[Marxism] Theses on Feuerbach, Woody Allen and Nandigram

[Sukla Sen <suklasenp@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

 http://www.kafila.org/2007/11/25/theses-on-feuerbach-woody-allen-and-nandigram/

 
Theses on Feuerbach, Woody Allen and Nandigram 
Published by 
Nivedita Menon 
at November 25, 2007 
 
In Wolfgang Becker's film Good Bye Lenin set in East
Germany at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall, a
young boy tries to protect his invalid mother from the
shock of learning about the transformation that has
overtaken their country. When despite his elaborate
deception, she manages to see a television programme
showing thousands of cheering Germans at the remnants
of the wall, he tells her that the capitalist west has
fallen, that refugees from West Berlin are pouring
into the East, and that East Germany has welcomed them
with open arms. And she believes him. 
Thing is, there was no historical inevitability to the
fall of communism. The story the boy tells his mother
in Good Bye Lenin could well have been the way things
went in history, but for the self-destructiveness of
Stalinism ? its hubris, its fetishization of a certain
notion of industrialization and progress, its
anti-democratic core, its contempt for the "people" it
claimed to represent (or rather, the people it claimed
to be.)

Watching the 21st century Stalinist saga unfold in
West Bengal, one is overwhelmed by anger and deep
sadness. Among the graffiti during the 1968 struggles
in Paris was this one ? "We are the people our parents
warned us against." To Buddhadeb and the "Left
intellectuals" who rally to his defence one can only
say ? "You are the people Marx warned us against." If
there is one truth to take away from Marx it is this ?
there can be no one Marxism for all times. The
philosopher who said "It is not consciousness that
determines being but social being that determines
consciousness" ? that Marx would have been a
post-marxist today. 

The Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach ("Philosophers have
only interpreted the world, the point however, is to
change it") has been read by Stalinist marxism to mean
"Don't Think, Just Act!" Say the Stalinists, "We have
already given you the truth, the way and the life"
(the resonance with biblical liturgy is inescapable),
"all you need to do is to have your consciousness
raised to ours, and to follow." 

But the Theses on Feuerbach are a critique of
Feuerbachian materialism, which assumes that the world
exists independently of, and outside our minds. Marx,
in the ten theses that precede the famous Thesis XI,
polemically argues that Feuerbach and all previous
materialists envisaged objects in a contemplative way,
as if they exist independently of human activity. For
Marx, the objects of human perception are not simply
given in nature, but are produced in a complex
interaction with human needs and efforts. The third
Thesis criticizes the "materialist doctrine" of
Feuerbach for the assumption that human beings are the
mere products of external circumstances and
upbringing, forgetting the crucial factor that when
circumstances change, it is human intervention that
changes them. In Marx's materialism there is a
dialectical relationship between external reality and
human thought. 

Without this element of human agency, a materialist
doctrine must necessarily divide society into two
sections - one of which is superior, which understands
the abstract laws of progress of matter; and another
which is ignorant of these laws and lives its everyday
life as if their petty little lives were as real as
the laws of progress of matter. The irony of course,
is that to posit in advance the metaphysical category
of 'laws of history' by which we measure 'progressive'
theory and politics, is not to be materialist at all.
It is to give primacy to the conceptual ? to the Idea.


It is only when we start with the ways in which
subjectivity is constructed - for 'women' and 'men',
for "peasants", or whatever, within
patriarchal/raceist/casteist/capitalist society, and
engage with these actually existing subjectivities
that our political practice and understanding would be
materialist. A 'materialist' politics would have to
track actually existing subjectivities and engage with
their potentialities and limits 

Marx emphasises the fact that the development of the
mind is at the same time the process by which the
world is transformed - the mind and the world are
interdependent. Society can be changed only by the
mass of people transforming the world (their worlds),
and not by a handful of reformers explaining the world
to the masses ? then shoving the masses into line with
armed guards if they have the temerity to have their
own understanding of their reality. 

Hence Thesis XI. Far from denying the importance of
philosophy and thinking, its claim is that to change
the world is not to be outside it, objectively
"interpreting" a fixed reality and pushing it in
pre-determined directions. When you engage with the
world, it changes you as much as you change it. 

For this Marx, the term "Narodnik" would not be the
term of abuse it is for Karat, who hurled it at Sumit
Sarkar at some point in this long and dreadful saga.
Sumit and his colleagues too, were careful during
their press conference to deny they were Narodniks,
but after all, what is a Narodnik, and why shouldn't
we be Narodniks? Narodniks believed that peasant
communes could be the basis for socialism (see Aditya
Nigam's earlier post for a detailed discussion on this
issue) ? but my point here is about the ecological
unsustainablity of capitalist industrialization. Not
only is it not a desirable road to socialism comrades,
it is not a possible road to anywhere but the bleak
hell of a devastated earth.

Woody Allen once mused, "I love humanity. It's people
I can't stand." The CPI(M) conversely, loves peasants
(the party is permanently "in solidarity with
struggling peasants everywhere"); it's the peasantry
it can't stand. Unless the class itself is obliterated
and every last peasant is transformed into a wage
slave, how is the economy to be thoroughly
industrialized, and how else will the path be cleared
for socialism? 

"There Will Be No Chemical Hub in Nandigram." Nice
bumper sticker. But will there be one on some other
farmland? A nuclear plant in Haripur? A SEZ in another
village? A corporation setting up a "Singapore-type"
housing society on farmland anywhere in the state? In
that case comrades, remind us again ? the difference
between you and every other pro-capitalist neo-liberal
party is?? 





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