File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/97-02-08.012, message 40


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>




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