Published on Thursday, March 3, 2011 by TomDispatch.com
Oilquake in the Middle East: The Collapse of the Old Oil Order
by Michael T. Klare
Whatever the outcome of the protests, uprisings, and rebellions now sweeping the Middle East, one thing is guaranteed: the world of oil will be permanently transformed. Consider everything that’s now happening as just the first tremor of an oilquake that will shake our world to its core.
For a century stretching back to the discovery of oil in southwestern Persia before World War I, Western powers have repeatedly intervened in the Middle East to ensure the survival of authoritarian governments devoted to producing petroleum. Without such interventions, the expansion of Western economies after World War II and the current affluence of industrialized societies would be inconceivable.
Here, however, is the news that should be on the front pages of newspapers everywhere: That old oil order is dying, and with its demise we will see the end of cheap and readily accessible petroleum -- forever.
Ending the Petroleum Age
Let’s try to take the measure of what exactly is at risk in the current tumult. As a start, there is almost no way to give full justice to the critical role played by Middle Eastern oil in the world’s energy equation. Although cheap coal fueled the original Industrial Revolution, powering railroads, steamships, and factories, cheap oil has made possible the automobile, the aviation industry, suburbia, mechanized agriculture, and an explosion of economic globalization. And while a handful of major oil-producing areas launched the Petroleum Age -- the United States, Mexico, Venezuela, Romania, the area around Baku (in what was then the Czarist Russian empire), and the Dutch East Indies -- it’s been the Middle East that has quenched the world’s thirst for oil since World War II.
In 2009, the most recent year for which such data is available, BP reported that suppliers in the Middle East and North Africa jointly produced 29 million barrels per day, or 36% of the world’s total oil supply -- and even this doesn’t begin to suggest the region’s importance to the petroleum economy. More than any other area, the Middle East has funneled its production into export markets to satisfy the energy cravings of oil-importing powers like the United States, China, Japan, and the European Union (EU). We’re talking 20 million barrels funneled into export markets every day. Compare that to Russia, the world’s top individual producer, at seven million barrels in exportable oil, the continent of Africa at six million, and South America at a mere one million.
As it happens, Middle Eastern producers will be even more important in the years to come because they possess an estimated two-thirds of remaining untapped petroleum reserves. According to recent projections by the U.S. Department of Energy, the Middle East and North Africa will jointly provide approximately 43% of the world’s crude petroleum supply by 2035 (up from 37% in 2007), and will produce an even greater share of the world’s exportable oil.
To put the matter baldly: The world economy requires an increasing supply of affordable petroleum. The Middle East alone can provide that supply. That’s why Western governments have long supported “stable” authoritarian regimes throughout the region, regularly supplying and training their security forces. Now, this stultifying, petrified order, whose greatest success was producing oil for the world economy, is disintegrating. Don’t count on any new order (or disorder) to deliver enough cheap oil to preserve the Petroleum Age.
To appreciate why this will be so, a little history lesson is in order.
The Iranian Coup
After the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC) discovered oil in Iran (then known as Persia) in 1908, the British government sought to exercise imperial control over the Persian state. A chief architect of this drive was First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill. Having ordered the conversion of British warships from coal to oil before World War I and determined to put a significant source of oil under London’s control, Churchill orchestrated the nationalization of APOC in 1914. On the eve of World War II, then-Prime Minister Churchill oversaw the removal of Persia’s pro-German ruler, Shah Reza Pahlavi, and the ascendancy of his 21-year-old son, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi.
Though prone to extolling his (mythical) ties to past Persian empires, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi was a willing tool of the British. His subjects, however, proved ever less willing to tolerate subservience to imperial overlords in London. In 1951, democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadeq won parliamentary support for the nationalization of APOC, by then renamed the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC). The move was wildly popular in Iran but caused panic in London. In 1953, to save this great prize, British leaders infamously conspired with President Dwight Eisenhower‘s administration in Washington and the CIA to engineer a coup d’état that deposed Mossadeq and brought Shah Pahlavi back from exile in Rome, a story recently told with great panache by Stephen Kinzer in All the Shah’s Men.
Until he was overthrown in 1979, the Shah exercised ruthless and dictatorial control over Iranian society, thanks in part to lavish U.S. military and police assistance. First he crushed the secular left, the allies of Mossadeq, and then the religious opposition, headed from exile by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Given their brutal exposure to police and prison gear supplied by the United States, the shah’s opponents came to loathe his monarchy and Washington in equal measure. In 1979, of course, the Iranian people took to the streets, the Shah was overthrown, and Ayatollah Khomeini came to power.
Much can be learned from these events that led to the current impasse in U.S.-Iranian relations. The key point to grasp, however, is that Iranian oil production never recovered from the revolution of 1979-1980.
Between 1973 and 1979, Iran had achieved an output of nearly six million barrels of oil per day, one of the highest in the world. After the revolution, AIOC (rechristened British Petroleum, or later simply BP) was nationalized for a second time, and Iranian managers again took over the company’s operations. To punish Iran’s new leaders, Washington imposed tough trade sanctions, hindering the state oil company’s efforts to obtain foreign technology and assistance. Iranian output plunged to two million barrels per day and, even three decades later, has made it back to only slightly more than four million barrels per day, even though the country possesses the world’s second largest oil reserves after Saudi Arabia.
Dreams of the Invader
Iraq followed an eerily similar trajectory. Under Saddam Hussein, the state-owned Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC) produced up to 2.8 million barrels per day until 1991, when the First Gulf War with the United States and ensuing sanctions dropped output to half a million barrels daily. Though by 2001 production had again risen to almost 2.5 million barrels per day, it never reached earlier heights. As the Pentagon geared up for an invasion of Iraq in late 2002, however, Bush administration insiders and well-connected Iraqi expatriates spoke dreamily of a coming golden age in which foreign oil companies would be invited back into the country, the national oil company would be privatized, and production would reach never before seen levels.
Who can forget the effort the Bush administration and its officials in Baghdad put into making their dream come true? After all, the first American soldiers to reach the Iraqi capital secured the Oil Ministry building, even as they allowed Iraqi looters free rein in the rest of the city. L. Paul Bremer III, the proconsul later chosen by President Bush to oversee the establishment of a new Iraq, brought in a team of American oil executives to supervise the privatization of the country’s oil industry, while the U.S. Department of Energy confidently predicted in May 2003 that Iraqi production would rise to 3.4 million barrels per day in 2005, 4.1 million barrels by 2010, and 5.6 million by 2020.
None of this, of course, came to pass. For many ordinary Iraqis, the U.S. decision to immediately head for the Oil Ministry building was an instantaneous turning point that transformed possible support for the overthrow of a tyrant into anger and hostility. Bremer’s drive to privatize the state oil company similarly produced a fierce nationalist backlash among Iraqi oil engineers, who essentially scuttled the plan. Soon enough, a full-scale Sunni insurgency broke out. Oil output quickly fell, averaging only 2.0 million barrels daily between 2003 and 2009. By 2010, it had finally inched back up to the 2.5 million barrel mark -- a far cry from those dreamed of 4.1 million barrels.
One conclusion isn’t hard to draw: Efforts by outsiders to control the political order in the Middle East for the sake of higher oil output will inevitably generate countervailing pressures that result in diminished production. The United States and other powers watching the uprisings, rebellions, and protests blazing through the Middle East should be wary indeed: whatever their political or religious desires, local populations always turn out to harbor a fierce, passionate hostility to foreign domination and, in a crunch, will choose independence and the possibility of freedom over increased oil output.
The experiences of Iran and Iraq may not in the usual sense be comparable to those of Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Libya, Oman, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Tunisia, and Yemen. However, all of them (and other countries likely to get swept up into the tumult) exhibit some elements of the same authoritarian political mold and all are connected to the old oil order. Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Oman, and Sudan are oil producers; Egypt and Jordan guard vital oil pipelines and, in Egypt’s case, a crucial canal for the transport of oil; Bahrain and Yemen as well as Oman occupy strategic points along major oil sealanes. All have received substantial U.S. military aid and/or housed important U.S. military bases. And, in all of these countries, the chantis the same: “The people want the regime to fall.”
Two of these regimes have already fallen, three are tottering, and others are at risk. The impact on global oil prices has been swift and merciless: on February 24th, the delivery price for North Brent crude, an industry benchmark, nearly reached $115 per barrel, the highest it’s been since the global economic meltdown of October 2008. West Texas Intermediate, another benchmark crude, briefly and ominously crossed the $100 threshold.
Why the Saudis are Key
So far, the most important Middle Eastern producer of all, Saudi Arabia, has not exhibited obvious signs of vulnerability, or prices would have soared even higher. However, the royal house of neighboring Bahrain is already in deep trouble; tens of thousands of protesters -- more than 20% of its half million people -- have repeatedly taken to the streets, despite the threat of live fire, in a movement for the abolition of the autocratic government of King Hamad ibn Isa al-Khalifa, and its replacement with genuine democratic rule.
These developments are especially worrisome to the Saudi leadership as the drive for change in Bahrain is being directed by that country’s long-abused Shiite population against an entrenched Sunni ruling elite. Saudi Arabia also contains a large, though not -- as in Bahrain -- a majority Shiite population that has also suffered discrimination from Sunni rulers. There is anxiety in Riyadh that the explosion in Bahrain could spill into the adjacent oil-rich Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia -- the one area of the kingdom where Shiites do form the majority -- producing a major challenge to the regime. Partly to forestall any youth rebellion, 87-year-old King Abdullah has just promised $10 billion in grants, part of a $36 billion package of changes, to help young Saudi citizens get married and obtain homes and apartments.
Even if rebellion doesn’t reach Saudi Arabia, the old Middle Eastern oil order cannot be reconstructed. The result is sure to be a long-term decline in the future availability of exportable petroleum.
Three-quarters of the 1.7 million barrels of oil Libya produces daily were quickly taken off the market as turmoil spread in that country. Much of it may remain off-line and out of the market for the indefinite future. Egypt and Tunisia can be expected to restore production, modest in both countries, to pre-rebellion levels soon, but are unlikely to embrace the sorts of major joint ventures with foreign firms that might boost production while diluting local control. Iraq, whose largest oil refinery was badly damaged by insurgents only last week, and Iran exhibit no signs of being able to boost production significantly in the years ahead.
The critical player is Saudi Arabia, which just increased production to compensate for Libyan losses on the global market. But don’t expect this pattern to hold forever. Assuming the royal family survives the current round of upheavals, it will undoubtedly have to divert more of its daily oil output to satisfy rising domestic consumption levels and fuel local petrochemical industries that could provide a fast-growing, restive population with better-paying jobs.
From 2005 to 2009, Saudis used about 2.3 million barrels daily, leaving about 8.3 million barrels for export. Only if Saudi Arabia continues to provide at least this much oil to international markets could the world even meet its anticipated low-end oil needs. This is not likely to occur. The Saudi royals have expressed reluctance to raise output much above 10 million barrels per day, fearing damage to their remaining fields and so a decline in future income for their many progeny. At the same time, rising domestic demand is expected to consume an ever-increasing share of Saudi Arabia’s net output. In April 2010, the chief executive officer of state-owned Saudi Aramco, Khalid al-Falih, predicted that domestic consumption could reach a staggering 8.3 million barrels per day by 2028, leaving only a few million barrels for export and ensuring that, if the world can’t switch to other energy sources, there will be petroleum starvation.
In other words, if one traces a reasonable trajectory from current developments in the Middle East, the handwriting is already on the wall. Since no other area is capable of replacing the Middle East as the world’s premier oil exporter, the oil economy will shrivel -- and with it, the global economy as a whole.
Consider the recent rise in the price of oil just a faint and early tremor heralding the oilquake to come. Oil won’t disappear from international markets, but in the coming decades it will never reach the volumes needed to satisfy projected world demand, which means that, sooner rather than later, scarcity will become the dominant market condition. Only the rapid development of alternative sources of energy and a dramatic reduction in oil consumption might spare the world the most severe economic repercussions.
© 2011 Michael T. Klare
Michael T. Klare is the Five College Professor of Peace and World Security Studies at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, and the author of Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America's Growing Dependence on Imported Petroleum. A documentary version of that book is available at bloodandoilmovie.com. His newest book, Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy, was recently published by Metropolitan Books.
Postado originalmente por Common Dreams.org, em 03/03/2011
quinta-feira, 3 de março de 2011
quarta-feira, 2 de março de 2011
Por que esconder estatísticas de criminalidade?
Caso desloca a discussão principal, que é sobre o sigilo das informações
CLAUDIO BEATO
ESPECIAL PARA A FOLHA
Vivi nos EUA e na Inglaterra como professor visitante, e me impressionava a liberdade que havia para utilizar dados de criminalidade produzidos pelo poder público.
Na Universidade Harvard, recebíamos alertas da polícia sobre atividades criminosas nas ruas ao redor do campus.
Quem queria alugar casa podia consultar nos sites da polícia as ocorrências no local. Em Londres, avisos em hotspots de delitos na cidade e em pontos de metrô convidavam os usuários e transeuntes a serem cautelosos nesses locais. Por aqui, as coisas são muito diferentes.
A ideia de que alguém possa vender dados sigilosos desloca e oblitera a principal discussão, que reside no fato de que informações de segurança pública sejam secretas e ocultas ao público.
Ao personificar a notícia sobre um suposto malfeito, perdemos o foco do que deveria ser um debate central hoje. Por alguma estranha razão, prefere-se não divulgar dados sob o pretexto de que poderiam levar intranquilidade aos habitantes.
Naturalmente existem dados e informações que podem identificar e prejudicar pessoas e sobre os quais deve-se ter toda a precaução.
Mas informações relativas à distribuição de crimes certamente não se enquadram nessa categoria.
Há outra discussão ainda mais central. Não existe uma má política na área da segurança que não se inicie por uma péssima condição na organização dos dados. E não existe um caso de sucesso que não esteja calcado em boas informações e análises.
Túlio Kahn fazia excelente trabalho na organização dos dados na CAP, para fins de planejamento e análise das políticas públicas em SP.
Boas análises funcionam como holofotes sobre áreas problemáticas, iluminando também o trabalho dos responsáveis por elas. É como pescar em águas onde sabemos onde estarão os diferentes tipos de peixes, bem como os maus pescadores.
Quem lida com análises nessa área sabe dos inúmeros preconceitos e vieses vigentes, que terminam gerando situações como esta.
É um dos últimos redutos no qual sobrevive o que restou da antiga comunidade de informações, e do qual se nutrem gestores que não gostam de ver suas atividades avaliadas, muito menos submetidas a escrutínio público.
CLAUDIO BEATO é coordenador do Centro de Estudos em Criminalidade e Segurança Pública da UFMG
Artigo publicado no jornal Folha de S. Paulo, em 02/03/2011
CLAUDIO BEATO
ESPECIAL PARA A FOLHA
Vivi nos EUA e na Inglaterra como professor visitante, e me impressionava a liberdade que havia para utilizar dados de criminalidade produzidos pelo poder público.
Na Universidade Harvard, recebíamos alertas da polícia sobre atividades criminosas nas ruas ao redor do campus.
Quem queria alugar casa podia consultar nos sites da polícia as ocorrências no local. Em Londres, avisos em hotspots de delitos na cidade e em pontos de metrô convidavam os usuários e transeuntes a serem cautelosos nesses locais. Por aqui, as coisas são muito diferentes.
A ideia de que alguém possa vender dados sigilosos desloca e oblitera a principal discussão, que reside no fato de que informações de segurança pública sejam secretas e ocultas ao público.
Ao personificar a notícia sobre um suposto malfeito, perdemos o foco do que deveria ser um debate central hoje. Por alguma estranha razão, prefere-se não divulgar dados sob o pretexto de que poderiam levar intranquilidade aos habitantes.
Naturalmente existem dados e informações que podem identificar e prejudicar pessoas e sobre os quais deve-se ter toda a precaução.
Mas informações relativas à distribuição de crimes certamente não se enquadram nessa categoria.
Há outra discussão ainda mais central. Não existe uma má política na área da segurança que não se inicie por uma péssima condição na organização dos dados. E não existe um caso de sucesso que não esteja calcado em boas informações e análises.
Túlio Kahn fazia excelente trabalho na organização dos dados na CAP, para fins de planejamento e análise das políticas públicas em SP.
Boas análises funcionam como holofotes sobre áreas problemáticas, iluminando também o trabalho dos responsáveis por elas. É como pescar em águas onde sabemos onde estarão os diferentes tipos de peixes, bem como os maus pescadores.
Quem lida com análises nessa área sabe dos inúmeros preconceitos e vieses vigentes, que terminam gerando situações como esta.
É um dos últimos redutos no qual sobrevive o que restou da antiga comunidade de informações, e do qual se nutrem gestores que não gostam de ver suas atividades avaliadas, muito menos submetidas a escrutínio público.
CLAUDIO BEATO é coordenador do Centro de Estudos em Criminalidade e Segurança Pública da UFMG
Artigo publicado no jornal Folha de S. Paulo, em 02/03/2011
sexta-feira, 25 de fevereiro de 2011
O governo controla o gasto, não o déficit
Alejandro Nadal
No livro "Teoria geral sobre o emprego, o juro e a moeda", Keynes destruiu vários mitos sobre o funcionamento de uma economia capitalista. Hoje, em plena crise e com discussões acaloradas sobre finanças públicas, há outra ideia igualmente perigosa que Keynes combateu com tenacidade. Consiste na comparação das finanças públicas com o orçamento de qualquer família. Com essa ideia falaciosa, hoje se insiste que o déficit público e o endividamento são insustentáveis. Nos Estados Unidos e na Europa, o argumento é o mesmo: como qualquer família, o governo tem que reduzir seus gastos. O artigo é de Alejandro Nadal.
Alejandro Nadal – La Jornada
Em 1936, John Maynard Keynes publicou sua Teoria geral sobre o emprego, o juro e a moeda. É o livro de economia mais importante do século XX. Nele, Keynes destruiu vários mitos sobre o funcionamento de uma economia capitalista. Por isso a academia se encarregou de distorcê-lo, desvirtuá-lo, cooptá-lo e, quando isso não foi possível, relegá-lo ao esquecimento.
Uma das lendas mais importantes destruídas pela obra de Keynes foi a crença de que, quando existe flexibilidade nos salários, se reestabelece o pleno emprego. Baseado em sua análise da demanda agregada, o multiplicador e sua teoria monetária do investimento, Keynes demonstrou que a flexibilidade dos salários não só permite alcançar uma posição de pleno emprego, mas também pode conduzir para uma situação de crise. A razão, em poucas palavras, é que ao derrubar-se a demanda efetiva, o investimento e o emprego caem juntos.
Mas esta mensagem de Keynes (como outras) foi considerada demasiado subversiva. A academia, sempre tão preocupada com a ciência, dedicou-se a distorcer a mensagem das instituições keynesianas. O resultado foi um período de cinco décadas nas quais os economistas acadêmicos construíram e refinaram modelos cada vez mais inúteis sobre o funcionamento das economias capitalistas. Esses modelos foram utilizados pelos bancos centrais e ministérios de finanças de todo o mundo para o desenho e aplicação de políticas econômicas.
A base desses modelos é que as economias capitalistas são sistemas de equilíbrio geral, mas com fricções. Ou seja, o capitalismo é sempre bem comportado. Mas deixa de sê-lo quando enfrenta essas fricções que podem ser de todo tipo: desde regulações impostas pelo governo, passando pelos “perversos sindicatos” e chegando aos choques externos. Assim, a academia passou os últimos 50 anos refinando modelos sobre economias capitalistas de equilíbrio com turbulências. Esse esquema mental impede pensar a economia capitalista como fonte de instabilidade perigosa.
Hoje, em plena crise e com discussões acaloradas sobre finanças públicas, há outra ideia igualmente perigosa que Keynes combateu com tenacidade (mas parece que sem êxito). Consiste na comparação das finanças públicas com o orçamento de qualquer família. Com essa ideia falaciosa, hoje se insiste que o déficit público e o endividamento são insustentáveis. Nos Estados Unidos e na Europa, o argumento é o mesmo: como qualquer família, o governo tem que reduzir seus gastos.
No ano passado as economistas Ann Pettifor e Victoria Chick divulgaram uma pesquisa sobre a política tributária, a redução do gasto e a redução do endividamento na Inglaterra. Examinaram dados dos últimos 100 anos das contas públicas e analisaram os episódios nos quais o governo buscou melhorar sua posição fiscal e reduzir o nível da dívida por meio de cortes nos gastos. Os episódios de consolidação fiscal, nos quais o gasto público efetivamente caiu, foram comparados com períodos de expansão fiscal (nos quais o gasto aumentou). Os resultados contradizem de maneira irrefutável o que hoje se considera o ponto de vista dominante. A conclusão é que, quando se aumenta o gasto mais rapidamente, o nível de endividamento público (relativo ao PIB) cai e a economia prospera. EM troca, quando o gasto é reduzido, o coeficiente dívida/PIB piora e os demais indicadores (sobre PIB e emprego) evoluem desfavoravelmente.
Quando se quer reduzir o déficit, nem sempre é uma boa ideia cortar o gasto público. Para uma família a redução do gasto quase sempre conduz diretamente à redução de seu endividamento ou de seu déficit. Mas para um governo, as coisas não são tão simples. O que o trabalho de Pettifor-Chick demonstra é que o governo só tem controle sobre o gasto, não sobre o déficit. O déficit depende do que ocorre em toda a economia. Quando existe capacidade instalada ociosa (como é o caso na atualidade) um programa de investimento público é produtivo e gera maior atividade no setor privado por meio de um efeito multiplicador. Tudo isso gera maior arrecadação, reduz a necessidade de endividamento, assim como o pagamento de juros mais adiante.
Outra descoberta de Pettifor-Chick é que a redução do investimento público contribuiu para deprimir os ingressos fiscais. Um corte no gasto público só é acompanhado de aumento de arrecadação fiscal se há uma contrapartida de um aumento importante no investimento privado. Mas, na maioria dos casos analisados, a contração no gasto público esteve associada com um comportamento letárgico do investimento privado. Neste caso, os efeitos adversos do multiplicador são uma má notícia para o emprego e as contas públicas. A mensagem para o debate sobre o estímulo fiscal é bastante clara. Mas talvez chegue demasiado tarde.
Publicado originalmente em http://www.cartamaior.com.br/templates/materiaMostrar.cfm?materia_id=17479
25/02/2011
Tradução: Katarina Peixoto
No livro "Teoria geral sobre o emprego, o juro e a moeda", Keynes destruiu vários mitos sobre o funcionamento de uma economia capitalista. Hoje, em plena crise e com discussões acaloradas sobre finanças públicas, há outra ideia igualmente perigosa que Keynes combateu com tenacidade. Consiste na comparação das finanças públicas com o orçamento de qualquer família. Com essa ideia falaciosa, hoje se insiste que o déficit público e o endividamento são insustentáveis. Nos Estados Unidos e na Europa, o argumento é o mesmo: como qualquer família, o governo tem que reduzir seus gastos. O artigo é de Alejandro Nadal.
Alejandro Nadal – La Jornada
Em 1936, John Maynard Keynes publicou sua Teoria geral sobre o emprego, o juro e a moeda. É o livro de economia mais importante do século XX. Nele, Keynes destruiu vários mitos sobre o funcionamento de uma economia capitalista. Por isso a academia se encarregou de distorcê-lo, desvirtuá-lo, cooptá-lo e, quando isso não foi possível, relegá-lo ao esquecimento.
Uma das lendas mais importantes destruídas pela obra de Keynes foi a crença de que, quando existe flexibilidade nos salários, se reestabelece o pleno emprego. Baseado em sua análise da demanda agregada, o multiplicador e sua teoria monetária do investimento, Keynes demonstrou que a flexibilidade dos salários não só permite alcançar uma posição de pleno emprego, mas também pode conduzir para uma situação de crise. A razão, em poucas palavras, é que ao derrubar-se a demanda efetiva, o investimento e o emprego caem juntos.
Mas esta mensagem de Keynes (como outras) foi considerada demasiado subversiva. A academia, sempre tão preocupada com a ciência, dedicou-se a distorcer a mensagem das instituições keynesianas. O resultado foi um período de cinco décadas nas quais os economistas acadêmicos construíram e refinaram modelos cada vez mais inúteis sobre o funcionamento das economias capitalistas. Esses modelos foram utilizados pelos bancos centrais e ministérios de finanças de todo o mundo para o desenho e aplicação de políticas econômicas.
A base desses modelos é que as economias capitalistas são sistemas de equilíbrio geral, mas com fricções. Ou seja, o capitalismo é sempre bem comportado. Mas deixa de sê-lo quando enfrenta essas fricções que podem ser de todo tipo: desde regulações impostas pelo governo, passando pelos “perversos sindicatos” e chegando aos choques externos. Assim, a academia passou os últimos 50 anos refinando modelos sobre economias capitalistas de equilíbrio com turbulências. Esse esquema mental impede pensar a economia capitalista como fonte de instabilidade perigosa.
Hoje, em plena crise e com discussões acaloradas sobre finanças públicas, há outra ideia igualmente perigosa que Keynes combateu com tenacidade (mas parece que sem êxito). Consiste na comparação das finanças públicas com o orçamento de qualquer família. Com essa ideia falaciosa, hoje se insiste que o déficit público e o endividamento são insustentáveis. Nos Estados Unidos e na Europa, o argumento é o mesmo: como qualquer família, o governo tem que reduzir seus gastos.
No ano passado as economistas Ann Pettifor e Victoria Chick divulgaram uma pesquisa sobre a política tributária, a redução do gasto e a redução do endividamento na Inglaterra. Examinaram dados dos últimos 100 anos das contas públicas e analisaram os episódios nos quais o governo buscou melhorar sua posição fiscal e reduzir o nível da dívida por meio de cortes nos gastos. Os episódios de consolidação fiscal, nos quais o gasto público efetivamente caiu, foram comparados com períodos de expansão fiscal (nos quais o gasto aumentou). Os resultados contradizem de maneira irrefutável o que hoje se considera o ponto de vista dominante. A conclusão é que, quando se aumenta o gasto mais rapidamente, o nível de endividamento público (relativo ao PIB) cai e a economia prospera. EM troca, quando o gasto é reduzido, o coeficiente dívida/PIB piora e os demais indicadores (sobre PIB e emprego) evoluem desfavoravelmente.
Quando se quer reduzir o déficit, nem sempre é uma boa ideia cortar o gasto público. Para uma família a redução do gasto quase sempre conduz diretamente à redução de seu endividamento ou de seu déficit. Mas para um governo, as coisas não são tão simples. O que o trabalho de Pettifor-Chick demonstra é que o governo só tem controle sobre o gasto, não sobre o déficit. O déficit depende do que ocorre em toda a economia. Quando existe capacidade instalada ociosa (como é o caso na atualidade) um programa de investimento público é produtivo e gera maior atividade no setor privado por meio de um efeito multiplicador. Tudo isso gera maior arrecadação, reduz a necessidade de endividamento, assim como o pagamento de juros mais adiante.
Outra descoberta de Pettifor-Chick é que a redução do investimento público contribuiu para deprimir os ingressos fiscais. Um corte no gasto público só é acompanhado de aumento de arrecadação fiscal se há uma contrapartida de um aumento importante no investimento privado. Mas, na maioria dos casos analisados, a contração no gasto público esteve associada com um comportamento letárgico do investimento privado. Neste caso, os efeitos adversos do multiplicador são uma má notícia para o emprego e as contas públicas. A mensagem para o debate sobre o estímulo fiscal é bastante clara. Mas talvez chegue demasiado tarde.
Publicado originalmente em http://www.cartamaior.com.br/templates/materiaMostrar.cfm?materia_id=17479
25/02/2011
Tradução: Katarina Peixoto
quarta-feira, 23 de fevereiro de 2011
Enfim, um plano de Dilma para o transporte hidroviário - 44 mil km navegáveis
Governo prepara pacote para hidrovias
As "estradas" de água, meio de transporte que sempre foi relegado a segundo - ou terceiro - plano na matriz logística nacional, estão prestes a entrar em nova fase. Nos últimos dez dias, o Ministério dos Transportes colocou no forno um pacote de medidas para melhorar as condições das principais hidrovias do país.
Um grupo de estudos integrado por representantes do ministério, do Departamento Nacional de Infraestrutura de Transportes (DNIT) e da Agência Nacional de Transportes Aquaviários (Antaq) foi montado para formatar um conjunto de ações que deverão ser realizadas ainda neste ano. O relatório, concluído no último fim de semana, será enviado nos próximos dias para a presidente Dilma Rousseff e para a ministra do Planejamento, Miriam Belchior. Ali são indicadas medidas de curto, médio e longo prazos que vão orientar os investimentos nas hidrovias, boa parte de um conjunto de obras que vai usar R$ 2,7 bilhões de orçamento previsto na segunda etapa do Programa de Aceleração do Crescimento (PAC 2).
O Valor teve acesso a informações de obras consideradas prioritárias e que serão licitadas nos próximos meses. Um dos principais projetos está voltado para dragagem (retirada de sedimentação do leito do rio), sinalização e balizamento da hidrovia do Madeira, com extensão de 1.115 km. O custo previsto é de cerca de R$ 120 milhões. Concluído o serviço, a capacidade de tráfego de carga no Madeira, que hoje é de 8 milhões de toneladas, poderá atingir 20 milhões de toneladas. No rio Amazonas, entre as cidades de Itacoatiara e Manaus, também será feita a retirada da sedimentação que avançou por causa do assoreamento. Em alguns trechos do canal principal do Amazonas, navios estão sendo obrigados a aliviar a quantidade de carga para chegar até Manaus. O mesmo problema será enfrentado no São Francisco, entre os municípios de Pirapora a Juazeiro, trecho no norte da Bahia que sempre foi transitável, mas que perdeu essa navegabilidade.
Outra obra de porte será tocada na hidrovia do Tocantins, que ganhará novo impulso a partir de abril com a entrada em operação comercial da eclusa de Tucuruí, no Pará. O projeto prevê que, a montante das eclusas, sejam realizadas obras de derrocamento e construção de outras eclusas numa região conhecida como "Pedral do Lourenço", entre Tucuruí e Marabá. Com isso, o trecho atual de 790 km de hidrovia - entre Tucuruí e a foz do Tocantins, em Vila do Conde - vai ganhar mais 400 km para navegação. A licitação para contratar a empresa que fará a retirada das pedras está prevista para sair no mês que vem. Hoje o Tocantins transporta cerca de 1 milhão de tonelada de carga por ano. Com a ampliação da rede, terá potencial para 70 milhões de toneladas.
A expansão e melhoria da hidrovia Paraná-Tietê, que tem 2,4 mil km de vias navegáveis, é outra prioridade. O governo de São Paulo trabalha na ampliação da via em seu trecho, mas a União quer contratar nos próximos meses uma consultoria para fazer estudos básicos que preveem a construção de eclusas do lado do Paraná.
Para Alex Oliva, superintendente de navegação interior da Antaq, os projetos sinalizam uma mudança de postura do governo com relação ao potencial logístico dos rios. "A hidrovia sempre foi vista como o 'patinho feio' do transporte, mas hoje o governo percebeu que tem um belo cisne nas mãos", diz. "Nesse processo, a retomada das obras das eclusas de Tucuruí e sua conclusão foram fundamentais e serviram para tirar a rolha que travava o setor."
O Brasil soma aproximadamente 44 mil km de rios, dos quais 29 mil km são naturalmente navegáveis, mas só 13 mil são efetivamente utilizados economicamente. A maior preocupação do governo, nesse momento, não é exatamente a de ampliar essa extensão - embora haja projetos em andamento para isso -, mas melhorar as condições do que já é utilizado. Nos próximos dias, a Antaq vai divulgar um mapa do setor hidroviário no país. O que os dados vão mostrar é que, no ano passado, os rios brasileiros transportaram um total de 65 milhões de toneladas de carga, quando uma estimativa conservadora do setor aponta para um potencial superior a 160 milhões de toneladas de carga por ano.
Embora a principal vocação das hidrovias seja o transporte de commodities, como grãos, minérios e insumos (fertilizantes e combustíveis, entre outros), apenas 5% da safra de grãos do país é transportada por elas, enquanto 67% seguem por estradas. Nos Estados Unidos, país que é um dos maiores exportadores de grãos do mundo, essa situação é absolutamente inversa. Lá, as estradas respondem por 16% do volume transportado, enquanto os rios têm 67% do total. "O resultado disso é o aumento no preço do frete e isso reduz a competitividade nacional", comenta Luiz Antônio Pagot, diretor-geral do DNIT.
Paralelamente à melhoria das condições de transporte nas principais hidrovias estão em construção 47 portos de pequeno porte. Desses, 26 estão localizados na Amazônia e deverão ser concluídos até o fim do ano que vem, com investimento total de aproximadamente R$ 400 milhões. Os demais, espalhados em outras regiões do país, serão entregues até 2014. O custo médio de uma estação de transbordo de carga com essas é de aproximadamente R$ 15 milhões. Trata-se, basicamente, da instalação de uma plataforma flutuante, um cais e terminais de carga e de passageiros.
No relatório que o Planalto receberá nos próximos dias, a lista de obras prioritárias estará acompanhada de uma relação de projetos que ainda precisam de estudos básicos para implementação. Já foram reservados pelo governo, segundo o DNI, R$ 400 milhões que vão financiar esses estudos, os quais vão apontar a viabilidade econômico-financeira desses projetos e qual o melhor cronograma de execução. O prazo para conclusão desses estudos é de três anos.
Fonte: Valor Econômico/André Borges | De Brasília 23/02/2011
As "estradas" de água, meio de transporte que sempre foi relegado a segundo - ou terceiro - plano na matriz logística nacional, estão prestes a entrar em nova fase. Nos últimos dez dias, o Ministério dos Transportes colocou no forno um pacote de medidas para melhorar as condições das principais hidrovias do país.
Um grupo de estudos integrado por representantes do ministério, do Departamento Nacional de Infraestrutura de Transportes (DNIT) e da Agência Nacional de Transportes Aquaviários (Antaq) foi montado para formatar um conjunto de ações que deverão ser realizadas ainda neste ano. O relatório, concluído no último fim de semana, será enviado nos próximos dias para a presidente Dilma Rousseff e para a ministra do Planejamento, Miriam Belchior. Ali são indicadas medidas de curto, médio e longo prazos que vão orientar os investimentos nas hidrovias, boa parte de um conjunto de obras que vai usar R$ 2,7 bilhões de orçamento previsto na segunda etapa do Programa de Aceleração do Crescimento (PAC 2).
O Valor teve acesso a informações de obras consideradas prioritárias e que serão licitadas nos próximos meses. Um dos principais projetos está voltado para dragagem (retirada de sedimentação do leito do rio), sinalização e balizamento da hidrovia do Madeira, com extensão de 1.115 km. O custo previsto é de cerca de R$ 120 milhões. Concluído o serviço, a capacidade de tráfego de carga no Madeira, que hoje é de 8 milhões de toneladas, poderá atingir 20 milhões de toneladas. No rio Amazonas, entre as cidades de Itacoatiara e Manaus, também será feita a retirada da sedimentação que avançou por causa do assoreamento. Em alguns trechos do canal principal do Amazonas, navios estão sendo obrigados a aliviar a quantidade de carga para chegar até Manaus. O mesmo problema será enfrentado no São Francisco, entre os municípios de Pirapora a Juazeiro, trecho no norte da Bahia que sempre foi transitável, mas que perdeu essa navegabilidade.
Outra obra de porte será tocada na hidrovia do Tocantins, que ganhará novo impulso a partir de abril com a entrada em operação comercial da eclusa de Tucuruí, no Pará. O projeto prevê que, a montante das eclusas, sejam realizadas obras de derrocamento e construção de outras eclusas numa região conhecida como "Pedral do Lourenço", entre Tucuruí e Marabá. Com isso, o trecho atual de 790 km de hidrovia - entre Tucuruí e a foz do Tocantins, em Vila do Conde - vai ganhar mais 400 km para navegação. A licitação para contratar a empresa que fará a retirada das pedras está prevista para sair no mês que vem. Hoje o Tocantins transporta cerca de 1 milhão de tonelada de carga por ano. Com a ampliação da rede, terá potencial para 70 milhões de toneladas.
A expansão e melhoria da hidrovia Paraná-Tietê, que tem 2,4 mil km de vias navegáveis, é outra prioridade. O governo de São Paulo trabalha na ampliação da via em seu trecho, mas a União quer contratar nos próximos meses uma consultoria para fazer estudos básicos que preveem a construção de eclusas do lado do Paraná.
Para Alex Oliva, superintendente de navegação interior da Antaq, os projetos sinalizam uma mudança de postura do governo com relação ao potencial logístico dos rios. "A hidrovia sempre foi vista como o 'patinho feio' do transporte, mas hoje o governo percebeu que tem um belo cisne nas mãos", diz. "Nesse processo, a retomada das obras das eclusas de Tucuruí e sua conclusão foram fundamentais e serviram para tirar a rolha que travava o setor."
O Brasil soma aproximadamente 44 mil km de rios, dos quais 29 mil km são naturalmente navegáveis, mas só 13 mil são efetivamente utilizados economicamente. A maior preocupação do governo, nesse momento, não é exatamente a de ampliar essa extensão - embora haja projetos em andamento para isso -, mas melhorar as condições do que já é utilizado. Nos próximos dias, a Antaq vai divulgar um mapa do setor hidroviário no país. O que os dados vão mostrar é que, no ano passado, os rios brasileiros transportaram um total de 65 milhões de toneladas de carga, quando uma estimativa conservadora do setor aponta para um potencial superior a 160 milhões de toneladas de carga por ano.
Embora a principal vocação das hidrovias seja o transporte de commodities, como grãos, minérios e insumos (fertilizantes e combustíveis, entre outros), apenas 5% da safra de grãos do país é transportada por elas, enquanto 67% seguem por estradas. Nos Estados Unidos, país que é um dos maiores exportadores de grãos do mundo, essa situação é absolutamente inversa. Lá, as estradas respondem por 16% do volume transportado, enquanto os rios têm 67% do total. "O resultado disso é o aumento no preço do frete e isso reduz a competitividade nacional", comenta Luiz Antônio Pagot, diretor-geral do DNIT.
Paralelamente à melhoria das condições de transporte nas principais hidrovias estão em construção 47 portos de pequeno porte. Desses, 26 estão localizados na Amazônia e deverão ser concluídos até o fim do ano que vem, com investimento total de aproximadamente R$ 400 milhões. Os demais, espalhados em outras regiões do país, serão entregues até 2014. O custo médio de uma estação de transbordo de carga com essas é de aproximadamente R$ 15 milhões. Trata-se, basicamente, da instalação de uma plataforma flutuante, um cais e terminais de carga e de passageiros.
No relatório que o Planalto receberá nos próximos dias, a lista de obras prioritárias estará acompanhada de uma relação de projetos que ainda precisam de estudos básicos para implementação. Já foram reservados pelo governo, segundo o DNI, R$ 400 milhões que vão financiar esses estudos, os quais vão apontar a viabilidade econômico-financeira desses projetos e qual o melhor cronograma de execução. O prazo para conclusão desses estudos é de três anos.
Fonte: Valor Econômico/André Borges | De Brasília 23/02/2011
The disconcerting rise of Europe’s far right - Against the new neoliberal order
Publicado no Le Monde Diplomatique - Fevereiro 2011 - http://mondediplo.com/2011/02/12farright
The radical right in the new democracies and semi-democracies of eastern Europe harks back to the apparent security of the old style nation-state. In doing so, it gives public voice to a fairly widely felt desire
by Michael Minkenberg
Radical rightwing groups are pitting themselves against the new neoliberal order in eastern Europe as they did against the state socialism that preceded it. Their existence is not surprising, and some specialists consider it a normal pathology that affects all societies that are modernising rapidly. What is really interesting is the regional specifics of the phenomenon.
Eastern Europe’s radical right distinguishes itself from its counterparts in the West. Since the regime changes, it has often captured impressive numbers of votes that have, nevertheless, fluctuated depending on the place and time.
Another particularity is openly pre- or anti-democratic ideology: unlike their western equivalents, the groups proclaim their nostalgia for the old despotic regimes, and the ethnic and territorial conception of national “identity” that prevailed under them. This sweeping nationalism allows some variation. There is a fascist autocratic right, inspired by the dictatorships of the interwar period, which persists in Russia, Romania and, more recently, Bulgaria, and is linked to the “national-communists” created by the collapse of the Soviet empire. There is also a more ethnocentric, racist right, which enthusiastically supports territorial revisionism, particularly in Hungary and the Czech Republic.
The desire to redraw frontiers is not unique to Russia, where since the 19th century nationalists have dreamed of owning ports in the warm waters of the Indian Ocean. Czech “Republicans” (SPR-RSV) demand that their country should fit the borders of the former Czechoslovakia, within which only a “homogenous” population would have the right to reside. In Romania, the Greater Romania Party (PRM) promotes inter-war borders as a way of demanding the annexation of Moldova. The desire for reconquest is strongest in Hungary. The Hungarian Justice and Life Party and the Movement for a Better Hungary both favour revising the Treaty of Trianon (1) and restoring Hungary’s Habsburg borders. All these parties adapt the symbols of the fascist movements and regimes of the 1930s, such as Hungary’s arrow cross or Romania’s Iron Guard.
In Poland, the phenomenon has been influenced by religious fundamentalism. At the beginning of the 20th century, Roman Dmowski, the theorist of “national democracy”, was already claiming that only Catholics made good Poles; the Christian-National Union (ZChN) insisted in the 1990s that Catholic dogma must be the foundation of Poland, and that it must defend the interests of all “ethnic” Poles scattered throughout eastern Europe. Since then the League of Polish Families (LPR) has taken up the banner, and re-activated the networks of its defunct predecessors (ZChN, the Movement for the Reconstruction of Poland or ROP, and the National Party or SN), and gained the support of Radio Maryja, an ultra-Catholic station that regularly broadcasts traditionalist, xenophobic and anti-semitic speeches to millions of listeners.
Racist tendencies
The asymmetry of East and West can also be seen on the organisational level. The eastern groups often support violence and share – to varying degrees – racist tendencies, a cult of the strong man and a disdain for elections and institutional politics. In Poland, hundreds of activists regularly gather in towns and cover walls in fascist and anti-semitic graffiti. The All-Polish Youth, a movement affiliated with the LPR until 2006, is notorious for its violence. In the Czech Republic, a radical “scene” has prospered, which likes to attack Roma people and therefore has the sympathy of part of the population. In the 1990s Hungary’s skinhead movement had about 4,000 members. The media estimate that the Russian equivalent has at least 50,000 supporters, to which can be added other violent groups, such as Aleksandr Dugin’s ultra-orthodox partisans, or the xenophobic militants of the Movement Against Illegal Immigration.
The extreme right is less structured in these countries than in the West, as is true with most political parties. Its electoral fluctuations, and its tendency to reconstitute itself from one election to the next, make it disconcertingly fluid. This also contributes to the permeable border between radical right movements and radical right parties, and between the radical right and the conservative right.
The distinctive characteristics of recent members of the European Union can be explained by regime changes, and by the region’s very specific history, which is layered over the democracy. The first layer is a compound – the immediate consequences of the dismantling of the USSR that began in 1989, plus the improvisation that shaped the transition towards democracy and the market economy, and the huge efforts made to enable the former members of the Warsaw Pact to join the EU. This severely tested the social fabric, creating a previously unknown gap between rich and poor, and a brutal discrepancy between people’s needs and a lack of available capital (including a lack of trust). Rightwing extremists knew how to exploit the popular discontent caused by this.
Then come the legacies of former communist regimes: a badly equipped bureaucracy; a political culture not given to tolerance; elites that have not been educated in the new system; parties that are weakly rooted in society; and an economy weighed down by a half-century of authoritarian centralism. This balance sheet has provoked resentment, which benefited the extreme right in a poorly structured political space. There are no immigrants (western Europe’s scapegoats) in eastern Europe. This role falls to local minorities and neighbouring countries, and will have a lasting impact on relations between states.
The third layer is thicker, made up of the lack of long-term democratic experience, from which all the countries have suffered since national independence (with the notable exception of Czechoslovakia). Hence the difficulty that their elites face in adapting to modernity, unlike the elites that ran Germany and Austria after 1945. Their task is made even harder because they cannot refer back to an older democratic tradition, such as during the inter-war period. So it is unsurprising that the rare reactions to the extreme right come almost exclusively from state institutions.
The construction of these countries began in the 19th century, was repeatedly interrupted during the 20th, and is still not complete today; almost all the countries that won independence after the fall of the Berlin Wall had belonged to multinational empires, Russian, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman, until the first world war. The national consciousness created in them during the 19th century adhered to an ethnic conception of nationhood because it lacked a state to guide it. That is why the continuity of the state and its frontiers remains uncertain. Since 1918 the triangular configuration of these countries has barely evolved: a nation-state, with “foreign” minorities within its borders and, scattered beyond, pockets of autochthonous populations more or less interested in reintegrating into the “mother country”. During the era of Soviet socialism, internationalism concealed these tensions. Since 1989 they have emerged and been fanned and exploited by ultra-nationalists.
The anti-communist pressures created by 1989 have rehabilitated the concept of the nation-state in eastern Europe. That is why nationalist and ethnocentric rhetoric is not marginal there, but an axis that structures public and political life, especially in a post-communist context that grants civil society only a minor role. Once the repudiation of elites and popular disenchantment with politicians have been added, it is hardly surprising that eastern European society increasingly leans to the right.
The radical right in the new democracies and semi-democracies of eastern Europe harks back to the apparent security of the old style nation-state. In doing so, it gives public voice to a fairly widely felt desire
by Michael Minkenberg
Radical rightwing groups are pitting themselves against the new neoliberal order in eastern Europe as they did against the state socialism that preceded it. Their existence is not surprising, and some specialists consider it a normal pathology that affects all societies that are modernising rapidly. What is really interesting is the regional specifics of the phenomenon.
Eastern Europe’s radical right distinguishes itself from its counterparts in the West. Since the regime changes, it has often captured impressive numbers of votes that have, nevertheless, fluctuated depending on the place and time.
Another particularity is openly pre- or anti-democratic ideology: unlike their western equivalents, the groups proclaim their nostalgia for the old despotic regimes, and the ethnic and territorial conception of national “identity” that prevailed under them. This sweeping nationalism allows some variation. There is a fascist autocratic right, inspired by the dictatorships of the interwar period, which persists in Russia, Romania and, more recently, Bulgaria, and is linked to the “national-communists” created by the collapse of the Soviet empire. There is also a more ethnocentric, racist right, which enthusiastically supports territorial revisionism, particularly in Hungary and the Czech Republic.
The desire to redraw frontiers is not unique to Russia, where since the 19th century nationalists have dreamed of owning ports in the warm waters of the Indian Ocean. Czech “Republicans” (SPR-RSV) demand that their country should fit the borders of the former Czechoslovakia, within which only a “homogenous” population would have the right to reside. In Romania, the Greater Romania Party (PRM) promotes inter-war borders as a way of demanding the annexation of Moldova. The desire for reconquest is strongest in Hungary. The Hungarian Justice and Life Party and the Movement for a Better Hungary both favour revising the Treaty of Trianon (1) and restoring Hungary’s Habsburg borders. All these parties adapt the symbols of the fascist movements and regimes of the 1930s, such as Hungary’s arrow cross or Romania’s Iron Guard.
In Poland, the phenomenon has been influenced by religious fundamentalism. At the beginning of the 20th century, Roman Dmowski, the theorist of “national democracy”, was already claiming that only Catholics made good Poles; the Christian-National Union (ZChN) insisted in the 1990s that Catholic dogma must be the foundation of Poland, and that it must defend the interests of all “ethnic” Poles scattered throughout eastern Europe. Since then the League of Polish Families (LPR) has taken up the banner, and re-activated the networks of its defunct predecessors (ZChN, the Movement for the Reconstruction of Poland or ROP, and the National Party or SN), and gained the support of Radio Maryja, an ultra-Catholic station that regularly broadcasts traditionalist, xenophobic and anti-semitic speeches to millions of listeners.
Racist tendencies
The asymmetry of East and West can also be seen on the organisational level. The eastern groups often support violence and share – to varying degrees – racist tendencies, a cult of the strong man and a disdain for elections and institutional politics. In Poland, hundreds of activists regularly gather in towns and cover walls in fascist and anti-semitic graffiti. The All-Polish Youth, a movement affiliated with the LPR until 2006, is notorious for its violence. In the Czech Republic, a radical “scene” has prospered, which likes to attack Roma people and therefore has the sympathy of part of the population. In the 1990s Hungary’s skinhead movement had about 4,000 members. The media estimate that the Russian equivalent has at least 50,000 supporters, to which can be added other violent groups, such as Aleksandr Dugin’s ultra-orthodox partisans, or the xenophobic militants of the Movement Against Illegal Immigration.
The extreme right is less structured in these countries than in the West, as is true with most political parties. Its electoral fluctuations, and its tendency to reconstitute itself from one election to the next, make it disconcertingly fluid. This also contributes to the permeable border between radical right movements and radical right parties, and between the radical right and the conservative right.
The distinctive characteristics of recent members of the European Union can be explained by regime changes, and by the region’s very specific history, which is layered over the democracy. The first layer is a compound – the immediate consequences of the dismantling of the USSR that began in 1989, plus the improvisation that shaped the transition towards democracy and the market economy, and the huge efforts made to enable the former members of the Warsaw Pact to join the EU. This severely tested the social fabric, creating a previously unknown gap between rich and poor, and a brutal discrepancy between people’s needs and a lack of available capital (including a lack of trust). Rightwing extremists knew how to exploit the popular discontent caused by this.
Then come the legacies of former communist regimes: a badly equipped bureaucracy; a political culture not given to tolerance; elites that have not been educated in the new system; parties that are weakly rooted in society; and an economy weighed down by a half-century of authoritarian centralism. This balance sheet has provoked resentment, which benefited the extreme right in a poorly structured political space. There are no immigrants (western Europe’s scapegoats) in eastern Europe. This role falls to local minorities and neighbouring countries, and will have a lasting impact on relations between states.
The third layer is thicker, made up of the lack of long-term democratic experience, from which all the countries have suffered since national independence (with the notable exception of Czechoslovakia). Hence the difficulty that their elites face in adapting to modernity, unlike the elites that ran Germany and Austria after 1945. Their task is made even harder because they cannot refer back to an older democratic tradition, such as during the inter-war period. So it is unsurprising that the rare reactions to the extreme right come almost exclusively from state institutions.
The construction of these countries began in the 19th century, was repeatedly interrupted during the 20th, and is still not complete today; almost all the countries that won independence after the fall of the Berlin Wall had belonged to multinational empires, Russian, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman, until the first world war. The national consciousness created in them during the 19th century adhered to an ethnic conception of nationhood because it lacked a state to guide it. That is why the continuity of the state and its frontiers remains uncertain. Since 1918 the triangular configuration of these countries has barely evolved: a nation-state, with “foreign” minorities within its borders and, scattered beyond, pockets of autochthonous populations more or less interested in reintegrating into the “mother country”. During the era of Soviet socialism, internationalism concealed these tensions. Since 1989 they have emerged and been fanned and exploited by ultra-nationalists.
The anti-communist pressures created by 1989 have rehabilitated the concept of the nation-state in eastern Europe. That is why nationalist and ethnocentric rhetoric is not marginal there, but an axis that structures public and political life, especially in a post-communist context that grants civil society only a minor role. Once the repudiation of elites and popular disenchantment with politicians have been added, it is hardly surprising that eastern European society increasingly leans to the right.
quinta-feira, 17 de fevereiro de 2011
Entre a liberdade de imprensa e a proteção da reputação individual
Slander or the paradoxes of freedom of speech
by Antoine Lilti [24-11-2010]
Translated with the support of the
Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme
Books reviewed: Robert Darnton, The Devil in the Holy Water or the Art of Slander from Louis XIV to Napoleon, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press (2010).Charles Walton, Policing Public Opinion in the French Revolution. The Culture of Calumny and the Problem of Free Speech, New York, Oxford University Press (2009).
Unverifiable rumours, spread by pseudo-journalists held in low esteem by their colleagues, circulate about the sexual indiscretions of the President and his wife. While claiming to have contempt for such gossip, the public devours it with an unhealthy appetite; the government worries about it and launches an immediate police inquiry. Does this sound familiar? Yet what we are talking about is not the recent dealings of Nicolas Sarkozy with the media, excesses in the blogosphere, or even the continuing troubles of the British royal family with tabloids and their insatiable curiosity, but, during the Old Regime, the libels [1] that were freely circulating thinly disguised scandalous anecdotes, supposed or entirely made-up, about the French Court. You will find everything you wanted to know about these libels in Robert Darnton’s latest book, The Devil in Holy Water.
Grub Street Culture
For the last thirty years, Robert Darnton has cast a new light on the 18th century. Thanks to his history of the book and of reading, his continuing interest in the social world of authors, and his unfailing curiosity about the least canonical books of the literary world, we are able to examine the cultural origins of the French Revolution with a fresh eye. According to Darnton, it was not the masterpieces of Rousseau and Montesquieu that undermined the intellectual foundations of the Old Regime, but the erotic and political pamphlets of the literary bohemia that debunked the myths of the monarchy and undermined its prestige [2]. This analysis, which emphasizes the paradoxical situation of a generation of young writers living in “Grub Street”, attracted by the new found prestige bestowed on men of letters but forced to write scandalous pamphlets to survive, has given rise to considerable controversy. Some historians have criticized Darnton for neglecting the role of ideas in the genesis of the French Revolution; others have accused him of exaggerating the political effects produced by the circulation of these pamphlets, and still others have claimed that he has overemphasized the divide in the literary landscape between established philosophers and anti-establishment newcomers. Darnton himself has responded to these criticisms by refining his arguments, drawing up a list of the forbidden best-sellers of the 18th century, and showing that his method can also be applied to canonical works and mainstream authors: these are his classical studies of the history of the publication of the Encyclopédie or of readers’ responses to Rousseau [3]. Nevertheless, libels are at the heart of his work – not just the famous and well-studied pornographic attacks on Marie-Antoinette, but also the bestsellers of clandestine literature such as the Anecdotes sur Mme la comtesse Du Barry, by Pidansat de Mairobert, or Le Gazetier cuirassé ou Anecdotes scandaleuses de la cour de France, by Charles Théveneau de Morande, published the same year, in 1771, in the midst of a political storm. Darnton has never ceased to study their transmission and to take a keen interest in the environment that had produced them. By publishing The Devil in Holy Water, he presents us with a kind of a reappraisal of this long term work.
Once again, the reader will encounter the charm of Darnton’s books: the fast pace of the narrative, a nose for archives and bibliographical discoveries, a predilection for colorful characters and fantastic adventures. But this time, the narrative balance has shifted: where the historian previously offered a clear-cut, and often provocative thesis backed up by a few, cleverly chosen and suggestive examples, the argument is more nuanced now, and leaves ample room for a systematic study of these polygraphs and the pamphlets that were written in such numbers.
From the Mazarinades of the 17th Century to Pre-Revolutionary Libels
There are many different ways to read such a comprehensive survey. The first one is to look for an answer to a famous question: do (bad) books make revolutions? On this issue, the reader is likely to be disappointed, because Darnton seems more cautious these days with his assertions. Admittedly, he insists that such a surge of public affronts to the elite of the Court must have strained the affective and political bonds between the monarchy and its people. But for all its nuances, the argument becomes somewhat hypothetical. In fact, the book shows that libels did not disappear with the Revolution – quite the opposite, in fact. When it came to it, the political culture of the Revolution did not hesitate to use the same methods of slanderous accusations and scandalous anecdotes.
Thus, the direct link between libels and the fall of the Old Regime recedes in favor of a more long-term analysis of the codes of satirical literature and its political usage. In fact, it seems that the historiographical discussion of the origins of the Revolution, which was so important at the time of the bicentenary, is now part of the past. After all, if we take a comparative approach, it has not prevented England, a country that enjoyed greater freedom of press and where slanderous attacks were also widespread at the turn of the century – even in daily newspapers –, from developing a strong patriotic attachment to its royal family.
A second take on this book, probably more in keeping with the goals of its author, is to dive with him into this world of libels and libelers (libellists), of which he paints a colorful portrait, with its codes, usage, its great men and renegades. Here, Robert Darnton has a great deal to offer with his incomparable knowledge of the protagonists of this small world. He even manages to discover a totally forgotten book, a novel written by a prolific author of libels, Anne Gédéon Lafitte, marquis de Pelleport, during his long captivity in the Bastille, a novel in which fictitious characters describe in great detail the habits of this literary bohemia [4]. A highly colorful character and fallen aristocrat, Pelleport is also the author of another roman à clés, the very Devil in the Holy Water from which Darnton has borrowed his title: this scandalous tale describes with fervor and an abundance of detail the unsuccessful attempts of the French police inspector Receveur to dismantle the network of libelers who have taken refuge in London as well as the betrayal by Théveneau de Morande, prince of libelers turned police informer.
Undeniably, one of the most fascinating aspects of Darnton’s account concerns the intricate links between the libelers from London and the French police who are responsible for their surveillance, and who arrange for the withdrawal of slanderous works. A complex game of bargaining and blackmailing emerges: police inspectors are sent to London on a mission to infiltrate the circle of French authors, who, in turn, demand money in exchange for not publishing their collections of scandalous anecdotes. However, these interchanges are ambiguous because some authors agree to work for the police while the inspector of the bookstore himself, Pierre-Antoine-Auguste Goupil, organizes a vast traffic of clandestine libels whose editing he oversees, revealing their dangers to his superiors and making them buy them back at great cost.
These conniving games, as well as the novels in which the libelers themselves play a role and make fun of the efforts of the police, are fascinating for what they reveal about the administrative and controlling organs of absolute monarchy, and Darnton excels in making sense of it all. But these games also cast a doubt on the actual political importance of these libels, insofar as they seem to operate in a kind of enclosed self-referential system. What if the police were the only ones to believe in the dangers of libels? And what if the shortcomings of the police authorities and the paranoia of the existing powers had artificially fed the market for this kind of scandalous literature and made slanderous blackmailing a perilous, yet lucrative exercise? In this case, the police archives and the libels themselves, far from being two opposing sources that confront one another, mirror each other to form one single corpus that leads us to overestimate their impact.
Finally, a third possible approach is to take calumny seriously as an object of history. One of the most important contributions of Darnton’s analysis is to show that slander constitutes a literary and editorial genre in itself, born of the ambition to expose, more or less explicitly, the secrets of great men. Like any genre, slander is the product of a literary tradition, which can be traced back to the work of Pietro Aretino, whose reputation was deeply ambiguous at the time: disparaged as a master of calumny, Aretino was also praised for his courage against the power and the Church, to the point that Voltaire did not hesitate to claim to be one of his disciples.
Therefore, because of its literary pedigree and this context of absolutism, slander ceases to be sheer calumny and becomes a form of denunciation, of social and political criticism instead. In the second part of his book, Darnton provides a description of the “basic ingredients” of this literature – the short story and the portrait – based on the model of private lives in which scandalous anecdotes always have a political meaning. The difficulty, then, is to distinguish what is the product of a tradition of fairly codified writing – that can be found in Rome at the Renaissance, in the Paris of la Fronde, and in France during the Enlightenment – from what corresponds to a socio-cultural transformation that is unique to the disappearing Old Regime and was made possible by its encounter with British journalism and new printing methods for disseminating the news. In other words, are the libels that mock the behavior of Louis XV and his royal mistresses or denounce the loose morals of Marie-Antoinette different in nature from the pasquinades and the mazarinades of previous centuries?
The Liberation of Speech and the Democratic Transition
By some editorial coincidence – which may point to a current trend in historiography – another book dedicated to slander at the end of the 18th century has been published lately, almost at the same time. Charles Walton is Darnton’s former student, but his approach is quite different: he is interested in understanding how the intellectuals of the Enlightenment, and later the revolutionaries, were forced to bring the new principles of freedom of press in line with the protection of individual reputations. The confrontation is no longer between the police and the libelers, but between a new liberal and egalitarian order, established by the Revolution, and the culture of honor, so deeply engrained in the society of the Old Regime.
In this perspective, Walton abandons the exploration of libels as an editorial genre in order to combine three different approaches: an intellectual history of the debates about the freedom of press that lead to the article XI of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and was pursued during the Revolution; a cultural history of the logic of honor, which was still very important during the Old Regime and did not disappear with the society of order; and lastly, a sociopolitical history of the micro-conflicts that brought into play, during the Revolution, slanderous practices and threats to the honor of individuals. A strong thesis thus emerges from these three combined analysis, each conducted on a different scale: the Revolutionary violence, during the Terror in particular, can be explained by the sudden passage of a society structured by the culture of honor, and in which the social value of a person depends, before anything else, upon his reputation and in which slander is the worst possible crime, to a more liberal society, formally egalitarian, in which freedom of speech is theoretically ensured. The skillfulness of this demonstration consists in showing that it is not the Jacobean principles that are responsible for the revolutionary violence, but the liberal principles themselves, not because of some intrinsic defect, but because of the explosive charge inherent in their application to a society still very much structured by a hierarchical and moral conception of social relations.
Like any broad interpretation of the revolutionary radicalization and the reign of Terror, Walton’s thesis is likely to be discussed in the future, and perhaps challenged, but it has the undeniable merit of replacing specious alternatives (the theory of circumstances or the Jacobean ideology) and of giving central attention to the difficulties of any democratic transition. Above all, the reader will learn a great deal in the process about the challenges that the idea of freedom of speech itself entailed in the debates that took place during the Enlightenment and the Revolution. He will realize, for instance, that the most liberal philosophers of the Enlightenment, like Condorcet, were never in favor of complete freedom of the press – at least not in the way we understand it now: they were satisfied with the mere suppression of prior censorship and, at times, set strict limits to freedom of speech. The reader will also learn that truly libertarian positions – the claim that we must fully trust the judgment of public opinion and prohibit nothing – were actually defended by very few, even during the first years of the Revolution. Soon, the deputies themselves were confronted with the issue of their own respectability and vulnerability to calumny. So, in order to protect their own dignity, they invented a crime of lèse-nation, on the model of the crime of lèse-majesté.
The Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1789 asserting that “the free communication of thoughts and of opinions is one of the most precious rights of man: any citizen thus may speak, write, print freely, save [if it is necessary] to respond to the abuse of this liberty, in the cases determined by the law” (art. XI) was both establishing a right and setting its limits, thus keeping its future determination open. The abuses it mentioned could be of various kinds – from blasphemy to sedition – but most of the revolutionaries were aware, like Brissot – who had been a journalist and a writer before the Revolution – that “to punish calumny without undermining the freedom of press is the most difficult problem to resolve in politics”.
Having started with an examination of the control of public opinion during the Revolution, Walton considers the problem of the necessary limits of freedom of speech: How can we guarantee freedom of speech and protect people’s reputation and dignity at the same time? This is a question that our contemporary liberal societies are still constantly confronted with. On this issue, our inheritance from the Enlightenment is far more complex, and far more interesting, than the famous sentence attributed to Voltaire (’I don’t agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”) – a sentence that is clearly apocryphal, as Walton reminds us opportunely – implied. Read in parallel, his and Darnton’s books delineate a public space that is quite different from the one that the specialists of the 18th century have explored in the last decades: not a Habermasian space of the rational usage of reason and harmonious sociability, but an ensemble of malevolent discourses and rumors, dependent upon countless social and political conflicts, and driven by a new fascination, fueled by the press, for the private lives of famous men and courtesans.Should we see in these two works signs of an evolution in historiography? We can, of course, read both of these books through the lens of standard questions, like the origins of the Revolution or the history of freedom of speech. Yet they seem to reveal a more salient aspect of our current relationship – both political and historiographical – to the Enlightenment: an ambiguous inheritance, constituted by a mixture of problems and contradictions rather than a stock of values that we must defend or reactivate. As an object of history, slander thus forces us to think historically about the complex relationships that exist between the institutions that guarantee freedom of speech, or its repression, the forms of writing that encourage political denunciation, and the increasingly public nature of the private lives of famous people.It seems therefore that the ambiguous relationship between the democratic ideal and the media can no longer be told as the history of a long drift from a public, critical space to a society of the spectacle threatened by a general preoccupation with the private lives of people. It is better to recognize, as these two books invite us to do, that the contradictions of freedom of speech are inherent in the cultural and political mutations that accompanied, during the long 18th century, the first democratization of European societies. First published in laviedesidées.fr. Translated from French by Pascale Torracinta with the support of Foundation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme.
by Antoine Lilti [24-11-2010]
To quote this article :
Antoine Lilti, « Slander or the paradoxes of freedom of speech », Books & Ideas, 24 November 2010. ISSN : 2105-3030. URL : http://www.booksandideas.net/Slander-or-the-paradoxes-of.html
Footnotes
[1] “The libelle (libel) [is] a scandalous account of public affairs and private life among the great figures and the court and capital. The term does not get much use in modern French, but it belonged to common parlance in the book trade of the Ancien Régime, and the authors of such works were listed in the files of the police as libelistes (libelers)”, Robert Darnton, The Devil in the Holy Water, p.2.
[2] This thesis was first established and developed in a series of articles published during the seventies and collected in The Literary Underground of the Old Regime, Harvard University Press (1982).
[3] See, for instance, Robert Darnton, The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie, 1775-1800, Harvard University (1979). To get a better idea of the discussions it provoked, see The Darnton Debate: Books and Revolution in the 18th Century, Haydn T. Mason (ed.), Oxford, Voltaire Foundation, (1998). One of the most recent examples of such discussion is Simon Burrows’ book, Blackmail, Scandal, and Revolution : London’s French Libellistes, 1758-92, Manchester, Manchester University Press (2006), in which the author challenges with passion Darnton’s view of the role played by libels and libelers in the crisis of the Old Regime.
[4] Robert Darnton republishes this work which he presents as “an unknown literary chef-d’oeuvre”, which may be somewhat of an exaggeration: Marquis de Pelleport, Les Bohémiens, edited by R. Darnton, Paris, Mercure de France (2010) (1st edition, 1790).
by Antoine Lilti [24-11-2010]
Translated with the support of the
Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme
Books reviewed: Robert Darnton, The Devil in the Holy Water or the Art of Slander from Louis XIV to Napoleon, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press (2010).Charles Walton, Policing Public Opinion in the French Revolution. The Culture of Calumny and the Problem of Free Speech, New York, Oxford University Press (2009).
Unverifiable rumours, spread by pseudo-journalists held in low esteem by their colleagues, circulate about the sexual indiscretions of the President and his wife. While claiming to have contempt for such gossip, the public devours it with an unhealthy appetite; the government worries about it and launches an immediate police inquiry. Does this sound familiar? Yet what we are talking about is not the recent dealings of Nicolas Sarkozy with the media, excesses in the blogosphere, or even the continuing troubles of the British royal family with tabloids and their insatiable curiosity, but, during the Old Regime, the libels [1] that were freely circulating thinly disguised scandalous anecdotes, supposed or entirely made-up, about the French Court. You will find everything you wanted to know about these libels in Robert Darnton’s latest book, The Devil in Holy Water.
Grub Street Culture
For the last thirty years, Robert Darnton has cast a new light on the 18th century. Thanks to his history of the book and of reading, his continuing interest in the social world of authors, and his unfailing curiosity about the least canonical books of the literary world, we are able to examine the cultural origins of the French Revolution with a fresh eye. According to Darnton, it was not the masterpieces of Rousseau and Montesquieu that undermined the intellectual foundations of the Old Regime, but the erotic and political pamphlets of the literary bohemia that debunked the myths of the monarchy and undermined its prestige [2]. This analysis, which emphasizes the paradoxical situation of a generation of young writers living in “Grub Street”, attracted by the new found prestige bestowed on men of letters but forced to write scandalous pamphlets to survive, has given rise to considerable controversy. Some historians have criticized Darnton for neglecting the role of ideas in the genesis of the French Revolution; others have accused him of exaggerating the political effects produced by the circulation of these pamphlets, and still others have claimed that he has overemphasized the divide in the literary landscape between established philosophers and anti-establishment newcomers. Darnton himself has responded to these criticisms by refining his arguments, drawing up a list of the forbidden best-sellers of the 18th century, and showing that his method can also be applied to canonical works and mainstream authors: these are his classical studies of the history of the publication of the Encyclopédie or of readers’ responses to Rousseau [3]. Nevertheless, libels are at the heart of his work – not just the famous and well-studied pornographic attacks on Marie-Antoinette, but also the bestsellers of clandestine literature such as the Anecdotes sur Mme la comtesse Du Barry, by Pidansat de Mairobert, or Le Gazetier cuirassé ou Anecdotes scandaleuses de la cour de France, by Charles Théveneau de Morande, published the same year, in 1771, in the midst of a political storm. Darnton has never ceased to study their transmission and to take a keen interest in the environment that had produced them. By publishing The Devil in Holy Water, he presents us with a kind of a reappraisal of this long term work.
Once again, the reader will encounter the charm of Darnton’s books: the fast pace of the narrative, a nose for archives and bibliographical discoveries, a predilection for colorful characters and fantastic adventures. But this time, the narrative balance has shifted: where the historian previously offered a clear-cut, and often provocative thesis backed up by a few, cleverly chosen and suggestive examples, the argument is more nuanced now, and leaves ample room for a systematic study of these polygraphs and the pamphlets that were written in such numbers.
From the Mazarinades of the 17th Century to Pre-Revolutionary Libels
There are many different ways to read such a comprehensive survey. The first one is to look for an answer to a famous question: do (bad) books make revolutions? On this issue, the reader is likely to be disappointed, because Darnton seems more cautious these days with his assertions. Admittedly, he insists that such a surge of public affronts to the elite of the Court must have strained the affective and political bonds between the monarchy and its people. But for all its nuances, the argument becomes somewhat hypothetical. In fact, the book shows that libels did not disappear with the Revolution – quite the opposite, in fact. When it came to it, the political culture of the Revolution did not hesitate to use the same methods of slanderous accusations and scandalous anecdotes.
Thus, the direct link between libels and the fall of the Old Regime recedes in favor of a more long-term analysis of the codes of satirical literature and its political usage. In fact, it seems that the historiographical discussion of the origins of the Revolution, which was so important at the time of the bicentenary, is now part of the past. After all, if we take a comparative approach, it has not prevented England, a country that enjoyed greater freedom of press and where slanderous attacks were also widespread at the turn of the century – even in daily newspapers –, from developing a strong patriotic attachment to its royal family.
A second take on this book, probably more in keeping with the goals of its author, is to dive with him into this world of libels and libelers (libellists), of which he paints a colorful portrait, with its codes, usage, its great men and renegades. Here, Robert Darnton has a great deal to offer with his incomparable knowledge of the protagonists of this small world. He even manages to discover a totally forgotten book, a novel written by a prolific author of libels, Anne Gédéon Lafitte, marquis de Pelleport, during his long captivity in the Bastille, a novel in which fictitious characters describe in great detail the habits of this literary bohemia [4]. A highly colorful character and fallen aristocrat, Pelleport is also the author of another roman à clés, the very Devil in the Holy Water from which Darnton has borrowed his title: this scandalous tale describes with fervor and an abundance of detail the unsuccessful attempts of the French police inspector Receveur to dismantle the network of libelers who have taken refuge in London as well as the betrayal by Théveneau de Morande, prince of libelers turned police informer.
Undeniably, one of the most fascinating aspects of Darnton’s account concerns the intricate links between the libelers from London and the French police who are responsible for their surveillance, and who arrange for the withdrawal of slanderous works. A complex game of bargaining and blackmailing emerges: police inspectors are sent to London on a mission to infiltrate the circle of French authors, who, in turn, demand money in exchange for not publishing their collections of scandalous anecdotes. However, these interchanges are ambiguous because some authors agree to work for the police while the inspector of the bookstore himself, Pierre-Antoine-Auguste Goupil, organizes a vast traffic of clandestine libels whose editing he oversees, revealing their dangers to his superiors and making them buy them back at great cost.
These conniving games, as well as the novels in which the libelers themselves play a role and make fun of the efforts of the police, are fascinating for what they reveal about the administrative and controlling organs of absolute monarchy, and Darnton excels in making sense of it all. But these games also cast a doubt on the actual political importance of these libels, insofar as they seem to operate in a kind of enclosed self-referential system. What if the police were the only ones to believe in the dangers of libels? And what if the shortcomings of the police authorities and the paranoia of the existing powers had artificially fed the market for this kind of scandalous literature and made slanderous blackmailing a perilous, yet lucrative exercise? In this case, the police archives and the libels themselves, far from being two opposing sources that confront one another, mirror each other to form one single corpus that leads us to overestimate their impact.
Finally, a third possible approach is to take calumny seriously as an object of history. One of the most important contributions of Darnton’s analysis is to show that slander constitutes a literary and editorial genre in itself, born of the ambition to expose, more or less explicitly, the secrets of great men. Like any genre, slander is the product of a literary tradition, which can be traced back to the work of Pietro Aretino, whose reputation was deeply ambiguous at the time: disparaged as a master of calumny, Aretino was also praised for his courage against the power and the Church, to the point that Voltaire did not hesitate to claim to be one of his disciples.
Therefore, because of its literary pedigree and this context of absolutism, slander ceases to be sheer calumny and becomes a form of denunciation, of social and political criticism instead. In the second part of his book, Darnton provides a description of the “basic ingredients” of this literature – the short story and the portrait – based on the model of private lives in which scandalous anecdotes always have a political meaning. The difficulty, then, is to distinguish what is the product of a tradition of fairly codified writing – that can be found in Rome at the Renaissance, in the Paris of la Fronde, and in France during the Enlightenment – from what corresponds to a socio-cultural transformation that is unique to the disappearing Old Regime and was made possible by its encounter with British journalism and new printing methods for disseminating the news. In other words, are the libels that mock the behavior of Louis XV and his royal mistresses or denounce the loose morals of Marie-Antoinette different in nature from the pasquinades and the mazarinades of previous centuries?
The Liberation of Speech and the Democratic Transition
By some editorial coincidence – which may point to a current trend in historiography – another book dedicated to slander at the end of the 18th century has been published lately, almost at the same time. Charles Walton is Darnton’s former student, but his approach is quite different: he is interested in understanding how the intellectuals of the Enlightenment, and later the revolutionaries, were forced to bring the new principles of freedom of press in line with the protection of individual reputations. The confrontation is no longer between the police and the libelers, but between a new liberal and egalitarian order, established by the Revolution, and the culture of honor, so deeply engrained in the society of the Old Regime.
In this perspective, Walton abandons the exploration of libels as an editorial genre in order to combine three different approaches: an intellectual history of the debates about the freedom of press that lead to the article XI of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and was pursued during the Revolution; a cultural history of the logic of honor, which was still very important during the Old Regime and did not disappear with the society of order; and lastly, a sociopolitical history of the micro-conflicts that brought into play, during the Revolution, slanderous practices and threats to the honor of individuals. A strong thesis thus emerges from these three combined analysis, each conducted on a different scale: the Revolutionary violence, during the Terror in particular, can be explained by the sudden passage of a society structured by the culture of honor, and in which the social value of a person depends, before anything else, upon his reputation and in which slander is the worst possible crime, to a more liberal society, formally egalitarian, in which freedom of speech is theoretically ensured. The skillfulness of this demonstration consists in showing that it is not the Jacobean principles that are responsible for the revolutionary violence, but the liberal principles themselves, not because of some intrinsic defect, but because of the explosive charge inherent in their application to a society still very much structured by a hierarchical and moral conception of social relations.
Like any broad interpretation of the revolutionary radicalization and the reign of Terror, Walton’s thesis is likely to be discussed in the future, and perhaps challenged, but it has the undeniable merit of replacing specious alternatives (the theory of circumstances or the Jacobean ideology) and of giving central attention to the difficulties of any democratic transition. Above all, the reader will learn a great deal in the process about the challenges that the idea of freedom of speech itself entailed in the debates that took place during the Enlightenment and the Revolution. He will realize, for instance, that the most liberal philosophers of the Enlightenment, like Condorcet, were never in favor of complete freedom of the press – at least not in the way we understand it now: they were satisfied with the mere suppression of prior censorship and, at times, set strict limits to freedom of speech. The reader will also learn that truly libertarian positions – the claim that we must fully trust the judgment of public opinion and prohibit nothing – were actually defended by very few, even during the first years of the Revolution. Soon, the deputies themselves were confronted with the issue of their own respectability and vulnerability to calumny. So, in order to protect their own dignity, they invented a crime of lèse-nation, on the model of the crime of lèse-majesté.
The Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1789 asserting that “the free communication of thoughts and of opinions is one of the most precious rights of man: any citizen thus may speak, write, print freely, save [if it is necessary] to respond to the abuse of this liberty, in the cases determined by the law” (art. XI) was both establishing a right and setting its limits, thus keeping its future determination open. The abuses it mentioned could be of various kinds – from blasphemy to sedition – but most of the revolutionaries were aware, like Brissot – who had been a journalist and a writer before the Revolution – that “to punish calumny without undermining the freedom of press is the most difficult problem to resolve in politics”.
Having started with an examination of the control of public opinion during the Revolution, Walton considers the problem of the necessary limits of freedom of speech: How can we guarantee freedom of speech and protect people’s reputation and dignity at the same time? This is a question that our contemporary liberal societies are still constantly confronted with. On this issue, our inheritance from the Enlightenment is far more complex, and far more interesting, than the famous sentence attributed to Voltaire (’I don’t agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”) – a sentence that is clearly apocryphal, as Walton reminds us opportunely – implied. Read in parallel, his and Darnton’s books delineate a public space that is quite different from the one that the specialists of the 18th century have explored in the last decades: not a Habermasian space of the rational usage of reason and harmonious sociability, but an ensemble of malevolent discourses and rumors, dependent upon countless social and political conflicts, and driven by a new fascination, fueled by the press, for the private lives of famous men and courtesans.Should we see in these two works signs of an evolution in historiography? We can, of course, read both of these books through the lens of standard questions, like the origins of the Revolution or the history of freedom of speech. Yet they seem to reveal a more salient aspect of our current relationship – both political and historiographical – to the Enlightenment: an ambiguous inheritance, constituted by a mixture of problems and contradictions rather than a stock of values that we must defend or reactivate. As an object of history, slander thus forces us to think historically about the complex relationships that exist between the institutions that guarantee freedom of speech, or its repression, the forms of writing that encourage political denunciation, and the increasingly public nature of the private lives of famous people.It seems therefore that the ambiguous relationship between the democratic ideal and the media can no longer be told as the history of a long drift from a public, critical space to a society of the spectacle threatened by a general preoccupation with the private lives of people. It is better to recognize, as these two books invite us to do, that the contradictions of freedom of speech are inherent in the cultural and political mutations that accompanied, during the long 18th century, the first democratization of European societies. First published in laviedesidées.fr. Translated from French by Pascale Torracinta with the support of Foundation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme.
by Antoine Lilti [24-11-2010]
To quote this article :
Antoine Lilti, « Slander or the paradoxes of freedom of speech », Books & Ideas, 24 November 2010. ISSN : 2105-3030. URL : http://www.booksandideas.net/Slander-or-the-paradoxes-of.html
Footnotes
[1] “The libelle (libel) [is] a scandalous account of public affairs and private life among the great figures and the court and capital. The term does not get much use in modern French, but it belonged to common parlance in the book trade of the Ancien Régime, and the authors of such works were listed in the files of the police as libelistes (libelers)”, Robert Darnton, The Devil in the Holy Water, p.2.
[2] This thesis was first established and developed in a series of articles published during the seventies and collected in The Literary Underground of the Old Regime, Harvard University Press (1982).
[3] See, for instance, Robert Darnton, The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie, 1775-1800, Harvard University (1979). To get a better idea of the discussions it provoked, see The Darnton Debate: Books and Revolution in the 18th Century, Haydn T. Mason (ed.), Oxford, Voltaire Foundation, (1998). One of the most recent examples of such discussion is Simon Burrows’ book, Blackmail, Scandal, and Revolution : London’s French Libellistes, 1758-92, Manchester, Manchester University Press (2006), in which the author challenges with passion Darnton’s view of the role played by libels and libelers in the crisis of the Old Regime.
[4] Robert Darnton republishes this work which he presents as “an unknown literary chef-d’oeuvre”, which may be somewhat of an exaggeration: Marquis de Pelleport, Les Bohémiens, edited by R. Darnton, Paris, Mercure de France (2010) (1st edition, 1790).
Marx, sem materialismo histórico e dialético
GEORGE LICHTHEIM
HISTORICAL AND
DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM
Historical and dialectical materialism are terms con-
ventionally employed to describe two aspects of the
theoretical structure known as Marxism. Although
logically independent of each other, the two concepts
are historically linked by virtue of the fact that they
evolved from a common intellectual stem. For practi-
cal purposes it is also relevant that Marx and Engels
are widely regarded as joint creators of a unified system
of thought encompassing nature and history. The fact
that this interpretation is erroneous does not render
it less significant. Insofar as the term “Marxism” has
come to stand for a systematic doctrine elaborated by
Engels and others after the death of Marx, the latter's
original intentions may be said to have been “devel-
oped” or “misinterpreted,” depending upon one's
viewpoint. Irrespective of where one stands on this
issue, it is a comparatively simple matter to distinguish
the historical materialism of Marx from the dialectical
materialism of Engels. In tracing this distinction, we
begin with Marx's writings on history, and then pro-
ceed to a consideration of the materialist ontology
outlined by Engels and subsequently institutionalized
in the dogmatic system of Marxism-Leninism. This
approach inverts the familiar procedure wherein his-
torical materialism is treated as the application to
history of the general doctrine of dialectical materi-
alism. Since no such view was at any time entertained
by Marx, we are on safe grounds in disregarding it.
1. Marx's Historical Materialism. A consideration
of this topic can usefully start out from an early work,
The Holy Family (1845), in which Marx draws a dis-
tinction between two divergent currents stemming
from the rationalist philosophy of the French eight-
eenth-century Enlightenment. On the one hand, the
philosophes had opposed what Marx called “mechani-
cal materialism” to the metaphysics of Descartes,
Spinoza, and Leibniz, thereby preparing the way for
the emancipation of natural science from Cartesian
metaphysics. Having successfully divorced Descartes'
physics from his metaphysics, this “Cartesian materi-
alism” eventually merged with “French natural sci-
ence.” The heritage of Descartes—who in his lifetime
had already encountered opponents in Gassendi (“the
restorer of Epicurean materialism”) and in Hobbes—
was, however, gradually dislodged by doctrines rooted
in Locke and was eventually given a new form by
Condillac and Helvétius. According to Marx, “As
Cartesian materialism merges into natural science
proper, the other branch of French materialism leads
direct to socialism and communism” (Marx, Holy Fam-
ily [1845], p. 175). Its ultimate source was an anthro
pological doctrine which emphasized the goodness of
man:
There is no need of any great penetration to realize that
the teaching of materialism on the original goodness and
equal intellectual endowment of men, the omnipotence of
experience, habit and education, and the influence of envi-
ronment... is necessarily connected with communism and
socialism. If man draws all his knowledge, sensation, etc.,
from the world of the senses and the experience gained in
it, the empirical world must be arranged so that in it man
experiences... what is really human and... becomes
aware of himself as man (ibid., p. 175, slightly revised).
This Marxian humanism, as formulated in the Holy
Family, the Theses on Feuerbach (1845), and the
German Ideology (1845-46), was a development of
eighteenth-century French materialism, minus its
Cartesian physics and the related epistemological
problem, in which he took no interest. The basic orien-
tation of this materialism was practical, and its appli-
cation to social life was seen by Marx to follow in-
evitably from insight into the human condition. “If man
is shaped by his surroundings, his surroundings must
be made human” (Holy Family, p. 176). This conclusion
followed without question for anyone who had incor-
porated the ethics of the French Enlightenment in his
own assumptions about the world. Marx was never
conscious of a moral problem in this respect, because
his values formed part of a commitment to the belief
that the humanization of nature (including that part
of “human” nature which was in fact pre-human, i.e.,
a heritage of man's animal past) was both possible and
desirable. In this sense, historical materialism from the
start incorporated a particular value-system: that of
the Enlightenment. At the same time the doctrine had
a specific theoretical content which differentiated it
from contemporary liberalism: it rejected the then
fashionable disjunction between society and the indi-
vidual. When he wrote in his sixth Thesis on Feuerbach
that “The essence of man is no abstraction inherent
in each separate individual. In its reality it is the en-
semble of social relations,” Marx reemphasized a notion
already stressed in the passage from The Holy Family
cited earlier: “If man is social by nature, he will de-
velop his true nature only in society, and the power
of his nature must be measured not by the power of
separate individuals, but by the power of society”
(Holy Family, p. 176).
The difference between the liberal and the socialist
position then, as Marx perceived it in the 1840's, re-
duced itself to this: the socialists (or communists),
having taken seriously the proposition that man is the
sum total of his social relations, were concerned to
remake society, whereas liberal rationalism postulated
Page 451, Volume 2
a fixed and stable individual human essence which
could be relied upon to find adequate expression in
appropriate social institutions—always supposing that
no artificial barriers were placed in the way. In prac-
tice, liberalism identified human rationality with en-
lightened self-interest, and the desirable social order
with one in which private initiative was permitted free
play. In this respect the liberals went back to the
philosophers of the eighteenth century, but then so did
Marx, with the difference that he rejected the individ-
ualism of the Scottish moralists and of Adam Smith,
in favor of the collectivism inherent in the French
materialists. It is important to realize that in its origins
“historical materialism” was an anthropological doc-
trine before it became a sociological one. Its signifi-
cance for Marx lay in the fact that it enabled him to
treat socialism (or communism) as the consistent appli-
cation to society of general principles extracted from
the philosophical study of human nature. Once this
nature was perceived as “social,” in the sense that it
always and everywhere refracted the character of the
cultural environment which men had constructed, the
“socialist” conclusion followed from the “materialist”
assumption. Or rather, it followed for Marx because
he took for granted the value-system of writers like
Holbach and Helvétius, for whom true self-love was
inconceivable in abstraction from human solidarity.
The notion that this anthropological naturalism is
anchored in a general theory of the universe, which
represents the world as a process of “dialectical”
movement from one stage to another, finds no support
in Marx's writings. For him, the only “nature” that
enters into practical consideration is man's own nature.
The external world, as it exists in and for itself, is
irrelevant to a thinker who approaches history with
a view to establishing what men have made of them-
selves and are still capable of becoming. It is the more
irrelevant because on Marx's assumptions about the
active role of consciousness in constituting our picture
of reality, the world is never simply “given,” any more
than that man is the passive receptacle of sense-
impressions. An external environment, true knowledge
of which is possible in abstraction from man's role in
shaping the world, is a fantasy, at any rate so far as
society is concerned. The only world we know is the
one we have constituted: that which appears in our
individual and collective experience. Man is indeed
part of nature, so that the distinction between natural
and historical science can only be relative, not absolute.
But “historical materialism” has to do with “anthro-
pological nature,” not with nature in the abstract. At
the same time, the emphasis upon the “historical”
aspect of the new viewpoint served to distinguish it
from the naturalistic approach of the eighteenth-
century French philosophes (and of Feuerbach), which
virtually ignored the historical process. A materialist
critique of the prevailing social and political conditions
presupposed an understanding of the manner in which
they had come into being, the forces which upheld
them, and the tendencies pointing beyond them. The
Theses on Feuerbach in particular represent a break
with “contemplative” materialism, and the adoption
of a “practical” standpoint which is revolutionary by
its very nature.
Historical materialism in this sense had a “dialec-
tical” element built into its conceptual structure from
the very first. It was at one and the same time an
analysis of the historical process, and the theoretical
underpinning of a particular viewpoint (the socialist
one) which implied a critique of liberal individualism
and its objective correlative: civil (or bourgeois) soci-
ety. This introduction of an activist element into a
doctrine of society proved baffling to most of Marx's
critics who accepted the positivist interpretation of
history as an ongoing process analyzable in strictly
factual terms. Historical events, on this view, were
analogous to the facts of natural science. They were
simply there to be studied in as dispassionate a manner
as possible, and the task of the historian (in Ranke's
words) was to explain “what really happened” (wie es
eigentlich gewesen).
Marx by the later 1840's was sufficiently close to
positivism to reject Hegel's philosophy of history, and
by implication the entire notion of a philosophy (as
distinct from a theory) of history: an enterprise whose
theological purpose had become evident to him, once
he had emancipated himself from Hegel and absorbed
the impact of Anglo-French materialism. At the same
time he differed from Comte (whose principal work
he first read in 1866, and then dismissed as rubbish)
in refusing to treat history as an accretion of data
which could be studied on the model of the natural
sciences. History to Marx was a self-activating totality
ultimately rooted in the “production and reproduction
of material life.” Its objectivity was not of the kind
that could be discerned by the study of “facts,” and
for the same reason it did not lend itself to the fram-
ing of general laws analogous to Newtonian physics:
the model of Comte's “social physics.” The materialist
approach was outlined by Marx in the German Ide-
ology of 1845-46, and subsequently confirmed in the
well-known Preface to the Critique of Political Econ-
omy (1859):
The mode of production of material life conditions the
social, political and intellectual life-process in general. It
is not the consciousness of men that determines their being,
but on the contrary their social being that determines their
consciousness.
Page 452, Volume 2
It has for its counterpart the activist note struck in
the Communist Manifesto (1848):
The history of all hitherto existing society is a history of
class struggles.
These two modes of perception are held in balance
by the notion that the “materialist conception of his-
tory” is both a theory of the historical process and a
means towards its mastery. Men become masters of
their fate in the measure in which they become con-
scious of the mechanism whereby history is set in
motion and kept going. In turning their insight to
practical account, they do not for this reason abandon
the scientific standpoint. Rather, they employ their
insight into the antagonistic character of the historical
process—specifically of its ultimate stage: contem-
porary bourgeois society—for the purpose of over-
coming the antagonism. Marx's historical materialism
differs from Comte's positivism in that it incorporates
practical (political or ethical) postulates within its very
conceptual structure. He does not formulate general
laws on the basis of a dispassionate study of “objective”
data; he conceptualizes the historical process, and in
this very act unifies (critical) theory and (revolutionary)
practice.
Although Marx never employed the term “sociol-
ogy” (possibly because he held Comte's work in low
esteem), it has become customary to treat the approach
briefly sketched out in the 1859 Preface, and exten-
sively developed in Capital (1867), as a sociological
doctrine analogous to that of Comte. Within the
Marxist school itself this fashion was inaugurated by
Engels, who in his Anti-Dühring (1878) attributed to
Marx “two great discoveries,” one of them being “the
materialist conception of history.” This was described
by Engels as the doctrine “that the production (of the
means to support human life) and, next to production,
the exchange of things produced, is the basis of all
social structure; that in every society that has appeared
in history, the manner in which wealth is distributed
and society divided into classes or orders is dependent
upon what is produced, how it is produced, and how
the products are exchanged.” Marx, who had read the
Anti-Dühring in manuscript, did not bother to correct
this simplified exposition of his very complex approach,
presumably because he regarded the book as a popular
tract destined for a semi-literate public. In consequence
it came to be widely believed that “scientific socialism”
(another term coined by Engels) had for its theoretical
foundation a species of economic determinism valid
for all stages of recorded history. In the light of this
quite unfounded assumption, the relationship of the
so-called “economic base” to the “political” or
“ideological” superstructure assumed the status of a
major theoretical difficulty whose solution kept a small
army of exegetes ceaselessly employed. The “materi-
alist” standpoint was understood in terms of Engels'
statement (in the passage already cited) as signifying
that “the final causes of all social changes and political
revolutions are to be sought... not in the philosophy,
but in the economics of each particular epoch” (Engels,
1878).
In point of fact, the problem of relating the “politi-
cal superstructure” to its “material foundation” had
originally (in 1842-44) presented itself to Marx as an
aspect of his critique of Hegel's political philosophy,
notably as formulated in the latter's Philosophy of Right
(1821). While already conscious of the distinction be-
tween “state” and “society,” Hegel had assigned a
subordinate role to the latter. Marx's “materialism,”
by contrast, took for its starting point the autonomy
of a society which had manifestly developed a dynamic
of its own: Western European bourgeois society, itself
propelled forward by the mechanism of what he
termed the “capitalist mode of production.” To this
extent his approach was in tune with the procedure
common among the classical economists, notably the
founders of that discipline of “Political Economy”
which had grown up in Western Europe between 1770
and 1830. The novelty he introduced lay in the fusion
of what was later termed “economics” with “sociol-
ogy” and “history.” An introduction to some bulky
1857-58 manuscripts (first published in 1939-41) de-
fines the subject of his investigations as the sphere of
“material production.” He goes on to suggest that,
within the totality of production-distribution-consump-
tion, one element—namely production—predominates.
“From it, the process continually recommences....
There is interaction between the various elements. This
is the case in every organic whole.” Nowhere does
Marx assert that production is “in the last analysis”
the causal factor “determining” the shape of society,
still less that “economics”—in the vulgar sense of eco-
nomic interest—“determines” the political process.
These notions were introduced by his interpreters,
beginning with Engels (1878), in an attempt to gen-
eralize a principle of investigation into an all-embrac-
ing causal explanation.
It is equally worth noting that Marx does not speak
of a “materialist conception of history,” contenting
himself with the more modest term “materialistic and
thus scientific method.” The conversion of his critical
method into a determinist social philosophy was pri-
marily the work of Engels, who after the death of
Marx in 1883 assumed the role of exegete. The next
step consisted in transforming the Marxian critique of
society into a comprehensive doctrine embracing both
nature and history. This process too was set in motion
Page 453, Volume 2
by Engels, and continued (after his death in 1895) by
the orthodox school, primarily represented by Karl
Kautsky, G. V., Plekhanov, and Antonio Labriola. It
will be considered in the following section. Here it
remains to be noted that in its original Marxian form
the “materialist conception of history” had a twofold
character: (1) As a general principle of historical inves-
tigation, or conceptualization, it remained a mere
sketch, although of great potential fertility for the
social sciences, a circumstance clearly recognized by
Max Weber, whose own work bore the imprint of his
lifelong preoccupation with the problems raised by
Marx. (2) As a finished theory of the actual historical
process, the new method had originally been employed
for the critical analysis of one particular social forma-
tion only: bourgeois society. Capital (1867-94) con-
tained an historical sketch of the rise of capitalism in
Western Europe, but did not attempt to answer the
question why no corresponding development had oc-
curred elsewhere. As for the pre-capitalist formations
briefly considered in the Grundrisse of 1857-58, the
analysis, while “materialist” enough, did not point to
“internal contradictions” similar to those which (in
Marx's view) were at work in contemporary bourgeois
society.
In fairness to all concerned, it may be said that
Marx's theoretical approach in the crucially important
Preface of the 1859 Critique, as well as in his earlier
and later writings, lent itself to an equivocation. On
the one hand, he had inherited from his prede-
cessors—notably Adam Smith and David Ricardo—the
notion of an autonomous economic sphere interacting
with the remainder of society (including the political
and cultural “superstructure”). On the other hand, he
had taken over from Hegel the conception of history
as a self-activating totality within which all the seem-
ingly independent elements were “organically” linked.
By fusing these two modes of thought, he arrived at
a vision of modern society as a uniquely determined
totality of social relations, dynamically propelled by
an equally unique and unprecedented mode of produc-
tion. The “historical” element in this “historical mate-
rialism” lay in the fact that he described as “bourgeois”
the social relations (or production relations) which
Smith and Ricardo had treated as “natural.” The “ma-
terialism” lay in his ascription to the “relations of
production” of a higher degree of reality than had been
accorded to them by Hegel and the other “idealist”
German philosophers. But if the “relations of produc-
tion” were virtually synonymous with “society,” there
was no specificity of the economic sphere, and the
distinction between base and superstructure broke
down. It cannot be said that Marx ever quite managed
to solve the problem, or even to state it in an entirely
unambiguous manner. Had he done so, both his follow-
ers and his critics would doubtless have been saved
a great deal of trouble.
2. The Dialectical Materialism of Engels. In contrast
to the “historical materialism” of Marx which, what-
ever its inadequacies, represents a momentous intel-
lectual achievement, the “dialectical materialism” of
Engels cannot be regarded as an important contri-
bution to philosophy. Its significance lies in the fact
that, for historical reasons, it has become the keystone
of an institutionalized system of thought binding upon
the adherents of what is officially known as Marxism-
Leninism. This philosophy having obtained official
status in the USSR and in Eastern Europe (not to
mention China, where it has undergone a further proc-
ess of barbarization and banalization), every discussion
of the subject necessarily assumes an unwelcome
quasi-political character. In what follows, these cir-
cumstances are disregarded as much as possible, and
attention is centered upon the intellectual substance
of the doctrine. The topical importance of what for
convenience may be termed “Soviet Marxism,” or
“Marxism-Leninism,” makes it necessary to direct the
reader's attention to the existence of an indigenous
literature on the subject; but it needs to be emphasized
that this literature holds little interest for anyone con-
cerned with the basic philosophical issues (Jordan,
1967).
Unlike Marx, who had undergone a rigorous aca-
demic training and possessed a comprehensive knowl-
edge of both ancient and modern philosophy, Engels
was self-taught in philosophic matters, a circumstance
which weighed heavily upon his subsequent attempts
to effect a synthesis of Hegelian logic and natural
science. A man of great talent, enormous versatility,
and inexhaustible capacity for work, he nonetheless
lacked the intellectual power which enabled Marx to
unify history, sociology, and economics into a coherent
system of thought. At the same time, the example set
by his senior associate, and his own profound attach-
ment to the Hegelian tradition—of which in a sense
he remained a lifelong prisoner—activated a dormant
ambition which he shared with other German writers
of his time: the desire to bring about a reconciliation
between the “natural philosophy” of the romantic
school and the positive sciences which had developed
under the quite different impact of Cartesian and
Hobbesian “mechanical materialism.” The resultant
synthesis—sketched in outline by Engels in his writings
of the 1870's and 1880's, and eventually termed
“dialectical materialism” by Plekhanov—became the
philosophical foundation of what from the 1890's on-
wards was very generally described as “Marxism”; the
term encompassing at one and the same time the
Page 454, Volume 2
historical materialism of Marx (as interpreted by
Engels), and the pseudo-ontological doctrine con-
structed by Engels from the debris of the Hegelian
system.
While it has been noted that Marx's naturalistic
approach from the start contained a “dialectical” ele-
ment, in that it left room for the interaction of human
consciousness and a nonhuman environment, the mate-
rialism of Engels could be described as “dialectical”
for reasons much more closely connected with the
enduring legacy of Hegel's system. Hegel had seen in
nature and history the unfolding of a metaphysical
substance which he termed “Spirit”; ultimately a theo-
logical conception, although Hegel for the most part
stayed closer to Aristotelianism than to Neo-Platonism.
For Marx there was no such universal principle of
motion. What he inherited from Hegel was rather a
species of holism which placed the idea of totality at
the center of all theoretical conceptualizations. From
this he deduced the methodological rule that the ele-
ments of a social structure could not be dissociated
from each other: they had to be regarded as parts
forming an organic, interconnected whole. While in
principle there was no reason why this rule should not
be extended to the domain of nature, Marx did not
in fact attempt to outline a general logic applicable
to nature and history alike. His doctrines relating to
societal evolution were not deduced from a general
principle, nor did he infer from his reading of Hegel's
Logic (cf. Wissenschaft der Logik, 1812-16) that par-
ticular changes in society were traceable to the opera-
tion of a universal law of motion. Least of all was he
concerned with the concept of an eternal material
substance underlying the phenomena. “The anthropo-
logical realism of Marx precluded the adherence to
absolute materialism of any sort, including dialectical
materialism” (Jordan, p. 93).
In contrast to Marx, who had genuinely abandoned
the Hegelian search for an all-embracing logic of (ma-
terial or spiritual) development, Engels revived the
notion that an objective process of this kind was
actually discoverable. Moreover, he undertook to show
that the dialectical principle—self-transcendence by
way of internal conflict to higher levels of develop-
ment—was operative in human history, conceived as
a singularity within the domain of nature. The basic
assumption of the dialectical method, on his reading,
was that:
The world is not to be understood as a complex of ready-
made things, but as a complex of processes, in which the
things apparently stable, no less than their mental images
in our heads (Gedankenabbilder), the concepts, go through
an uninterrupted change of coming into being and passing
away, in which despite all seeming accidentality and tem
porary retrogression, a progressive development asserts itself
in the end (Ludwig Feuerbach, in Selected Works, II, 351).
This speculative hypothesis in turn became the
foundation of an evolutionary doctrine applicable to
nature and history alike. In contrast to the prevailing
positivist evolutionism which was popular among lib-
erals because it specified an uninterrupted forward
movement from “barbarism” to “civilization,” Engels'
quasi-Hegelian approach emphasized the self-contra-
dictory nature of the process; dialectical motion im-
plied progress through conflict between opposing
forces. In its application to society this principle was
invoked by Engels' followers to account both for the
necessity of class conflict and for the inevitablity of
socialism as the resolution of one particular conflict
between classes. This presentation of the subject was
not understood as an imaginative metaphor—as such
it might have had some limited usefulness—but as the
“scientific” description of an ongoing process, one that
possessed a logic quite indifferent to the subjective
volition of its human representatives. As in Hegel's
philosophy of history, the Idea (the hidden rationality
of the Whole) triumphed at the expense of its own
agents, who might include entire classes, nations, or
generations. This reversion to Hegel's metaphysical
construction of world history was dubbed “dialectical
materialism” for no better reason than that Engels
substituted “matter” for “spirit” as the ontological
substance underlying the motion of the phenomena.
In practice his approach represented an abandonment
of Marx's revolutionary humanism and a return to the
Hegelian standpoint.
While Engels' partiality to the romantic Naturphi-
losophie inaugurated by Schelling, Carus, and other
German writers of Hegel's time had no practical con-
sequences, his adoption of a determinist approach in
the field of history opened the door to the subsequent
introduction by Kautsky of an evolutionism virtually
indistinguishable from that of Auguste Comte and
Herbert Spencer. The irony lay in the circumstance
that this mode of thought was positivist rather than
speculative. But having once introduced a determinist
monism in the name of “dialectical materialism,” it
proved comparatively easy to extrude the Hegelian
element while retaining the determinism. This became
the distinguishing mark of the Social-Democratic
variant of “orthodox Marxism.” In contrast to this
evolutionism, which went with democratic optimism
in politics, Lenin from about 1914 onwards system-
atically reintroduced the Hegelian emphasis upon con-
flict and contradiction as the motivating force. Before
that date he had been content to expand Engels' hints
into a “materialist” philosophy of science which was
Page 455, Volume 2
not particularly “dialectical,” but rather concerned to
defend the “objective” reality of the external world
against the “subjectivism” of Kant and his followers
(Jordan, pp. 208ff.).
In purely philosophical terms, the difference be-
tween Engels' ontological, or metaphysical, materi-
alism, and the doctrine of Plekhanov and Lenin is not
without interest. Plekhanov, and following him Lenin,
eliminated from the concept of “dialectical materi-
alism” the ontological notion of “matter” as an absolute
substance or constituent element of the universe. In
its place they introduced the rather more common
sensible use of “matter” as a logical concept signifying
little more than the externality of the world for the
reflective consciousness. In other words, they substi-
tuted for Engels' metaphysical monism an ordinary
epistemological realism which at least had the advan-
tage of being compatible with the procedure of the
natural sciences. The locus classicus of this trans-
formation (which was never described as such) is
Lenin's Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1909), a
work which after 1917 obtained canonical status in the
USSR and for the Marxist-Leninist school generally.
Unfortunately, the philosophers of this school have
simultaneously had to cope with Engels' own quite
different (because fundamentally metaphysical) under-
standing of the term “materialism,” as well as with
Lenin's quasi-Hegelian logical speculations in his
Notebooks of 1915-16. The resulting conflicts and con-
tradictions have furnished material for exhaustive logi-
cal tournaments among philosophers in Eastern
Europe, without for that reason bringing any nearer
that fusion of dialectical logic with positive science
which remains the stated aim of the Marxist-Leninist
school. Insofar as the gradual change in the intellectual
atmosphere since the late 1950's has encouraged
greater independence of thought in the Soviet sphere,
there has been a tendency for two “revisionist” trends
to crystallize outside the official orthodoxy: existential-
ist humanism, oriented on the writings of the young
Marx, on the one hand, positivist scientism and em-
piricism on the other. In countering these trends, the
official dogmatism of the Leninist school, while retain-
ing its function as an integrative ideology or Weltan-
schauung for the benefit of the Communist party,
appears to have been placed on the defensive; a posi-
tion from which it is unlikely to emerge.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
K. Marx, and F. Engels, The Holy Family (Moscow, 1956),
pp. 168-76. For the original text see Die Heilige Familie
(1845) in Marx-Engels Werke, (Berlin, 1959), 2, 132ff. T. B.
Bottomore and M. Rubel, Karl Marx—Selected Writings in
Sociology and Social Philosophy (London, 1956; New York,
1964), gives a selection of relevant passages on various
aspects of historical materialism. Although conventionally
attributed to both Marx and Engels, The Holy Family was
almost entirely composed by Marx, and the remarks cited
in the text represent a “materialist” and post-Hegelian view
on the subject of French naturalism as the ultimate source
of “socialism and communism”: the latter term carrying
more specific implications concerning the abolition of pri-
vate property. See also Karl Marx—Early Writings, trans.
and ed. T. B. Bottomore, with a foreword by E. Fromm
(New York, 1964), passim. The rather overworked theme
of Marx's views on human “alienation” is best approached
by consulting the Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of
1844 in the edition prepared and introduced by Dirk J.
Struik (New York, 1964) on the basis of Martin Milligan's
translation from the German text, as first published in
Marx-Engels, Gesamtausgabe (hereafter MEGA), Abt. I,
Band 3 (Berlin, 1932). An excellent analytical and critical
introduction to the topic of historical materialism in gen-
eral, and Marxian sociology in particular, is to be found
in Karl Korsch, Karl Marx (New York, 1963), passim.
Marx, Theses on Feuerbach (1845), posthumously pub-
lished by Engels as an Appendix to his own Ludwig Feuer-
bach (1888), now in Werke, Vol. 21 (Berlin, 1962), 263ff.
(without the Appendix); see MEGA, I, 5, 533ff., for the
original German text of the Theses. For an English-language
edition of Engels' essay and of the Theses, see Marx-Engels
Selected Works (Moscow, 1951), II, 324ff. For Marx's critique
of Feuerbachian materialism see The German Ideology, in
MEGA, I, 5, and the various translations. See also Marx's
letter to Engels of 24 April 1867 (MEGA, III, 3, 383), where
he observes that “the cult of Feuerbach” notable in the
Holy Family now seems rather out of date. It is fair to
say that Feuerbach's critique of religion was of greater
importance for Engels than for Marx, who took his materi-
alism straight from the British and French philosophers of
the eighteenth century. On this subject see Korsch, op. cit.,
pp. 172ff.; Sidney Hook, From Hegel to Marx (New York,
1950), pp. 220ff.
Marx, Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political
Economy (Berlin, 1859); see Marx-Engels, Selected Works
(Moscow, 1958), 1, 361ff. The subject is discussed from a
Marxist standpoint in Korsch, op. cit., pp. 183ff., and from
a positivist one in Z. A. Jordan, The Evolution of Dialectical
Materialism (London and New York, 1967), pp. 111ff. It is
undisputed that in the 1840's Marx received his decisive
intellectual stimulus towards what was later called the
materialist conception of history from Henri de Saint-Simon
and his pupils. The latter had once included A. Comte,
whose Cours de philosophie positive (1830-42) was then
unknown to Marx and made no impression on him when
he finally read it, many years later, in Littré's edition of
1864. Jordan (op. cit., pp. 125ff.) suggests that the Comtean
notion of social physics has its counterpart in the Marxian
approach, and that for Marx—as for Comte—“society is the
true reality, and the individual the abstraction” (p. 132).
The present writer is unable to accept these conclusions.
Neither does it seem to him that the 1859 Preface constitutes
a retreat from the sociological realism of Marx's earlier
Page 456, Volume 2
writings in favor of a neo-Hegelian philosophy of history
(Jordan, op. cit., p. 299).
F. Engels, Anti-Dühring. Herr Eugen Dühring's Revolu-
tion in Science (Moscow, 1954), p. 369. For the original
German text see Werke (Berlin, 1962), 20, 248ff. For an
account of what Marx intended by his “materialist” method
of investigation see Korsch, op. cit., pp. 167ff.; Bottomore,
Karl Marx—Selected Writings..., op cit., pp. 14ff. For
an extensive specimen of Marx's actual historical investi-
gations, see Karl Marx: Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations,
trans. Jack Cohen, edited and introduced by E. J. Hobsbawm
(London, 1964). This presents a brief extract from the bulky
manuscript composed by Marx in 1857-58 in preparation
for Capital (1867-94). While part of this material was used
by him for his Critique of Political Economy (1859), and
some minor excerpts appeared in Kautsky's Neue Zeit in
1903-04), the entire manuscript saw the light only in
1939-41, when it was published in Moscow under the title
Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Ükonomie. Virtually
ignored at the time, it was republished in its entirety in
Berlin in 1953 (in a volume running to over 1,000 printed
pages) and translated into Italian in 1956. Its importance
for the concept of historical materialism lies in the fact that
in it Marx, for the first and last time, dealt at some length
with the structure of non-European societies. He thus sup-
plied a basis for some of the startling generalizations of the
1859 Preface. Antedating Capital by a few years, the
Grundrisse already belong to his mature period, and their
study is essential for an understanding of his peculiar fusion
of history, sociology, and economics. They also cast some
light on the concept of the “Asiatic mode of production”
briefly adumbrated in the 1859 Preface, and subsequently
ignored in Soviet literature for reasons apparent to anyone
conversant with the circumstances of the Stalinist era. For
a dispassionate critique of the Marxian approach from an
empiricist standpoint, strongly marked by the influence of
Max Weber, see J. A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism,
and Democracy (New York, 1942), passim. This work, how-
ever, antedates the publication of the Grundrisse in an
edition available to Westerners, and thus does not entirely
come to grips with the problems raised by Marx's investi-
gations.
Z. A. Jordan, The Evolution of Dialectical Materialism:
A Philosophical and Sociological Analysis (London, 1967)
is the best introduction to this subject. Starting from the
now generally accepted distinction between the original
approach of Engels and that of Marx, the author traces in
considerable detail the exfoliation of Engels' unsystematic
essays into the fully developed system of “dialectical mate-
rialism” first outlined by G. V. Plekhanov and subsequently
codified by Lenin and his successors, down to and including
Stalin. Gustav A. Wetter, Dialectical Materialism: A Histori-
cal And Systematic Survey of Philosophy in the Soviet Union
(London, 1958), offers an equally learned, but differently
organized, account of the topic, the author giving little
space to Marx and Engels, while centering attention upon
the evolution of Soviet philosophy since 1917. Unlike
Jordan, he deals at some length with Bukharin, Deborin,
and some lesser figures. For a critique of Engels' philo
sophical writings see Sidney Hook, “Dialectic and Nature,”
in his Reason, Social Myths and Democracy (New York,
1950), pp. 183ff. For the impact of Leninism on the philo-
sophical and scientific discussions in the USSR before the
full rigor mortis of Stalinism set in, see David Joravsky,
Soviet Marxism and Natural Science 1917-32 (London, 1961).
For a more recent and less technical discussion of Marxism-
Leninism as a pseudo-ontological system of speculation
about nature and history see A. James Gregor, A Survey
of Marxism (New York, 1965). The brief reading list ap-
pended to this work provides a guide to official Soviet
literature on the subject, as well as to works by Western
authors and a few “revisionist” critics of Leninism who have
retained the Hegelian-Marxist approach antedating the
formulation of Soviet orthodoxy in the 1930's. For a brief
but pregnant discussion of this latter theme, see Eugene
Kamenka, “Philosophy in the Soviet Union,” Philosophy
(Journal of the Royal Institute of Philosophy), 38, No. 143
(Jan., 1963).
GEORGE LICHTHEIM e also Determinism v2-02 v2-03 ; Economic History v2-06 ; Enlightenment v2-10 ; Evolutionism v2-21 ; Ideology v2-60 v2-61 ; Marxism v3-18 ; Positivism v3-67 v3-68 v3-69 ; Revolution v4-22 ; Romanticism, Post-Kantian v4-28 ; Social Democracy. v4-35 ]
HISTORICAL AND
DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM
Historical and dialectical materialism are terms con-
ventionally employed to describe two aspects of the
theoretical structure known as Marxism. Although
logically independent of each other, the two concepts
are historically linked by virtue of the fact that they
evolved from a common intellectual stem. For practi-
cal purposes it is also relevant that Marx and Engels
are widely regarded as joint creators of a unified system
of thought encompassing nature and history. The fact
that this interpretation is erroneous does not render
it less significant. Insofar as the term “Marxism” has
come to stand for a systematic doctrine elaborated by
Engels and others after the death of Marx, the latter's
original intentions may be said to have been “devel-
oped” or “misinterpreted,” depending upon one's
viewpoint. Irrespective of where one stands on this
issue, it is a comparatively simple matter to distinguish
the historical materialism of Marx from the dialectical
materialism of Engels. In tracing this distinction, we
begin with Marx's writings on history, and then pro-
ceed to a consideration of the materialist ontology
outlined by Engels and subsequently institutionalized
in the dogmatic system of Marxism-Leninism. This
approach inverts the familiar procedure wherein his-
torical materialism is treated as the application to
history of the general doctrine of dialectical materi-
alism. Since no such view was at any time entertained
by Marx, we are on safe grounds in disregarding it.
1. Marx's Historical Materialism. A consideration
of this topic can usefully start out from an early work,
The Holy Family (1845), in which Marx draws a dis-
tinction between two divergent currents stemming
from the rationalist philosophy of the French eight-
eenth-century Enlightenment. On the one hand, the
philosophes had opposed what Marx called “mechani-
cal materialism” to the metaphysics of Descartes,
Spinoza, and Leibniz, thereby preparing the way for
the emancipation of natural science from Cartesian
metaphysics. Having successfully divorced Descartes'
physics from his metaphysics, this “Cartesian materi-
alism” eventually merged with “French natural sci-
ence.” The heritage of Descartes—who in his lifetime
had already encountered opponents in Gassendi (“the
restorer of Epicurean materialism”) and in Hobbes—
was, however, gradually dislodged by doctrines rooted
in Locke and was eventually given a new form by
Condillac and Helvétius. According to Marx, “As
Cartesian materialism merges into natural science
proper, the other branch of French materialism leads
direct to socialism and communism” (Marx, Holy Fam-
ily [1845], p. 175). Its ultimate source was an anthro
pological doctrine which emphasized the goodness of
man:
There is no need of any great penetration to realize that
the teaching of materialism on the original goodness and
equal intellectual endowment of men, the omnipotence of
experience, habit and education, and the influence of envi-
ronment... is necessarily connected with communism and
socialism. If man draws all his knowledge, sensation, etc.,
from the world of the senses and the experience gained in
it, the empirical world must be arranged so that in it man
experiences... what is really human and... becomes
aware of himself as man (ibid., p. 175, slightly revised).
This Marxian humanism, as formulated in the Holy
Family, the Theses on Feuerbach (1845), and the
German Ideology (1845-46), was a development of
eighteenth-century French materialism, minus its
Cartesian physics and the related epistemological
problem, in which he took no interest. The basic orien-
tation of this materialism was practical, and its appli-
cation to social life was seen by Marx to follow in-
evitably from insight into the human condition. “If man
is shaped by his surroundings, his surroundings must
be made human” (Holy Family, p. 176). This conclusion
followed without question for anyone who had incor-
porated the ethics of the French Enlightenment in his
own assumptions about the world. Marx was never
conscious of a moral problem in this respect, because
his values formed part of a commitment to the belief
that the humanization of nature (including that part
of “human” nature which was in fact pre-human, i.e.,
a heritage of man's animal past) was both possible and
desirable. In this sense, historical materialism from the
start incorporated a particular value-system: that of
the Enlightenment. At the same time the doctrine had
a specific theoretical content which differentiated it
from contemporary liberalism: it rejected the then
fashionable disjunction between society and the indi-
vidual. When he wrote in his sixth Thesis on Feuerbach
that “The essence of man is no abstraction inherent
in each separate individual. In its reality it is the en-
semble of social relations,” Marx reemphasized a notion
already stressed in the passage from The Holy Family
cited earlier: “If man is social by nature, he will de-
velop his true nature only in society, and the power
of his nature must be measured not by the power of
separate individuals, but by the power of society”
(Holy Family, p. 176).
The difference between the liberal and the socialist
position then, as Marx perceived it in the 1840's, re-
duced itself to this: the socialists (or communists),
having taken seriously the proposition that man is the
sum total of his social relations, were concerned to
remake society, whereas liberal rationalism postulated
Page 451, Volume 2
a fixed and stable individual human essence which
could be relied upon to find adequate expression in
appropriate social institutions—always supposing that
no artificial barriers were placed in the way. In prac-
tice, liberalism identified human rationality with en-
lightened self-interest, and the desirable social order
with one in which private initiative was permitted free
play. In this respect the liberals went back to the
philosophers of the eighteenth century, but then so did
Marx, with the difference that he rejected the individ-
ualism of the Scottish moralists and of Adam Smith,
in favor of the collectivism inherent in the French
materialists. It is important to realize that in its origins
“historical materialism” was an anthropological doc-
trine before it became a sociological one. Its signifi-
cance for Marx lay in the fact that it enabled him to
treat socialism (or communism) as the consistent appli-
cation to society of general principles extracted from
the philosophical study of human nature. Once this
nature was perceived as “social,” in the sense that it
always and everywhere refracted the character of the
cultural environment which men had constructed, the
“socialist” conclusion followed from the “materialist”
assumption. Or rather, it followed for Marx because
he took for granted the value-system of writers like
Holbach and Helvétius, for whom true self-love was
inconceivable in abstraction from human solidarity.
The notion that this anthropological naturalism is
anchored in a general theory of the universe, which
represents the world as a process of “dialectical”
movement from one stage to another, finds no support
in Marx's writings. For him, the only “nature” that
enters into practical consideration is man's own nature.
The external world, as it exists in and for itself, is
irrelevant to a thinker who approaches history with
a view to establishing what men have made of them-
selves and are still capable of becoming. It is the more
irrelevant because on Marx's assumptions about the
active role of consciousness in constituting our picture
of reality, the world is never simply “given,” any more
than that man is the passive receptacle of sense-
impressions. An external environment, true knowledge
of which is possible in abstraction from man's role in
shaping the world, is a fantasy, at any rate so far as
society is concerned. The only world we know is the
one we have constituted: that which appears in our
individual and collective experience. Man is indeed
part of nature, so that the distinction between natural
and historical science can only be relative, not absolute.
But “historical materialism” has to do with “anthro-
pological nature,” not with nature in the abstract. At
the same time, the emphasis upon the “historical”
aspect of the new viewpoint served to distinguish it
from the naturalistic approach of the eighteenth-
century French philosophes (and of Feuerbach), which
virtually ignored the historical process. A materialist
critique of the prevailing social and political conditions
presupposed an understanding of the manner in which
they had come into being, the forces which upheld
them, and the tendencies pointing beyond them. The
Theses on Feuerbach in particular represent a break
with “contemplative” materialism, and the adoption
of a “practical” standpoint which is revolutionary by
its very nature.
Historical materialism in this sense had a “dialec-
tical” element built into its conceptual structure from
the very first. It was at one and the same time an
analysis of the historical process, and the theoretical
underpinning of a particular viewpoint (the socialist
one) which implied a critique of liberal individualism
and its objective correlative: civil (or bourgeois) soci-
ety. This introduction of an activist element into a
doctrine of society proved baffling to most of Marx's
critics who accepted the positivist interpretation of
history as an ongoing process analyzable in strictly
factual terms. Historical events, on this view, were
analogous to the facts of natural science. They were
simply there to be studied in as dispassionate a manner
as possible, and the task of the historian (in Ranke's
words) was to explain “what really happened” (wie es
eigentlich gewesen).
Marx by the later 1840's was sufficiently close to
positivism to reject Hegel's philosophy of history, and
by implication the entire notion of a philosophy (as
distinct from a theory) of history: an enterprise whose
theological purpose had become evident to him, once
he had emancipated himself from Hegel and absorbed
the impact of Anglo-French materialism. At the same
time he differed from Comte (whose principal work
he first read in 1866, and then dismissed as rubbish)
in refusing to treat history as an accretion of data
which could be studied on the model of the natural
sciences. History to Marx was a self-activating totality
ultimately rooted in the “production and reproduction
of material life.” Its objectivity was not of the kind
that could be discerned by the study of “facts,” and
for the same reason it did not lend itself to the fram-
ing of general laws analogous to Newtonian physics:
the model of Comte's “social physics.” The materialist
approach was outlined by Marx in the German Ide-
ology of 1845-46, and subsequently confirmed in the
well-known Preface to the Critique of Political Econ-
omy (1859):
The mode of production of material life conditions the
social, political and intellectual life-process in general. It
is not the consciousness of men that determines their being,
but on the contrary their social being that determines their
consciousness.
Page 452, Volume 2
It has for its counterpart the activist note struck in
the Communist Manifesto (1848):
The history of all hitherto existing society is a history of
class struggles.
These two modes of perception are held in balance
by the notion that the “materialist conception of his-
tory” is both a theory of the historical process and a
means towards its mastery. Men become masters of
their fate in the measure in which they become con-
scious of the mechanism whereby history is set in
motion and kept going. In turning their insight to
practical account, they do not for this reason abandon
the scientific standpoint. Rather, they employ their
insight into the antagonistic character of the historical
process—specifically of its ultimate stage: contem-
porary bourgeois society—for the purpose of over-
coming the antagonism. Marx's historical materialism
differs from Comte's positivism in that it incorporates
practical (political or ethical) postulates within its very
conceptual structure. He does not formulate general
laws on the basis of a dispassionate study of “objective”
data; he conceptualizes the historical process, and in
this very act unifies (critical) theory and (revolutionary)
practice.
Although Marx never employed the term “sociol-
ogy” (possibly because he held Comte's work in low
esteem), it has become customary to treat the approach
briefly sketched out in the 1859 Preface, and exten-
sively developed in Capital (1867), as a sociological
doctrine analogous to that of Comte. Within the
Marxist school itself this fashion was inaugurated by
Engels, who in his Anti-Dühring (1878) attributed to
Marx “two great discoveries,” one of them being “the
materialist conception of history.” This was described
by Engels as the doctrine “that the production (of the
means to support human life) and, next to production,
the exchange of things produced, is the basis of all
social structure; that in every society that has appeared
in history, the manner in which wealth is distributed
and society divided into classes or orders is dependent
upon what is produced, how it is produced, and how
the products are exchanged.” Marx, who had read the
Anti-Dühring in manuscript, did not bother to correct
this simplified exposition of his very complex approach,
presumably because he regarded the book as a popular
tract destined for a semi-literate public. In consequence
it came to be widely believed that “scientific socialism”
(another term coined by Engels) had for its theoretical
foundation a species of economic determinism valid
for all stages of recorded history. In the light of this
quite unfounded assumption, the relationship of the
so-called “economic base” to the “political” or
“ideological” superstructure assumed the status of a
major theoretical difficulty whose solution kept a small
army of exegetes ceaselessly employed. The “materi-
alist” standpoint was understood in terms of Engels'
statement (in the passage already cited) as signifying
that “the final causes of all social changes and political
revolutions are to be sought... not in the philosophy,
but in the economics of each particular epoch” (Engels,
1878).
In point of fact, the problem of relating the “politi-
cal superstructure” to its “material foundation” had
originally (in 1842-44) presented itself to Marx as an
aspect of his critique of Hegel's political philosophy,
notably as formulated in the latter's Philosophy of Right
(1821). While already conscious of the distinction be-
tween “state” and “society,” Hegel had assigned a
subordinate role to the latter. Marx's “materialism,”
by contrast, took for its starting point the autonomy
of a society which had manifestly developed a dynamic
of its own: Western European bourgeois society, itself
propelled forward by the mechanism of what he
termed the “capitalist mode of production.” To this
extent his approach was in tune with the procedure
common among the classical economists, notably the
founders of that discipline of “Political Economy”
which had grown up in Western Europe between 1770
and 1830. The novelty he introduced lay in the fusion
of what was later termed “economics” with “sociol-
ogy” and “history.” An introduction to some bulky
1857-58 manuscripts (first published in 1939-41) de-
fines the subject of his investigations as the sphere of
“material production.” He goes on to suggest that,
within the totality of production-distribution-consump-
tion, one element—namely production—predominates.
“From it, the process continually recommences....
There is interaction between the various elements. This
is the case in every organic whole.” Nowhere does
Marx assert that production is “in the last analysis”
the causal factor “determining” the shape of society,
still less that “economics”—in the vulgar sense of eco-
nomic interest—“determines” the political process.
These notions were introduced by his interpreters,
beginning with Engels (1878), in an attempt to gen-
eralize a principle of investigation into an all-embrac-
ing causal explanation.
It is equally worth noting that Marx does not speak
of a “materialist conception of history,” contenting
himself with the more modest term “materialistic and
thus scientific method.” The conversion of his critical
method into a determinist social philosophy was pri-
marily the work of Engels, who after the death of
Marx in 1883 assumed the role of exegete. The next
step consisted in transforming the Marxian critique of
society into a comprehensive doctrine embracing both
nature and history. This process too was set in motion
Page 453, Volume 2
by Engels, and continued (after his death in 1895) by
the orthodox school, primarily represented by Karl
Kautsky, G. V., Plekhanov, and Antonio Labriola. It
will be considered in the following section. Here it
remains to be noted that in its original Marxian form
the “materialist conception of history” had a twofold
character: (1) As a general principle of historical inves-
tigation, or conceptualization, it remained a mere
sketch, although of great potential fertility for the
social sciences, a circumstance clearly recognized by
Max Weber, whose own work bore the imprint of his
lifelong preoccupation with the problems raised by
Marx. (2) As a finished theory of the actual historical
process, the new method had originally been employed
for the critical analysis of one particular social forma-
tion only: bourgeois society. Capital (1867-94) con-
tained an historical sketch of the rise of capitalism in
Western Europe, but did not attempt to answer the
question why no corresponding development had oc-
curred elsewhere. As for the pre-capitalist formations
briefly considered in the Grundrisse of 1857-58, the
analysis, while “materialist” enough, did not point to
“internal contradictions” similar to those which (in
Marx's view) were at work in contemporary bourgeois
society.
In fairness to all concerned, it may be said that
Marx's theoretical approach in the crucially important
Preface of the 1859 Critique, as well as in his earlier
and later writings, lent itself to an equivocation. On
the one hand, he had inherited from his prede-
cessors—notably Adam Smith and David Ricardo—the
notion of an autonomous economic sphere interacting
with the remainder of society (including the political
and cultural “superstructure”). On the other hand, he
had taken over from Hegel the conception of history
as a self-activating totality within which all the seem-
ingly independent elements were “organically” linked.
By fusing these two modes of thought, he arrived at
a vision of modern society as a uniquely determined
totality of social relations, dynamically propelled by
an equally unique and unprecedented mode of produc-
tion. The “historical” element in this “historical mate-
rialism” lay in the fact that he described as “bourgeois”
the social relations (or production relations) which
Smith and Ricardo had treated as “natural.” The “ma-
terialism” lay in his ascription to the “relations of
production” of a higher degree of reality than had been
accorded to them by Hegel and the other “idealist”
German philosophers. But if the “relations of produc-
tion” were virtually synonymous with “society,” there
was no specificity of the economic sphere, and the
distinction between base and superstructure broke
down. It cannot be said that Marx ever quite managed
to solve the problem, or even to state it in an entirely
unambiguous manner. Had he done so, both his follow-
ers and his critics would doubtless have been saved
a great deal of trouble.
2. The Dialectical Materialism of Engels. In contrast
to the “historical materialism” of Marx which, what-
ever its inadequacies, represents a momentous intel-
lectual achievement, the “dialectical materialism” of
Engels cannot be regarded as an important contri-
bution to philosophy. Its significance lies in the fact
that, for historical reasons, it has become the keystone
of an institutionalized system of thought binding upon
the adherents of what is officially known as Marxism-
Leninism. This philosophy having obtained official
status in the USSR and in Eastern Europe (not to
mention China, where it has undergone a further proc-
ess of barbarization and banalization), every discussion
of the subject necessarily assumes an unwelcome
quasi-political character. In what follows, these cir-
cumstances are disregarded as much as possible, and
attention is centered upon the intellectual substance
of the doctrine. The topical importance of what for
convenience may be termed “Soviet Marxism,” or
“Marxism-Leninism,” makes it necessary to direct the
reader's attention to the existence of an indigenous
literature on the subject; but it needs to be emphasized
that this literature holds little interest for anyone con-
cerned with the basic philosophical issues (Jordan,
1967).
Unlike Marx, who had undergone a rigorous aca-
demic training and possessed a comprehensive knowl-
edge of both ancient and modern philosophy, Engels
was self-taught in philosophic matters, a circumstance
which weighed heavily upon his subsequent attempts
to effect a synthesis of Hegelian logic and natural
science. A man of great talent, enormous versatility,
and inexhaustible capacity for work, he nonetheless
lacked the intellectual power which enabled Marx to
unify history, sociology, and economics into a coherent
system of thought. At the same time, the example set
by his senior associate, and his own profound attach-
ment to the Hegelian tradition—of which in a sense
he remained a lifelong prisoner—activated a dormant
ambition which he shared with other German writers
of his time: the desire to bring about a reconciliation
between the “natural philosophy” of the romantic
school and the positive sciences which had developed
under the quite different impact of Cartesian and
Hobbesian “mechanical materialism.” The resultant
synthesis—sketched in outline by Engels in his writings
of the 1870's and 1880's, and eventually termed
“dialectical materialism” by Plekhanov—became the
philosophical foundation of what from the 1890's on-
wards was very generally described as “Marxism”; the
term encompassing at one and the same time the
Page 454, Volume 2
historical materialism of Marx (as interpreted by
Engels), and the pseudo-ontological doctrine con-
structed by Engels from the debris of the Hegelian
system.
While it has been noted that Marx's naturalistic
approach from the start contained a “dialectical” ele-
ment, in that it left room for the interaction of human
consciousness and a nonhuman environment, the mate-
rialism of Engels could be described as “dialectical”
for reasons much more closely connected with the
enduring legacy of Hegel's system. Hegel had seen in
nature and history the unfolding of a metaphysical
substance which he termed “Spirit”; ultimately a theo-
logical conception, although Hegel for the most part
stayed closer to Aristotelianism than to Neo-Platonism.
For Marx there was no such universal principle of
motion. What he inherited from Hegel was rather a
species of holism which placed the idea of totality at
the center of all theoretical conceptualizations. From
this he deduced the methodological rule that the ele-
ments of a social structure could not be dissociated
from each other: they had to be regarded as parts
forming an organic, interconnected whole. While in
principle there was no reason why this rule should not
be extended to the domain of nature, Marx did not
in fact attempt to outline a general logic applicable
to nature and history alike. His doctrines relating to
societal evolution were not deduced from a general
principle, nor did he infer from his reading of Hegel's
Logic (cf. Wissenschaft der Logik, 1812-16) that par-
ticular changes in society were traceable to the opera-
tion of a universal law of motion. Least of all was he
concerned with the concept of an eternal material
substance underlying the phenomena. “The anthropo-
logical realism of Marx precluded the adherence to
absolute materialism of any sort, including dialectical
materialism” (Jordan, p. 93).
In contrast to Marx, who had genuinely abandoned
the Hegelian search for an all-embracing logic of (ma-
terial or spiritual) development, Engels revived the
notion that an objective process of this kind was
actually discoverable. Moreover, he undertook to show
that the dialectical principle—self-transcendence by
way of internal conflict to higher levels of develop-
ment—was operative in human history, conceived as
a singularity within the domain of nature. The basic
assumption of the dialectical method, on his reading,
was that:
The world is not to be understood as a complex of ready-
made things, but as a complex of processes, in which the
things apparently stable, no less than their mental images
in our heads (Gedankenabbilder), the concepts, go through
an uninterrupted change of coming into being and passing
away, in which despite all seeming accidentality and tem
porary retrogression, a progressive development asserts itself
in the end (Ludwig Feuerbach, in Selected Works, II, 351).
This speculative hypothesis in turn became the
foundation of an evolutionary doctrine applicable to
nature and history alike. In contrast to the prevailing
positivist evolutionism which was popular among lib-
erals because it specified an uninterrupted forward
movement from “barbarism” to “civilization,” Engels'
quasi-Hegelian approach emphasized the self-contra-
dictory nature of the process; dialectical motion im-
plied progress through conflict between opposing
forces. In its application to society this principle was
invoked by Engels' followers to account both for the
necessity of class conflict and for the inevitablity of
socialism as the resolution of one particular conflict
between classes. This presentation of the subject was
not understood as an imaginative metaphor—as such
it might have had some limited usefulness—but as the
“scientific” description of an ongoing process, one that
possessed a logic quite indifferent to the subjective
volition of its human representatives. As in Hegel's
philosophy of history, the Idea (the hidden rationality
of the Whole) triumphed at the expense of its own
agents, who might include entire classes, nations, or
generations. This reversion to Hegel's metaphysical
construction of world history was dubbed “dialectical
materialism” for no better reason than that Engels
substituted “matter” for “spirit” as the ontological
substance underlying the motion of the phenomena.
In practice his approach represented an abandonment
of Marx's revolutionary humanism and a return to the
Hegelian standpoint.
While Engels' partiality to the romantic Naturphi-
losophie inaugurated by Schelling, Carus, and other
German writers of Hegel's time had no practical con-
sequences, his adoption of a determinist approach in
the field of history opened the door to the subsequent
introduction by Kautsky of an evolutionism virtually
indistinguishable from that of Auguste Comte and
Herbert Spencer. The irony lay in the circumstance
that this mode of thought was positivist rather than
speculative. But having once introduced a determinist
monism in the name of “dialectical materialism,” it
proved comparatively easy to extrude the Hegelian
element while retaining the determinism. This became
the distinguishing mark of the Social-Democratic
variant of “orthodox Marxism.” In contrast to this
evolutionism, which went with democratic optimism
in politics, Lenin from about 1914 onwards system-
atically reintroduced the Hegelian emphasis upon con-
flict and contradiction as the motivating force. Before
that date he had been content to expand Engels' hints
into a “materialist” philosophy of science which was
Page 455, Volume 2
not particularly “dialectical,” but rather concerned to
defend the “objective” reality of the external world
against the “subjectivism” of Kant and his followers
(Jordan, pp. 208ff.).
In purely philosophical terms, the difference be-
tween Engels' ontological, or metaphysical, materi-
alism, and the doctrine of Plekhanov and Lenin is not
without interest. Plekhanov, and following him Lenin,
eliminated from the concept of “dialectical materi-
alism” the ontological notion of “matter” as an absolute
substance or constituent element of the universe. In
its place they introduced the rather more common
sensible use of “matter” as a logical concept signifying
little more than the externality of the world for the
reflective consciousness. In other words, they substi-
tuted for Engels' metaphysical monism an ordinary
epistemological realism which at least had the advan-
tage of being compatible with the procedure of the
natural sciences. The locus classicus of this trans-
formation (which was never described as such) is
Lenin's Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1909), a
work which after 1917 obtained canonical status in the
USSR and for the Marxist-Leninist school generally.
Unfortunately, the philosophers of this school have
simultaneously had to cope with Engels' own quite
different (because fundamentally metaphysical) under-
standing of the term “materialism,” as well as with
Lenin's quasi-Hegelian logical speculations in his
Notebooks of 1915-16. The resulting conflicts and con-
tradictions have furnished material for exhaustive logi-
cal tournaments among philosophers in Eastern
Europe, without for that reason bringing any nearer
that fusion of dialectical logic with positive science
which remains the stated aim of the Marxist-Leninist
school. Insofar as the gradual change in the intellectual
atmosphere since the late 1950's has encouraged
greater independence of thought in the Soviet sphere,
there has been a tendency for two “revisionist” trends
to crystallize outside the official orthodoxy: existential-
ist humanism, oriented on the writings of the young
Marx, on the one hand, positivist scientism and em-
piricism on the other. In countering these trends, the
official dogmatism of the Leninist school, while retain-
ing its function as an integrative ideology or Weltan-
schauung for the benefit of the Communist party,
appears to have been placed on the defensive; a posi-
tion from which it is unlikely to emerge.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
K. Marx, and F. Engels, The Holy Family (Moscow, 1956),
pp. 168-76. For the original text see Die Heilige Familie
(1845) in Marx-Engels Werke, (Berlin, 1959), 2, 132ff. T. B.
Bottomore and M. Rubel, Karl Marx—Selected Writings in
Sociology and Social Philosophy (London, 1956; New York,
1964), gives a selection of relevant passages on various
aspects of historical materialism. Although conventionally
attributed to both Marx and Engels, The Holy Family was
almost entirely composed by Marx, and the remarks cited
in the text represent a “materialist” and post-Hegelian view
on the subject of French naturalism as the ultimate source
of “socialism and communism”: the latter term carrying
more specific implications concerning the abolition of pri-
vate property. See also Karl Marx—Early Writings, trans.
and ed. T. B. Bottomore, with a foreword by E. Fromm
(New York, 1964), passim. The rather overworked theme
of Marx's views on human “alienation” is best approached
by consulting the Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of
1844 in the edition prepared and introduced by Dirk J.
Struik (New York, 1964) on the basis of Martin Milligan's
translation from the German text, as first published in
Marx-Engels, Gesamtausgabe (hereafter MEGA), Abt. I,
Band 3 (Berlin, 1932). An excellent analytical and critical
introduction to the topic of historical materialism in gen-
eral, and Marxian sociology in particular, is to be found
in Karl Korsch, Karl Marx (New York, 1963), passim.
Marx, Theses on Feuerbach (1845), posthumously pub-
lished by Engels as an Appendix to his own Ludwig Feuer-
bach (1888), now in Werke, Vol. 21 (Berlin, 1962), 263ff.
(without the Appendix); see MEGA, I, 5, 533ff., for the
original German text of the Theses. For an English-language
edition of Engels' essay and of the Theses, see Marx-Engels
Selected Works (Moscow, 1951), II, 324ff. For Marx's critique
of Feuerbachian materialism see The German Ideology, in
MEGA, I, 5, and the various translations. See also Marx's
letter to Engels of 24 April 1867 (MEGA, III, 3, 383), where
he observes that “the cult of Feuerbach” notable in the
Holy Family now seems rather out of date. It is fair to
say that Feuerbach's critique of religion was of greater
importance for Engels than for Marx, who took his materi-
alism straight from the British and French philosophers of
the eighteenth century. On this subject see Korsch, op. cit.,
pp. 172ff.; Sidney Hook, From Hegel to Marx (New York,
1950), pp. 220ff.
Marx, Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political
Economy (Berlin, 1859); see Marx-Engels, Selected Works
(Moscow, 1958), 1, 361ff. The subject is discussed from a
Marxist standpoint in Korsch, op. cit., pp. 183ff., and from
a positivist one in Z. A. Jordan, The Evolution of Dialectical
Materialism (London and New York, 1967), pp. 111ff. It is
undisputed that in the 1840's Marx received his decisive
intellectual stimulus towards what was later called the
materialist conception of history from Henri de Saint-Simon
and his pupils. The latter had once included A. Comte,
whose Cours de philosophie positive (1830-42) was then
unknown to Marx and made no impression on him when
he finally read it, many years later, in Littré's edition of
1864. Jordan (op. cit., pp. 125ff.) suggests that the Comtean
notion of social physics has its counterpart in the Marxian
approach, and that for Marx—as for Comte—“society is the
true reality, and the individual the abstraction” (p. 132).
The present writer is unable to accept these conclusions.
Neither does it seem to him that the 1859 Preface constitutes
a retreat from the sociological realism of Marx's earlier
Page 456, Volume 2
writings in favor of a neo-Hegelian philosophy of history
(Jordan, op. cit., p. 299).
F. Engels, Anti-Dühring. Herr Eugen Dühring's Revolu-
tion in Science (Moscow, 1954), p. 369. For the original
German text see Werke (Berlin, 1962), 20, 248ff. For an
account of what Marx intended by his “materialist” method
of investigation see Korsch, op. cit., pp. 167ff.; Bottomore,
Karl Marx—Selected Writings..., op cit., pp. 14ff. For
an extensive specimen of Marx's actual historical investi-
gations, see Karl Marx: Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations,
trans. Jack Cohen, edited and introduced by E. J. Hobsbawm
(London, 1964). This presents a brief extract from the bulky
manuscript composed by Marx in 1857-58 in preparation
for Capital (1867-94). While part of this material was used
by him for his Critique of Political Economy (1859), and
some minor excerpts appeared in Kautsky's Neue Zeit in
1903-04), the entire manuscript saw the light only in
1939-41, when it was published in Moscow under the title
Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Ükonomie. Virtually
ignored at the time, it was republished in its entirety in
Berlin in 1953 (in a volume running to over 1,000 printed
pages) and translated into Italian in 1956. Its importance
for the concept of historical materialism lies in the fact that
in it Marx, for the first and last time, dealt at some length
with the structure of non-European societies. He thus sup-
plied a basis for some of the startling generalizations of the
1859 Preface. Antedating Capital by a few years, the
Grundrisse already belong to his mature period, and their
study is essential for an understanding of his peculiar fusion
of history, sociology, and economics. They also cast some
light on the concept of the “Asiatic mode of production”
briefly adumbrated in the 1859 Preface, and subsequently
ignored in Soviet literature for reasons apparent to anyone
conversant with the circumstances of the Stalinist era. For
a dispassionate critique of the Marxian approach from an
empiricist standpoint, strongly marked by the influence of
Max Weber, see J. A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism,
and Democracy (New York, 1942), passim. This work, how-
ever, antedates the publication of the Grundrisse in an
edition available to Westerners, and thus does not entirely
come to grips with the problems raised by Marx's investi-
gations.
Z. A. Jordan, The Evolution of Dialectical Materialism:
A Philosophical and Sociological Analysis (London, 1967)
is the best introduction to this subject. Starting from the
now generally accepted distinction between the original
approach of Engels and that of Marx, the author traces in
considerable detail the exfoliation of Engels' unsystematic
essays into the fully developed system of “dialectical mate-
rialism” first outlined by G. V. Plekhanov and subsequently
codified by Lenin and his successors, down to and including
Stalin. Gustav A. Wetter, Dialectical Materialism: A Histori-
cal And Systematic Survey of Philosophy in the Soviet Union
(London, 1958), offers an equally learned, but differently
organized, account of the topic, the author giving little
space to Marx and Engels, while centering attention upon
the evolution of Soviet philosophy since 1917. Unlike
Jordan, he deals at some length with Bukharin, Deborin,
and some lesser figures. For a critique of Engels' philo
sophical writings see Sidney Hook, “Dialectic and Nature,”
in his Reason, Social Myths and Democracy (New York,
1950), pp. 183ff. For the impact of Leninism on the philo-
sophical and scientific discussions in the USSR before the
full rigor mortis of Stalinism set in, see David Joravsky,
Soviet Marxism and Natural Science 1917-32 (London, 1961).
For a more recent and less technical discussion of Marxism-
Leninism as a pseudo-ontological system of speculation
about nature and history see A. James Gregor, A Survey
of Marxism (New York, 1965). The brief reading list ap-
pended to this work provides a guide to official Soviet
literature on the subject, as well as to works by Western
authors and a few “revisionist” critics of Leninism who have
retained the Hegelian-Marxist approach antedating the
formulation of Soviet orthodoxy in the 1930's. For a brief
but pregnant discussion of this latter theme, see Eugene
Kamenka, “Philosophy in the Soviet Union,” Philosophy
(Journal of the Royal Institute of Philosophy), 38, No. 143
(Jan., 1963).
GEORGE LICHTHEIM e also Determinism v2-02 v2-03 ; Economic History v2-06 ; Enlightenment v2-10 ; Evolutionism v2-21 ; Ideology v2-60 v2-61 ; Marxism v3-18 ; Positivism v3-67 v3-68 v3-69 ; Revolution v4-22 ; Romanticism, Post-Kantian v4-28 ; Social Democracy. v4-35 ]
Assinar:
Postagens (Atom)