Our contemporary debate about Islamic terrorism is heavily influenced by philosophical Marxism.{1} Nearly a century ago, Marxists became the preeminent practitioners of terrorism. They justified their terrorism in the name of humanism.
We would be mistaken in believing that Marxism could have no influence on public debate about terrorism today, because Marxist command economics have been rejected everywhere in the West. Marxist intellectuals are ensconced in the political Left of all Western nations, in the humanities and social science disciplines of universities, in the editorial and reporting staff of many newspapers and magazines, and in the fashion world of literary criticism. They are represented in the social welfare bureaucracies, especially of Britain, France, and Germany. They utilize the World Wide Web to promote radical social change. In a word, Marxists infest the institutional nexus of public discussion in Western democracies. Their strategic placement gives Marxist dead-enders an influential voice.
To refute the radical Left interpretation of terrorism and to reclaim Western humanism, we must understand the earlier debate over Marxist terrorism that the current debate extends. We are going to look at Marxist terrorism through one of its most sympathetic expositions, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Humanism and Terrorism: An Essay on the Communist Problem (1947).{2}
Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of Communist violence was first published in Les Temps Modernes in 1946 as a series of articles responding to Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, published in 1941.{3}
Darkness at Noon is a fictionalized account of a Communist leader’s imprisonment and pre-trial hearings as a counter-revolutionary during the Show Trials of 1936-1938. In these trials, Stalin cynically purged the Communist party of his opponents. The novel expresses Koestler’s disillusionment with Marxism as a philosophy of history and Communism as its political embodiment. The Communists routinely and unapologetically used individual terrorism and mass terrorism to advance their political interest. Koestler saw terrorism as the betrayal of morality. It affronted humanism by denying the sanctity of the individual. It elevated utilitarian politics above ethical principle. The Communists dismissed such views as bourgeois sentimentalism.
In the quotation below, the main character of the novel, N. S. Rubashov, described in his prison diary how the Communists had transformed political action:
“It has been said that No. 1 [Stalin] has Machiavelli’s Prince lying permanently by his bedside. So he should: since then, nothing really important has been said about the rules of political ethics. We [the Communists] were the first to replace the nineteenth century’s liberal ethics of ‘fair play’ by the revolutionary ethics of the twentieth century. In that also we were right: a revolution conducted according to the rules of cricket is an absurdity. Politics can be relatively fair in the breathing spaces of history; at its critical turning points there is no other rule possible than the old one, that the end justifies the means.”{4}
This was the condemnation that Merleau-Ponty sought to refute.
In 1947, Merleau-Ponty emerged as France’s leading philosopher of phenomenology. In 1942, he published The Structure of Behavior. In 1946, he published his magnum opus, Phenomenology of Perception. He held a chair of philosophy at the Collège de France from 1952 to 1961, when he died.
His philosophical phenomenology was relevant to his critique of the Communist use of terrorism. In Humanism and Terrorism, he explained the Marxist justification of terrorism within the Marxists’ theory of the material dialectic of human behavior. (Merleau-Ponty was not a Marxist—he was an existentialist—but he was sympathetic to Marxism and Communism.) According to this theory, no behavior—not the policeman’s shooting of a murderous criminal or the terrorist’s destruction of a city bus loaded with civilians—can be justly evaluated from the perspective of that person’s intention or ethical theory. All behavior can be evaluated justly, Merleau-Ponty wrote, only from the perspective of the embedment of behavior in the material conditions of life and the material forces of history.{5}
Material conditions of life is the same framework for behavior evoked in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. In explaining our knowledge of ourself as Being-in-our-world, Merleau-Ponty emphasized the material interaction of our physical body, the material world of objects, other persons-as-objects, our own body as an object, and our neurological senses. None of these elements exists independently. The phenomenology of the individual is thereby directly connected to the material forces of history.{6}
Because individual psychology and social change are seamlessly connected, moral issues that appear in society, such as political decisions (to bomb or not to bomb a crowded restaurant, for instance), should be reflected in personal psychology. We would expect, therefore, that Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical phenomenology of perception will help us understand his exposition of Marxist ethics expressed in Humanism and Terrorism. With that introduction, let us first summarize what Merleau-Ponty said in Humanism and Terrorism.
Merleau-Ponty began with several principles he stated to be unassailable. Because they are irrefutable, it was not necessary for Merleau-Ponty to do more than refer to them.
The first principle is that all of a person’s actions are performed within an immediate matrix of material causality (objective causality, in Marxist vocabulary). Our homes, our shops and offices, and our social meeting rooms, together with the family, friends, colleagues, and strangers with whom we share them, are examples of this immediate matrix.
This proximate matrix is itself embedded within a larger material world, material social structures, and material forces. This larger world is experienced by all persons as external and objective to themselves. The large material world is economic in essence. People produce food, goods, and services to keep themselves alive and to reproduce themselves through children. This large economic world dynamically changes according to economic laws and undergoes class struggle as explained by Marx.
All actual motivation and reason for a person’s actions are traceable only to the chains of material causality that weave like tangled spaghetti through the economic world. Subjective motivations, such as spiritual inspiration, traditions of charity, and ethical ideals, that appear to originate solely within our consciousness or somewhere besides the material world, are false. They serve only to mask actual motives. Bourgeois ideals are instances of such delusional rationalizations.
The second principle is that economic relations in capitalism are violent. The liberal principle that capitalist economic relations are based on contract is a lie. It disguises the ugly truth of the laborer’s powerlessness in contract negotiations and her subsequent exploitation in dark satanic mills and sweatshops around the globe.
The third principle is that all political relations in all states, except in an attained communist society, are violent. “All law is violence,” Merleau-Ponty says, referring to liberalism.{7} Groups of people make laws to compel behavior by other groups of people.
In truth, society is created by and exists continually through violence. The basis of society is—in other words—terror. As a result, society can only be changed by violence—by terror. Communists may not be condemned for violence by capitalists and liberals, because capitalists and liberals do not condemn the violence in capitalism and liberalism. Capitalists and liberals do not even recognize their own violence for what it is. In this regard, Communists are preferable social company because they are at least honest about their violence.
In such a world, true humanism is impossible and all invocations of humanism are simply sanctimonious hypocrisy. No person recognizes any other person as a subjective being existing as an end unto herself. We treat each other—because of the nature of our world—as mere means to ends.
It follows from the Marxist analysis, that all acts of violence are morally equivalent. The “law-abiding” capitalist who negotiates a labor contract with a laborer and then calls upon the police to enforce it is just as violent as, and morally equivalent to, the revolutionary “terrorist” who plants a bomb on the capitalist’s car and blows the capitalist and his family to smithereens.
How then, asked Merleau-Ponty, are we to judge Communist violence? How can we discriminate between Communist violence and bourgeois violence? We can distinguish between them only in terms of the material tendency of history. Is Communist violence likely to produce a humanist society in which violence no longer exists? Marx said, yes. Is capitalist violence likely to produce such a future world? Marx said, no.
Merleau-Ponty concludes, “Successful revolutions taken altogether have not spilled as much blood as the empires. All we know is different kinds of violence and we ought to prefer revolutionary violence because it has a future of humanism.”{8}
We should notice, in closing, that much of Merleau-Ponty’s argument lends itself easily to the Left’s rhetorical thesis that Third World terrorism against the United States is just response for the United States’ “economic terrorism” (i.e., globalization) against the third world.
Notes
1. Postmodern culture criticism is also involved in the Left’s analysis of terrorism; but—I am arguing—Marxism is the most important anti-American perspective in the debate.
2. Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror (1969). For complete bibliographic information, see the references below.
3. Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror (1969), “Author’s Preface,” p. xxxi. Koestler, Darkness at Noon (1966).
4. Koestler, Darkness at Noon (1966), p. 79.
5. “In refusing to judge liberalism in terms of the ideas it espouses and inscribes in constitutions and in demanding that these ideas be compared with the prevailing relations between men in a liberal state, Marx is not simply speaking in the name of a debatable materialist philosophy—he is providing a formula for the concrete study of society which cannot be refuted by idealist arguments.” Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror (1969), p. xiv.
6. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (1962), p. 198, and note 18, pp. 198-200.
7. Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terrorism (1969), p. xxxvi.
8. Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terrorism (1969), p.107.
References
Koestler, Arthur. Darkness at Noon [Sonnenfinsternis]. English edition, 1941. Translated by Daphne Hardy. Reprint edition. New York: Bantam Books, 1966.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist Problem [Humanisme et Terreur, Essai sur le Probleme Communiste, 1947]. Translated and with notes by John O’Neill. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception [Phénomènologie de la perception, 1945]. Translated by Colin Smith. London and New York: Routledge Classics, 1962, 2002.
(This essay is a slightly reduced version of an article I published elsewhere in 2003.)
You didn't understand the essay or what the Marxists were saying; read the essay again, carefully.
Posted by: Turin | April 04, 2008 at 02:23 PM