Date: Thu, 6 Feb 1997 12:02:19 -0500 From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood-AT-panix.com> Subject: Re: M-I: Nietzsche and revolutionary action (lnp post 1) At 10:47 AM -0500 2/6/97, Louis Proyect wrote: >James Farmelant pointed out how Nietzsche influenced the Bogdanov ultraleft >faction in the Bolshevik Party and I pointed out the similar influences he >had on Mariategui, the father of Peruvian Marxism. In either case, Nietzsche >was seen as an antidote to the passive, timid and accomodationist tendencies >in social democracy. Foucault was close to the Gauche Proletarienne, a French Maoist group of the late 1960s/early 1970s. Its ideology grew progressively more extreme, in line with the 1968 slogan, "Soyons Cruels!" - "Be Cruel!" The GP's leader, Pierre Victor (ne Benny Levy) said, "To overthrow the authority of the bourgeois class, the humiliated population has reason to institute a brief period of terror and to assult bodily a handful of contemptible, hateful individuals. It is difficult to attack the authority of a class without a few heads belonging to members of this class being paraded on the end of a stake." By the early 1970s, more and more French militants were recoiling from this violent rhetoric. The 1972 Palestinian attack at the Munich Olympics seems like some sort of turning point; many French Maoists were Jewish, and the Olympic attack scared them. Among those who turned at this point was Andre Glucksmann, who, if I remember correctly, was no small influence on the rightward turn of French intellectual opinion. Foucault too would turn away >from the hyperviolence of the 1968-72 period, saying: "In the beginning of the seventies, I thought that it was possible to put in light, the real, the concrete, the actual problem, and that a political movement could come and take this problem and, from the data of the problem, elaborate something else. But I think I was wrong.... The political, spontaneous movement in which, with a great effort, I put my experience, my hopes - well, that didn't happen." There was as much de Sade and Bataille in this French radicalism as there was Marx and Mao. Bataille had an early essay called "The Use Value of D.A.F. de Sade" criticized the surrealists for their admiration of Sade without putting sadism into practice; wrote Bataille, "it is time to choose between the conduct of cowards afraid of their own joyful excesses" and brave, serious sadists, who called for the creation of revolutionary organizations "that have ecstasy and frenzy as their goal (the spectacular death of animals, partial tortures, orgiastic dances, etc.)." Lou's post, from which the quote at the top is excerpted, talked about the problems of reformism and social democracy, and set some kind of revolutionary spirit against it. But revolutionary spirit of the 1968 sort came to a very bad end. It may be that the kind of violence the French Maoists supported has a place in Third World countries, ones that are deeply poor and suffused with extreme violence. But in the First World, it runs the danger of ending in burnout, as in France, or fascism, as in Germany. [My source on the French stuff is again James Miller's The Passion of Michel Foucault.] Doug -- Doug Henwood Left Business Observer 250 W 85 St New York NY 10024-3217 USA +1-212-874-4020 voice +1-212-874-3137 fax email: <mailto:dhenwood-AT-panix.com> web: <http://www.panix.com/~dhenwood/LBO_home.html> --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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