Berlin moments

I arrived in Berlin, just in time for Fest der Linken, but this was prefaced by a sign in a railway station toilet:

 

Ah yes, the spirit of the DDR lives on. In Rosa Luxemburg Platz, Die Linke and many communist groups from other parts of Europe were present:

There was an old friend:

He eventually went home, to bed in a local left-wing terror nest:

But then, Germans will be Germans … I happened upon this in the next toilet I visited:

 

The DDR lives on!

Spotted in Fürstenwalde a couple of weeks ago:

 

Something Leninist about earth day

Earth day = Lenin’s birthday = 22 April.

Now that is a communist plot.

Unless it’s a Kantian plot …

 

More on the resistance and persistence of the DDR

To follow on from a story elsewhere on ‘The Resistance and Persistence of the DDR‘, I have been pondering a few further items: the worker (grew up in the DDR) who was simply not accustomed to adversarial approaches in the workplace, even after his capitalist boss in the brave new Germany had swindled him of pay; the continuation of the Freie Deutsche Jugend (English too), especially in eastern Germany and through the schools (an eye-opening history is on their website).

But I’ve been on another trail:

With the ideological war still going on between east Germany and west Germany, especially since the latter annexed the former and colonised it, the Trabi is often at the centre of it all. But what I find intriguing is how many of these simple, tough machines are still going. This one is the 601 S (Standard), made from 1963 to 1991. I found it in a side street in Bernstadt:

And this lovely blue number is in the neighbouring village of Rennersdorf:

Although it was a bit cold on the second visit:

You will notice that these haven’t been restored or modified; just the basic, solid original build – with formidable acceleration and stability. That would make them anywhere up to 50 years old. Or slightly older, if we take a 600, built from 1962:

That one was spotted in Herrnhut, chugging along with that characteristic two-stroke sound.

All the same, does anyone take this seriously? Do they really signal a sense that the DDR was a pretty good thing after all?

I wondered until I came across a late model 1100, again in Herrnhut:

But what’s that on the left hand windscreen?

Yes indeed, a DRR plate:

 

Lenin’s dream

Our grandchildren will examine the documents and other relics of the epoch of the capitalist system with amazement. It will be difficult for them to picture to themselves how the trade in articles of primary necessity could remain in private hands, how factories could belong to individuals, how some people could exploit others, how it was possible for those who did not work to exist

Lenin ‘Three Speeches Delivered in Red Square, May Day, 1919′ CW 29, 330 // Три речи на Красной площади 1 мая 1919 г. Хроникерские записи. LPSS 38, 325

(The index of Lenin, Religion, and Theology draws closer to completion)

 

Quote and picture of the day: Plato and Marx

On that dreadfully reactionary eastern European thinker, Lunacharsky notes perceptively:

Platonism was an aberration of the life instinct (Religion and Socialism, vol 1, p. 219)

By contrast, Marxism is an affirmation:

 

Prague 3: City of Prophets

Apart from its seedier side and the delight of finding Lenin in Prague, the main reason to visit was to seek out the revolutionary prophets.  Prague is of course the town where Jan Hus first made his impact, kicking off the Bohemian Reformation in the fifteenth century, a good hundred years or more before Luther got things moving in Wittenberg. And the church where it happened, where Hus electrified people with his preaching, was the Bethlehem Chapel:

That is, apparently, the original pulpit where it all happened. A frontal view:

The view from below:

The revolutionary firebrand, Thomas Müntzer, also preached from the same pulpit. And this is what it looks like when you peer through the pulpit door and into the church, the moment before stepping out and holding forth:

However, the most intriguing aspect of all this is that the chapel was rebuilt early in the communist era of Czechoslovakia. Why? Like Müntzer in the DDR, Jan Hus became a hero of the communist government and they did much to resurrect knowledge and admiration for his work outside the movements inspired by him.

Are there other prophets in Prague? Perhaps …

Or maybe here …

But it does have some great trams that take you all over the city:

 

Two new posts: Political Theology and Philosophers for Change

Some more shameless self-promotion: a couple of pieces of mine have found their way onto other sites:

1. ‘Taking Notes 13: Roadblocks of the Old New Left’, is up at Philosophers for Change.

2. ‘From Political Economy to Imperial Monotheisms: On Transitions in the Sacred Economy’, is on the Political Theology blog.

 

Between Lenin and the Zinzendorf Society

It must be the 60th anniversary of Joe Stalin’s death today that has brought up a somewhat strange conjunction. Only a few days ago I was enjoying the company of some of those involved in the Lenin research group in Nanjing:

Here is to be found a person holding a position to which everyone should aspire: a Professorship of Scientific Socialism.

Needless to say, I gave a lecture while in Nanjing:

 And then, hours later, I was trudging through the snow of eastern Germany:

Climbing a hill called Langsamer Tod (Slow Death):

All in order to get to the evening meal of the Zinzendorf Society:

… as one does.

 

Stinky tofu … and the tension between vulgar and ruptural Marxism

‘Are you really sure you want to eat that?’ she asked.

‘Why not?’ I said, pointing to the picture menu. ‘It looks like a delectable dish of tofu’.

‘Stinky tofu?’ she said. ‘Not many foreigners like it’.

‘How can I not eat stinky tofu?’ I said.

I was about to engage in what is arguably one of the most pleasurable experiences in China: a meal with a colleague from Fudan University’s Centre for the Study of Contemporary Marxism Abroad. Why so pleasurable? Apart from the food, it is because my colleague has one of the quickest and sharpest minds I have encountered in a very long time, often leaving me floundering. We share many interests, so we push each other to new thoughts, dipping and weaving in a free play of the mind.

We spoke of Ernst Bloch (1885-1977) and the metaphysics of Marxism; of Anatoly Lunacharsky (1875-1933) and God-building in the Russian Revolution; of revolutionary enthusiasm and calm analysis; and of vulgar Marxism and its dialectical form. All this turned out to be a knot more complex than at first appears to be the case. How so? That knot presents a series of overlapping but apparently irreconcilable oppositions. These oppositions begin with the warm and cold streams of Marxism, but then move on to include fiery passion and careful reason, subjective and objective conditions, and vulgar and ruptural approaches to the dialectic. Let me begin with the warm and cold streams, which will then enable me to engage with the other oppositions.

Lunacharsky and Bloch (who is many respects the heir of the former, even though he was not aware of Lunacharsky’s work) were both proponents of the warm stream of Marxism. By the warm stream I mean the importance of revolutionary passion, of the appeal to the emotions, of a political myth in which one can believe despite the most devastating of setbacks, of a Marxist metaphysics that is able to bring about an Aufhebung of religion. Both Lunacharsky and Bloch were responding to what may be called the cold stream of Marxism, in which rational analysis of the objective conditions of history was the key. All one needed was a greater knowledge of the objectively existing laws of history, especially of the phases of historical development, so that the path to revolution was clear. For Lunacharsky, who was a central figure in the Russian Revolution and to the Left of Lenin, the Second International was the embodiment of this approach, in which Hegel was a bad influence and in which his residue needed to be excised from Marx’s thought. Bloch too found this mechanistic approach troublesome – he had lived long enough to know a little of the Second International, but then also the resolute ‘history is one our side’ approach that continued to bedevil Marxism into the midst of the twentieth century.

So far, this is relatively straightforward: they want a more vibrant, warmer Marxism that touches the heart as well as the mind. They wish to restore the enthusiastic, subjective and moral dimension of Marxism. At this point, one may object: is this not the stuff of demagoguery? Does not such an approach leave one open to the traps of deploying specific techniques to fire up the emotions of the masses? That is, does not this approach leave one open to the charge of ‘vulgar’ Marxism, especially if we understand ‘vulgar’ in its Latin sense of ‘crowd’ and ‘common people’?

Now our knot of problems becomes much more interesting, for Lunacharsky and Bloch (and indeed the Frankfurt School and their inheritors) were profoundly suspicious of ‘vulgar’ Marxism. It all turns on what one means by ‘vulgar’. For them, vulgar Marxism is precisely the coldly rational Marxism I mentioned earlier. Here is the mechanistic, causal understanding of history, which may be broken down into carefully defined stages that lead inexorably to a socialist revolution. But vulgar also operates with the slogan of ‘the base is to blame’. The base or infrastructure provides the real and material cause of all that is; all that is of the superstructure – culture, philosophy, politics, religion, ideology – may be regarded as excretions or epiphenomena of the base. These two elements work smoothly together, for once you know the mechanisms of the base, once you know the socio-economic causes of all that is, you may be able to predict the course of history.

A further question needs to be asked: who is responsible for this vulgar Marxism? Given that it is the exercise of reason over the emotions, the use of cold theory, of calm and calculated analysis and discussion, vulgar Marxism is actually the domain of intellectuals. In other words, this type of Marxism is an intellectualist development.

Its obverse is the warm Marxism I mentioned earlier, the Marxism of emotional engagement, of powerful political myth, of the heart rather than the mind. At this point, the dialectic comes into play. The intellectualist, cold stream of vulgar Marxism is a version that flattens the dialectic inherited from Hegel. Here we find the triads of thesis, antithesis and synthesis; here is the Hegel of the progress of history in grand stages. The other Hegel is somewhat different. Now he becomes the proponent of a ruptural dialectic, one of breaks in continuity. Here subjective intervention creates history, over against the objective unfolding of history. This is the complex and sophisticated dialectic that enamoured Lenin so and was a major factor in formulating the revolutionary strategy that led to the success of the October Revolution.

So we have arrived at an unexpected juncture: vulgar Marxism is the simplistic, intellectualist tendency; ruptural Marxism is the sophisticated, complex dimension. On the side of the former may be gathered cold theory, the exercise of reason and the mechanistic understanding of the stages of history. On the side of the latter do we find warmth, myth, inspiration, and above all the revolutionary break.

Do we then take sides, preferring one or the other in light of our predilections? No, for both are actually part of, and necessary to, the dialectical Marxist tradition. I speak not of an Aristotelian golden mean, with a dose of sober theory functioning to dampen too much revolutionary ardour; or perhaps some fire and zeal in order to counter the killjoy rationalists. Instead, I speak of a dialectical tension between them, the one needing the other in order to make the movement viable. In this tension may be found the classic merger theory of the Erfurt Program of 1891: socialism at an organisational level is the merger of intellectuals and the masses, both of whom learn from one another and are changed in the process.[1] It was certainly not a process of some advanced intellectual lifting workers and peasants to a new level of consciousness.

In this tension may Lenin’s thought and practice be located, between a mechanistic vulgar Marxism and a deep awareness of the ruptural possibilities of the dialectic. Lenin often moves between one and the other, but at his most luminous moments the two are juxtaposed against one another. And here do we find Marx’s own thought (let alone that of Engels), who could outdo the best of the vulgar Marxist themselves in his formulations. At the same time, he was by no means unaware of the depths and complexities of a ruptural appreciation of the dialectic.

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[1] For the English translations, see www.germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/pdf/eng/513_Erfurt%20Program_94.pdf. For the German: www.marxists.org.