he is describing is what he is promoting: the idealisation of the objective factors of a situation, so that the human Subject is all but eliminated. Out goes God, in come the atoms and the molecules.

The dialectic that is political is the one between subjective humans and the objective (yes, material) universe. In this political dialectic, the subject is the “point”. As Marx wrote in the 11^th Thesis on Feuerbach: “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” Who’s point? Our point: the human beings’ point. A dialectic between material and material is like a tree falling in the forest, unseen and unheard by anyone. It is a real event, but it is not a political event.

Similarly, a switch from an imaginary world of superstition, to prioritising inert material, is no gain at all. In fact these are only two different forms of idealism. In both cases powers are held up that are higher than people, whether invisible or visible. But in politics, the power that matters is people-power. For sure, that means people-power in a real, material world. It does not mean a “balancing act”.

Hoffman’s (then) devotion to materialism leads him to write that “[man] developed out of the world of nature through a long process of evolution and his ideas are the product of the mental activity of his brain, itself a highly developed and complex form of matter.”

This places us in relation to “man” like spectators at the moment that God in Genesis breathed a spirit into Adam, but without the explanatory story that the Bible gives us.

How does a “complex form of matter” become human? Actually, it is not even necessary to ask. It is only Hoffman’s kind of materialism that leads to such questions. For the rest of us, humanity is as much of a “given” as the atoms and molecules of which matter is composed, except that humanity is special, while matter is matter; and humanity is revolutionary work-in-progress.

It is the free-willing human Subject that is at the centre of our consciousness, our concerns, and our morality.

Click on these links:

The Weapon of Theory, 1966, Amilcar Cabral (7710 words)

Dialego, Part 1, Necessity of Theory, 1976, John Hoffman (3627 words)

Dialego, Part 2, Theory of Action, 1976, John Hoffman (4318 words)

Freedom

[CU for Tuesday, 3 November 2009]

Before the main text of this post there are two double quotations (first Sheehan’s words, then Caudwell’s) taken from Helena Sheehan’s Christopher Caudwell web page.

The act of knowing transformed what was known. It was never possible to detach the thing known from the knowing of it. Caudwell opposed all passivist imagery in describing knowledge. Knowledge was not a matter of copying, mirroring, photographing, reflecting. Although he never remarked on Lenin's use of such imagery in [Lenin’s] Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, he had read the book and his rejection of the reflectionist model was quite explicit and polemically expressed. In no uncertain terms, Caudwell made his point:

“The mirror reflects accurately: it does not know. Each particle in the universe reflects the rest of the universe, but knowledge is only given to human beings as a result of an active and social relation to the rest of reality.”

In terms of the debate within [Lenin’s] Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, it was neither the position of Lenin nor that of Bogdanov. Nor was it the position of Lukacs or Korsch either. It was perhaps the position Gramsci was groping for, but never expressed with such confident clarity as Caudwell. When it came down to it, being preceded knowing, knowing flowed from being and evolved as an extension of being. Decidedly post-Cartesian, Caudwell asserted: I live therefore I think I am. In a concise statement of the fundamental contours of his theory of knowledge, he wrote:

“The question of which is first, mind or matter, is not therefore a question of which is first, subject or object ... Going back in the universe along the dialectic of qualities, we reach by inference a state where no human or animal bodies existed and therefore no minds. It is not strictly accurate to say that therefore the object is prior to the subject any more than it is correct to say the opposite. Object and subject as exhibited by the mind relation, come into being simultaneously.... We can say that relations seen by us between qualities in our environment (the arrangement of the cosmos, energy, mass, all the entities of physics) existed before the subject-object relationship implied in mind. We prove this by the transformations which take place independent of our desires. In this sense, nature is prior to mind and this is the vital sense for science. These qualities produced, as cause and around produce effect, the synthesis, or particular subject-object relationship which we call knowing. Nature therefore produced mind. But the nature which produced mind was not nature "as seen by us." . . . It is nature.... as having indirect not direct relations with us.... Such a view reconciles the endless dualism of mentalism and objectivism. It is the universe of dialectical materialism. Unlike previous philosophies, it includes all reality: it includes not only the world of physics, but it includes smells, tastes, colors, the touch of a loved hand, hopes, desires, beauties, death and life, truth and error.”

Christopher Caudwell’s “Studies in a Dying Culture” were published at a particular moment in history. Caudwell had been killed while defending the Republic in the Spanish Civil War [Image below: Caudwell on the eve of his departure for Spain, from a group photograph]. With its references to his contemporaries H G Wells, Bertrand Russell, and E M Forster (and the 18^th-century philosopher Jean-Jaques Rousseau) Caudwell’s essay may seem dated at first glance, but actually, like a lot of Caudwell’s work, it remains critical today and right up to date, in a time when the question of the free-willing human Subject is once again at the forefront.

“Implicit in the conception of thinkers like Russell and Forster, that all social relations are restraints on spontaneous liberty, is the assumption that the animal is the only completely free creature. No one constrains the solitary carnivore to do anything. This is of course an ancient fallacy. Rousseau is the famous exponent. Man is born free but is everywhere in chains. Always in the bourgeois mind is this legend of the golden age, of a perfectly good man corrupted by institutions. Unfortunately not only is man not good without institutions, he is not evil either. He is no man at all; he is neither good nor evil; he is an unconscious brute.

“Russell's idea of liberty is the unphilosophical idea of bestiality… The man alone, unconstrained, answerable only to his instincts, is Russell's free man. Thus all man's painful progress from the beasts is held to be useless. All men's work and sweat and revolutions have been away from freedom. If this is true, and if a man believes, as most of us do, as Russell does, that freedom is the essential goal of human effort, then civilisation should be abandoned and we should return to the woods. I am a Communist because I believe in freedom. I criticise Russell, and Wells, and Forster, because I believe they are the champions of unfreedom.”

Caudwell had got to the heart of the matter: “I am a Communist because I believe in freedom,” he wrote. And what is that? Of all politicians, only those who are communists will be able to answer the question “What is freedom?” in a satisfactory way. Others will echo the sophisticated Bertrand Russell’s bourgeois-romantic version of freedom, as a return to the condition of the wild beasts, or otherwise will say little, or nothing.

Power to the People is our slogan. This is the essence of our project. It means that the masses will have agency. The masses will be human, which is to say, able to think and to act upon their thoughts. This is the active freedom that Caudwell writes about. “This good, liberty, contains all good,” he says.

After Caudwell, and after the war that ended in victory over the fascists against whom Caudwell had fought with his body as well as his pen, bourgeois thinkers did not embrace Caudwell’s idea of liberty. Instead, they fled to irrational, anti-humanist and even outright anti-human philosophies: existentialism, positivism, structuralism, and especially the overtly irrational “Post-modernism” that has now become the house philosophy of Imperialism. Some of them declared “The Death of the Subject”. In other words, they denied human free will.

In 2002 another English author and philosopher called James Heartfield defied the Post-Modernists and published a book called “The ‘Death of the Subject’ Explained” thereby helping to inspire the Johannesburg Communist University that started in 2003. Heartfield kindly allowed the CU to use some extracts from his book. These are contained in the second linked document below.

We communists are for freedom. We are human, not post-human. We are part of a liberation movement, not only of the colonially oppressed, but of humanity worldwide against Imperialism. We are the ones with the theory of freedom. It is the source of our morality. Power to the People! Amandla!

The concept of the free-willing human Subject is the most valuable product of philosophy, including the philosophy of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. We are going to defend it, including, if necessary, against the concept of materialism, if materialism is taken to say that human life and culture is only a transitory arrangement of molecules.

The image at the top of this post is the “Uomo Vitruviano” of Leonardo da Vinci, from the humanist period of the Italian Renaissance. Its meaning is that Man (humanity) is the measure of the Universe.

Click on these links:

Liberty, a Study in Bourgeois Illusion, 1938, Caudwell (9550 words)

Death of the Subject Explained Selection, 2002, Heartfield (14148 words)