Chris Hedges on Blanqui
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I found this of interest, an article by the political commentator Chris Hedges, on the oft-forgotten Blanqui and the quotes from Blanqui.
http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/05/25/our-mania-hope-curse
Quote:“All atrocities of the victor, the long series of his attacks are coldly transformed into constant, inevitable evolution, like that of nature. … But the sequence of human things is not inevitable like that of the universe. It can be changed at any moment.” He foresaw that scientific and technological advancement, rather than being a harbinger of progress, could be “a terrible weapon in the hands of Capital against Work and Thought.”And in a day when few others did so, he decried the despoiling of the natural world. “The axe fells, nobody replants. There is no concern for the future’s ill health.”
“Humanity,” Blanqui wrote, “is never stationary. It advances or goes backwards. Its progressive march leads it to equality. Its regressive march goes back through every stage of privilege to human slavery, the final word of the right to property.” Further, he wrote, “I am not amongst those who claim that progress can be taken for granted, that humanity cannot go backwards.”
Two of the comments effectively challenges Hedges anti-Marx assumption.(another of the comments amused me…Marx wrote what he wrote because his birth-sign was Taurus)
And perhaps to feed LBird's interest, Chrus Hedges on knowledge
Quote:Knowledge does not lead to wisdom. Knowledge is more often a tool for repression. Knowledge, through the careful selection and manipulation of facts, gives a false unity to reality.What a load of crap (Hedges's article) and pretentious with it. But it does say he's a graduate of Harvard Divinity School. If he's not a miserable Protestant he sounds like one!. Pity because some of his other stuff has been ok. Don't think he can be trusted on Blanqui either since he says that Blanqui was involved in the Paris Commune (he would have liked to have been but was in prison elsewhere) and he doesn't give any source for the quotes.PS. Just looked him up on wikipedia and he's a Presbyterian minister. So I guessed right.
As i keep saying, people come to socialistic conclusions by different journeys and thus bring their own particular baggage with them. A number of the comments reflect your view on this article. He always seems to me to be a miserable bastard in interviews….might be because of his vegan diet ;-pAnother astute observation about him from yourself He is a bit like Rikki Fulton's, Reverend I. M. JollyI highlighted the ones that corrected his view of Marx. Sometimes an article is worth it because of the responses it brings forth, not because it is 100% correctI was also disappointed by the fact i couldn't follow up on the quotes
alanjjohnstone wrote:I found this of interest, an article by the political commentator Chris Hedges, on the oft-forgotten Blanqui and the quotes from Blanqui.http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/05/25/our-mania-hope-curseAnd perhaps to feed LBird's interest, Chrus Hedges on knowledgeQuote:Knowledge does not lead to wisdom. Knowledge is more often a tool for repression. Knowledge, through the careful selection and manipulation of facts, gives a false unity to reality.Chris Hedges wrote:Wisdom is not knowledge. Knowledge deals with the particular and the actual. Knowledge is the domain of science and technology. Wisdom is about transcendence. Wisdom allows us to see and accept reality, no matter how bleak that reality may be. It is only through wisdom that we are able to cope with the messiness and absurdity of life. Wisdom is about detachment. Once wisdom is achieved, the idea of moral progress is obliterated. Wisdom throughout the ages is a constant. Did Shakespeare supersede Sophocles? Is Homer inferior to Dante? Does the Book of Ecclesiastes not have the same deep powers of observation about life that Samuel Beckett offers? Systems of power fear and seek to silence those who achieve wisdom, which is what the war by corporate forces against the humanities and art is about. Wisdom, because it sees through the facade, is a threat to power. It exposes the lies and ideologies that power uses to maintain its privilege and its warped ideology of progress.Knowledge does not lead to wisdom. Knowledge is more often a tool for repression. Knowledge, through the careful selection and manipulation of facts, gives a false unity to reality. It creates a fictitious collective memory and narrative. It manufactures abstract concepts of honor, glory, heroism, duty and destiny that buttress the power of the state, feed the disease of nationalism and call for blind obedience in the name of patriotism. It allows human beings to explain the advances and reverses in human achievement and morality, as well as the process of birth and decay in the natural world, as parts of a vast movement forward in time. The collective enthusiasm for manufactured national and personal narratives, which is a form of self-exaltation, blots out reality. The myths we create that foster a fictitious hope and false sense of superiority are celebrations of ourselves. They mock wisdom. And they keep us passive.Wisdom connects us with forces that cannot be measured empirically and that are outside the confines of the rational world. To be wise is to pay homage to beauty, truth, grief, the brevity of life, our own mortality, love and the absurdity and mystery of existence. It is, in short, to honor the sacred. Those who remain trapped in the dogmas perpetuated by technology and knowledge, who believe in the inevitability of human progress, are idiot savants.“Self-awareness is as much a disability as a power,” the philosopher John Gray writes. “The most accomplished pianist is not the one who is most aware of her movements when she plays. The best craftsman may not know how he works. Very often we are at our most skillful when we are least self-aware. That may be why many cultures have sought to disrupt or diminish self-conscious awareness. In Japan, archers are taught that they will hit the target only when they no longer think of it—or themselves.”Artists and philosophers, who expose the mercurial undercurrents of the subconscious, allow us to face an unvarnished truth. Works of art and philosophy informed by the intuitive, unarticulated meanderings of the human psyche transcend those constructed by the plodding conscious mind. The freeing potency of visceral memories does not arrive through the intellect. These memories are impervious to rational control. And they alone lead to wisdom.Hedges contrasts his individualist and elite 'wisdom' with social 'knowledge'.We Communists, on the other hand, should contrast the historical and social class basis of science. That is, 'bourgeois science' versus 'proletarian science'.For the bourgeoisie, their science produces wise knowledge; for the proletariat, their science produces wise knowledge.'Wisdom' is always from a class perspective, not from individual intuition or elite revelation.Hedges is merely a religious bluffer. There is no 'unvarnished truth'.'Truth' is a social, and thus class, construction. And for the proletariat, 'truth' must be a democratic construction.Hedges has no more access to 'reality' than do the positivists. His 'transcendence' mirrors the positivists' mythical 'neutral method' of bourgeois science.Both are lying to us, for their own undemocratic purposes.
I think Hedges must have read the May/June 2014 edition of Radical Philosophy where the passages from Blanqui will have been quoted::https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/auguste-blanqui-heretical-communisthttps://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/blanquis-bifurcationshttps://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/the-radical-gapThe passages he quotes from Blanqui' aren't up to much either.
There is a load of Blanqui stuff that has recently appeared from nowhere on MIA https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/blanqui/index.htm
I thought were going to have a discussion on Blanqui? I thought the following was well ahead of the game for 1834 predating Karl and Proudhon somewhat anyway. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/blanqui/1834/soupe.htm
Blanquism, Bolshevism, Rosa Russian Stage-ism and Menshevik ‘tittle-tattle’ prophecy ‘without foundation’. Rosa Luxemburg Blanquism and Social Democracy If today the Bolshevik comrades speak of the dictatorship of the proletariat, they have never given it the old Blanquist meaning; neither have they ever made the mistake of Narodnaya Volya, which dreamt of “taking power for itself” (zachvat vlasti)…………………………..Clearly no social democrat falls for the illusion of the proletariat being able to maintain itself in power. If it could, it would lead to the domination of its working class ideas and it would realise socialism. But it is not strong enough at this time..[ in Ruusia ], for the proletariat, in the strictest sense of the word, constitutes a minority in the Russian empire. The achievement of socialism by a minority is unconditionally excluded, since the very idea of socialism excludes the domination of a minority. So, on the day of the political victory of the proletariat over tsarism, the majority will claim the power which the former has conquered. Concretely, after the fall of tsarism, power will pass into the hands of the most revolutionary part of society, the proletariat, because the proletariat will take possession of all posts and keep watch over them until power is placed in the hands of those legally called upon to hold it – in the hands of the new government, which the Constituent [Assembly], as the legislative organ elected by the whole population, is alone able to determine. Now, it is a simple fact that it is not the proletariat that constitutes a majority in society, but the petty bourgeoisie and the peasantry, and that, as a consequence, it will not be the social democrats who form a majority in the Constituent, but the democratic peasants and petty bourgeois.We may lament this fact, but we will not be able to change it. Broadly speaking, this is the situation as the Bolsheviks understand it, and all social democratic organisations and parties outside Russiaitself share this vision.Where Blanquism fits into it is difficult to imagine. https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1906/06/blanquism.htmlI suspect from some of the stuff Hedges has come up with recently that he has been listening to Bolsheviks of various persuasions. Some of our Trots 'may' feel the need and opportunity of re-inventing themselves as permanent revolution Blanquists.
Dave B wrote:I thought were going to have a discussion on Blanqui?I thought the following was well ahead of the game for 1834 predating Karl and Proudhon somewhat anyway.https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/blanqui/1834/soupe.htmI see that this is the source of the passage Hedges quote to try to make Blanqui a miserablist Protestant like himself but that he has truncated and distorted it (even if he is using a better translation). The full passage reads (he only quoted the parts in italics):
Quote:Yes! The right of property is in decline. Generous spirits prophesy and call for its fall. The Essenian principle of reality has slowly sapped it over the course of eighteen centuries through the successive abolition of the various servitudes which served as the basis for its power. It will disappear one day, along with the last privileges that serve as its refuge and nook. The past and the present guarantee us this resolution. For humanity is never stationary. It either advances or goes back. Its progressive march led it to equality. Its backward march climbs, by all of privilege’s steps, to personal slavery, the final word in the right of property. To be sure, before returning there, European civilization would have perished. But through what catastrophe? A Russian invasion? To the contrary, it is the north that will itself be invaded by the principle of equality that the French bring in the conquest of nations. The future is not in doubt.Blanqui has gone up in my estimation again, even if he was a proto-Leninist or, rather, even if Lenin was a latter-day Blanquist. Blanqui took the view that the people had been kept in such ignorance, mainly thanks to the Catholic church, that they had to be liberated from above by a revolutionary minority which once in power would educate them into communism. Understable perhaps in 1834, less so in 1870, but not in 1902 and certainly not today.
Adam I think you could be a bit kinder to Chris. I have been reading him for several years on informationclearinghouse as he has been writing highly critical and informative articles on the egregious state of US capitalism and foreign policy etc. More to the point perhaps he has left me with the impression he has been moving at quite a rate towards ‘revolutionary’ politics and in that sense he could be seen as a similar phenomena to our friend Russell. He used to have the intensely irritating habit of referring to Bolshevik Russia as ‘communist’ or ‘communism’. He has just written a book called Wages of Rebellion probably, a christian play on ‘Wages of Sin’ ? Eg; http://rabble.ca/whatsup/chris-hedges-speaks-about-wages-rebellion I have not read yet but in a clip I have seen of it he describes Lenin’s Russiaas state capitalism. So we could give the guy a bit of a break as it has taken the Trot intellectuals nearly 100 years to get to that position. He is clearly totally confused about Marxism in general. Thus he says as presumably his generalised misinterpretation of the Marxist Stage-ist that; …dismissed the belief, central to Karl Marx, that human history is a linear progression toward equality and greater morality….. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article41955.htm If only I could pick that out and make it true! I don’t think post 1844 Karl would appreciate the insinuation that he was a moralist let alone the idea that economic progression of capitalism was the royal road to Morality and equality. Ironically perhaps that was the Christian Hegel’s position that Karl ‘turned on its head’ for something ‘a bit different’. Although as with these things there is a ‘mustard seed’ sized grain of truth in it which forms part of the Marxist ‘positivism’. The argument, rather than my assertion of ‘truth’, was that capitalism would tend to reduce all workers to an economic uniform homegenous mass with the ‘progesssive’ ‘global’ erosion of pay differentials. [Actually another interesting contributor to informationclearinghouse ex Reagan technocrat Craig Roberts observes and laments this as the erosion of the exceptional US middle-classes due to the outsourcing of US capitalist production etc.] And even in some cases the in-sourcing of skilled labour that demands a higher a price for their labour power commodity. UKIP style; a lot is made of the ‘flood’ of unskilled labour into the UK etc and the alarming migration numbers etc. Which is indeed ‘lamentable’ for the capitalist class because with a ‘minimum wage system’ there are small advantages in increasing the numbers of unskilled labour as the net effect is just to throw out the ‘bottom million’ into the ‘expensive’ safety net. Things in reality are remarkably different and little commented upon at the, outside London, 30K bracket. I know two Cubans, a Venezuelan and two non UK passport holding Pakistani’s, all working ‘over here’ on special skilled labour work permit visa things. The capitalist class like that kind of thing as workers who demand 30K and more to maintain their labour power are just taking the piss and need taking down a peg or two.
This ‘working class equalising’ affect depends a lot on your own economic perspective. Some of us arrogantly demand that third world workers should gradually raise themselves to ‘our’ level and thus not economically interfere with ‘our’ position, taken as read, and the holistic capitalistic game of selling your labour power as a commodity. And don’t like being ‘equalised’ or as they see it as being dragged down by economic realities. Admittedly these third world workers need to step up to the plate, as they will, and get unionised etc so maybe ‘reformism’ needs to start ‘not at home’. EG Clayton Aniline closed recently in Manchesterhaving been there since 1875 due to cheaper labour and cheaper Bhopaland ‘Green’ like safety standards elsewhere. So I think that maybe it is the international positivism of the equalisation of global labour power in capitalism with the hope of solidarity/empathy that comes with it that depends that much less on patronising charity. Returning to Hedges, he says; .. The fall of the Roman Empire, for example, led to misery throughout Europe during the Dark Ages, roughly from the sixth through the 13th centuries.. I appreciate as a lover of intellectual literature and the arts and that exceptional class that patronise that kind of thing etc. That the fall of the Roman Empire must be as a distressing historical experience, as the fall of the ‘Greek intellectual Empire’ to the Christian Hegelians of the 19thcentury. Although these Christian positivists tended to brush aside these advanced Greeks interests in buggering goats; (actually saw it in Naplesmuseum recently-not my thing really and was in a special room )and homosexuality etc http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2292709/The-art-exhibition-PG-warning-Erotic-Pompeii-goat-statue-amused-Romans-arrives-British-Museum.html You would think Chris would have as a Christian a more reflective view on the Roman Empirethat crucified his JC as part of his ‘Wages of Rebellion’. And as with the Maoist ‘shining path’ Peruvian peasant style anti positivist ‘Apocalypse of John’, written in AD 69, who as an early Christian had the fantasies of a divine anti Roman arsonists. There are academics reviewing Christian literature, eg Corintians II for example, who with computerised linguistic tools etc suspect that some of it maybe collations and compilations of separate documents rather than discrete works. To say that the ‘Apocalypse of John’ is a chaotic and disjointed work will no doubt draw some laughs. I think the Christian burning of Rome fantasies in it pre dated the event; as in Bin Laden/ World Trade Centre thing, who did what when and to whom and why is obviously much more impossible too to sort out than now. Or in other words ‘Nero’ had a point, The Dark Ages –another view. It would appear from recent material that these barbarians who overthrow Rome had there own set of moral values and were appalled by the antics that went in the coliseum; they seemed to have a more of a Klingon culture which is explored in 'Star Trek the next Generation’. And that the ‘Dark Ages’ economy ie before 600AD was more orientated towards clan based non state based and ‘non exploitive based labour’; there is a very interesting passage on this in one of the early chapters of volume one.? Bored now.I think there are also some other interesting people out there who are hitting the airwaves; and I think alot more people are reading informationclearinghouse and watching people like Hedges and Richard Wolff on RT. As below, Wolf and his friends, after making a quite acceptable analysis of Russian and Chinese State Capitalism etc from the beginning; ends outlinning what is communism and what is not. Looking at it from a perspective distribution of ‘surplus’ might look a bit odd but it sort of drops out from their previous analysis of capitalism and state capitalism in terms of ‘surplus value’. Although actually Karl in one of his very rare excursions into what communism would look like in Volume III also briefly talked about it in economically formal terms. RE the production of surplus’s by the working members of society to expand productivity enhancing means of production and to support members of society who could not work etc eg children, the old and the disabled etc etc Anyway;A Postscript on the USSR, the PRC, and Communism “ What might an actual communist alternative have looked like within the USSRand the PRC? Within our surplus framework, a communist class structure is defined as anarrangement of production such that the workers who produce a surplus are also, collectively, the persons who receive and distribute that surplus. This collectivity of workers presumably distributes their own surplus in ways aimed to secure the conditions for this communist class structure to survive and grow. Such a communism’s contrast with state capitalism and state feudalism is stark and clear. While the collectivity of workers produces surplus alike in capitalism, feudalism, and communism, only in communism does that same collectivity also receive and distribute the surplus. Perhaps we can conclude by reposing and answering this basic question: do examinations of the class histories of the USSRand the PRC show that the collectivity of their productive industrial workers received and distributed their own surpluses. We find clearly that they did not. Hence communism did not exist there on a society-wide basis, despite the contrary claims made throughout the decades by friends and enemies alike. http://www.academia.edu/9713101/State_Capitalism_vs_Communism or http://www.rdwolff.com/content/state-capitalism-versus-communism-what-happened-ussr-and-prc What I quite like about Wolff is that he makes the effort to de-intellectualise everything and give practical examples that people are familiar with of the manifestation of theories and abstract analysis. Eg http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article42000.htm Clearly I hope non of that involves a carte blanc endorsement of everything he says.
Some of Wolff may be acceptable and as usual it is mostly his historical analysis but when it comes to contemporary political action, overall, i find his reformism i.e. his advocacy of WSDEs unpalatable and, worse, anti-socialist. He is a shameless advocate of the Mondragon model of co-operatives and for banking structures on the lines of the North Dakota State Bank. You are very right to add the caveat that you offer no carte blanche endorsement of him. His differences with the WSM and other Marxist scholars such as Kliman run deep. He and Gar Alperovitz are real dangers to the socialist movement, IMHO, and whatever their academic merits are outweighed by their "practical" politics.
Wolff exposed herehttp://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/subject/richard-wolffBlanqui didn't think much of cooperatives either. Good article here on him, and his "Revolution (= Insurrection) Not Reform" theory and practice (in a sense we're also descended from Blanqui but in a different line from Lenin):http://links.org.au/node/4115
Well, well, well…from a conference that featured both Hedges and Wolffhttp://www.leftforum.org/I'm sure the moderator will ignore that we now are discussing not Chris Hedges on Blanqui, but Chris Hedges on Karl Marx and declaring Marx was right. http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/06/01/marx-was-right
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