Cartesian Egalitarianism: A Follow Up Post

In a comment on the previous post on Cartesian egalitarianism, Scu raised some important concerns, one that I address in the forthcoming essay, and one which was beyond the scope of the paper, but nevertheless important.

First, to the question of whether Cartesian egalitarianism has any value for anti-colonial or post-colonial theory and praxis, I cite a passage from Aimé Césaire's Discourse on Colonialism, which was in many ways the impetus for my reconsideration of Descartes. In this paper I only had a chance to mention this in passing:

Aimé Césaire, in his Discourse on Colonialism, invokes the principles of Cartesianism against the false universality of the colonial legacy (its science, politics, and sociology), which denigrates the non-European to the benefit and “glory” of Western bourgeois society. He argues that “the psychologists, sociologists et al., their views on ‘primitivism,’ their rigged investigations, their self-serving generalizations, their tendentious speculations, their insistence on the marginal, ‘separate’ character of non-whites” rest on “their barbaric repudiation, for the sake of the cause, of Descartes’s statement, the charter of universalism, that ‘reason…is found whole and entire in each man,’ and that ‘where individuals of the same species are concerned, there may be degrees in respect of their accidental qualities, but not in respect of their forms, or natures’” (56).

Second, about the problem of Descartes's account of animals. Here, I completely agree that Descartes is unhelpful and infuriating. But in reading through the replies and objections to the Meditations, I discovered that Pierre Gassendi might be a resource for considerations of the human/animal distinction (not just against Descartes, but against Aristotle as well):

You [Descartes] say that brutes lack reason. Well, of course they lack human reason, but they do not lack their own kind of reason. So it does not seem appropriate to call them ἄλογα [irrational] except by comparison with us or with our kind of reason; and in any case λόγος or reason seems to be a general term, which can be attributed to them no less than the cognitive faculty or internal sense (AT, VII: 270-271) .

Piero Gleijeses, "The Cuban Drumbeat"

Let's just get it out the way now: Piero Gleijeses's The Cuban Drumbeat (Seagull, 2009) is one of best political pamphlets I've read in several years. It's the second installment in Seagull's "What was Communism?" series, but this concise volume puts the question in the present, if not the future tense.* Gleijeses shows that, far from being exhausted, the internationalism and anti-colonialism of Cuba's foreign policy has succeeded in transforming the relationships between formerly colonized and underdeveloped regions and the imperial powers that seek to exploit them.

The extent of Cuba's internationalism has not always been recognized, nor even understood. Even if the US government, according to internal documents, had recognized from the beginning the reason for the popular support for Fidel Castro's leadership, it has nevertheless spent decades propagating outright misinformation. Lost in this state-media echo chamber are the accomplishments of  Cuban socialism both domestically and internationally. For a balanced account of the successes and failures of Castro's domestic policy, see Richard Gott's Cuba: A New History (Yale, 2004); The Cuban Drumbeat recounts the history of Cuba's internationalism.

As both the United States and Castro recognized, the "power of Cuba is the power of its revolutionary ideas [and] the power of its example" (Castro quoted on p. 11). In the 1960s, the determination of the United States to stifle this power led to the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban missile crisis, the embargo, and continuous attempts at subverting the socialist government; the determination of Cuba led to small scale assistance to revolutionaries in Latin America and Africa, the most notable of them led by, and led to the death of, Che Guevara. It is worth noting that Gleijeses tactfully avoids that retrospective and romantic distinction between Che, the permanent revolutionary and the statist-bureaucratic Castro brothers (Recall here Fanon's comment from 1961 in Wretched of the Earth: "Castro attending the UN in military uniform does not scandalize the underdeveloped countries. What Castro is demonstrating is how aware he is of the continuing regime of [imperialist] violence. What is surprising is that he did not enter the UN with his submachine gun").

The living tradition of tradition of Cuba's anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism might have its roots in Latin America, but it first came to fruition in Africa in the 1970s. To understand Cuba's support of African revolutionaries, it is important to look beyond the interests of the Cold War superpowers. Gleijeses argues that Castro saw, from very early on, that revolutionary action also required an attentiveness to the relationships between what we now call the Global North and Global South. Cuba's fate in the post-Soviet era has largely rested on the kinds of alliances and internationalism that it established in the 1970s in Africa. Gleijeses writes:

Cuban leaders were convinced that their country had a special empathy for and a special role to play in the Third World beyond the confines of Latin America. The Soviets and their East European allies were white and, by Third World standards, rich; the Chinese exhibited the hubris of a great and rising power, and were unable to adapt to African and Latin American culture. By contrast, Cuba was non-white, poor, threatened by a powerful enemy and culturally both Latin American and African. It was, therefore, a unique hybrid: a Socialist country with a Third World sensibility. This mattered, in a world that was dominated, as Castro rightly understood, by the 'conflict between privileged and underprivileged, humanity against imperialism' and where the major fault line was not between socialist and capitalist states but between developed and underdeveloped countries (18).

While today we can recognize how these ideas, from a humanitarian side, have shaped the relationships between Cuba, Venezuela, and Bolivia (see, on this score, of course, Tariq Ali's Pirates of the Caribbean),  in the 1970s and 1980s the most stunning examples of Cuban internationalism were its military interventions in Angola, which took place within a complex set of relationships between three rival independence parties in Angola, Namibia (a former German colony then under the mandate of South Africa), the United States, and South Africa.

After the collapse of the Portuguese dictatorship in 1974, a power-sharing agreement was arranged between the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) and the National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA), for joint rule of Angola until November 1975. However, the arrangement was short-lived; civil war broke out in spring 1975 between the Soviet-backed MPLA and the UNITA-FNLA, the latter which had the covert backing of South Africa  (who felt that an MPLA victory would endanger its control over Namibia) and the United States (this probably goes without saying, but the US interpreted the conflict only through the lens of the Cold War). Despite the these powerful allies, UNITA and FNLA could not defeat the MPLA, so in October, at the quiet urging of the United States, South Africa invaded Angola. While Cuba had been giving  small-scale medical and tactical assistance to the MPLA, in November 1975, Castro sent thousands of troops to combat the invasion. This "unprecedented" military action took both Washington and Moscow by surprise, and it proved decisive. Within a few months the MPLA-Cuban force had turned back South African aggression, and on 27 March 1976, South Africa withdrew, defeated, from Angola.

The victory of the MPLA-Cuban alliance was, Gleijeses notes, a turning point in the fight against  Pretoria's  domination of southern Africa. He argues that neither realpolitik nor "narrow interests" can explain Cuba's motivation; rather "Castro sent troops because of his commitment to what he called 'the most beautiful cause,' the struggle against apartheid" (30).

But this would not be the end of the struggle. Because Angola gave support to the the South West Africa People's Organization (SWAPO), who were fighting for Namibia's independence, in 1981, again with the support of the United States, South Africa invaded Angola again. And yet again Cuba's military prowess proved crucial. In September 1987 the South African Defense Force (SADF) launched a major offensive in Southeastern Angola, cornering the Angola Army in Cuito Cuanavale. Despite the sense of inevitability that South African and Western Diplomats claimed for the fall of Cuito Cuanavale (62), Cuban forces beat back the SADF, and then marched southwest toward the Namibian border, forcing South Africa out of Angola, then to the negotiating table, and finally out of Namibia. Gleijeses writes that:

As a child, in Italy, I heard my father talk about the hope he and his friends felt in December 1941 as they had listened to the radio reports of the German troops leaving the city of Rostov on the Don. It was the first time in two years of war that the German superman had been forced to retreat. I remembered his words--and the profound sense of relief they conveyed--as I read the South African and Namibian press from these months in early 1988. For the blacks of Namibia and of South Africa, the advance of the Cuban columns towards the border, pushing back the troops of apartheid, was a clarion call of hope (64).

In recounting the victory of social solidarity over the powers of colonialism and imperialism, The Cuban Drumbeat captures a rare moment of hope in the long struggle against oppression.

Notice the date, however; soon after the victory in Angola the Soviet bloc would collapse, jeopardizing Cuba's economy and infrastructure; while Havana often acted internationally without consulting Moscow, it still remained dependent on Soviet economic assistance. Nevertheless, just at that time a new kind of revolutionary movement was beginning to gain strength across Latin America. Cuba has, since the 'fall of communism', depended on relationships build through the humanitarian side of its internationalism, for decades training doctors and funding education for African, Asian, and Latin American students. Its kind of internationalism still represents, in the era, we might say, of the Bolivarian Revolution, a direct challenge to the hegemony of the neoliberal world. The question is whether this revolution can create a lasting international infrastructure that can create a more egalitarian future.

Note
* I criticized this choice of tense in the title of the series in my review of Tariq Ali's The Idea of Communism.

Back to Sartre's Futures

Unlike the other contributors to our series, The Futures of Sartre's Critique, I've only recently returned to his work. I had studied, in my very early twenties, parts of Being and Nothingness, paged through, with varying degrees of interest, the pieces collected in the anthology Essays in Existentialism, and maybe even looked over a few  post-68 interviews. I'd written a few papers on Sartre, but overall, I felt that his work was incomplete. Indeed, it should have felt that way; only the essays on art found in Essays in Existentialism were published after the 1940s. I read and wrote, but only tangentially with Sartre (there's a few more twists in this winding story, but I will leave them aside for the time being).

This changed in June 2007. I had read Sam Harris's The End of Faith, hoping to find an ethical atheist...but I found a moralizer. For somebody so concerned with what he now calls "well-being," Harris's book is overwrought with indignation and self-righteousness, not to mention lacking a sense of justice. Anything goes, including torture and benevolent dictatorship, for Harris, if it can 'save' us from the benighted hordes of the non-Western world. Of course, political interpretations of so-called religious fanaticism are excluded from his inquiry, in order to focus on the religious ideas themselves. That's nice, but it does not tell us why some concepts become prevalent at some points and not others, how these concepts come to represent not just religious but political struggles. But Harris won't take the long history of imperialism seriously. Those who do, such as Noam Chomsky, are treated with a general condensation.

So, I had to turn to an ethical atheist...and Sartre provides a clear language to engage these kinds of arguments...but then, as it always happens, I write for a few days and then quickly get diverted, because defining the actuality of atheism (it's political and metaphysical commitments) is only part of a much larger political struggle. The fight between new atheism and religion is a particularly western kind of political fight; they can go on talk shows, sell their books and t-shirts, and feel as self-righteous and as persecuted as they want. They can inspire people, convince them to change. Either way, it's all narrated in a self-interested, self-help kind of way. There's a "secret solidarity", as Ronald Aronson states it, between the two.  It's a spectacular substitute for a much more difficult struggle for social justice.

If it's about social justice, however, what does Sartre have to say for future struggle? That's what I want to discuss here. Even though we're commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Critique of Dialectical Reason (Volume 1, of course), I'm going to introduce that book through Search for a Method. Sartre writes that

Far from being exhausted, Marxism is still very young, almost in its infancy; it has scarcely begun to develop. It remains, therefore, the philosophy of our time. We cannot go beyond it because we have not gone beyond the circumstances which engendered it (30).

And yet he states:

Marxism stopped. Precisely because this philosophy wants to change the world, because its aim is "philosophy-becoming-the-world,"  because it is and wants to be practical, there arose within it a veritable schism which rejected theory on one side and praxis on the other....Marxism found itself unable to bear the shock of these new struggles, the practical necessities and the mistakes which are always inseparable from them (21-22).

How to reconcile these two seemingly contradictory statements about Marxism, that philosophy of our time  which has nevertheless stopped? Jean-Luc Nancy's The Inoperative Community rejects the claim that a philosophy could be the horizon of our contemporary times. The very idea of a horizon, Nancy claims, is no longer valid. And, obviously, all of us educated in more or less pluralist philosophy departments might find this claim to be obvious, but it's not.

Sartre introduces three periods of modern philosophy-- the first dominated by Descartes and Locke, the second by Kant and Hegel, and the third by Marxism-- but this third period is qualitatively different. While each of these three philosophies acts, during its respective period, as a horizon to cultural and philosophical forms of its time, Marxism also describes the relationships of the means of production. Descartes, Locke, Kant, or Hegel may have put forward systems that governed other cultural and philosophical forms, but Marxism does something entirely different; it broke down the wall between philosophy and political economy. Class struggle against the bourgeois or capitalist modes of production are "the circumstances which engendered it." This has shaped previous philosophy, but not in a decisive and reflexive way. If we follow Marx himself, we could say that the crises of philosophies that do not overstep their boundaries into political economy can be refuted by their very own ideological means; their abstraction becomes a weapon against them.

And yet, "Marxism stopped." How? Sartre introduces a crucial distinction between 'philosophy' and ideology.' A philosophy constructs new set of relationships between thought and praxis, and ideology comes in and does the practical work, it takes inventory, it extends new methods (8). Existentialism, according to the Sartre of Search for a Method, is an ideology and not a philosophy. Marxism stopped, according to Sartre, because it can no longer measure the life of the masses as it is lived by them; instead, Marxism interprets a priori this lived world, individuality is reduced to a series of formulas and types. Marxism needs existentialism to seek out man (sic) "everywhere where he is, at his work, in his home, in the street" (28), but, Sartre argues, "historical materialism furnished the only valid interpretation of history and that existentialism remained the only concrete approach to reality" (21).

Sartre calls this the "double demand" of praxis, for both thinking concrete reality and criticizing political economy. He also identifies the the central and persistent problem: how to make the political imagination that drives praxis (its desires, passions, and fidelities) overlap with a totalizing critique of political economy (the production and reproduction of the relationships that organize and dominate the masses under capitalism) and vice versa? This question is just as relevant today as it was in 1957, just as "the circumstances which engendered" Marxism are, broadly speaking, just as relevant today as they were when Marx wrote.

Sartre's challenge to Marxism revolves around its treatment of the concrete and lived world of the masses.He is one of the first to see that the 'factory' is no longer the locus of the political imagination, that the locus is elsewhere (anticipating post-Fordism?). He has been criticized for his lack of interest in rank and file party organization due to his petty bourgeois background, but I think we should turn this critique around. His relative lack of interest in party organization is also connected to the emphases he placed on local spontaneity and systematic anti-colonialism. 'Imagining' this intersection of spontaneity and anti-colonialism has proved to be difficult for praxis (historically speaking, it was rejected or ignored by the French Communist Party), but it does explain Sartre's proximity to post-68 Maoism.

Schematic conclusions are risky to draw, but it is probably safe to say that many of the figures of post-68 post-structuralism, with their emphases on micro-politics and resistances, lost sight of the totalizing movement of political economy. The upshot is that political practices were extended into previously marginalized social spaces (the prisons, psychiatry, sexuality, etc). Nevertheless, today, we need a totalizing critique, which should pass again through Marx, the later Sartre, and the anti-colonialism and post-colonialism of Fanon, Césaire, and others. We need a  renewed critique of capitalism and a critique of the privilege that Westerners live by virtue of living in North America or Europe, and the exploitation and violence that engender it,  we need a sense of vigilance in order to critique and refuse every so-called humanitarian justification for imperial war and exploitation. We too need to be decolonialized, de-imperialized.