The Specter of Depression: Paul Mattick’s Business as Usual

Business as Usual: the Economic Crisis and the Failure of Capitalism

Reaktion Books (London), 2011

Paul Mattick’s Business as Usual is an attempt to come to grips with the global economic crisis that began in 2007 in Marxist terms, an entry into a growing category books which includes David Harvey’s The Enigma of Capital. Mattick (son of the late council communist Paul Mattick) argues that, contrary to views of the entirety of the world of economists and business journalists, the ongoing crisis (ongoing in the sense that economies of Europe and the U.S. are inextricably interrelated) fundamentally reflects the dire problem of profitability for capitalism. However much the economists may wish to trumpet the long-awaited turnaround, the threat of depression and war haunt a system running out of options.

Mattick provides a bracing reminder of the reality of the nature of the capitalist system in his analysis of the limits of Keynesian stimulus policies:

From the viewpoint of economics—including most left-wing approaches—the point of an economy is the allocation of resources to meet consumption needs. The chief issue distinguishing conflicting viewpoints, then, is what sort of economy—what mix, for example, of market and state planning—does the best job of promoting the public welfare (the wealth of nations). This is why most economists, including Keynes, think of profit-making as a device for getting people with money to invest in the production that seves consumption. And this is what allows a contemporary Keynesian like Paul Krugman to ignore the imperative of profitability and insist, in making an argument for a massive stimulus program, that “under current conditions, a surge in public spending would employ Americans who would otherwise be unemployed and money that would otherwise be sitting idle, and put both to work producing something useful.” But capitalism is a system not for providing “employment” as an abstract goal but for employing people who produce profits; its goal is not the production of useful things but the increase of capital.

 Mattick excels in the anti-Keynesian argument so neccessary today (Naomi Klein should put this book on her reading list) as well as in his passages on the enormous role of the state in the capitalist economy, but in his stated aim of avoiding “jargon,” he constructs a critical structure lacking a treatment of  the foundation of the origin of profit: surplus value (the word “value” does not appear in the book) and the abstract labor that produces it. This stems from Mattick’s appearent interpretation of Marxism as a critique of political economy, rather than a philosophic criticism not only of political economy, but of the subjective assumptions that underlay it. The fetish of the commodity, as Marx criticizes it in Chapt. 1 of Capital, is neither an economic nor a sociological category, but rather a philosophic predicate of capitalist “civilization.”

Because of this sociological truncation of Marx’s thought (one he shares with David Harvey), the criticism offered in Business as Usual is ultimately inadequate. It should be read, however, as the puncturing of the balloon of dominant economic thinking it delivers is a salutory one.

(The excerpted passage is from Chapter 5: “Appropriate Policies”)

Retrospective Review: Boris Souvarine’s Stalin

Stalin

by Boris Souvarine, translated by C.L.R. James

Alliance Book Corporation, 1939

No biography in the conventional sense can be written about Stalin, due to the far-reaching falsification of the historic record of the “life” the man lived. Although Boris Souvarine’s Stalin is frequently referred to as a biography, it can be more accurately described as a detailed history and critique of the course of the Russian revolution and counter-revolution.

English-language sources on Souvarine’s life and politics are not particularly strong, but he was born in Russia and emigrated as a child with his family to France. He participated in the left-wing of the French socialist movement and was a charter member of the Communist Party, eventually breaking with the Third International in sympathy with Trotsky. He was not, strictly-speaking, a Trotskyist, but functioned as an independent oppositionist. Souvarine organized the French section of the Institute for Social History (which was burglarized by the GPU in a successful effort to obtain Trotsky’s archives). Souvarine sided with Victor Serge in his criticisms of Trotsky (he was also acquainted with Panait Istrati), which earned him the enmity of the Old Man. It is difficult to determine Souvarine’s post-WW II political trajectory from the sources at hand, but he seems to have moved towards a more traditional social democratic position.

Souvarine’s Stalin, originally published in 1935 and translated into English by C.L.R. James (while he worked on The Black Jacobins), is strong on the period after Lenin’s death and excels in its account of the Triumvarate and the so-called United Opposition. The English edition contains a long postscript on the Moscow Trials and the Great Terror, which must have been written after the original edition. Below  are two brief (non-contiguous) excerpts from the postcript, dealing with the fascinating diplomatic relationship (and social kinship) of the U.S.S.R. and fascist Italy.

Criticism &.c highly recommends this indispensable book.

*  *  *

from Stalin by Boris Souvarine (excerpts from the postscript, “The Counter Revolution”)

ONE of the most remarkable phenomena of the period, the discovery of a Fatherland in the U.S.S.R., some time after the triumph of national-socialism in Germany, was the result of a great miscalculation of Stalin. He hoped at first to come to an agreement with Hitler, as he had formerly done with Mussolini, in spite of the verbal differences in doctrine, and on the basis of the similarity in method between parties of the mailed fist. Since the reception of the Duce at the Soviet Embassy in Rome, on the morrow of the murder of Matteotti, and later, under the pretext of courtesy, the dispatch of congratulations to Mussolini by Rykov after his stay at Sorrento, where Gorky spent most of his time, the relations between the U.S.S.R. and Italy became increasingly intimate and cordial. Mussolini did not conceal a discreet admiration for Lenin, and the reciprocal borrowings increased between the two totalitarian regimes, hand in hand with the progress of their economic relations. In 1933, the year of Hitler’s advent to power, an Italo-Soviet commercial agreement was concluded in May, followed in September by a pact of friendship, non-aggression and neutrality. A Soviet squadron anchored in October off Naples, and the following year an Italian military delegation proceeded to Moscow. Russia even placed orders for warships in Italy. Cordial telegrams from Litvinov testify for posterity to this mutual understanding…. Mussolini flattered himself that he had established a model entente with the Bolsheviks, suppressing communism at home whilst negotiating advantageously with the so-called Soviet State. Thus Stalin thought that he would conclude a similar pact with Hitler, on the ruins of the communist movement in Germany. The renewal of the agreement of Rapallo confirmed him in this hope, as did the new credit facilities granted to the U.S.S.R. by German industry. But he had to sing a different tune when the Third Reich assumed an attitude of determined hostility toward the Bolshevism of the Russo-Soviet State as towards export communism. Hitler’s intuition finally prevailed over the contrary view; a view fairly widespread both in the Reichswehr and in diplomatic circles, which opposed to a new Drang nach Oesten the Bismarckian conception of an alliance with Russia. In vain the Caucasian, D. Kandelaki, appointed as commercial envoy to Berlin with a secret mission from Stalin, multiplied advances, invitations and soundings. The Fuehrer turned a deaf ear and persevered in his attack on Russia through the Communist International. In the end the disappointed Stalin had no choice but to turn toward France and England, toward the League of Nations, to play a different game, and to awaken in the peoples of the U.S.S.R. the consciousness of patriotic duty and of the fascist danger.

*  *  *

Mussolini had taken a keen interest in this unique counter-revolution, to the point of devoting to it commentaries from his own pen in the Popolo d’Italia. After the sensational execution of the generals, his article entitled Twilight (13th June, 1937) was somewhat severe on Stalin’s regime where “massacre is on the order of the day and of the night.” But a month later, the Critica Fascista (15th July) considered, in a study of the Fascism of Stalin, that the latter’s “fascist” reforms proved the natural force of expansion and the universality of the ideal of the Black Shirts. And during the trial of the twenty-one, Mussolini himself asked (Popolo d’talia for 5th March, 1938) whether “in view of the catastrophe of Lenin’s system, Stalin could secretly have become a fascist,” and stated that in any case “Stalin is doing a notable service to fascism by mowing down in large armfuls his enemies who had been reduced to impotence.” In large armfuls, indeed, Stalin mowed down not only his enemies, declared or secret, alleged or real, but also his “friends,” his creatures, his accomplices. Between the last two pseudo-judicial exhibitions, he had mowed down not only the Old Guard of the Party and the flower of the Communist Youth, but, after the General Staff of the Red Army, all the heads of Soviet governmental, of national and local administration. (It almost goes without saying that the former oppositionists, not produced at the trials, such as Smilga, Preobrazhensky, Sosnovsky, Byeloborodov, Uglanov, etc., must have succumbed in the jails of their “socialist fatherland.”)

See also:

Panaït Istrati’s Russia Unveiled: A Forgotten Classic Of Opposition To Stalinism

The Marginal Marx

Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity and Non-Western Societies

by Kevin B. Anderson

The University of Chicago Press, 2010, 319 pp.

Marx is journalistically rediscovered  at regular intervals, at least when business writers have to confront an economic crisis. He makes good copy. The academic intellectual consensus, however, is that Marx is no longer relevant. To them, he is either a brilliant but fundamentally mistaken critic of the excesses of capitalism’s early period or the figure chiefly responsible for the social catastrophies of the twentieth century (the late Tony Judt exemplified this attitude). An important new book by scholar Kevin B. Anderson—author of Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism—forces us to realize that despite the oppresive prevalence of this opinion, we may not yet even know Marx.

Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity and Non-Western Societies is a thoroughgoing account of the extensive but little known writings of Marx on such diverse topics as the U.S. Civil War, the politics of Britian’s domination of Ireland, Tsarist Russia’s imperialism in the Caucasus, and early anthropological studies of India, Indonesia, and Peru (the global “margins” of the book’s title). Much of this material appeared as newspaper contributions to Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune (Marx was recruited to the paper by the Fourierist socialist Charles A. Dana) and the Viennese periodical Die Presse. An enormous amount of this writing, however, has remained not only unpublished, but also unseen except by a small circle of scholars and archivists since Marx’s death in 1883. The history and provenance of this material is another important focus of Anderson’s book.

Anderson’s argument—which in large measure he develops from currents in the work of Raya Dunayevskaya—is that the Marx scorned as an economic determinist and exclusively class-oriented thinker by the liberal intellectuals is by great lengths more sophisticated than his contemporary critics assume. So much so that Marx’s persistent investigations into the origins and history of the communal forms of property that long predate the age of capitalism are so wide-reaching that we must conclude that a profound rethinking of the idea of what used to be called “socialism” is in order.

While Marx’s critical notes on the American anthropologist Henry Lewis Morgan are known—perhaps unfortunately—through what Frederick Engels made of them in his Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Marx also made extensive notes on the works of lesser-known figures such as his friend Maxim Kovalevsky (Russia), J.W.B. Money (Java), John Budd Phear (India), and Thomas Raffles (India). Some of these multilingual excerpts and critical notes were transcribed (but not translated) by the anthropologist Lawrence Krader and published in 1972 as The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx. Anderson indicates that these notes and others will appear in English some time in the near future as Commune, Empire, and Class: 1879-82 Notebooks on Nonwestern and Precapitalist Societies (multiple editors, including Anderson) and Patriarchy and Property: The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx (from Yale University Press), edited by David Norman Smith.

The publication of these notes in English will make them available for the first time to those of us below the Olympian heights of international Marx scholarship involved in the production of the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe (MEGA) project.

Dunayevskaya—among the first American Marxists to single out these studies—called Marx’s Ethnological Notebooks a “trail to the 1980s” when she published Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution in 1982. Outside of the narrow realm of Marxology, what is their significance today? While the question is largely outside the scope of Anderson’s book, he does venture a brief answer to the effect that their immediate relevance to today’s world is limited, stressing the fact that the tenuously surving forms of communal ownership and production in Marx’s time have all but completely disappeared today.

However, he goes on to say:

Marx’s multilinear approach toward Russia, India, and other noncapitalist lands is more relevant for today at a general theoretical or methodological level, however. It can serve an important heuristic purpose, as a major example of his dialectical theory of society. Therein, he worked on the basis of the general principle that the entire world was coming under the domination of capital and its value form, while at the same time analyzing very concretely and historically many of the major societies of the globe that had not yet come fully under that domination.

But in a world in which both the left and right concur that humanity has no choice but to organize its material and spiritual existence on the basis of the expanded reproduction of value, an encounter with this “marginal” Marx may have the potential for an impact greater—on those who are willing to exercise the power of cognition—than Anderson seems willing to anticipate. Can a subjective “shock of recognition”—to use a phrase of Herman Melville’s that Dunayevskaya was fond of—produced by both Marx’s method and conclusions serve as the missing element in what the Russian revolutionary Alexander Herzen (who looked to the surviving communal forms of his country to serve as the basis of a new society) called the algebra of revolution? It is an open question, but in a world threatened in both the long and short term by the capital’s need to expand, humanity does not have the luxury of prolonging an answer.

Alan Wald on the literature of the Browder era

Trinity of Passion: the Literary Left and the Antifascist Crusade

University of North Carolina Press, 2007, (319 pages).

Alan Wald, a cultural historian of the U.S. left and editorial board member of Against the Current, is now midway through a projected trilogy on leftist writers of the twentieth century. Trinity of Passion: the Literary Left and the Antifascist Crusade focuses (primarily) on novelists of the thirties and forties and their relationship to the Spanish Civil War, the Popular Front, and the African-American struggle against racism during this period. The phrase “Trinity of Passion” comes from a poem by Edwin Rolfe, an Abraham Lincoln Battalion veteran.

Unlike the writers treated in Wald’s best known book, the excellent The New York Intellectuals: the Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s, those he profiles here are either members or close fellow travelers of the Communist Party.

Some of the highlights of the book are his discussions of the politics of African-American novelist Ann Petry, the writers of the large Yiddish-language CP press, and the political journey of playwright Arthur Miller, who we learn here sometimes used the pen name Matt Wayne in party publications.

Wald read his way through a prodigious amount of obscure novels from the period. While he doesn’t always make a strong case for the literary merit of some of this material, he does succeed in crafting a detailed view of the lost world of the cultural orbit of the CP (he includes a fascinating picture of the Daily Worker‘s city room among the books photographs).

His discussion of the Party’s subordination of the African-American struggle to the war effort of the Churchill-Roosevelt-Stalin Grand Alliance is in my view the book’s most noteworthy aspect and a welcome antidote to the influential revisionist school of historiography on the CP’s relationship to Black America.

The final book of Wald’s trilogy is to be titled The American Night: The Literary Left in the Era of the Cold War. Like this book and Wald’s other efforts, I anticipate that it will be worth reading.

New Review by Paresh Chattopadhyay

Paresh Chattopadhyay has published a review of a collection of socialist writings edited by Irfan Habib, a prominent Marxist historian of Mughal India, in the most recent issue of Economic and Political Weekly (Vol. 45, Issue 41; Oct. 9-15, 2010). As usual, Chattopadhyay does not let his scholarly respect for an individual deter him from issuing a devastating criticism when what he considers distortions of Marxism are involved. Habib’s book is On Socialism: Selections from Writings of Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, V I Lenin, J V Stalin, Mao Zedong (2009).

•••

An Excerpt From Chattopadhyay’s review, “Marx Made to Serve Party-State”

Stalinist Conception of Socialism

Let us now see how the editor depicts the socialist society, basing himself, in Marx’s case, almost wholly on a single text – the Gothacritique. Here we find as designers of this society not only Marx and Engels but also Lenin, Stalin and Mao. This “Hall of Fame” also accommodates in one corner [Oscar] Lange and [Maurice] Dobb (p 171). Socialism has a number of features: means of production are socialised; they are brought under “public ownership”, that is, state ownership. The product of surplus labour generated under this ownership provides for replacement and enlargement of the productive apparatus, “distribution among workers as additions to their wages or for social services”, and administration (our italics) (pp 171, 173). This is a mixture of Capital and the Gothacritique, between the accumulation process of capital and the enlarged reproduction of socialist economy.

Let us explore further the editor’s analysis. He cites from the Gothacritique the ultra famous paragraph beginning with the statement that in the cooperative society producers do not exchange their products, and that producers receive from society labour certificates indicating the amount of labour s/he has performed enabling her/him thereby the means of consumption having cost the same amount of labour. The editor then finds out by cost-benefit analysis (aided presumably by market socialists like Lange and Dobb), that Marx’s distribution scheme was not the most efficient, and concludes by asserting the necessity of the use of money (in lieu of Marx’s scheme) and declaring “we therefore come back to money, and so to commodity sale” (in socialism) (pp 173-74). Next, the editor asserts that as “Marx grappled with the problem of payment for labour under socialism, one notices his cautious hesitations”. He refers to Marx’s affirmation of the prevalence of principle of equal exchange – as in the commodity world (a bourgeois right) – in socialism, and concludes that the “labour process thus remains that of free wage labour” (p 174, our emphasis). “Labour power remains a commodity under Socialism” (p 175). The question now is, after taking over commodity production and wage labour from capital(ism) as the necessary elements, what specific characteristic could still mark the new society as socialist in Marx’s sense! The editor’s view that “a socialist economy is established by converting means of production into public – that is, state-property” was indeed the view of the spokespersons of Russia’s Party- State, but certainly not Marx’s.

State, commodity production and wage labour were always considered by Marx as foreign and antagonistic to the society of free and associated producers, which is what socialism is, right from its first stage onwards. There is no counter example in Marx’s texts. Marx starts his struggle against these elements of enslavement and alienation right from 1843-44. The remarkable thing is, in this whole discussion the editor, like Stalin, Lange e tutti quanti never refers to the new society’s specific mode of production or the specific relations of production arising therefrom. Marx opposes socialism’s associated mode of production (AMP) to the capitalist mode of production (CMP). “Property relations are only a juridical expression of production relations” (Marx 1859, 1980: 100). Even the very text of Marx which the editor is analysing underlines this. “Are the economic relations (that is, production relations) regulated by the legal conceptions or do not, on the contrary, the legal conceptions originate (entspringen) in the economic relations?” (Marx 1875, 1966: 177).

References

(1966) (1875): Randglossen zum Programm der deutschen Arbeiterpartei in Marx-Engels Ausgewälte Schriften, Vol 2 (Frankfurt am Mein: Fischer).

(1980) (1858-61): Ökonomische Manuskripte und Schriften, MEGA II/2 (Berlin: Dietz).

No Politics Are Local: A Critique of Robin Kelley’s Hammer and Hoe

I have finally taken the time to read Robin D.G. Kelley’s Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression. The book was written twenty years ago, but it is still widely read and its subject matter is of such importance that it warrants a brief review here.

Kelley is a professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. His book, published in 1990, is part of a current of American historiography that—broadly speaking—attempts to rehabilitate the position of the Communist Party in the interpretation of the struggle of African-American freedom struggle. Since the book was published, Kelley’s work has become more interesting, perhaps in part due to the influence to his encounter with the late Chicago Surrealist Franklin Rosemont and the Black Radical Congress inaugural meeting in 1988 (see my review of Black, Brown and Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora, which he co-edited with Rosemont).

Hammer and Hoe is distinguished from most of the revisionist writing on the CP (for example, the work of Maurice Isserman) in that Kelley prefers the party’s Third Period and Hitler-Stalin Pact policy to that of the Popular Front. In Kelley’s view, the more “radical” domestic policies allowed the Communists to create an “invisible army” of northern Alabama sharecroppers and industrial workers (miners and steel workers) in Birmingham to combat the near-monolithic system of violent racism that reigned over the south. The Popular Front, Kelley argues, subordinated those efforts to the class collaboration that was the party’s official line between 1935 and 1939.

My main objection to Kelley’s thesis is that it is impossible to separate “domestic” from “international” politics (which Kelly calls “foreign policy issues” on p. 190—where in a discussion of Germany’s invasion of Poland he neglects to mention that the U.S.S.R. also invaded the country). To do so is to violate the Marxist relationship between theory and practice and to reduce potentially revolutionary activity to reformism.

The book does make a contribution of confronting us with the incredible level of deadly racist violence which was the foundation of Jim Crow rule in the democratic U.S., so-called. Kelley concludes with a brief discussion of the relationship of this period with the emergence of the civil rights movement in Alabama in the 1960s, speculating on the “Long Civil Rights Movement” thesis.

For an alternate view of the events Kelley closes with, I refer readers to Chapter 20 (“Stokely Carmichael in Lowndes County”) in Charles Denbys’ Indignant Heart: A Black Workers’s Journal, a book that should be studied in its entirety alongside Hammer and Hoe.

Surrealism and the Non-White World

Black, Brown and Beige: Surrealist Writings From Africa and the Diaspora

Edited by Franklin Rosemont and Robin D.G. Kelley

University of Texas Press. 2009. 395 pages.

A title in the Surrealist Revolution series.

•••

African-American historian Robin Kelley and Surrealist Franklin Rosemont (who passed away in 2009) have produced a provocative compilation of Surrealist texts from Africa, the Caribbean, and Black America. Black, Brown and Beige: Surrealist Writings From Africa and the Diaspora makes a great contribution in that it makes plain the necessity to rethink some inadequate categories of race, politics, literature, and history.

Kelley’s scholarly career has taken an interesting turn since the publication of Hammer and Hoe in 1990, his study of the Alabama Communist Party of the 1930s (I have yet not read it in its entirety, but I intend to take this book up soon in the context of the so-called revisionist trend in U.S. Communist Party historiography). Kelley, most recently the author of a biography of jazz musician Thelonius Monk, has now for a number of years blended strong currents of Surrealist influence into an interesting Left cultural and political interpretation of African-American history.

Surrealism was strongly oriented to the colonial world from its inception in the 1920s, a characteristic that strategically positioned it for its great encounter with Negritude when André Breton met Aimé Césaire in Martinique in 1940. But almost a decade earlier, a vibrant group of Martinican students in France had initiated their own Surrealist effort in a journal called Légitimate Défense, published in 1932. The group was led by Etienne Léro and although it only published one number of the journal, its lasting influence exceeded by great lengths its modest distribution. Césaire read the journal while himself a student in France and went on to launch Tropiques, a journal inspired in large part by Légitimate Défense.

Much less well known is the history of the Surrealists of the Arab world, which in my opinion, makes the book’s section on North Africa its most interesting. Georges Heinen, an Egyptian, encountered Surrealism as a student in France in 1934. Upon his return he organized a series of groups and journals that would culminate in a formal Surrealist association in Cairo, notable for its high degree of participation women such as Ikbal El Alailly and Joyce Mansour. Surrealists of Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria are also profiled.

One weakness of this section is a failure on the part of Kelly and Rosemont to discuss the position of the Surrealists of North Africa towards Islam. While Heinen’s father was a Coptic Egyptian and Mansour was Jewish, any attitude towards the dominant religion of the region is mentioned only once, in a short text by Habib Tengour, an Algerian, called “Maghrebian Surrealism.” He writes, “It is, after all, in Maghrebian Sufism that surrealist subversion asserts itself: pure psychic automatism, mad love, revolt, unanticipated encounters, etc.” Interesting, but it demands comment by the editors.

The section on African-America and Surrealism is fascinating and presents what amounts to an alternative cultural history of the U.S. In particular, I found the information on the influence of Surrealism on Richard Wright to be fascinating. While I don’t share the diffuse interpretation of Surrealism of the Chicago school of Surrealism, which Kelley adheres to, the discussion of Ted Joans and Bob Kaufman alone are valuable contributions to the literary history of the post-war U.S.

The book’s final section is a moving essay by Kelley on the importance of Surrealism for the future of Black America, “Surrealism and the Creation of a Desirable Future.” Kelley writes, “As hard as it is for me to admit, I believe Marxism has failed to comprehend this elusive thing we call consciousness.” A statement not without some merit, to be sure, but one that assumes we know the full breadth of Marx’s vision. Kelley’s co-writer Franklin Rosemont was a keen appreciator of Marx’s Ethnological Notebooks, composed late in his life and the result of intense study of the history and development of human societies in pre-Columbian North America, Europe, and Asia. I believe that the fact that we do not yet have an English translation of the Notebooks available to us means that there are great potential avenues of development for Marxism ahead of us. Surrealism is so closely related to Marxism, as Kelley and Rosemont’s valuable book reminds us, that rather than Surrealism supplanting Marxism, as Kelley seems to believe necessary, it is my contention that the two will develop together.

Google Books has a long excerpt from the book available.

Breton and Haiti, Once Again

I just had the opportunity to read André Breton: Magus of Surrealism by Anna Balakian, the first American scholar to seriously investigate Surrealism. Balakian, who passed away in 1997 (see obituary in The New York Times, August 15, 1997), published Literary Origins of Surrealism in 1947, after having interviewed Breton when he lived in New York. André Breton: Magus of Surrealism, published in 1971, can be described as an expansive literary biography which takes up each period of the poet’s long career.

Among the many things that impressed me about the book was her serious attempt to understand Breton as a philosopher (see Chapter XVI, “Toward a New Humanism,” as well as the introduction to the third edition of her Surrealism: the Road to the Absolute), although she sees in his thought affinities with Structuralism that I believe are completely at odds with the main current of his thinking. One must also at least mention her discussion of what can be called Breton’s (and possibly Balakian’s) heterosexism.

Below is an excerpt from Chapter XII, “The Political Adventure on Two Continents,” which describes Breton’s visit to Haiti in 1946, discussed earlier on this blog. I particularly like her description of the changing racial composition of Breton’s audience on the three evenings of his lectures.

•••

On their way back to France, Breton and his new wife, Elisa, were invited by Dr. Pierre Mabille, his old friend, to give a number of lectures in Haiti, where Mabille had become a cultural attache in Port-au-Prince. No one was in a more sympathetic frame of mind than Mabille to herald all the attractive qualities of Breton as poet, as intellectual leader, and even as social prophet. He had all the luminaries lined up for what was perhaps the most magnificent and official reception given to Breton anywhere in all his life. Before a resplendent and educated, mostly white audience he gave the first of three scheduled addresses At the second session half the audience was black; by the third session the blacks largely outnumbered the whites. Soon thereafter occurred the Haitian revolution which overthrew the demagogical regime. It has been said, half in jest, that the only political action Breton’s revolutionary pronouncements ever produced was the Haitian revolution. Of course, it was rather one of those miraculous coincidences of chance in which Breton believed so profoundly. The overthrow of the government had been long in the planning. Perhaps Breton’s fervent tones of sympathy for the Haitian people and his expressed confidence in their autochthonous genius, catalyzed the impending storm, triggered the brewing rebellion, proved to be the Marseillaise of the Revolution,—and certainly caused much embarrassment to Breton’s host and “deplorable repercussions on his activities as a cultural attache.” [1]

Breton’s message to his Creole audience was a continuation of the monologue begun in Mexico and carried on in the United States; it was perhaps most dramatically relevant to the immediate needs of Haiti: that the natural forces of nature, that man’s intrinsic manifestations of cult, have as their centrifugal force a high sense of human dignity and liberty, and that the so-called forces of “civilization” intervene not to enhance these innate realities but to obstruct them, and are therefore doomed to self-destruction. Haiti for him was still bearing the marks of French imperialism, and his own visit there, a significant evidence of the unity of intent in surrealism, whose first political protest had been against the war in Morocco in 1925. As Breton remembered the events in Haiti in Entrentiens: “The newspaper Ruche, organ of the young generation…declared my words electrifying, and decided to take an insurrectional tone.” [2]

In weighing the differences between the ethnic heritage of the Haitians and Western civilization, Breton tips the balance in favor of the former, with his particular flare for finding success where misery exists and misery where success and progress are overtly proclaimed. He contrasts the divisions that exist in European civilization with the monolithic nature of the Haitian. He extols the Haitian’s power to amalgamate his African animism with the aboriginal voodoo cult and the best in Christian mysticism, capturing the essential forces of the three in a single potent vision of the unity of the material and the spiritual, of the affective and the rational, and producing a deepening sense of reality. Breton finds the innocent man, as symbolized by the Haitian, closer to the discovery of the Philosopher’s Stone, which leads to self-discovery and wisdom, than the civilized man who is bent on discovering only the contradictions and conflicts in himself and in his society. Again, situating surrealism as an extension of eighteenth-century illuminism and the French Revolution, Breton sees it as a tool for the search of knowledge; it is to be an antidote to mere mechanical progress which, “whether man contributes to it by his work or simply enjoys it, tend to isolate him in an abstract world where the meaning of his effort or his pleasure is depreciated, when it does not in addition hurl him into the most cruel disillusionment.” [3]  Man’s effort is ever annihilated by its unnatural direction, his pleasure is obliterated by artificially imposed duties.

[1] Preface to Pierre Mabille, Le Miroir du merveilleux, Editions de Minuit, Paris, 1962, p. 11.

[2] Entretiens, p. 244. (In English as Conversations: The Autobiography of Surrealism, 1993)

[2] “Le Surrealisme,” Conjonction, Jan. 1946, p. 13.

The Martinique Route

Martinique: Snake Charmer
by André Breton, with text and illustrations by André Masson
University of Texas Press, 2008. 117 pages.

One of Franklin Rosemont’s final contributions before his death in 2009 was seeing this book—part of the University of Texas Press Surrealist Revolution series, which he edited—through to print. As Rosemont says in his valuable introduction, “For lack of a translation, it has been overlooked in the United States and the rest of the English speaking world.” Thanks to the efforts of Rosemont and David W. Seaman, the translator, we at long last have this small classic before us.

These writings are products of André Breton’s profound 1941 encounter with the Caribbean world, a result of the necessity of flight from the increasingly threatening political and social atmosphere of Vichy France. Breton and his family were assisted in taking what was called the “Martinique route” by Varian Fry and the Emergency Rescue Committee. Fry includes the following harrowing description of a police search of his rented chateau (dubbed Villa Hope Visa by Victor Serge) in his stirring memoir of this time, Surrender on Demand. Breton and his family, along with Serge and several other intellectuals, were residing in the chateau. This passage appears in Chapter IX, “The Marshal Comes to Town.”

“Enter this,” the commissaire said, handing him the drawing.

It was one of the things left over from the previous night’s contest. It contained, among other things, a gallic cock. Beneath it someone had printed the words: “Le terrible crétin de Pétain.”

“Revolutionary propaganda,” the commissaire snorted.

“But I insist,” Breton was saying, “that the word is not Pétain, but putain. It is a comment by a friend on a friend. It does not concern the Marshal.”

“And the cock? The cock is France, isn’t it?” the commissaire shouted.

“C’est contestable,” Breton said weakly.

“Revolutionary propaganda, as clear as the nose on your face,” the commissaire said. “Enter it.”

The plainclothesman entered it.

“Invraisemblable,” Breton said, returning to his chair with a shrug of resignation.

The outcome of the incident for Fry and his guests was a stay of several days in the hold of a prison ship in the port of Marseille.

Breton and his family obtained exit visas in March. They departed on a steamer, Capitaine Paul Lemerle, the passenger list of which included anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss. Rosemont notes that Breton and Levi-Strauss struck up a friendship on the voyage and it is the latter whom I believe Breton refers to as a “highly distinguished young scientist” in “Troubled Waters,” his riveting account of the end of the voyage and his experiences of internment and police surveillance on the island.

In his preface, Breton describes his book as reflecting a profound duality, a tension between the opposites of interior and exterior, subjective and objective, that finds expression in the opposites of “lyrical language” and the “language of simple information.” In other words, Breton and his co-thinker André Masson (who arrived on Martinique shortly after the Bretons) produced a deeply dialectical work.

The manifold Surrealist impulses coming from the tropical island are explored in depth in the “Creole Dialogue,” a transcript of a conversation between Breton and Masson. Among the topics of the discussion is the painter Rousseau’s work “Snake Charmer”, which lends its title to the book. The two discuss the nature of creative inspiration in Europe and in the colonial world, contrasting the human world with the natural world that, on Martinique, exceeds by great lengths the achievements of  art. In this context they mention the massive volcanic eruption that took place on the island in 1902 and which was written about by Rosa Luxemburg. [1]

As Rosemont notes in his introduction, the heart of the book is Breton’s essay on Aimé Césaire, “A Great Black Poet.” By sheer chance, an element deeply appreciated by Surrealism, Breton came upon a copy of Tropiques, the literary journal edited by Césaire. Breton at once recognized the importance of the journal’s writings and was introduced to Césaire and his wife, Suzanne. Here we are at the moment of a thoroughgoing reconfirmation of the global essence of Surrealism, encompassing the Black world and anticipating the successful revolts against colonialism that were to initiate themselves even before the end of the war. I say reconfirmation because Martinican students in France had already contributed to Surrealist journals and Breton himself had visited and been greatly influenced by Mexico in 1938. Here we have another example of Breton being far ahead of the existing revolutionary movement (I mean Trotskyism) in his perspectives.

It should be noted that Césaire was to enter the Communist Party after the war (a move that must have deeply disappointed Breton), although he did definitively break with it in 1956, the year of the suppressed revolution in Hungary.

Martinique: Snake Charmer documents a moment of great importance for Breton and Surrealism. It represents, in essence, a time of suffering (“wounded and indignant,” in Breton’s words from the preface) that would lead to the beginnings of a rebirth visible in the pages of Arcane 17 and Ode to Charles Fourier. This book deserves close study.

·

[1] Luxemburg’s article was translated by David Wolff and was reproduced in News & Letters in 1983. It appears in The Rosa Luxemburg Reader and can also be found in the Luxemburg section of the Marxist Internet Archive.

Struggling with James

Urbane Revolutionary: C.L.R. James and the Struggle for a New Society
(University Press of Mississippi , 2008, 282 pages)

***

While not exactly a new book, Frank Rosengarten’s Urbane Revolutionary: C.L.R. James and the Struggle for a New Society is an important addition to the large body of James literature and deserves a serious critical response. Rosengarten, a scholar of Antonio Gramsci, is a late arrival to the James school, having embarked on a study of James only in 2001. If one dates the opening of scholarly interest in James as having begun with the publication of Paul Buhle’s C.L.R. James: the Artist as Revolutionary in 1988 (although it must be noted that Buhle’s interest in James well predates the 1980s), then Rosengarten is a latecomer who makes up for his tardiness with thoroughness and scholarly rigor.

James lived a large life and anyone attempting to understand him has to be able to follow his activities and grasp his prodigious intellectual output through five decades spent in the Caribbean, Britain, the U.S., and elsewhere. Rosengarten takes his task seriously and provides a strong biographical narrative as well as a critical analysis. Rosengarten frames much of his discussion on the tension he perceives in James between his universalist proletarian internationalism and what Rosengarten calls—appropriating a concept of Gramsci’s of the prison writings—the “national-popular.” By this is meant a national and particularist tendency (involving class collaboration) evident in James’s writings and activities regarding the de-colonizing world, especially in his period of intense involvement in the politics of his native Trinidad, where James first worked closely with independence leader Eric Williams (author of the influential book, Capitalism and Slavery), then broke with him and led an unsuccessful electoral challenge.

Perhaps the argument would have fared better if Rosengarten had developed more fully Gramsci’s use of the concept, but in any event, I don’t think he is on the right track in his analysis. What I believe Rosengarten is grappling with here is the theoretical inconsistency between the radical spontaneist current in James’s thought (most fully developed with Grace Lee and, to a lesser extent, Cornelius Castoriadis, in 1958′s Facing Reality) and the parallel form of mass struggle led by the party James believes is appropriate in the de-colonizing world (Trinidad, Ghana, etc.). In James’s thought, it appears that there is no relationship between the two. Rosengarten does not mention Greneda at all, but James’s writings on the Caribbean and Africa are not unconnected to the events of 1983, in which a fatal split in the revolutionary New Jewel Movement led to the assassination of Maurice Bishop and the subsequent U.S. invasion.*

One distinguishing feature of the book is the space devoted to Raya Dunayevskya, James’s co-leader in the Johnson-Forest Tendency. Dunayevskaya is all-too-often relegated to a footnote in accounts of James’s life in the U.S., but Rosengarten takes her work in this period seriously and treats her as a figure to be respected. While her life and work after her 1955 split with James is not taken up here, I don’t think it is too much of an exaggeration to say that there is a book about Dunayevskaya attempting to emerge from Rosengarten’s narrative. Such a book, I believe, would show that Dunayevskaya strongly developed some of the best contributions of the Johnson-Forest Tendency, the study of the Hegelian dialectic, in-and-for-itself, and the fullness of Marx’s critique of capitalism and capitalist society, contributions that James, while he never rejected them, did not pursue. These issues were at the heart of the divergence of paths between James and Dunayevskaya from 1953 to their formal break in 1955, a development which Rosengarten is not particularly strong on here.

Among the biographical details Rosengarten provides are at least two which provide thought for rethinking James. Small coin, perhaps, but they were unknown to me and are further evidence of James’s confounding theoretical inconsistency. The first is an account of a month-long trip James took to Cuba in early 1968, in the company of a large group of intellectuals and activists including Dennis Brutus and scholar Robert Hill, who would later become James’s literary executor. While Rosengarten indicates that James had some ambivalent feelings toward government control of the arts in Cuba, his attitude was for the most part strongly positive. While this is a small example, I find it impossible to reconcile this attitude toward a heavily state-oriented regime with the strongly mass-oriented nature of the work of J.R. Johnson (James’s political name) of the 1940s and 1950s. In fact, the whole theory of the foco, developed by Che Guevara (who was killed in Bolivia the year before), is best understood as an explicit negation of mass participation in the revolutionary process. The second is a perplexing engagement with the philosophy of Martin Heidegger James undertook in the 1960s. While the Marxist critique of existentialism was an important task (Dunayevskaya criticized Sartre in her Philosophy and Revolution, published in 1973), this intellectual episode is difficult to fathom.

I have not mentioned yet James’s literary writings, which are the subject of much of the recent James scholarship, but Rosengarten treats the topic at length. His discussion of James’s Melville book, Mariners, Castaways and Renegades, is unfortunately hampered by his strong U.S.S.R.-nostalgia (Gorbachev is described as having “rallied the forces of democratic renewal”). While I agree with Rosengarten’s position on the indispensability of that book’s concluding chapter for interpreting it as a whole, I disagree with him on the merit of the content of the chapter.

Rosengarten also takes up James’s classic Black Jacobins in his section on literature and includes a valuable textual comparison between the original edition (1938) and the revised form of 1963, the one available to readers today.

Rosengarten’s book reminds one that despite the great amount of published works on James of the last twenty years, much of his writing is out of print or exists, unpublished, in archival collections (James’s papers are dispersed between the Reuther Library at Wayne State University, Columbia University, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the University of the West Indies in Trinidad). Among James’s book-length works not currently in print are Notes on Dialectics, Modern Politics, and Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution. Among his papers are the manuscript of an autobiography and a large number of important letters to friends and colleagues. A brief list of recent contributions toward bringing out James’s unavailable work includes American Civilization, an important document of the 1950s edited by Anna Grimshaw and Keith Hart and published in 1993; Marxism For Our Times (1999), edited by Martin Glaberman, James’s closest U.S. co-thinker (Glaberman passed away in 2001); Facing Reality, which was republished in 2006 in, not one, but two editions; and You Don’t Play With Revolution: the Montreal Lectures of C.L.R. James, edited by Robert Hill and published year by AK Press (the lectures were delivered during a visit to Canada in the late 1960s—I have not seen this book yet).

Urbane Revolutionary is a serious book that makes a contribution toward helping us both comprehend and criticize the work of C.L.R. James.

* For a brief but important elaboration of this criticism, see Chapter 5 of John Alan’s Dialectics of Black Freedom Struggles (News and Letters Committees, 2003).

The Hathi Trust Digital Library includes a scan of the original edition of Facing Reality.