Norman Geras sadly died in October 2013 from cancer of the prostate. He was born in 1943 in what is now Zimbabwe, but would have been Rhodesia at the time, and went to school there. He never spoke about this to me, but I would imagine that being part of a Jewish family in Rhodesia would have presented various challenges given that the white population tended to be racist. Geras subsequently became a student at Pembroke College and Nuffield College at the University of Oxford. In 1967 he was appointed as a lecturer at the University of Manchester, and eventually became a professor there. He was famous for his view that Manchester was the centre of the universe! I am not sure at what stage he became a Marxist, but he was certainly a Marxist by the time that I first encountered him as an undergraduate student when I was at the University of Manchester. I recall him lecturing on Lenin’s ‘What Is to Be Done?’. At that stage he must have been only three or four years older than the students he was teaching. Subsequently I was lucky enough to be able to do a PhD at Manchester University. My supervisor, Mike Evans, had an unrivalled knowledge of Marx’s work, but was reluctant to debate general perspectives, and Norman was extremely helpful in this respect.
A personal recollection from my student years is that there were widespread protests against the apartheid regime in South Africa, and British students planned to disrupt the series of test matches between England and the visiting South African cricket team. Norman said that he supported these protests rather reluctantly, as he was extremely fond of watching cricket, and one of the highlights of his year when living in Rhodesia had been the visit of the South African cricket team. He loved the team with a real passion: ‘For this South African team, the South Africa of the mid-1950s, is my team. It is the team of my life, the one launched in the deepest recesses of my consciousness’ (Holliday 2012, p. 251). His love of cricket was indeed remarkable. He possessed a library of some 2500 books about cricket (Holliday 2012, p. 252). Geras co-wrote two short books about cricket with the Ian Holliday. Each describes a test match in great detail. One feature of both books is that Geras had a phenomenal grasp of cricketing statistics that enabled him to puzzle even a very knowledgeable fellow cricket lover. As we will see, the title of one of his books, much of which is based upon a study of the Holocaust, came to him as he was on his way to Headingley cricket ground.
For the last few years of his life Geras posted extensively to his prize-winning political blog, normblog. Some good general appreciations of this have been written by no less than four authors in Garrard and de Wijze (2012). Apart from adding my enthusiastic agreement to the generally appreciative comments of these authors I shall not be discussing normblog in general terms in this book. I shall, however, make reference to it from time to time in order to amplify the discussion.
The Plan of the Book
Apart from the above I shall have very little to say about Geras’s personal life. Instead, I shall focus on the main books and articles that he wrote. In each case I shall give an exposition of what he said, together with a more or less critical commentary. On some issues I regard his work as extremely thorough and very well argued, and there will be little by way of criticism. Other chapters are more critical. It is only a shame that Geras himself is not available to respond to critical comments, as I am certain that his replies would have been very interesting.
The chapters of the book basically follow the order of publication of Geras’s writings, although certain issues are run together—for example, earlier articles that linked to his discussion of Marx and human nature are run together with the book that he wrote on this theme.
Chapter 2 discusses Geras’s first book, which comprises of four essays on Rosa Luxemburg, discussing barbarism and the collapse of capitalism; the debate that occurred between socialists following the 1905 revolution in Russia about the nature of the forthcoming Russian revolution; the role of the mass strike; and the issue of the extent to which day-to-day socialist struggles should be linked to the ultimate goal of socialist revolution. This chapter largely comprises exposition, but in the course of Geras’s book on Luxemburg he asserts that both she and Lenin came to agree with Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution. I take issue with this in Chapter 3. I also have reservations about his treatment of the economic aspects of Luxemburg’s theories. Geras is to be commended particularly for his emphasis that Luxemburg did not advocate spontaneity for its own sake.
Chapter 3 deals with Geras’s early Trotskyism. I consider his writings in this area one of the least satisfactory parts of his overall work. I go carefully through Geras’s discussion of permanent revolution, politics, the use of terror and the rise of fascism, and argue that he failed to apply his usual rigorous approach to Trotsky’s work and theories. If Geras had been more careful in his assessment of Trotsky, he might well have adopted the liberal Marxist position that characterizes his later work at a much earlier stage. Indeed, in the conclusion, Chap. 13, there is a section where this theme is further considered, because even in his later writings, Geras arguably never really comes to terms with his views about Trotsky.
Chapter 4 is discussion of Geras’s work on the issue of Marx and human nature. In his book: Marx and Human Nature: Refutation of a Legend (Geras 1983), Geras is widely held to have demonstrated that there is a theory of human nature in the older Marx, and thus to have vindicated the position taken by the majority of British commentators on Marx that there is an overall continuity between Marx’s writings on alienation between 1843 and 1845, and the older Marx. I disagree with this position. I show that the account of human nature that Geras legitimately finds in the older Marx is a very thin one, which basically does not support the alienation theory. I also go on to show that the appearance of the alienation theory in the older Marx that Geras to some extent and others very enthusiastically see as demonstrating continuity in Marx fails to do this. I agree with him that we require a theory of human nature today as part of a theory of justice which we need as part of our arguments for socialism, but do not agree that such a theory is readily available throughout Marx’s work.
Chapter 5 is a discussion of Geras’s critique of Althusser. In Chap. 4 I had already identified that Geras has criticized Althusser’s assertion that the older Marx’s theories are not based on a theory of human nature. In Chap. 5 Geras takes issue with Althusser’s conception of science. In particular, he asserts that Althusser’s conception of science is on the borderlines of idealism, of a picture of science as something neutral outside the social formation. Instead, Geras wants to emphasize that all the most famous Marxists learned from the practice of the working class, Marx learning the necessity of destroying the bourgeois state from the Paris commune, Rosa Luxemburg learning the value of the mass strike, Trotsky learning the value of permanent revolution from the experience of the revolution of 1905, and Lenin learning the importance of the Soviets. He also takes issue with Althusser’s idea that ideology continues under communism.
I offer a limited defence to Althusser on the grounds that Geras is selective in the political practice from which his Marxists learned.
Chapter 6 considers Geras’s work on Marx’s theory of justice. Most authors in this area have their own view of whether or not Marx has a theory of justice, and therefore there is widespread disagreement on Geras’s conclusion that Marx had a theory of justice but did not think that he had a theory of justice. However, for a succinct summary of what Marx says in this area and the possible positions available in the considerable literature up to the time of Geras’s articles on Marx and justice there is no one to equal Geras. If you are looking for his finest writing in the sense that everyone would agree that it makes a valuable contribution, this is it.
Geras concludes that Marx has a theory of justice, but, particularly as it is stated in a contradictory way, it is quite limited and a theory of justice based on Marxism requires considerable fleshing out. Geras’s attempts to do this are discussed in Chap. 7, which examine a series of pieces in which Geras produces a more substantive approach to questions of justice. These include the relationship between Marxism and moral advocacy, and a discussion of whether, if violent revolution is required, there are moral limits to revolutionary violence. In 2006 Geras was the lead author of the Euston Manifesto, a manifesto for leftist bloggers. This contains a very strong commitment to human rights and parliamentary democracy. The last part of Chap. 7 deals with Geras’s discussion of Marx’s economics, which argues that it is not sustainable as economic theory but, by looking at its inadequacies, many worthwhile issues for an egalitarian theory of justice may be developed.
Chapters 8 and 9 deal with Geras’s critique of various forms of postmodernism. Chapter 8 comprises of his assault on Laclau and Mouffe, who contended that there were such a lot of problems with Marxism that it was necessary to move on to a struggle for radical democracy.
Chapter 9 comprises of an account of Geras’s critique of Richard Rorty’s Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Rorty 1989), which advocates a form of ironic liberalism based on pragmatism. Rorty contends that there is no such thing as human nature. As might be expected, Geras takes him to task at some length on this issue. Rorty also asserts that people are most naturally sympathetic to those with whom they have something in common. While this might sound plausible in the abstract, Geras brings forward extensive evidence to show that people’s motivation was invariably to do with human decency in one way or other rather than prior acquaintance. Geras also takes issue with what might be seen as the foundations of Rorty’s anti-foundationalism, namely his advocacy of pragmatism.
I am generally sympathetic to Geras’s critique of Rorty, but suggest some additions, particularly based on analyzing Rorty’s pragmatism in greater philosophical depth.
Chapter 10 is largely the exposition of an edited collection on the Enlightenment. Geras was one of the editors. I provide a brief exposition of this excellent collection.
Chapter 11 comprises a departure from the Marxist-inspired themes of previous chapters. It is based on Geras’s very extensive reading of the secondary literature on the Holocaust. Here Geras plumbs the depths of human iniquity. His main interest is in the question of why bystanders simply got on with their daily life rather than attempting to intervene. He comments that the same basic situation applies to most people in the advanced countries. There are horrors in the world—starvation, lack of shelter and care, various forms of state repression including torture and mass extermination—and yet most of us carry on with our daily enjoyments and do very little about it. Geras says that it is as if there was a contract of mutual indifference, meaning that we agree with each other not to give mutual aid. He finds this to be a deeply pessimistic conclusion, and explores ways in which we might escape the contract of mutual indifference. If it is accepted that there is a duty to bring aid, and a corresponding right to assistance in extreme distress, then we have the beginnings of a way out of the contract of mutual indifference. He goes on to discuss Ralph Miliband’s views about the possibility of socialism given that there have been such dreadful events as the Holocaust. Geras concludes that there is a basic human capacity for doing evil, and that this needs to be factored into any plans for a socialist future. One Marxist who discussed the Holocaust from time to time was Ernest Mandel. Geras considers that his analysis of the Holocaust is inadequate, in a way that raises questions about whether any Marxist explanation of the Holocaust could be satisfactory. In a fine piece of applied analytical philosophy, Geras discusses the question of whether or not the Holocaust was unique, and manages to show both that no other historical events quite matches it, but that it shares common features with other events. In the last two sections of Chap. 10 two related issues are discussed. One is Geras’s attitude to the state of Israel and the Palestinians—was he willing to accept conduct from Israel that amounted to ethnic cleansing? I conclude that he can be defended on this score. I then briefly consider some things that he said about anti-Semitism, arguing that this is an imp...