The Norman Geras Reader

What's there is there'

Ben Cohen, Eve Garrard

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781526103871
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

This is the first book to gather the key writings of the distinguished political theorist Norman Geras into a single volume, providing a comprehensive overview of the thinking of one of the most important Marxist philosophers in the post-war era. Among the essays included here are 'The Controversy about Marx and Justice', 'The Duty to Bring Aid', 'Primo Levi and Jean Amery: Shame' and the contentious 'Euston Manifesto', which lays down a set of central principles for the democratic left in the twenty-first century. The reader is rounded out with several posts from Geras's much-loved and widely read 'Normblog', as well as companion essays by Alan Johnson and Terry Glavin, which explore how Geras's philosophical concerns led to his more recent, trenchant critiques of the direction of left-wing politics.

PART I

Marxism and liberalism

On Geras’s Marxism

Alan Johnson

an unwavering commitment to the goal of anti-capitalist social transformation, a transparent sense of humanity and a conception of democracy informed by vital liberal assumptions. This is a combination still to be commended, I believe, today.

Norman Geras, 2002¹

In a body of work marked by the meticulous exegesis, scrupulous critique and creative development of the classical Marxist tradition, Norman Geras established himself as the twentieth-century Marxist theoretician we need most in the twenty-first century. Why? Three reasons: few understood better that the core of classical Marxism was its theory of human self-emancipation; few were better able or more willing, none the less, to critique the obstacles to self-emancipation, the footholds for authoritarianism within the very same tradition; and fewer still understood that Marxism needed to negotiate articles of conciliation (not surrender) with liberalism if all those obstacles were to be overcome.

A popular and democratic Marxism

‘The principle of self-emancipation’, wrote Geras in 1971, ‘is central, not incidental, to historical materialism.’ Armed with that insight, he proceeded to excavate from the Marxist tradition some precious theoretical resources to serve a democratic and self-emancipatory socialism, resources that had been buried by Stalinism and scorned by social democratic reformism: foremost among these was an appreciation of the creative power of mass popular struggle. That appreciation could hardly be more relevant today when things are once again ‘kicking off all over’, to use the title of a book by the broadcaster and writer (and former Trotskyist) Paul Mason. There are few better accounts of the intimate relation between ‘the widest and deepest mobilization of the masses’ on the one hand, and the achievement of social progress and human self-emancipation on the other, than the writings of Norman Geras, two supreme examples being ‘The Mass Strike’ and ‘The Literature of Revolution’, his reflections on the thought of Rosa Luxemburg and Leon Trotsky respectively.

Marx’s principle of human self-emancipation is simple enough: the muck of ages – poverty and exploitation, violence and oppression – will be sloughed off not from above by an elite but from below by ‘the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority’. However, the immense majority can only become ‘fit to rule’ through a practical education punctuated by popular struggles. Many of Geras’s writings are concerned with fidelity not merely to Marx’s principle but to the critical investigation of its theoretical status and the practical conditions of its realisation, from questions of political organisation and socialist strategy to the ethics of revolutionary violence.

Geras returned again and again to the theme of untrammelled democracy as the only possible political form in which that practical education could take place and human self-emancipation be secured. One of the essential strands of the legacy of Rosa Luxemburg, he insisted, was precisely her appreciation of ‘the vital importance of elementary democratic rights as instruments for the self-emancipation of the working class’, and her understanding that if people really are to work out their own liberation then they need ‘the most extensive, thoroughgoing, “unlimited” democratic rights and liberties’.

An anti-authoritarian Marxism

But Geras was no mere celebrant of classical Marxism. He tracked down to their theoretical lairs a series of disabling anti-democratic and illiberal tendencies that lurked within Marxism itself and undermined the principle of self-emancipation: among them, an elitist conception of the relation between party and class, a tendency to insouciance about ‘bourgeois’ democratic rights, a failure to properly think through the ethics of revolutionary violence and a dogmatic rejection of the very idea of a biological human nature. In each case, Geras tried to separate the disabling tendency or reactionary impulse from what he believed were deeper, truer impulses to human emancipation within the tradition, and to trace the historical conditions and political consequences of the error. (He was willing to deal in notions of truth and error, not able to see how either the pursuit of knowledge or the pursuit of justice could proceed without those notions.)

For example, he showed why those Marxists, such as Althusser and Marcuse, who treated people as mere dupes, ‘the total objects of their circumstances’, stood at odds to the principle of self-emancipation, for each had to rest their strategy for the transition on what Marx called ‘the old crap’: the need for an authoritarian Legislator to liberate from above the poor befuddled masses down below. And Geras knew where forcing people to be free ended up.

Geras even showed how the conceptions of democracy and political representation in the thought of his heroes, Trotsky and Luxemburg, were deficient in some important senses. In his essays ‘Classical Marxism and Proletarian Representation’ (1981) and ‘Democracy and the Ends of Marxism’ (1994) he moved from highlighting the huge strengths of both thinkers to alerting us to those lacunae and errors in their thought that inadvertently offered points of support to authoritarianism. In the case of Trotsky, Geras pointed out that the error was not always inadvertent. He argued that the Old Man had badly lost his way from 1919 to 1921 when he defended the Communist Party’s right to ‘assert its dictatorship even if that dictatorship temporarily clashed with the passing moods of the workers’ democracy’. Geras, then himself a militant in the British section of Trotsky’s Fourth International, insisted that that ‘amounted to an explicit violation of the principles of socialist democracy’.

And, famously, Geras showed us there was explanatory and normative significance for a self-emancipatory politics in the fact that ‘Marx did not reject the idea of human nature’, adding that ‘he was right not to do so’. It is not easy to convey to people what a brave (and liberating) move this was at the time in Marxist circles where the dismissal of any kind of human nature, and crucially, therefore, any serious notion of human limit, was routine.

A liberal Marxism

Later, and in relative solitude, Geras did much to work out the shape of articles of conciliation (not surrender) between Marxism and liberalism. I believe he came to see that the immanent critique of Marxism of the kind he had mounted himself, drawing on the resources of Marxism, while still vital, was not enough. Not all the resources needed were there, not all the gaps could be filled. Marxism had ‘elements that are wanted’, i.e. lacking, and liberalism possessed some resources that were needed. So we Marxists, he thought, must be willing to put ourselves into ‘liberalism’s more advanced school’, when it is more advanced, and study its ‘rich and impressive philosophical literature on the subject of justice’. More: while the name of his desire, human self-emancipation, did not change, he framed it now as – this happy phrase is his – a ‘minimum utopia’. We had to settle for that given the nature of ‘that most complex being’. ‘Any feasible conception of progress today’, he wrote, ‘needs to come to terms with the likely persistence of some of the less pleasant tendencies and potentialities that are lodged within the characteristic make-up of human beings.’ He remained committed to self-emancipation, but he had a more critical and realistic understanding of what made up the self, and what the self was capable of, for good and ill.

However, he never allowed his sharper awareness of our ‘less pleasant tendencies and potentialities’ to form part of what he lambasted as the Great Moving Right Show. His ‘minimum utopia’ may no longer have been the world revolution envisaged by the first four congresses of the Third International, but it was still nothing less than a new civilisation: a revolutionary rupture with the entire culture of dog-eat-dog possessive individualism he despised – a culture for which we might use the term neoliberalism. His book The Contract of Mutual Indifference: Political Philosophy after the Holocaust (1998) included a stinging indictment of liberalism as a culture which underwrote that contract, licensing possessive individualism and bystanding.

Even as Geras opened up new lines of traffic with liberalism, he was scrupulous in his defence of Marxism against criticisms that he saw as careless or ignorant ploys to reduce and traduce the tradition and its thinkers. He famously assailed seven types of obloquy in a brilliant essay in The Socialist Register. And in a coruscating series of exchanges in the New Left Review with the political theorists Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Geras comprehensively criticised their reduction of the Marxist tradition to a crude economic necessitarianism – ‘ex-Marxism without substance’, he called it.

A Gerasian Marxism?

In his careful survey ‘The Marxism of Norman Geras’, Professor David McLellan thinks that late Geras sometimes sounded ‘more like Bernstein than Luxemburg’.² And indeed he did. We moved from proletarian self-emancipation to human emancipation, and from class interest towards ethical universalism as defining the socialist goal; the idea of socialism as being historically guaranteed, never significant to him at any time, had long gone, and a crop of ‘vital liberal assumptions’ were now firmly ensconced somewhere near the centre of his Marxism.

But if Geras sometimes sounded like Eduard Bernstein, he also still sounded much of the time like Rosa Luxemburg. Am I reading into Norman what I want to find there if I say that part of his legacy is precisely to suggest to us what it would be to mediate between those two great social democrats? Perhaps. But then, perhaps not. Geras refused to let go of two profound insights he drew from the democratic revolutionary socialist Rosa Luxemburg: that, simply put, and in her words, ‘the masses are the decisive factor’ when it comes to social change, and that the historic choice we face is still what she said it was: ‘socialism or barbarism’. I think it was while holding fast to those truths that Geras opened up new lines of communication with a liberal socialism that many identify with Eduard Bernstein. And Norman could have led us to many worse places than that. From there we can set out again.

By way of a final word, this good news: those willing to really study the essays of Norman Geras will secure for themselves a genuine, old-fashioned, honest-to-goodness education! In a field routinely disfigured by needlessly recondite writing, Geras’s essays on Marxism are models of clarity and intelligence; reading them, one is given every opportunity not just to grasp his argument but to grasp what argument is, not just to see his reasoning but to learn how to reason. I was lucky enough to be Norman’s student in the early 1980s and a few of us read his book Marx and Human Nature in draft form. He shared it with us because we were all Trotskyist militants in those days, and he was genuinely interested in what we thought of it. (To be taken that seriously at that age is quite something. Three decades later, when the two of us co-wrote, with others, the Euston Manifesto, reproduced in this volume, I was still in awe of him.) I recall now my feeling about Marx and Human Nature. I have felt it often after reading Norman Geras’s writing. It was the joy one feels when the clouds part, the sun shines and the meaning and importance of theory becomes not just clear but part of one’s own flourishing. For those who have not yet read Geras-as-Marxist, that joy awaits.

Notes

1 From ‘Marxism, the Holocaust and September 11: An Interview with Norman Geras’, Imprints, Vol. 6, No. 3, 2002–3.

2 David McLellan, ‘The Marxism of Norman Geras’, in Stephen De Wijze and Eve Garrard (eds), Thinking Towards Humanity (Manchester University Press, 2012); pp. 27–43.

1

Human nature and historical materialism

(Chapter 3 of Marx and Human Nature: Refutation of a Legend, Verso/NLB, London, 1983)

It is surely remarkable that so many have discerned, with the emergency of the materialist conception of history, a dismissal by Marx of the idea of human nature. The German Ideology, after all, setting down that celebrated conception for the first time, expressly criticizes the mistake of those who, ignoring what it terms the ‘real basis of history’, thereby exclude from the historical process ‘the relation of man to nature’, create an ‘antithesis of nature and history’.¹ It might be thought that, for Marx, this antithesis is mistaken only with respect to external nature, and not also with respect to nature as something inherent in humanity. But it is easy to show that this is not the case. Marx includes such an inner, human nature squarely within the ‘real basis of history’.

In fact, The German Ideology at one point echoes a passage from The Holy Family just in emphasizing nature’s internal as well as external dimensions. In both works, the intent behind the emphasis is a materialist one, a ‘double’ natural constraint being insisted upon in opposition to themes which are manifestly idealist. In The Holy Family, Marx accuses Bruno Bauer of †sublimating ‘all that affirms a finite material existence outside infinite self-consciousness’ and, hence, of combating nature – ‘nature both as it exists outside man and as man’s nature’. Bauer, Marx also says, does not recognize ‘any power of human nature distinct from reason’.² In the passage from The German Ideology, it is Christianity, rather, that is the object of criticism:

The only reason why Christianity wanted to free us from the domination of the flesh and ‘desires as a driving force’ was because it regarded our flesh, our desires as something foreign to us; it wanted to free us from determination by nature only because it regarded our own nature as not belonging to us...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction Ben Cohen and Eve Garrard
• Part I Marxism and liberalism
• Part II The longest hatred: antisemitism
• Part III The responsibility to protect
• Part IV Normblog: the best of
• Epilogue: reflections on the work of Norman Geras Terry Glavin
• Norman Geras: the complete bibliography
• Index