Zizek & Machiavelli, Not Hegel (was Re: Montesinos)

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Sun Oct 8 18:15:18 PDT 2000



>In a message dated 10/8/00 12:08:05 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
>peterk at enteract.com writes:
>
><< I tend towards the beautiful soul position, but at least I admit it. >>
>
>Once upon at time,w hen there was a movement inw hich they were important,
>Marxists had to worry about "dirty hands." Brecht wrote "The Measures Taken."
>Lukcas cozied up to be Stalinism's chief respectable thinker and turned his
>mighty Hegelian scholarship into an attack on "the beautiful soul." Then the
>position that it was better to be effective than entirely clean had a point,
>although one cannot be entirely happy with the results, whgich often involved
>apologia for the indensible for no real advantage to the movement that was
>supposedly being served. I have no doubt that if there is a socialist
>revolution, it will have to be defended with rough and sometimes doubtful
>measures. That's why, for example, I never blame Trotsky for putting down the
>Krondstadt revolt--no society at war could tolerate mutiny in the military
>like that, least of one that had, as it seemed, a dim prospect of promoting
>the goals of our movement. However, this is idle today. In our circumstances,
>when there is no movement in our movement and any MArxist contribution to it
>is insignificant, sneering at beautigl souls is justification of realpolitik
>for its own sake: it leaves you in the positioon of being neither clean nor
>effective. We have no justification here and now for not coming out in favor
>of the right thing.
>
>And even when realpolitik is called for, there are limits. This was a point
>Trotsky made, with good effect, against Dewey in their debate over Their
>Morals and Ours. Thus while I would say that Krondstadt was a justifiable
>tragedy, not a crime, the suprression of the independent trade unions was one
>too far: that was a crime. Does the fact that Milosovic retained a large
>state sector make his national chauvinsim and murderous brutality an entrry
>on the Krinsadt side of the ledge? I don't think so, Kronstadt was arguablly
>necessary to retain military discipline and support a potentially socialist
>society against powerful enemies beant on its destruction. Srebenica was just
>another act of murderous terrorism, one that harmed rather than promoted any
>conceivable socialist goal, however much it may have furthered no-neck
>nationalism in Serbia. Yoshie and Lou should be ashamed of themselves.
>
>--jks

Explanation is not justification (though it is for Hegel -- I disagree with Hegel on historical necessity). The Yugoslav civil wars did not necessarily have to happen (history is contingent, and we can think of many "what if" scenarios here -- what if Yugoslavia had chosen not to follow the path of devolution?), and practically no murder that has been committed in the course of it -- including Srebrenica -- is morally justifiable. _Nor are capitalism & imperialism_.

My simple position is that one must accept being objective, not subjective, supporters of the enemies of the evil empire, for the short term. (Otherwise, we can't even join an anti-war demonstration, for instance.) What matters is your objective action, not your subjective opinion. (Opinions are like ass holes, as Americans say; everybody has one.) In the long term, though, your objective opposition to the evil empire would help bring down the "lesser evils" later as well. (It's easier to overthrow the enemies of the evil empire than the evil empire itself; therefore, we should never foist the latter on peoples on the periphery in the vain hope of protecting them from the former.)

***** From: Apsken at aol.com Date: Tue, 30 Mar 1999 15:40:29 EST To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com Subject: Revolutionary Defeatism

Revolutionary defeatism is a phrase from Lenin referring to the duty of Marxists in imperialist countries to oppose the war efforts of their own governments (and thus in effect to encourage the defeat of their countries' armies by their imperialist opponents, although the actual slogans of the Soviet of Workers and Soldiers were "Turn the guns around!" and "Turn the imperialist war into civil war!"; Lenin used the term defiantly and provocatively, to stiffen his comrades' resolve in the face of the Second International's collapse into national patriotism). Naturally revolutionary defeatists also hope for the rest of what Doug wrote, but those points are beyond the usual meaning of the term. Hal Draper as a Shachtmanite leader once wrote an article titled "The Myth of Lenin's 'Revolutionary Defeatism'," which was a tortured argument that Lenin didn't really mean it, that it would have been contradictory for German workers to advocate the defeat of Germany; British, the defeat of Britain; Russians, the defeat of Russia, and so forth, as though those outcomes were mutually exclusive of one another and of the revolutionary project. Hal's real problem was his anti-Stalinist discomfort in calling for the defeat of the U.S. in a hypothetical war with the USSR; his article was a fundamental text for the Third Camp, shortly before the main Third Camp leaders abandoned their pretense and declared themselves in support of U.S. military conquests. As a consequence of Hal's tutelage, many otherwise radical Third Campers had great difficulty in taking a positive view of a Vietnamese victory over U.S. forces, because they regarded both Ho Chi Minh and the NLF as surrogates of Soviet "imperialism," against which they were holding out their Third Camp alternative.

Ken Lawrence <http://nuance.dhs.org/lbo-talk/9903/2082.html> *****

In other words, "revolutionary defeatism": it is "the duty of Marxists in imperialist countries to oppose the war efforts of their own governments," as Ken Lawrence reminded us a while ago. The leftists who have failed to do so energetically in the case of the Yugoslav affairs, in my opinion, are beautiful souls (if they are not cruise-missile liberals, that is).

Yoshie

P.S. BTW, Machiavelli has a better position on necessity and morality than Hegel, William Blake, etc. What Machiavelli says is that what is necessary may be nevertheless unjust (whereas, for Hegel, what is historically necessary is rational and justifiable). This is about moral & political responsibility. There is no excuse for not accomplishing your duty; but there is no excuse for accomplishing your duty either. Do your duty without hoping that historical necessity, political necessity, etc. would cover your ass, or so says Zizek, in my interpretation.

P.P.S. Thanks for giving me an occasion to say what I have been thinking.



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list