Djehuti
12th May 2005, 12:00
All Bergquist's text are excellent. Unfortunatly only this is available in english, though an acquaintance of mine have translated some more of Bergquists text, if you like this one, I might find a way to post the others as well.
The other texts are:
Was Marx wrong:
1: Science and ideology
2: Science and logic
3: Marx was wrong!
4: The marxists were wrong!
5: Marx was right!
6: The epistemology
7: History materialism
(this one is the eight part)
The Impossible capitalism:
1: Such is capitalism
2: The boundaries of capitalism
3: The boundaries of the market
4: The spiral of death
5: Life on a stick
6: The Great illusion
7: What is to be done?
About the state:
1: State and society
2: Leviathan
3: The state and the revolutionaries
And the article "Marx and Darwin". I do not completly agree with everything in the text, and some things I very much disagree with. Still, they are all excellent.
--------
Confessions of an Unrepentant Vulgar Marxist
©Lars Bergquist 1992
[The final chapter of Hade Marx fel? (Was Marx Wrong?), Stockholm 1992]
I have used the previous chapters to establish the facts (I do hope that nobody is too browbeaten to protest). This last chapter is different. It is both more speculative and more personal. My excuse is that Marxism is no abstract academic Glasperlenspiel. It is and must be life and action. If we do not dare live Marxism, then we should at least leave it and the Marxists alone and in peace.
I came to Marxism by the same route as Marx himself did; this is not intended to be as self important as it may sound. The hope of a society without power and subjection, of a dignified existence for man, is a hope that anyone can entertain. This position-taking however is the inner compass of Marxism: Without it, Marxism degenerates into a purely intellectual exercise which puts its participants under no obligation whatever. When we lose this moral compass, then we are lost in the wilderness where we willingly accept the power-claims of both Stalinism and capitalism - often simultaneously.
Each time that Europe has seen a turn to the left during the last one hundred and twenty years, Marxism has acquired a tail - a baggage of café intellectuals and academic pedants who have jumped on the bandwagon, often with intentions that have been perfectly honourable in their own eyes. The new-found fellowship with les damnés de la terre has given rise to many a frisson of the kind that the intellectual bourgeoisie often experiences when slumming. Still, it is well not to put your foot into something unpleasant. So, no accusation do the fashionable Marxists fear more than that of being vulgar.
Consequently, there has been no fashionable idealist philosophy during the last century that the fashionable Marxists have not tried to infuse Marxism with. Following the latest signals from the haute monde, they have sought to prove that Marxism is no Ersatz thought for dumb proletarians, but the best and most refined empirio-criticism, logical positivism, humanism, analytical philosophy, structuralism - and of course also the best variety of the philosophy according to which the universe is a hallucination in the brain of an assistant professor. And Christianity, oops, I nearly forgot Christianity. It has not been really 'in', but it has never been totally 'out' either; and there has consequently never been any lack of comrades who have tried to persuade us that Marx was simply one of the prophets, and that Marxism is compatible not only with idealism as such, but with the religious variety.
What makes the living essence of Marxism incomprehensible and indigestible to these people is its position-taking, quite simply. Marxism and Marxists will not accept certain facts, and especially the power relations of present society (they do not even accept power as such, but this is completely incomprehensible to a bourgeois. How can people live without a boot pressed against the backs of their necks and a police stick waving behind them?) They find it necessary to take a position. This exactly is the 'vulgarity' that strikes horror into the fashionable Marxists. It means that they cannot mumble and be evasive, cocoon themselves in their own empty phrases and reassure both themselves and their listeners that this was not really serious, it was just an academic Gedankenexperiment. They did not really mean it - they just wanted to wave the latest and most exotic buzzwords. Vulgarity, calling a spade a spade, is in their eyes simply class treason, treason against their own class, the bourgeoisie. Few have the courage to commit that transgression unblinkingly.
I do not know why these vapours have never troubled me. On the contrary, I have always found the clarity of Marxism attractive, the openly declared premises and the forthright conclusions. After I had rid myself of the Christian paranoia at the age of thirteen, it was a natural second step (though this followed much later) also to free myself of social and political mystifications. I took both these steps with a feeling of immense liberation which is still vivid in my memory. They were steps out of the anguished half-light of myth into a brightly lit, comprehensible reality, into a world where the use of one's human reason was permissible.
That the world should be comprehensible to us without the aid of revelations and arcana is probably the most revolutionary notion ever. This is humankind's declaration of its own coming of age. Those who have in fresh memory my first essays on this subject, those on science, will also understand that this notion is no symptom of intellectual hubris.
First, we understand since Darwin why reason can comprehend reality, the cause of that strange consonance of thought and being which has for so long mystified the philosophers. If our ability to think had been of no use in understanding the world, then we would not have possessed it. Secondly, we now comprehend that our truths are provisional. We are not spying on God, and neither do we write laws for the cosmos. Man's thought will always have a frontier to push against.
The existence of this frontier has certainly always been a delight to the spirit-junkies. We do not know everything, they say; therefore we know nothing (though they can enlighten us of course). Outside the light of our knowledge begins darkness, and in this darkness, just out of reach of the irritating light of reason, is the abode of the Other, the transcendent world, that of which you cannot speak, only scream or mumble. Down on your knees before darkness! Never shall we understand what dwells there, except by the intervention of those priests and prophets who eagerly offer to tell us about it, in much detail and for a consideration, of course.
And then the circle of light widens and the supposedly transcendent world becomes accessible to inspection. The terrain proves to be much the same as that which we knew previously. It is new terrain; new vistas open and we have to redraw our maps. But the monsters and the powers that the spiritualists painted to us have evaporated just as the sea-serpents and the dog-headed tribes that the cartographers drew in the atlases of yore, to fill in the blank spaces on sea and land.
The spirit-junkies are not put off however. Their consternation eases and they note with satisfaction that the new and wider circle of light also has its limit; behind it begins darkness again, and they move their lares and penates there, all those idols that can exist only in the dark. See, you do not know everything ... and we do the same procedure as before.
But if we recognize that our knowledge can never be comprehensive, is this not a fundamental problem for us? Is there then not a chance after all that the darkness-mongers are right, that a radically non-physical reality does exist somewhere? Je n'ai besoin de cet hypothèse. ['I do not need this hypothesis.' Laplace's famous rejoinder when Napoleon asked him 'what place God had in his system'.] It is superfluous. There is nothing in our knowledge of the world that would make this hypothesis necessary. If this transcendent reality did exist, then our ignorance of it would be known by us, we would see a large, clearly visible gap in all our scientific models. The fact that this gap is nowhere to be found banishes the transcendent reality to the lumber-room where those things are stored which no one can prove and which no one takes the trouble to refute, because their existence or nonexistence would not make the slightest difference.
There certainly are kinds of information about reality that will remain forever inaccessible to us. For instance, we cannot make any measurements inside a black hole, because no light, no signal, no data can leave it. Does that mean that we shall have to join in the chorus in praise of ignorance: ignorabimus, ignorabimus - we shall never know? Not at all. The point is that we know why we do not know, and that we know that the cause of our ignorance is a physical one, part of physical reality itself. Kant was correct in saying that das Ding für uns can never be completely congruent with das Ding an sich. His mistake was the belief that there existed a metaphysical abyss between them, that the thing in itself belonged to a different, non-physical reality.
Just as physical reality is comprehensible, so is social reality. We are not doomed to be tossed forever like shipwrecked sailors on an unknown ocean. Marx claimed, and I think he was right in this, that the gods and the powers of religion are hypostasized, anthropomorphic personalizations of social power and impotence. Light has driven them away. Similarly, the gods and the powers of the ideologists shall once burst like trolls in the sunrise: the economical 'realities', man's inherent capitalism, the holy market, the state as the only organizational form of humankind, the necessity of the élite and the permanence of subservience.
A society can be completely transparent to its members and still exist and work. Relationships between people must not necessarily masquerade as prices of goods. Man's creative labour must not forever be a hostile power in opposition to him. He is entirely a social animal, and his sociality is in no need of mystification and coercion. It is neither threats of eternal nor of temporal retribution that make most of us behave decently to each other: it is our human nature. Adolf Eichmann was no born criminal. It was not his biological nature, the chimpanzee within, that made him a mass murderer. It was his other, cultural nature, for this is where ideologies arise and linger. It was an ideology, not his genes that told him that it was his duty to organize the Holocaust.
Mystification and power are not inherent in society as such; then society would be fundamentally evil, and we too as social beings would be basically evil. Neither are they necessary to us because of external circumstances, a Leviathan which must rule us in order to check our inherent blood-lust. They are necessary only to those who would exploit others, to those who would use others as tools of their own ambition and their own enrichment. Free men and women can defend themselves against such people, rationally and with restraint, if they are allowed to do so. But how can you fight crime and greed in a society that exists only to further the interests of the criminals and the greedy?
Freedom, then, is possible. We do not need the Leviathan. Hobbes believed that society had been instituted, that men in their natural state were non-social and that their cohabitation was an invention, which had once been introduced among them, and in the form of absolute monarchy even. But it is not society that has been erected above us; man has become human in and through a society, only in a society is our human existence possible (and how long would you survive as an animal in the woods?) It is the state that has been instituted - above and against civil society, above and against its members. And human beings have needed it, to shore up their class power over subordinate classes.
A free society does not mean that all conflicts, all dilemmas, all suffering suddenly evaporate. All such statements are purely verbal charlatanery. The hills will not change into marzipan, nor the seas into lemonade. Sorrow and death will forever walk amongst us, the mirror images of joy and birth. Such is the human condition, and no social arrangements in the world can abolish it nor can any ideological smokescreens hide it in the long run. They are the consequences of our biological nature, which the ideologists hate so. But those who hate it, hate life itself. Those who will not face our tragedy will not see our glory either. Whoever must hide reality from himself, anaesthetize himself with chemical or ideological drugs, with megalomaniacal ideas about race or manifest destiny or with what Engels referred to as "the tiresome notion of personal immortality," denies his own humanity. For the difference between ourselves and the chimp is neither reason nor emotion, and least of all 'consciousness'. Our hairy brother holds all this in common with us, in kind if not in degree. The difference consists in two things which have probably been given to us along with the gift of language: one is certainly rationalization, hypocrisy, the ability to hide our motives even from ourselves. But the other is that we are the only animal which is conscious of his own mortality, at least occasionally, and can still continue to live and love, to think and act.
I do not think that you can ever cease to be a Marxist. I do not think that you can accept half-truths, lies, rationalizations, ideology, when you have once learnt to use your reason. For Marxism is scientific. To abjure it, we must therefore reject not only its answers, we must reject its questions and the very way of putting them. This would be tantamount to rising and declaring that earth is flat and that all we need to know about it is found in the Holy Writ. This would be possible only as a mental suicide, after which a zombie existence only would remain to one, as one of the undead.
Those who make this recantation, believing it, can therefore never have been Marxists. A thinking human being cannot change himself into an idiot. Self-idiotization is certainly possible, but it must be started early. Pathological idiocy also exists, but as a problem in neurology, not in social science. Those erstwhile 'Marxists' and 'communists' which are now milling about in a panic, slinging mud at their own past - and thus incidentally at themselves - in their eagerness to find new owners with new collars and leashes, those people may have paid the dues of a party, or learnt some ready-made cathechism by rote. They have never lived Marxism, understood Marxism - which is basically the same thing. And if they have cause to feel shame, which may sometimes well be the case, then neither Karl Marx nor their honest comrades have given them cause to do so.
This age of collapse, panic and confusion is also a fruitful age, an era of great possibilities. For three generations, we and our parents and predecessors have been dragging Stalinist 'really existing socialism' along as the chained prisoner dragged his iron ball. It has been impossible to distance oneself from it: it has remained attached to us by the chain of the past. Its dreadful weight derives from Stalinism's own indigestible mass of reaction and barbarism. No matter what we have said, no matter what we have done - and of course no matter what we have thought - the societies of Stalinism have been the highly visible, overwhelmingly concrete examples of 'socialism'. Aha, like in Russia? End of debate.
No matter what we have thought ... but many of us were never capable of thinking our own thoughts out. It was all right to distance oneself from this or that aspect of Stalinism. This was after all necessary, even in a civilization as imperfect as that of capitalism. It was even all right to distance yourself from all aspects of Stalinism. But only one by one, separately, never in their entirety. All that was found impossible to accept had to be described as unfortunate but isolated abuses, instances of degeneration which the apologists were rather too eager to write to the account of capitalist encirclement and aggression. In principle, they argued like the propagandists and fellow-travellers of capitalism, who painted each imperialist outrage, each massacre, each case of publicly revealed pillage as isolated but regrettably unavoidable spots in an otherwise brightly shining sun. In the shadows there lurked forever the notion that Stalinism was after all somehow socialist and that it therefore had to be defended. And then you rose and applauded the Soviet delegate when he had regurgitated his nonsense, and he who first stopped clapping was nearly as perfidious a 'Trotskyist-Maoist' as he who would not applaud at all. All attempts to analyse 'existing socialism' with the instruments of Marxism were indignantly rejected. Marxism could explain all societies on this planet Earth, from prehistoric time to the present, except those that actually claimed to be Marxist.
And then there were of course the congress-farers. There certainly were 'leading comrades' who felt irresistibly called to speak at the congresses of ruling parties, to produce the same meaningless newspeak as the hosts used, and to warm themselves in the glow of the great or at least the minor luminaries of this world. These are exactly the comrades who are now screaming about the criminal nature of all that they have themselves officially harangued in Moscow, Berlin, Prague and Bucharest. And we, the non-leading comrades? What crimes have we committed? We who never ate Brezhnev's caviar, drunk Honecker's schnapps or slept in Ceausescu's bed? We who only fought for a just society in Sweden, and who mostly received only hatred, contempt and harassment for our trouble, instead of schnapps and caviar? What crime have we committed? The criminals point their fingers, and cannot help but point at themselves. They must content themselves with this.
Much has been written about the 'pilgrims' of socialism, of those who devoutly travelled to various Vaticans in order to kiss the feet of various Popes. And they did exist. It is heavy going for a human being never to be able to say anything but no, no. We have a need to sometimes say yea. We are not all strong enough to say no to our yea-urge. Many people feel an overwhelming need to find somewhere something to affirm, something you can point to as a living model, a holy and Catholic church where salvation is. It is at the same time remarkable how the bourgeois pilgrim traffic is taken for granted. Has anybody ever poked fun at all those upper-class faithful who have kissed the sidewalk outside the New York Stock Exchange or have stood trembling with awe outside the White House? Not to speak of their parents and their peregrinations to Berlin? That people travel to these holy places in order to worship there is regarded as a perfectly natural thing. Only pilgrimages in the wrong direction elicit comment. But imagine the scandal, if C.H. Hermansson or Lasse Werner had frequented the corridors of the Central Committee or the KGB, the way Carl Bildt or Olof Palme frequented the State Department or the C.I.A.! [Carl Henrik Hermansson and Lars Werner - former chairmen of the Swedish CP, later 'the Left'. Carl Bildt, present leader of the Conservative ('Moderate') party in Sweden. Olof Palme, former chairman of the Social Democrats and Prime Minister.]
We are now rid of all that. Russia is still a terrifying example - but to the other side. The collapse, the fall, the coming mass starvation and dictatorship are now iron balls around the feet of the bourgeois only. They wrote the recipe for disaster. We are back at square one: we have to define our terms without letting others define them for us, to lay out our course which does not lead us to any ultramontane Vatican, to be ourselves without any obligations other than that to our own conscience. We are free.
The bourgeois too are back to square one. But they are not free. From this moment they are irrevocably bound to their own deeds and misdeeds. The fall of Stalinism has not made capitalism the least bit more capable of solving its own problems. It can however no longer refuse its own peoples a decent life, absolving itself by pointing to the threat of the Evil Empire. There are no excuses anymore. For the first time in seventy years, daylight shines brightly on the battlefield of the class struggle. Here we stand. There they are. This is what they do, this is how they are. They are the enemy. It is a merciless light, but we see clearly by it.
And when we reach for a map, then there is only one available. It is incomplete. It must be added to and refined. Certain parts of it have to be revised. But it is the only map; for those that the enemy are trying to press on us are useless. Only reality is good enough for us - this accursed reality which hobbles us and tortures us, but which nevertheless has an irrefutable point in its favour: it exists, and it is alone in doing so.
Edit:
Source: http://www.timberwolf.a.se/home/conf.html
The other texts are:
Was Marx wrong:
1: Science and ideology
2: Science and logic
3: Marx was wrong!
4: The marxists were wrong!
5: Marx was right!
6: The epistemology
7: History materialism
(this one is the eight part)
The Impossible capitalism:
1: Such is capitalism
2: The boundaries of capitalism
3: The boundaries of the market
4: The spiral of death
5: Life on a stick
6: The Great illusion
7: What is to be done?
About the state:
1: State and society
2: Leviathan
3: The state and the revolutionaries
And the article "Marx and Darwin". I do not completly agree with everything in the text, and some things I very much disagree with. Still, they are all excellent.
--------
Confessions of an Unrepentant Vulgar Marxist
©Lars Bergquist 1992
[The final chapter of Hade Marx fel? (Was Marx Wrong?), Stockholm 1992]
I have used the previous chapters to establish the facts (I do hope that nobody is too browbeaten to protest). This last chapter is different. It is both more speculative and more personal. My excuse is that Marxism is no abstract academic Glasperlenspiel. It is and must be life and action. If we do not dare live Marxism, then we should at least leave it and the Marxists alone and in peace.
I came to Marxism by the same route as Marx himself did; this is not intended to be as self important as it may sound. The hope of a society without power and subjection, of a dignified existence for man, is a hope that anyone can entertain. This position-taking however is the inner compass of Marxism: Without it, Marxism degenerates into a purely intellectual exercise which puts its participants under no obligation whatever. When we lose this moral compass, then we are lost in the wilderness where we willingly accept the power-claims of both Stalinism and capitalism - often simultaneously.
Each time that Europe has seen a turn to the left during the last one hundred and twenty years, Marxism has acquired a tail - a baggage of café intellectuals and academic pedants who have jumped on the bandwagon, often with intentions that have been perfectly honourable in their own eyes. The new-found fellowship with les damnés de la terre has given rise to many a frisson of the kind that the intellectual bourgeoisie often experiences when slumming. Still, it is well not to put your foot into something unpleasant. So, no accusation do the fashionable Marxists fear more than that of being vulgar.
Consequently, there has been no fashionable idealist philosophy during the last century that the fashionable Marxists have not tried to infuse Marxism with. Following the latest signals from the haute monde, they have sought to prove that Marxism is no Ersatz thought for dumb proletarians, but the best and most refined empirio-criticism, logical positivism, humanism, analytical philosophy, structuralism - and of course also the best variety of the philosophy according to which the universe is a hallucination in the brain of an assistant professor. And Christianity, oops, I nearly forgot Christianity. It has not been really 'in', but it has never been totally 'out' either; and there has consequently never been any lack of comrades who have tried to persuade us that Marx was simply one of the prophets, and that Marxism is compatible not only with idealism as such, but with the religious variety.
What makes the living essence of Marxism incomprehensible and indigestible to these people is its position-taking, quite simply. Marxism and Marxists will not accept certain facts, and especially the power relations of present society (they do not even accept power as such, but this is completely incomprehensible to a bourgeois. How can people live without a boot pressed against the backs of their necks and a police stick waving behind them?) They find it necessary to take a position. This exactly is the 'vulgarity' that strikes horror into the fashionable Marxists. It means that they cannot mumble and be evasive, cocoon themselves in their own empty phrases and reassure both themselves and their listeners that this was not really serious, it was just an academic Gedankenexperiment. They did not really mean it - they just wanted to wave the latest and most exotic buzzwords. Vulgarity, calling a spade a spade, is in their eyes simply class treason, treason against their own class, the bourgeoisie. Few have the courage to commit that transgression unblinkingly.
I do not know why these vapours have never troubled me. On the contrary, I have always found the clarity of Marxism attractive, the openly declared premises and the forthright conclusions. After I had rid myself of the Christian paranoia at the age of thirteen, it was a natural second step (though this followed much later) also to free myself of social and political mystifications. I took both these steps with a feeling of immense liberation which is still vivid in my memory. They were steps out of the anguished half-light of myth into a brightly lit, comprehensible reality, into a world where the use of one's human reason was permissible.
That the world should be comprehensible to us without the aid of revelations and arcana is probably the most revolutionary notion ever. This is humankind's declaration of its own coming of age. Those who have in fresh memory my first essays on this subject, those on science, will also understand that this notion is no symptom of intellectual hubris.
First, we understand since Darwin why reason can comprehend reality, the cause of that strange consonance of thought and being which has for so long mystified the philosophers. If our ability to think had been of no use in understanding the world, then we would not have possessed it. Secondly, we now comprehend that our truths are provisional. We are not spying on God, and neither do we write laws for the cosmos. Man's thought will always have a frontier to push against.
The existence of this frontier has certainly always been a delight to the spirit-junkies. We do not know everything, they say; therefore we know nothing (though they can enlighten us of course). Outside the light of our knowledge begins darkness, and in this darkness, just out of reach of the irritating light of reason, is the abode of the Other, the transcendent world, that of which you cannot speak, only scream or mumble. Down on your knees before darkness! Never shall we understand what dwells there, except by the intervention of those priests and prophets who eagerly offer to tell us about it, in much detail and for a consideration, of course.
And then the circle of light widens and the supposedly transcendent world becomes accessible to inspection. The terrain proves to be much the same as that which we knew previously. It is new terrain; new vistas open and we have to redraw our maps. But the monsters and the powers that the spiritualists painted to us have evaporated just as the sea-serpents and the dog-headed tribes that the cartographers drew in the atlases of yore, to fill in the blank spaces on sea and land.
The spirit-junkies are not put off however. Their consternation eases and they note with satisfaction that the new and wider circle of light also has its limit; behind it begins darkness again, and they move their lares and penates there, all those idols that can exist only in the dark. See, you do not know everything ... and we do the same procedure as before.
But if we recognize that our knowledge can never be comprehensive, is this not a fundamental problem for us? Is there then not a chance after all that the darkness-mongers are right, that a radically non-physical reality does exist somewhere? Je n'ai besoin de cet hypothèse. ['I do not need this hypothesis.' Laplace's famous rejoinder when Napoleon asked him 'what place God had in his system'.] It is superfluous. There is nothing in our knowledge of the world that would make this hypothesis necessary. If this transcendent reality did exist, then our ignorance of it would be known by us, we would see a large, clearly visible gap in all our scientific models. The fact that this gap is nowhere to be found banishes the transcendent reality to the lumber-room where those things are stored which no one can prove and which no one takes the trouble to refute, because their existence or nonexistence would not make the slightest difference.
There certainly are kinds of information about reality that will remain forever inaccessible to us. For instance, we cannot make any measurements inside a black hole, because no light, no signal, no data can leave it. Does that mean that we shall have to join in the chorus in praise of ignorance: ignorabimus, ignorabimus - we shall never know? Not at all. The point is that we know why we do not know, and that we know that the cause of our ignorance is a physical one, part of physical reality itself. Kant was correct in saying that das Ding für uns can never be completely congruent with das Ding an sich. His mistake was the belief that there existed a metaphysical abyss between them, that the thing in itself belonged to a different, non-physical reality.
Just as physical reality is comprehensible, so is social reality. We are not doomed to be tossed forever like shipwrecked sailors on an unknown ocean. Marx claimed, and I think he was right in this, that the gods and the powers of religion are hypostasized, anthropomorphic personalizations of social power and impotence. Light has driven them away. Similarly, the gods and the powers of the ideologists shall once burst like trolls in the sunrise: the economical 'realities', man's inherent capitalism, the holy market, the state as the only organizational form of humankind, the necessity of the élite and the permanence of subservience.
A society can be completely transparent to its members and still exist and work. Relationships between people must not necessarily masquerade as prices of goods. Man's creative labour must not forever be a hostile power in opposition to him. He is entirely a social animal, and his sociality is in no need of mystification and coercion. It is neither threats of eternal nor of temporal retribution that make most of us behave decently to each other: it is our human nature. Adolf Eichmann was no born criminal. It was not his biological nature, the chimpanzee within, that made him a mass murderer. It was his other, cultural nature, for this is where ideologies arise and linger. It was an ideology, not his genes that told him that it was his duty to organize the Holocaust.
Mystification and power are not inherent in society as such; then society would be fundamentally evil, and we too as social beings would be basically evil. Neither are they necessary to us because of external circumstances, a Leviathan which must rule us in order to check our inherent blood-lust. They are necessary only to those who would exploit others, to those who would use others as tools of their own ambition and their own enrichment. Free men and women can defend themselves against such people, rationally and with restraint, if they are allowed to do so. But how can you fight crime and greed in a society that exists only to further the interests of the criminals and the greedy?
Freedom, then, is possible. We do not need the Leviathan. Hobbes believed that society had been instituted, that men in their natural state were non-social and that their cohabitation was an invention, which had once been introduced among them, and in the form of absolute monarchy even. But it is not society that has been erected above us; man has become human in and through a society, only in a society is our human existence possible (and how long would you survive as an animal in the woods?) It is the state that has been instituted - above and against civil society, above and against its members. And human beings have needed it, to shore up their class power over subordinate classes.
A free society does not mean that all conflicts, all dilemmas, all suffering suddenly evaporate. All such statements are purely verbal charlatanery. The hills will not change into marzipan, nor the seas into lemonade. Sorrow and death will forever walk amongst us, the mirror images of joy and birth. Such is the human condition, and no social arrangements in the world can abolish it nor can any ideological smokescreens hide it in the long run. They are the consequences of our biological nature, which the ideologists hate so. But those who hate it, hate life itself. Those who will not face our tragedy will not see our glory either. Whoever must hide reality from himself, anaesthetize himself with chemical or ideological drugs, with megalomaniacal ideas about race or manifest destiny or with what Engels referred to as "the tiresome notion of personal immortality," denies his own humanity. For the difference between ourselves and the chimp is neither reason nor emotion, and least of all 'consciousness'. Our hairy brother holds all this in common with us, in kind if not in degree. The difference consists in two things which have probably been given to us along with the gift of language: one is certainly rationalization, hypocrisy, the ability to hide our motives even from ourselves. But the other is that we are the only animal which is conscious of his own mortality, at least occasionally, and can still continue to live and love, to think and act.
I do not think that you can ever cease to be a Marxist. I do not think that you can accept half-truths, lies, rationalizations, ideology, when you have once learnt to use your reason. For Marxism is scientific. To abjure it, we must therefore reject not only its answers, we must reject its questions and the very way of putting them. This would be tantamount to rising and declaring that earth is flat and that all we need to know about it is found in the Holy Writ. This would be possible only as a mental suicide, after which a zombie existence only would remain to one, as one of the undead.
Those who make this recantation, believing it, can therefore never have been Marxists. A thinking human being cannot change himself into an idiot. Self-idiotization is certainly possible, but it must be started early. Pathological idiocy also exists, but as a problem in neurology, not in social science. Those erstwhile 'Marxists' and 'communists' which are now milling about in a panic, slinging mud at their own past - and thus incidentally at themselves - in their eagerness to find new owners with new collars and leashes, those people may have paid the dues of a party, or learnt some ready-made cathechism by rote. They have never lived Marxism, understood Marxism - which is basically the same thing. And if they have cause to feel shame, which may sometimes well be the case, then neither Karl Marx nor their honest comrades have given them cause to do so.
This age of collapse, panic and confusion is also a fruitful age, an era of great possibilities. For three generations, we and our parents and predecessors have been dragging Stalinist 'really existing socialism' along as the chained prisoner dragged his iron ball. It has been impossible to distance oneself from it: it has remained attached to us by the chain of the past. Its dreadful weight derives from Stalinism's own indigestible mass of reaction and barbarism. No matter what we have said, no matter what we have done - and of course no matter what we have thought - the societies of Stalinism have been the highly visible, overwhelmingly concrete examples of 'socialism'. Aha, like in Russia? End of debate.
No matter what we have thought ... but many of us were never capable of thinking our own thoughts out. It was all right to distance oneself from this or that aspect of Stalinism. This was after all necessary, even in a civilization as imperfect as that of capitalism. It was even all right to distance yourself from all aspects of Stalinism. But only one by one, separately, never in their entirety. All that was found impossible to accept had to be described as unfortunate but isolated abuses, instances of degeneration which the apologists were rather too eager to write to the account of capitalist encirclement and aggression. In principle, they argued like the propagandists and fellow-travellers of capitalism, who painted each imperialist outrage, each massacre, each case of publicly revealed pillage as isolated but regrettably unavoidable spots in an otherwise brightly shining sun. In the shadows there lurked forever the notion that Stalinism was after all somehow socialist and that it therefore had to be defended. And then you rose and applauded the Soviet delegate when he had regurgitated his nonsense, and he who first stopped clapping was nearly as perfidious a 'Trotskyist-Maoist' as he who would not applaud at all. All attempts to analyse 'existing socialism' with the instruments of Marxism were indignantly rejected. Marxism could explain all societies on this planet Earth, from prehistoric time to the present, except those that actually claimed to be Marxist.
And then there were of course the congress-farers. There certainly were 'leading comrades' who felt irresistibly called to speak at the congresses of ruling parties, to produce the same meaningless newspeak as the hosts used, and to warm themselves in the glow of the great or at least the minor luminaries of this world. These are exactly the comrades who are now screaming about the criminal nature of all that they have themselves officially harangued in Moscow, Berlin, Prague and Bucharest. And we, the non-leading comrades? What crimes have we committed? We who never ate Brezhnev's caviar, drunk Honecker's schnapps or slept in Ceausescu's bed? We who only fought for a just society in Sweden, and who mostly received only hatred, contempt and harassment for our trouble, instead of schnapps and caviar? What crime have we committed? The criminals point their fingers, and cannot help but point at themselves. They must content themselves with this.
Much has been written about the 'pilgrims' of socialism, of those who devoutly travelled to various Vaticans in order to kiss the feet of various Popes. And they did exist. It is heavy going for a human being never to be able to say anything but no, no. We have a need to sometimes say yea. We are not all strong enough to say no to our yea-urge. Many people feel an overwhelming need to find somewhere something to affirm, something you can point to as a living model, a holy and Catholic church where salvation is. It is at the same time remarkable how the bourgeois pilgrim traffic is taken for granted. Has anybody ever poked fun at all those upper-class faithful who have kissed the sidewalk outside the New York Stock Exchange or have stood trembling with awe outside the White House? Not to speak of their parents and their peregrinations to Berlin? That people travel to these holy places in order to worship there is regarded as a perfectly natural thing. Only pilgrimages in the wrong direction elicit comment. But imagine the scandal, if C.H. Hermansson or Lasse Werner had frequented the corridors of the Central Committee or the KGB, the way Carl Bildt or Olof Palme frequented the State Department or the C.I.A.! [Carl Henrik Hermansson and Lars Werner - former chairmen of the Swedish CP, later 'the Left'. Carl Bildt, present leader of the Conservative ('Moderate') party in Sweden. Olof Palme, former chairman of the Social Democrats and Prime Minister.]
We are now rid of all that. Russia is still a terrifying example - but to the other side. The collapse, the fall, the coming mass starvation and dictatorship are now iron balls around the feet of the bourgeois only. They wrote the recipe for disaster. We are back at square one: we have to define our terms without letting others define them for us, to lay out our course which does not lead us to any ultramontane Vatican, to be ourselves without any obligations other than that to our own conscience. We are free.
The bourgeois too are back to square one. But they are not free. From this moment they are irrevocably bound to their own deeds and misdeeds. The fall of Stalinism has not made capitalism the least bit more capable of solving its own problems. It can however no longer refuse its own peoples a decent life, absolving itself by pointing to the threat of the Evil Empire. There are no excuses anymore. For the first time in seventy years, daylight shines brightly on the battlefield of the class struggle. Here we stand. There they are. This is what they do, this is how they are. They are the enemy. It is a merciless light, but we see clearly by it.
And when we reach for a map, then there is only one available. It is incomplete. It must be added to and refined. Certain parts of it have to be revised. But it is the only map; for those that the enemy are trying to press on us are useless. Only reality is good enough for us - this accursed reality which hobbles us and tortures us, but which nevertheless has an irrefutable point in its favour: it exists, and it is alone in doing so.
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Source: http://www.timberwolf.a.se/home/conf.html