On the Left

Marxism In Modern France.
by George Lichtheim.
Columbia University Press. 212 pp. $6.75.

In less than two hundred pages of text, George Lichtheim develops and splendidly illuminates three distinct themes, each of which could well have made a full-length book. First, dealing mainly with events before 1920, he shows how Marxism and then Leninism were grafted onto the outlook of the Western world's only revolutionary labor movement, and enabled the French Communist party to strike roots in the national soil and to emerge after the Second World War as a dynamic movement appealing to many of the country's best minds. In the second part of the book, Lichtheim turns from workers to intellectuals, from practice to theory, from writing for historians to writing for philosophers, and dissects the theoretical debates which flourished after 1945 when the most insular country in Europe opened its frontiers to foreign ideas (a decade before they were opened to foreign goods) and Marxism became the reigning orthodoxy. In the third part, the author addresses himself to historian and philosopher equally. Taking France as “Europe's political laboratory,” where the social trends of the time always emerge most clearly, he discusses the relevance of the Marxist analysis to modern industrial society and uses the master's method to bury the Marxist dogma. But this tidy division of the book does Lichtheim less than justice, for his central preoccupation throughout is the striving for the unity of theory and practice and the breakdown of the Marxist claim to provide it. Even before the final synthesis, he never forgets his dual aim. He analyzes history to give the indispensable background to the debate about theory, and theory to show how philosophic debate influences political decision; time and again he affirms the relevance of “seemingly abstruse discussions,” approaching his presumably skeptical, pragmatic English-speaking readership in a mood of mildly impatient pedagogy.

In the historical section the comparison with Germany is always in his mind. The French labor movement, born in the traumatic experience of defeat in civil war, was inspired both by Proudhon's ouvri-érisme—an aggressively proletarian mistrust of bourgeois intellectuals—and by the Blanquist conception of a conspiratorial revolutionary elite. Both were genuine and indigenous French traditions on which, as Lichtheim shrewdly observes, Leninism could base itself after the natural heir of those traditions-revolutionary syndicalism—had collapsed at the outbreak of world war. No French working-class party could share the illusions of the German SPD: that the state was a neutral arbiter, and politics a secondary field of activity since the inexorable march of the historical process would soon make the workers' accession to power inevitable. Frenchmen either sought like the Social Democrats to defend and then transform the bourgeois democratic state, or, like the Communists, they utterly repudiated it, appealing to the basic syndicalism of the French workers who thought they had found in the October Revolution the fulfillment of a dream which their own bourgeoisie had frustrated in France. This interpretation can be questioned in some details. French Guesdism was (as he says) very like the orthodox doctrine of the SPD, and the French Socialists, accepting democracy but refusing until 1936 to join bourgeois governments, showed no more realism than their German counterparts before 1914; while the latter, using revolutionary rhetoric to console themselves for total political impotence today by the promise of total victory tomorrow, were anticipating the French Communists' very similar solution to a very similar problem. Again, to Lichtheim, the reintegration of the French workers in the nation began with the union sacrée of 1914, when socialists and syndicalists alike gave full support to national defense—so that while in Germany there was opposition to the war from the start, in France it grew only as the carnage became intolerable. Yet this debatable distinction is hard to reconcile with the later assertion that the revolutionary defeatism, which the Blanquist tradition made unthinkable in the First World War, was accepted by the Communist party cadres between 1939 and 1941 as the natural course for revolutionary Frenchmen. But in general this is a stimulating and perceptive account of how French Communism built upon the specific characteristics of the local workers' movement.

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The central paradox of Lichtheim's account of the intellectual debate (which draws attention to many little-known Communist, Trotskyist, and revisionist authors, but discusses little written after 1963 and does not mention the name of Althusser) is that Marxism attained its dominant position just when the political power of the Communist party was declining. Raymond Aron called it the opium of the intellectuals in 1955, and it enjoyed an extraordinary ascendancy among them at a time when it was fast losing ground among their counterparts elsewhere. (This development Lichtheim rather oddly describes as one by which the French were catching up.)

But intellectuals will not subordinate themselves to the proletariat—and abandon their critical faculty to the “semi-educated bureaucrats” of the party—unless they are convinced it is “the predestined executor of history's purpose.” Lichtheim recognizes the significance of Sartre's revolt against determinism, while having no illusions about his imbecility in short-term political analysis or his mystic reliance on a mythical and idealized proletariat and party. The existentialist critics might think of themselves as Marxists in theory and fellow-travelers in practice, but their attempt to rescue Marx by returning to his early libertarian writings undermined the pretensions to infallibility of the faithful. More important, no doubt, was the disillusionment of intellectual adherents of a supposedly libertarian movement when de-Stalinization in the USSR and revolt in the satellites shattered the Communist party's claim that its revolution would bring freedom to the working-class at home as it had in the USSR; and who saw all around them the evidence that French society was being rapidly transformed, while an ultra-Stalinist Communist party obstructed, stagnated, and increasingly lost touch with the progressive forces it was supposed to represent. Yet Lichtheim, after arguing that intellectuals were attracted to Marxism by its claim to hold the key to the historic future and demonstrating the falsity of that claim, can still maintain that in the long run the debates among intellectuals were decisive for the country's political future.

In the final section, the author moves beyond France to a critique of Marxism in the modern world. Generalizing from the bourgeois revolution, Marxism propounded its indispensable myth: that the proletariat could make their own revolution and establish their own rule. But since they do not control the means of production, they can do neither. In the brave new world of planning and technocracy, the key issues are those the labor movement never resolved: in practice the role of the intellectual in relation to the proletariat, in theory the choice between the syndicalist demand for workers' control and the socialist conception of a rational and scientific social order. Lenin's elitist party prefigured in its hierarchical organization the bureaucratic structures needed by the new rulers. For like all institutions thrown up by the working class, including the trade unions, the Communist party has escaped from its origins and become autonomous—a new source of alienation. Why then, asks Lichtheim, did bourgeois parties remain responsive to the class which created them instead of developing similar totalitarian distortions? He replies that bourgeois society was unplanned and left social forces to find their own level in the free market (of ideas as well as goods). Liberals had anticipated his answer long ago when they defended capitalism by prophesying that freedom would perish under socialism.

Lichtheim is less pessimistic. He recognizes that a Communist party in power is in a backward country a substitute for capitalism as a mechanism for rapid industrialization, and in a developed country a totalitarian instrument for severe and effective repression of the workers. In a Western democracy, it is merely irrelevant. Unable to win power because it cannot adapt to reality, it will survive where it is well entrenched, as in France, by defending the most backward peasants and small businessmen and by exploiting the emotional appeal of syndicalism—pretending it is still waging the wrong class struggle when the real one has already been decided in favor of a new class. Where political freedom survives, men of the Left must choose between the two realistic solutions: reformist heirs of the Fabians (and of Jaures, according to Lichtheim) can join the winning side and try to humanize the technocrats; radical syndicalists can fight for the interests of the proletariat in permanent protest against a system they can never hope to control.

The book is readable, pungent, and generally clear, though it suffers at times from compression. Well-turned phrases and incidental stimulating insights are scattered abundantly throughout; among the minor themes are the dialogue between Marxists and Catholics, and an interpretation of Gaullism. While he is not slow to expose nonsense, the author is no debunker, and he brings out the relevance and historical importance of the groups and the theorists he discusses, showing unreserved contempt only for the Communist party bosses and the intellectual hacks who followed their orders (but not for those Communist writers who displayed minds of their own). The specialist on French affairs will learn much from him, but Lichtheim's book is also a significant contribution to the contemporary theoretical debate on the far Left. His conceptions of history and politics, his deep respect for Marx and his critical assessment of Marxism, his stress on the political role of intellectuals and his pessimism about that of the workers, will provoke some readers to violent dissent and others to a reexamination of their own fundamental assumptions.