THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH vs. Doug Enaa Greene

THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH, VOL.3, ISSUE#8, SEPT-NOV/2019

Doug Enaa Greene is a radical intellectual, historian and author of Communist Insurgent: Blanqui’s Politics of Revolution. Greene has been published in Socialism and Democracy, Counterpunch, Jacobin, Cultural Logic and Red Wedge Magazine.

Brotherwise Dispatch – It was through reading Illuminations by Walter Benjamin that I was first introduced to Louis-Auguste Blanqui in the fragmentary essay entitled “Theses on the Philosophy of History”. There Benjamin writes critically of the deliberate erasure of Blanqui from the historical memory of the Left. How would you describe the motivations involved in writing your book, Communist Insurgent: Blanqui’s Politics of Revolution, in relation to that erasure which continues to this day?

Doug Enaa Greene - Before talking about Blanqui, I just want to provide a very brief overview of who he is for your audience. Born in France, Louis-Auguste Blanqui (1805-1881) was one of the most revered, dedicated and uncompromising communist revolutionaries of the nineteenth century. Even Marx acknowledged that Blanqui was the head and heart of the revolutionary movement in France. Blanqui had participated in five abortive revolutions from 1830 to 1870. Every French government since 1830 had seen fit to lock Blanqui up and he spent half of his life in jail. Despite long periods of imprisonment, Blanqui emerged from the dungeons each time with his sights set on the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of a communist republic.

When we talk about rescuing Blanqui from obscurity, it's important to note that he has suffered the same fate as other revolutionaries, whether Marx, Lenin, Che, and Trotsky, since we are living at the “end of history” where socialism and revolution are declared impossible. Names such as Blanqui need to be erased since they believed that a different world was possible and acted to realize it. And it is not just the ruling class which have propagated that narrative, but socialists and communists. By in large, once those parties give up and accept the idea that revolution is not either possible or desirable. In this vision, communist revolution might be a nice idea or a sentimental dream, but it is relegated safely aside while the only goal is tweaking the system a bit, but leaving its fundamental mechanisms of exploitation and oppression intact.

Naturally, this means that the name of Blanqui is buried as Benjamin pointed out and we are left with the non-revolutionary “common sense” that prevails on the left (both in his time and in ours). And that means anyone who seeks to rescue Blanqui and Blanquism from obscurity has to cut through all that obfuscation. In the 140 years since Blanqui's death, there have been comparatively few biographies and studies devoted to him in either in English or French. Until my book was released in 2017, the last major English language study of Blanqui was in the early 1970s (there was a French one in the 1980s). So there was not much discussion of Blanqui going on.

My own interest in Blanqui came about after a long period of political activism from 2011-2013, focused in the Occupy Movement and its offshoots. By the time that milieu dried up, I needed to make sense about what had happened. I had gone into the Occupy Movement naively expecting that a revolution was around the corner and conducting myself as such. That didn't happen naturally, but I was still fired up with the same revolutionary energy. I wasn't quite sure what to do now or how to orient myself and how to be a revolutionary in a non-revolutionary situation. I feared falling into the dominant pitfalls of the American left of co-option of either reformism and the Democrats or a kind of activism that involved going through the motions, but not fundamentally changing anything. Since I am a historian by training, I turned to the study of the revolutionary tradition to make sense of my predicament.

My interests turned to the French Revolution in the late 18th century. It was during this classical bourgeois revolution that modern communism emerged in the shape of Gracchus Babeuf. What interested me was that Babeuf was active as a communist after the high-tide of the revolution passed and reaction was setting in. He took communism out of the realm of speculation and attempted to give it material force and agency by struggling for power. Babeuf failed and, in all likelihood, there was no way for him to realize communism in that moment. However, what impressed me about Babeuf was that he pushed the emancipatory energies as far as they would go. Or to put it another way, Babeuf was practicing the politics of the impossible. And despite his failure, he left a powerful legacy that other socialists and communists built on. I wrote a long essay on the French Revolution and Babeuf, but realized that I had only touched on the beginnings of modern communism. The next logical step was to look at Blanqui. I originally planned to write an essay on him too, but the project kept growing into a book.

I want to return to your original question about rescuing Blanqui from erasure. In the process of writing my book and other essays related to Blanqui, I realized that this figure was unfairly maligned. Originally, I had actually not thought much of Blanqui as a person or his theories, but my own views changed. I realized that for all his faults – notably elitism and a focus on conspiratorial organization – that he recognized some fundamental truths. He knew that the ruling class couldn't be appealed to, but must be fought to the bitter end. Blanqui saw that you couldn't reconcile the interests of the workers and bourgeoisie. He gave serious thought to developing the tactics and strategies needed to conquer power – something that both Lenin and Trotsky recognized. Lastly, Blanqui lost pretty much every major struggle he was involved in and spent half of his life in prison, but he never gave up, but stayed faithful to the communist ideal.

So I see my part in rescuing Blanqui from erasure as highlighting his virtues while not forgetting his weaknesses. Blanqui asked all the right questions about how to make a revolution: what tactics and strategy were needed? What class would carry it out? What type of organization was needed? I believe that almost all the answers he provided were wrong, but those are the questions that we need to ask if we're serious about revolution. And rather than consigning Blanqui to the dust bin of history, we should look at him anew because he has so much to teach us about how thinking about revolution.

BD – To some Benjamin and Blanqui appear to be on opposite sides of the planet, if not at least, very different sides of the Leftist spectrum. What are your thoughts on “the impasse of the Left” and how that informs and necessitates Benjamin’s discursive engagement with Blanqui in his work?

DEG - On the surface, Benjamin and Blanqui are vastly different figures. On the one hand, Benjamin is not a political activist in the traditional sense, but a scholar and theorist more comfortable in books and archives. By contrast, Blanqui is a revolutionary activist par excellence where theory and practice are indistinguishable. Despite this gap between the scholar and the activist, Blanqui and Benjamin have an important meeting point in thinking through what it means to be a revolutionary in a time of defeat.

So Benjamin had discussed Blanqui off and on throughout the 1930s in his writings on France, but he is most known for discussing Blanqui in his last major work, “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” This was a work written in 1940 and it was a time of utter defeat for Benjamin. The possibilities of anti-fascist struggle appeared dead. In 1939, the Soviet Union signed a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany. Now it appeared that the great rivals of the USSR and Nazi Germany were burying the ideological hatchet. For millions of communists and anti-fascists such as Benjamin, this was a horrible blow. For Benjamin, the pact was a betrayal of the struggle against fascism not only by the USSR but by the various communist parties that upheld it. For Benjamin, the communist parties had too much blind faith that Stalin represented the forces of progress, which led them to enforce a rigid discipline in their ranks and subordinate action to the dictates of Soviet foreign policy. All of this bred passivity.

For all his criticism of the USSR and its allies, Benjamin did not let the moderate social democratic left off the hook. Since the beginning of World War I, social democracy had given up on revolution and placed their faith in reform and gradual progress to deliver socialism. The social democrats believed they were moving with the tide of history. Social democracy's belief in their inevitable victory bred passivity and fatalism. This left social democracy unable to respond to either the Great Depression or the rise of Nazism. In the end, there was no inevitable victory, only bitter defeat.

So the moment Benjamin faced was one of defeat and where the left had no viable strategy forward. To think through this situation, Benjamin turned to Blanqui. For Benjamin, Blanqui's life provided an antidote to ideas of progress, opportunism, fatalism and passivity. According to Benjamin,

“In L'Eternite par les asters, Blanqui displayed no antipathy to the belief in progress; between the lines, however, he heaped scorn on the idea. One should not necessarily conclude from this that he was untrue to his political credo. The activity of a professional revolutionary such as Blanqui does not presuppose any faith in progress; it presupposes only the determination to do away with present injustice. The irreplaceable political value of class hatred consists precisely in its affording the revolutionary class a healthy indifference toward speculations concerning progress. Indeed, it is just as worthy of humane ends to rise up out of indignation at prevailing injustice as to seek through revolution to better the existence of future generations. It is just as worthy of the human being; it is also more like the human being. Hand in hand with such indignation goes the firm resolve to snatch humanity at the last moment from the catastrophe looming at every turn. That was the case with Blanqui. He always refused to develop plans for what comes 'later.'”

According to Benjamin, Blanqui's Eternity by the Stars, provided an antidote to leftist ideas of progress, opportunism, fatalism and passivity. For Benjamin, Blanqui's Eternity by the Stars “is an unconditional surrender, but it is simultaneously the most terrible indictment of a society that projects this image of the cosmos-understood as an image of itself-across the heavens.” Benjamin argues that the work means the following in regards to political action, that while the objective situations were overwhelmingly stacked against revolutionaries, there was space to be created for an act. In fact, the will to fight and win against the odds can open up new and unseen roads to communism. And the future is not promised in advance, but are only revealed in the course of struggle.

Now it's possible to see the appeal of these ideas in our current moment, which bear similarities to the time of Benjamin. With the election of Trump, reaction is on the march in the United States. While there has been an upsurge of interest in “socialism” since the Recession of 2008, it is largely being channeled into electoralism, reformism and blind faith in progressive Democrats to deliver victories. So a little dose of Blanquism may be a healthy antidote to our own current illusions.

However, I don't argue for taking up Benjamin's embrace of Blanqui wholeheartedly. I think there are a number of problems with his approach. Before I get to that, let me preface all this by saying that we owe Benjamin a lot when it comes to Blanqui. Benjamin did a great deal to rescue him from obscurity and treated Blanqui as more than political swear word, but as a towering figure.

What then are the problems of Benjamin's interpretation? For one, Benjamin argues that Blanqui rejected both the idea of progress and the Enlightenment. In fact, he argues that Blanqui's work with its concept of eternal return showed affinity with the anti-Enlightenment philosopher Fredrich Nietzsche. If Benjamin is correct, then we would have to remove Blanqui from the Enlightenment tradition and place him among the romantics. I'll be talking more about the relation between Blanqui and the Enlightenment later, but suffice to say that throughout his life Blanqui was a partisan of the Enlightenment. Furthermore, there is no evidence that Nietzsche was influenced by Blanqui's work. In fact, their worldviews were fundamentally opposed. Nietzsche was an aristocratic rebel who hated socialism and democracy, while Blanqui was a devoted communist.

Secondly, Blanqui's conception in the Eternity by the Stars does not preclude progress. Voluntarism was perfectly compatible with a belief in progress. Blanqui did not believe that progress would arrive of its own accord or followed a predetermined route. Certainly he rejected any fatalistic conception of progress. Rather progress, depended on revolution and that in turn depended on the actions of a select few.

Finally, Blanqui's work is not an admission of defeat. While in prison, he wrote this work in 1872 in the aftermath of the Paris Commune, when thousands of workers and revolutionaries were massacred. Certainly that weighed on his mind. After writing this work, Blanqui lived for another ten years and after his release from prison, he spent the final years engaged in feverish political activity across France. As the British socialist Ian Birchall notes: “If ever a revolutionary fought till the last breath, it was Blanqui.”

Therefore, Benjamin's interpretation of Blanqui is certainly worth looking at anew and does challenge many of the prevailing assumptions on the left, but it does have clear limitations in providing any road map.

BD – In your book, Communist Insurgent: Blanqui’s Politics of Revolution, your decisive engagement with Blanqui’s radical critique of positivism was fascinating to say the least. For those of our readers who haven’t checked out your book yet, would you mind getting into how in drawing on his critique of positivism, “For Blanqui, science and atheism were no ends in and of themselves but part and parcel of the revolutionary project”?

DEG - Of course. So positivism emerged in the early 19th century and its main theorist was August Comte. According to positivists such as Comte, society and history were governed by a series of scientific laws, which once understood, then society could be subjected to scientific management. Positivism also posited its own theory of progress, whereby the spread of scientific ideas would modernize society and overcome backward and non-scientific ideas.

On the surface, it might seem that Blanqui, a believer in progress, would support positivism. And it is certainly true that he does have an approving word to say about the benefits of positivism. As a stalwart atheist, Blanqui believed that positivism laid the intellectual foundations of atheism, something that he wholeheartedly approved of. This was possible because of positivism's basis in materialism. However, positivism refused to take a clear stand defending the truths of materialism, meaning that they left room for religion to creep in. By not being clear on the defense of materialism, Blanqui believed that positivism undermined the case for atheism and retreated from challenging the existing order. In fact, Blanqui argued that positivism was for a safe alternative for atheists who didn't want to become involved in revolutionary politics.

Since positivism was not interested in challenging the status quo, Blanqui claimed that its theories were used to restructure society for the benefit of the wealthy and privileged. And Blanqui believed that if science was divorced from materialism and revolution, then it could legitimize the crimes of the of the existing order. Positivism is science and history placed on the side of the bourgeoisie. The regime of Napoleon III, that Blanqui relentlessly fought took up this ideology and so did “modernizing” states such as the Mexico of Porfirio Diaz. For Napoleon III or Diaz, progress and science was something given to poor and backward people by enlightened elites. While this theory spread modern ideas, it also spread the belief that the poor were inferior and it legitimized the rule of powerful oligarchs. In this schema, the advance of the bourgeoisie was fully in line with progress and the natural order, so the working class should merely accept their fate. As a communist, Blanqui refused to accept this.

And here we come to the heart of the differences between Blanqui and the positivists. Both were believers in progress and the value of science, but Blanqui believed it was necessary to be an uncompromising materialist. He did this because like a true son of the Radical Enlightenment, he refused to make any concessions to religion. According to Blanqui, religion was a bulwark of the existing order and a determined foe of democracy, reason, enlightenment, and equality. It kept the masses of people in darkness and slavery. He argued that atheism rested on the foundation of materialism (or naturalism) which restored the dignity and independence of man. Materialism was a revolutionary weapon against the bourgeoisie. From materialism sprung science, education and human action while religion preached ignorance and subjugation. Therefore, Blanqui welcomed every attack on religion from enlightenment, secular education, science, and even positivism since they challenged superstition.

However, Blanqui argued that atheism along with science must be battering rams in challenging the existing order, not buttressing them the way positivism did. He understood that the questioning of religion under the guise of positivism was perfectly acceptable for the wealthy classes since it did not challenge private property, but served to justify it under a scientific veneer. However, atheism becomes a revolutionary weapon in the hands of the oppressed since it could open a Pandora's box. If free thinking led to questioning the dogmas of the Church and God, then other accepted truths were open to question such as the division between rich and poor. Ultimately then, Blanqui saw atheism, science and materialism as intimately linked in the struggle for liberation.

There was also a difference in Blanqui and positivism's conceptions of progress. The positivists believed progress was a slow, evolutionary and gradualist process that could not be rushed. This not only condemned rebellion by the oppressed, but justified the crimes of the existing order. Like the positivists, Blanqui believed in progress and that communism was the natural end point, as measured by the advance of association and cooperation over individualism. However, he did not believe that communism would arrive on its own. Blanqui's view of progress was not linear, but recognized forward advance just as much as regression. In fact, he would likely have agreed with Rosa Luxemburg's assertion that humanity faced a choice between socialism and barbarism. Ultimately, progress to communism depended on revolution, which in turn depended on a revolutionary elite who would give history a push.

Now, Blanqui's view of atheism, science and materialism as integral to the revolutionary project is not just something of historical interest, but has relevance for today. In our own day, we have “new atheists” such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens who reject religion, but their atheism serves to provide cover for imperialist wars, racism, police states and Islamophobia. The influence of postmodernism with its claims that there is no objective and scientific truths. If we are serious about changing the world, then we must plant our philosophical flag.

The choice of a worldview is not simply an academic question. Not all philosophies are equal and we need to choose between them since some provide right answers and others provide wrong ones. Taking sides in the class struggle, means determining which side represents the universal interests of humanity. To discover what universal interests are requires a concept of universal human nature where there is a material need for safety, security, and providing for human needs through cooperation and association. Lacking this conception of human nature, neither a classless society and solidarity cannot be created. What hinges on this question is whether we recognize revolution is a material necessity or just an ethical ideal empty of content. A revolutionary politics requires a revolutionary philosophy and this is something that clearly Blanqui understood.

BD – In your essay “Blanqui and the Communist Enlightenment”, you write that “For Blanqui, it was absolutely clear that revolutionary politics requires a revolutionary philosophy. This philosophy was provided by the Enlightenment taken to its radical conclusions.” However, as a historian, how do you deal with the difficulties arising from the fact that Blanqui himself “was not above the racist prejudices of his times”, and as you unambiguously make clear in your book, uncritically indulged in not only racism, but anti-Semitism and nationalist chauvinism which were in no way transformed by his “revolutionary philosophy” or challenged by the “radical conclusions” of the Enlightenment?

DEG - Some of this question I dealt with above, but here I need to delve more into the question of the Enlightenment and Blanqui's place in that tradition. To begin with, I want to say that I am very influenced by the work of Harrison Fluss, Landon Frim, and Jonathan Israel on the difference between the moderate and radical Enlightenment.

As I said in the article you just mentioned, the Enlightenment worldview is united by three major claims. The first one is that the natural and social worlds can be understood and acted upon through reason without resorting to God or the supernatural. Secondly, if the conditions we live under are not the result of divine will, then they are man-made, and that means they can potentially be changed. This claim is buttressed with the idea that history moves in a particular direction, characterized by progress. Thirdly, that human beings possess universal rights, regardless of who they are.

During the 17th and 18th centuries as the Enlightenment offered a philosophical challenge to monarchies, backwardness, nobility and religion throughout Europe. However, this was largely an elite affair confined to the bourgeoisie and progressive nobility in the salons. During the French Revolution, the Enlightenment worldview took to the streets and led to the downfall of the Bourbon Monarchy and the birth of the First Republic led by Jacobins with sweeping democratic and social rights. None of this would have happened without the intervention of ordinary people who had taken up Enlightenment ideas and made them their own.

It was the experience of Jacobinism that revealed most clearly the split between the moderate and radical Enlightenment traditions. The moderate wing of the Enlightenment was represented by the upper classes who did not favor democracy but a constitutional monarchy and the protection of private property. or the champions of the moderate Enlightenment, this was as far as they were willing go. However, that meant that the universalist claims of the Enlightenment could never be fully realized, but remained limited and in danger of being rolled back.

By contrast, the radical Enlightenment was represented by the lower classes of workers, peasants and sans-culottes who had fought with arms in hand for the revolution. For them, the revolution gave them the opportunity to articulate their own radical demands, which often pointed beyond capitalism. It is from the radical Enlightenment that Babeuf and modern communism emerged along with feminism and anti-colonialism. In contrast to the moderate Enlightenment, it is only the radical Enlightenment that more consistently manifests the universalist claims of secularism, republicanism, and egalitarianism.

And Blanqui was very much an heir of the radical Enlightenment. He stated very clearly that any revolutionary theory must be based on the principles of the Enlightenment: “The philosophy inaugurated in the 18th century by Diderot and Holbach, proclaimed and promulgated in the 19th century as the unanimous verdicts of science, is the only possible basis of the future. The experiment is over. All the abortions of the Revolution since 89 are due to the abandonment of this philosophy. One must choose between it or the Middle Ages. It will be our flag.”

Furthermore, he defended the principles of the French Revolution throughout his life. Since Blanqui was a partisan of Enlightenment, equality, progress and science, he stood with those who represented it such as the Jacobins. This did not extend to the modern Jacobins though. After the failure of the 1848 Revolution, Blanqui believed that the Jacobins no longer represented the interests of the people, but had switched to the camp of the bourgeoisie.

Since the bourgeoisie no longer stood for the people, he said that the banner of the Enlightenment had passed to the working class. And Blanqui argued that the Enlightenment had provided better weapons for the people in the shape of socialism. In other words, to be a Jacobin today meant being a communist. And that meant it was only communists who could truly realize the promises of the French Revolution: “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, and that admirable symbol, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, which, broadly interpreted, contains the seeds of all the developments of future society.” And the final result of the Enlightenment lay in communism: “Communism will only be achieved through the absolute triumph of enlightenment. It will be its ineluctable consequence, its social and political expression.” So Blanqui took the radical Enlightenment to its logical conclusion and embraced communism.

Having provided all that background, I want to return to your question. You're quite correct that Blanqui was not just a partisan of the Enlightenment, but that his worldview was not consistent. He embraced universalism alongside a virulent French nationalism, anti-Semitism, and voluntarism. As you note Blanqui was very much a product of his times and did not transcend them. While recognizing Blanqui's very clear limitations, we should ask if those limitations are what is essential about his worldview.

And I think what Huey P. Newton, founder of the Black Panther Party, said about why we can accept Marx's dialectical method despite his limitations can also apply to Blanqui:

“Whether or not Marx was a racist is irrelevant and immaterial to whether or not the system of thinking he helped to develop delivers truths about processes in the material world. And this is true in all disciplines. In every discipline you find people who have distorted visions and are at a low state of consciousness who nonetheless have flashes of insight and produce ideas worth considering.”

So to fully answer your question, I think that figures like Blanqui need to be held to account for reneging on the universality of humanity which can only be done by simultaneously understanding the socio-historical context in which they lived, and that their own personal prejudices don't necessarily change the validity of their revolutionary ideas.

BD – As a writer and historian, how would describe challenges and responsibilities of radical intellectual engagement in our contemporary world?

DEG - For most of history, ordinary people have not written history. This isn't to say that they had no history - they told stories, possessed an oral tradition, or they may have accepted the dominant narrative. But most people have not written history for the simple reason they could not read or write and were too busy working. The art of history was reserved with those who possessed leisure time to research and write, education and no pressing financial burdens - in other words, history was written by wealthy men and naturally reflected that perspective. This is not to say that it is all useless - Greek and Roman historians are foundational to understanding the historian's craft. However, our understanding of history changed after the 1840s with the development of Marxism. Perhaps it will sound a bit arrogant of me to claim - but here was a theory that allowed us to understand the underlying structure of society and how to change it. Now, the writing of history was taken out of the hands of the wealthy and powerful. Through a Marxist lens, the past becomes comprehensible and we learn that we are not victims of fate, but to know how systems of exploitation work and the victories and defeats of the past. Our past is too important to be written by the ideologues of the ruling class, it needs to be written by Marxists. And in the hands of the working class, that history becomes a flaming sword to level the foundations of this society and redeem the hopes of the past. Therefore, those of us who have been able to receive academic and intellectual training should impart our knowledge in service of the people to help provide the necessary theoretical and philosophical foundations for the struggles ahead.

However, it is hard being a Marxist today. A great deal of Marxism is located in the academy and lost its revolutionary message and appeals to an academic elite. Furthermore, intellectuals who are willing jettison and water down their revolutionary ideology and accept the rewards offered by the powers that be will likely abandon the struggle. As Max Horkheimer said: "A revolutionary career does not lead to banquets and honorary titles, interesting research and professorial wages. It leads to misery, disgrace, ingratitude, prison and a voyage into the unknown, illuminated by only an almost superhuman belief."

So the challenges to radical intellectuals are very real, but no one said it would be easy. After all, like Blanqui, we are fighting for the liberation of humanity from the shackles of oppression and ignorance. That's the greatest cause in the history of the world and if that is not worth fighting and sacrificing for, then I don't know what is.

This has been another one of our BROTHERWISE FIVE interview series, during which THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH interrogates intellectuals, artists and activists with five probing questions to the delight of our readers.

On behalf of Doug Enaa Greene and THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH,

Peace.

-A. Shahid Stover

(this interview of Doug Enaa Greene for THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH was conducted by A. Shahid Stover through email correspondence from July 7th – 14th, 2019.)