Morality and revolution
in everday life
Whether we like it or not ideological motives always influence the revolutionary conduct of individuals and the masses, just as material interests condition social being and ultimately social consciousness. The most immediate proof is the process of struggle which the Nicaraguan people has launched and continues to lead.
Think of the weight of ideology in the struggle against the Somocista dictatorship, or ideological rallying cries in the fight against imperialism: sovereignty, self-determination, national identity and dignity, defence of the fatherland, and so on. And though these ideas tend to have a more consistent meaning for workers and peasants, their role in forming consciousness is inescapable. Indeed were it not for ideology there would be no such thing as confused workers, or peasants with nonrevolutionary positions; in other words, to leave material conditions on their own to resolve the problem of social consciousness is to leave the enemy the initiative in the field of ideological struggle.
The ideological struggle, however it manifests itself culturally, cannot be left to the bourgeoisie, not even in its most spiritual aspects: science, ethics, morals, art or literature. If the concept of morality has been more used by religious people than revolutionaries, this should not prejudice revolutionaries to leave the struggle in their hands.
Just as Marx did not hesitate to take over the dialectical methods of the greatest idealist of his time-Hegel—to place them at the disposal of the revolution, so the Sandinista revolution should not shrink from the battle to wrest the banner of democracy from the right wing, nor hesitate to build a revolutionary morality for fear that we trespass on religious territory. This is all the more important since countless ideological factors bear on each and every task of the revolution: at work, for defence, in daily rela-
In general, morality is the totality of norms and qualities of human conduct which for a long time have formed the ideological cement which glues people together socially and makes it possible for them to live together.
It expresses the historical dimension of individual behaviour and is
The underlying function of morality is the subordination of the needs, desires, and particular aspirations to social necessities. However, we come to morality proper only when this necessity is interiorised, and moreover takes on a certain permanence.'
Most doctrines which underpin the need for morality give it two connotations: on the one hand good behaviour, good habits, and virtue, and on the other the spiritual, subjective, or individual as opposed to the physical, material or social. This scheme is shared by Marxist doctrine.
Morapy in an on of i sot a ollei individual. Lesliy is created So bat the
Morality serves to elevate society to greater heights, so that it can disembarrass itself of
Besides moral codes, which nourish social relations and articulate collective life, we find legality—open or institutionalised force and violence to regulate order in civilised life, often expressing society's moral content,
Until now, the normative consensus of discernment between what is considered good and bad, the necessary and the unnecessary, the historical and the ahistorical, has drawn on different sources depending on the period; speaking very broadly three moments have contributed to it:
humanity's religious systems, mercantile relations sanctioned by capitalism, and ultimately the Marxist concept of history. We shall therefore discuss three dimensions or directions of morality, a Christian morality or the morality of sacrifice, a bourgeois or petty-bourgeois morality, and a political or social morality. Ultimately, above all rooted in the creation of socialist regimes in the world, Marxist theory is starting to pose the importance of a morality of daily life in the construction of a
Though the individual synthesizes all dimensions of life, there are social spaces with differentiated codes of behaviour depending on the social relations of any given historical moment: life in primitive groups, sexual or family organization, class relations, public life or private life in general, and so on. With no intention of changing the Marxist classification of classes, indeed assuming it to be valid, our study of morality selects two major spheres of analysis—the social and the individual—so as to concentrate on the everyday aspect of morality in dealing with the latter. We begin from the proposition that actual behaviour, either of people in general or revolutionaries in particular, feeds on an entire historical culture deposited precisely in the sphere of daily life, that is, that each moment carries with it all the new advances produced by change, but also
14 International Marxist Review tions, and so on.
nourished by biological, psychic and social needs.
'average man' particular social individual. 2 the exploitation of labour. 3 new society.
, that is the abstract 'public man'
, and morality, adjust themselves to the at other times negating or expressing its immorality.
Morality and revolution in everyday life 15 preserves much of the detritus of the past. All this is expressed in a diversity of unspecialized practices and customs which the individual reproduces and consumes.
In morality as in all ideological questions, we have to distinguish between theory and practice. There is therefore a theory of morality and a moral practice, abstract principles which hardly anyone attains, and concrete norms attained to a greater or lesser degree. Therefore we have to distinguish in the field of morality three elements which constitute its totality:
a) Doctrine, that is, the theoretical framework in which principles and objectives are organized, the concept or the ideological seal of approval, the strategy for implementation, its field of application, and so on. In general, doctrine seeks to respond to and express the internal needs of society, the individual, classes and particular persons, in that order.
b) Values and norms as such, which express the general agreement which legitimises the morality of the day. These are equivalent to categories and concepts in science, and in almost all of them one finds ideas such as love, friendship, freedom, happiness, good and bad, including political concepts.
c) Institutions, which are the bodies or establishments charged with educating, spreading, seeing to, sanctioning, extending or eternalizing doctrine. This is the most compulsive element of morality and when it erects itself over and against individuals or classes it converts itself into the major expression of immorality in society-whether it be a juridical institution, a church, or a party.
We want to discuss the problematic of those values which have nourished the revolution—ideological motives in general and morality in particular, especially in relation to daily living through which the life of the workers and the people in general develops—in the conviction that to reconstruct a way of life is precisely to know it. It is precisely the problem of how to live which shows us, more clearly than anything else, in what sense an isolated individual becomes an object, and not a subject, of events. A way of life, that is to say a combination of daily habits, is elaborated (to an even greater degree than in the economy) "behind people's backs' (the expression is Marx's).
Conscious creation in the domain of mode of existence has played an insignificant role in the history of humanity. Mode of existence is the sum of disorganised experiences of individuals; it is transformed spontaneously under the influence of revolutionary techniques or struggles and, in general, reflects society's past much more than its present.4
This article does not set out to lay down a catechism or treatise for believers, but to call attention to the importance of daily morality both for theory and for revolutionary practice. We believe that if there is a morality for the normal human who is content with the established order and with the civilization he or she inherits, there must be a morality, that is, a referential norm of conduct which permits us to revolutionise the individual environment within which we develop, in other words, a morality
16 International Marxist Review not just for certain moments in life but for life itself, that is, for everyday life, for building a new society. To deny this would be to abandon the attempt which revolutionaries are making and the example they are following to introduce, among the people, into the alienated world of the contradiction between the social and the individual. Even worse, it would be to deny the possibility and potential of revolutionising daily life in support of the political and social tasks of the Sandinista revolution. The field of struggle of everyday life It is beyond question that in Nicaragua as in the rest of Latin America revoluționary practice is in advance of revolutionary theory. This obliges us to reflect critically on the need to think through our own revolutionary process. Just as serious, however, is the lack of thought and planning which goes into daily morality, or a theoretical practice which can accumulate, distil and test out as doctrine the gains of revolutionary conduct in everyday life-that is, the process through which the life and morality of individuals and classes develops. Revolutionary practice has a moral content and contains many moral norms, but as Marxists, as Sandinistas, and as revolutionaries we are still far from having advanced a moral doctrine as, for example, Christianity has. Indeed, we often borrow our moral code from Christianity. We are also far from a means of neutralising the aftertaste of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois morality.
When we say that political morality, is much more evident at a social or public level, we do not deny that these values, for example those generated in the struggle against dictatorship and imperialism, also influence our individual behaviour. But not all daily behaviour can be deduced from these confrontations. Moreover, the moral examples of these confrontations are developed fundamentally for determinate periods. There is also a daily behaviour, consciously or unconsciously normalised in the life of revolutionaries, but not derived from or called for by the principles and assumptions of Marxist theory, and which should be the object of our discussions.
The search for a daily morality of revolution, or, which is the same, for revolutionary behaviour in daily life, might seem like an eccentricity or an exotic intellectual luxury, unless we acknowledge that the lack of a Marxist morality of daily life doesn't prevent revolutionaries living with traditional daily morality, some using the petty bourgeoisie's double morals and others still believing that the revolution ends with the question of power and the economy, in the factories and the streets, and that both reproduce in their everyday relationships what they are trying to destroy through social relations of production; as Wilhelm Reich clearly put it: "revolutionaries in the factory, reactionaries in the family'. Nor is there any difference for workers and peasants who live out the daily contradiction between political tasks of the revolution and traditional conduct in the
Morality and revolution in everyday life 17 house, in their community, in their Protestant sects, their Catholic churches, and in the canteens, as soldiers on leave, in relations with triends, with their tamilies, in party relations, in personal relations at work, in free time, on holidays and Sundays, in individual feelings, in their needs and wants, in their intimate aspirations, in love and in a further gamut of gratification whose significance is enormous. Even the most revolutionary, the most working class or most peasant of comrades cannot dissociate the ideals of struggle from their individual lives. And in fact they do not, as testified actively by the religious sectors, by reactionary propaganda, the lies of Honduran radio stations financed by imperialism, ideological diversionism, and so on.
We can thus confirm that the sphere of everyday life has been the refuge of the most traditional values of the bourgeoisie and of capitalism, and morality the instrument with which they daily recuperate the advances made in the periodic impulses of the most revolutionary moments of humanity. Thus, just as the institutionality of a revolution is the juridical guarantee of maintaining and stabilising its great conquests, so the formulation of a morality is the guarantee of extending it. A revolutionary process which cannot extend itself will end up losing momentum and offering itself up passively to the morality of recuperation. Just as small property and small commerce are the seeds of differentiation and material alienation, so small individual actions and the most routine behaviour are the seed of political actions and social behaviour; transmitting their revolutionary or reactionary character each to the other.
By the term everyday morality we understand the totality of values and norms of behaviour which are accepted as good, or at least beyond question for personal ethics, independent of their degree of accomplishment, and independent of the level of conflict between values-precepts and subjective subordination. Everyday life refers to the most personal, internal, intimate or private relations in which society has less control over the individual and where the individual has a greater capacity to decide on her or his own destiny-for example, in relations of friendship, love, in family relations, in games with children or adults to whom you are close, or in relations between neighbours: that is, all activities distanced from public, work, religious or political life-without denying the existence of everyday relations in these fields also.
Normally, everyday life reduces to passive and frivolous aspects of living in which the individual repeatedly consumes her or his daily life without any attempt at specialization, through habits transmitted from generation to generation. For example, in daily or routine activities at home or work, in passive entertainment, going over to commercialised spectacles, in the course of duty: in summary all the mechanical, unreflecting, atomised and nonauthentic daily business whose automatic aim is the directed reproduction of social animality.
Beyond the distinction between the private and the public, or the routine and the unusual, the concept of everyday life refers to the world of the
18 International Marxist Review subjective and personal with which we live daily, that is, the world in which men and women take daily refuge, the field in which social inertia is full of traditions, rites, myths, and prejudices. It could be the world of creativity and gratification were it not for the fact that today this persists as an alienated world, a world of secret illusions, frustrated imagination, shop-window fantasies, alienated identifications, fears and insecurities hace ned by unsatisfied desires, by lasses ed filtration in daily dreamtakings, by hates, rancours and resentments, and so on-regardless of the fact that each class resolves this in its own manner.
Marxism's lack of a theory of daily morality is in large part due to the analytical preponderance which Marxism gives to the influence of social factors on individual behaviour:
a) the preponderance of the forces of production in historical-social development on the social relations of production, and the expectation that the latter will change with the former;
b) the preponderance of social being over social consciousness, expressed in the expectation that the second will change as soon as the first does;
c) the preponderance of social class over the individual, trusting more to collective practice than to individual class consciousness;
d) the preponderance of productive activities over reproductive activities;
e) the preponderance of the material and objective world over the subjective and human world;
f) the preponderance that negating the existing economic and political world has over affirmation and assertion, above all over individual and cultural affirmation and self-assertion in revolutionary change. This produces a confrontation of revolutions as soon as statisation happens or a process has been given the name of socialism;
We believe that though the priorities of the above antimonies is correct, there is room for individual, daily, subjective and private action which influences the transformation of daily social production relations, social consciousness, the individual her/himself and the revolution. A historical morality which sythesizes the social and the individual, that is, the integrity of the human. As Marx said:
The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism-that of Feuerbach included-is that the thing (Gegenstand), reality, sensuousness, is only conceived in the form of the object
(objekt) or of contemplation (Anschauung), but not as human sensuous activity, practice, not subjectively. (Theses on Feuerbach)
If the struggle against the regime has to include the struggle against the system, then it must include the struggle against the alienated culture and civilization which we inherit. The terrain of this struggle is everyday life, and one of its main weapons is precisely a set of explicit values which will make it possible to extend revolutionary conduct beyond generations which participate in the seizure of power or the great transformations of the system, beyond exemplary conduct in the field of politics as such.
Morality and revolution in everyday life 19
Bureaucratization, administrative corruption, loss of enthusiasm in the masses, the double morality of the petty bourgeoisie, the reproduction of religious ideology among the poor and the professional classes, motives of wealth, power, prestige or any other such arrogance on the part of various social classes, the spiritual poverty of the workers, opportunism, machismo, and so on are not to be eliminated by decree or by invoking the proletariat. Nor can we wait for the end of war or for the productive forces to reach some predetermined level before we confronting them, in daily discussions, appealing to the principles and values of the most revolutionary comrades, competing with the traditions and religions of the day, appealing to the revolutionary values of the workers, inferring norms of conduct from the best of its daily political practice, in summary, posing the problem of revolutionary morality in all spheres of life. Christian morality, or the morality of sacrifice Christian doctrine also developed an institution, the Church, which often put its own interests before those of doctrine as such, defining a set of values which have become part of the universal culture of the West. Institutionalization inclined Christian indoctrination towards administrative methods, including repressive ones, so that the hegemony it once achieved was weakened precisely because its doctrine was too weak to become accepted as a consensus, when it proved inadequate to adapt itself to the material and cultural changes of a lay world.
Religious morality-Christian morality in the case of the Western civilization to which we belong-is historically speaking a morality of individual sacrifice, tending to disembarrass itself of the sins of the day It acquired its legitimacy through the promise of individual salvation to reach a better life hereafter, denying all possibility of a social and earthly salvation.
Its functionality was rooted in securing acceptance for what Freud called the 'Reality principle as against the pleasure principle's. That is, the acceptance of the established order, of the division of labour, of the necessity to repress and sublimate individual pleasure in order to permit development of culture and hence the necessities for economic accumulation. It was a morality for the poor, but in favour of exploitation; a morality of consolation and resignation for the weakest, but favouring that which makes some weak and others strong. And perhaps it could not have been otherwise while the real conditions for social liberation and material transformation did not exist. However, as time passed, individual sacrifice was transformed into a means of exchange for the costs of individual salvation and entered as such the domain of the institution, of the church, whose power and wealth began to regulate daily life, eventually producing a morality in which sacrifice is no longer a means but an end in itself.
In the course of the centuries this morality was institutionalised in a
20 International Marxist Review series of ideological apparatuses which guaranteed its reproduction and began to generate ambiguous conduct, depending on the situation of the church itself, sometimes despotic and inquisitorial, at others subordinated to authority in all its manifestations. But in general and as far as it touched the masses, it was that morality which Nietzsche denounced as the practice of fools and fainthearts, subject and responsible more and more to the alienated relations between the soul and slavery in all its historical forms. A morality of obedience and passivity, frigidity and eternally repressed resentment, the most passive piety and the most abject fanaticism.
Sacrifice as a norm of conduct was exalted by the Catholic church into the most sacred place of all, the altar of altars, the highest of the high, the sacrifice of death. The rite of death, played out by Christ himself, the most beloved object of Christians, cultivated in Western-Christian civilization a devaluation of life, more precisely the values of life, even in the name of these values. Perhaps the most obvious example is the discourse on love based on ascetism, abstinence and all kinds of privation. A morality which elevates salvation in this world into an exercise of sacrifice, and eternal salvation into the highest of sacrifices, the crucifixion, thus raising death to the most desired of sacrifices.
In this dialectic uniting sacrifice and recompense another substantive element of Christian morality can be found, that is the guilt complex inserted into individual souls, which allows them to be condemned before being judged, to torment them without recompense, to create for them a conduct of personal insecurity which submits them to the most miserable of lives, and all for the mere masochistic gratification of achieving a sacrifice.
Guilt for sins which have not been committed has for millennia held back rebellion against authority, the struggle for true liberation, efforts to emerge from the vale of tears into which original sin has plunged us. But the aspect of Christian morality which calls our attention most is that, instrumentalized in the Church to deny and reject the most human values of daily life, rooted in sacrifice and eternal repentance for sins not committed, it has nevertheless succeeded in regulating individual conduct. Far from concluding or believing that suffering is innate to humans, though accepting that it is moral and legitimate to pay the price of humanity's historical goals, the only thing which occurs to us is that morality, this body of precepts, this doctrine which regulates individual conduct, has a functionality in the psychosocial metabolism of humans which makes it necessary and desirable. Happiness and individual salvation require means of achievement, to regulate the impulses of life, and morality is one of them. The other point is that Christian morality has until now held a monopoly of this. This suggests it is worth emulating for revolutionaries and above all for Marxist revolutionaries.
Moreover Christian morality's success in securing mass acceptance is not to be found in the institutional morality of the Catholic church but in the morality of daily conduct. The search for the subjective, for the
Morality and revolution in everyday life 21 satisfaction of man's internal needs, of self-relation, independent of having met it sublimated in another being, shows the potential of daily morality.
Religion is the conduct of man faced with his own being-on this is based his truth, his capacity for good, and his own morality-but in his own being not as if it were his own, but as if it were that of another being distinct from him and opposed to him-and in this is founded his lack of truth, his limit, his contradiction with reason and morality, from this flows the pernicious fount of religious fanaticism, from this flows the supreme metaphysical principle of human sacrifice; in a word, here is the basis of all atrocities, of all the horrific scenes in the tragedy which is the history of religions.6
We believe that Christian morality has a material basis, generated by the long history of ignorance and deprivation of the internal needs of the individual. On Christian morality Reich tells us that:
Religion must not be fought. But neither is it tolerable for it to prevent the masses acquiring the advances of science, including the means to guarantee sexual happiness. This will also let us see if the Church is right to affirm the supernatural origin of religious sentiment. However children and adolescents have to be systematically protected against sexual anxiety and against all sentiments of guilt.?
Culture and science are also battlefields for the class struggle wherever we meet it, including in war:
enemy. y without culture is an ignorant army, and an ignorant army cannot defeat the Bourgeois morality and the petty bourgeoisie Two revolutions in history merit imitation by virtue of their scope: Christian monotheism in the spiritual domain and the appearance of commerce in the material domain. The efforts which two thousand years ago went into humanising God have a revolutionary significance, comparable with the socialism of our day—the expropriation of the expropriatorsunderstanding Christ as the expropriator of the Eternal Father and God as life's great confiscator, the great expropriator of human potential. We must add that this effort degenerated into Catholicism and the Church, and eventually the expropriation of daily life continued in other forms. The other great revolution, this time in the economic field, came with the appearance of trade and the institution of the market, of capitalism and the state as we know them today, not just for what they mean for the past, but for their meaning for the future, that is, for the forces which they unleashed for the perspective of social liberation and human creativity. With the market, of course, appeared the morality of wealth and power, accompanied by contradictions and elements which made its transformation possible.
The commercialization of the economy not only set up the division of labour and classes but also the commercialization of daily life, the hierarchization of power and the isolation of the individual, and gave morality an enormously mercantile content. It is not just a verbal coincidence that terms such as 'values' and 'goods', even with varying meanings, are to be found both in moral philosophy and in political economy.9
22 International Marxist Review
Effectively, not only have these terms become fundamental concepts for modern society, but human behaviour, when it refers to what is good or valid is heavily motivated by what the market considers good, useful or of some value.
The development of the productive forces of the market has filled the world with riches and filled the individual with poverty, but the creation of this wealth has created the real objective conditions of its social distribution. The division of property has concentrated the means of production and split up individuals into producers and consumers, but it has made possible the concentration of workers in centres of work. Capital as a social relation has unleashed accumulation for the sake of accumulation and mediatized workers as producers and consumers. Of course it is not our purpose to serve as apologists for the market, but to show how the alienation of human behaviour brings with it the possibilities for human liberation, as and when the direction of its conduct is changed. Exploitation and subordination might be more rampant than ever, but salvation is not to be found in the heavens but in the hell of human commercialization
All systems until now have promised human happiness. Christianity promises spiritual salvation; bourgeois morality promises material salvation in the form of wealth and through technological progress and individual effort. The latter are obviously necessary but given the division of labour and class divisions this promised land of riches has only been accessible to bourgeois individuals in the system. Formally it maintained individual finality, although the benefits were available only to one group.
Mediatization and noncommunication between humans are sediments deposited in everyday life by the market and by power. Money is responsible for the former and institutions for the latter. From birth the individual lives isolated in his or her allocated piece of the world, in contact with the rest of the species only through ideological apparatuses like school, the family circle, public institutions, or commercial establishments-that is, through a commercialised world in which all that changes in the monotonous tedium of the marketplace are prices. Coexistence or communication are conceived only in conjunction with a toll, a tariff organised and mediatized by the institutional power of the system. Money to end the separation between man and woman, or to bring individuals passively together in places of entertainment. Everything achieved with money has been established as good or valid, and everything considered good or valid, whether material or spiritual, has been regulated by money.
There is a social class, the petty bourgeoisie, which believes in the moral values of the capitalist system, but has no real access to wealth or power, which subsists in their interstices and whose morality corresponds to the desperate desire to possess them. The petty bourgeoisie is a much stricter defender and fighter for the system's norms. Precisely because it has neither reward nor heavenly promise it learned to love even before getting its hands on the loved object: material goods and a bit of power. It
Morality and revolution in everyday life 23 performs whichever role it is allocated even better than called for. Into the heart of everyday life it carries its failed actions in the world of frustrations, celebrating the head of the family while dreaming of the head of state, subjected and repressed by authority, authoritarian towards anyone who i will let it, jealous of all its own possessions while squandering alienated labour, proud of its role and ashamed of its lack of success in the fetishized world of commodities, sanctimonious in its sought-after relations and machista in its prostitutet ones.
Petty bourgeois morality functions as a double morality, a conduct legitimised by social order and by the possibilities and privileges of each individual; one conduct to satisfy conquered vanity and another to gratify lost vanity; one conduct to cheat everyone else and another to cheat oneself; a law for oneself and another for the rest. The exercise of double morality has helped harmonise the conflicts between values generated by social needs and those generated by individual possibility. Without prostitution as it is conceived today, for example, virginity and chastity would be impossible. Without confession and repentance, sin and guilt complexes would have destroyed the mental health of the individual. Without the petty bourgeoisie's privileges and toleration for vice it would reject the values it preaches to everyone else. If the everyday life of public man were laid bare, his public life would shatter. In short, without petty bourgeois dual standards, the morality it advances would be impossible.
Of course we are using the term petty-bourgeois in a more qualificatory than social sense, even though there is a socio-material base for these attitudes. We say this because we don't believe that the workers, artisans, small workers, medium peasants in general, and other popular classes are excluded from this behaviour. As Marx said: "The petty bourgeoisie will be an integral part of all future social revolutions' io Political morality or social morality Of course there are non-moral norms in the reactionary world of politics and in the shape of institutions dedicated to the defence of the existing order of exploitation and domination accumulated from the past. However we want to deal with the political morality of social change.
The fundamental characteristic of political morality is that its values and virtues are always expressed at great moments. In spite of this, it is born of confrontation with the legitimised institutional inertia of the political morality of the old order, so that it is born questioning this, confronting it, and therefore calling forth great courage, discipline, conviction and mysticism and a large shot of social and individual energy on all sides. But the very energy and commitment required makes it easy for this effort to dry up once the principal object of changes has been achieved. Moreover the heights of achievement hide what has not changed, just as some things appear to change and then revert to normality. The history of change
24 International Marxist Review appears as an agitated tide storming the coast and receding. After the storm part of its cargo is dumped while the rest falls back to whence it came. Analysis has to track down not just what happened but what could not happen, and at the same time explain how the movement behaves.
A political morality exists more in practice than in theory, concerned with the norms of political conduct of the individual, which in the case of Marxism centres on regulating the collective conduct of individuals in classes, among the masses, in the vanguard or as public figures, and which is exclusively, moreover, a function of the motives of the struggle or the political tasks of the moment. Not the daily struggle but the great battles or the great but short periods of revolution. As Lenin said:
We deny all this morality at the margin of human nature, at the margin of classes. We say that this morality is entirely subordinate to the interests of the class struggle of the proletariat. Our ethics takes as their point of departure the interests of the class struggle of the proletariat.
And those who call themselves Leninists have not always been faithful to Lenin's conduct. Consider for example the ridiculous extremes, criticised by Engels, to which economism went in seeking to reduce everyday activities to mechanical and automatic reflections of class structures. And how many Leninist parties have there been in Latin America which in the name of the proletariat have neither made the revolution or let it be made? Many of them, acting in the name of the proletariat, forgot the real proletarians of flesh and bone, forgot the individuals who make up the class.
In classic Marxist theory there are enough references to the subjective and individual aspects of the revolutionary, however, and perhaps because of prejudice against idealist and bourgeois treatments of these categories, militant Marxism has shied away from opening up the dialectic between the social and the individual. We know of Marx and Engel's references in the Manifesto in which they speak of the Communists, Lenin's texts about professional revolutionaries, and Trotsky's references to workers' individual and daily lives. In militant Marxism, when it speaks of revolution, subjects appear only collectively: the historical subject, the vanguard, or the political subject, the people and classes or the social subject. And these, when referred to, are discussed in general and at extraordinary moments in their lives: in guerilla wars, in great battles, during the most significant public events, and so on. Of course the communists, the professional revolutionaries, the guerilleros or, in our case, the Sandinistas do not make up a social class or even a class fraction (though all have a determinate class origin), nevertheless the revolutionary process of class struggle and its advance would be inconceivable without the action and example of these revolutionaries. They are men and women who act on ideological motives, on the basis of principles and norms, with a conception of the world, a theory, but also agreement on values, ideals, a morality-and this in full accord with their fight to transform social, economic and material conditions.
As a response to the apology which the historians construct out of so humans than the human in history, at least the humans who make up the masses rather than those who call upon them. There has been a kind of taboo against pointing out and hence realising the individual creativity of men and women. If formerly man alienated all responsibility for his own merits from actions which transform, forgetting that society, a people or a class are the product of the individuals of this same class. In the battle against individualism, individuals should not emerge as the losers, let alone their individual or human creativity. More recently, however, a greater sensitivity and preoccupation for recuperating the subjective and individual aspects inside classes is noticeable, not only at the high points of struggle but also to give the movement continuity, to furnish it with examples, with a mystique of heroic actions, to give it the very human values of fraternity, solidarity, disposition to take risks in the face of death, altruism in combat, bravery and comradeship, friendship and
Being a revolutionary is a quality which transcends class origin and situation, thanks to ideology, that is, thanks to a theoretical or moral consciousness, in other words, thanks to motives produced by rationality of categories or the rationality of values. Its responsibility is rooted in being consciously and concretely the vanguard of the society in which one lives, since it serves no purpose to possess a revolutionary theory if one lacks a revolutionary morality consistent with revolutionary positions. And this can only arise from the individual identity with one's own values, that is, actions which produce gratification not just for everyone else but for oneself. This in the last instance is achieved through a morality and in a school: as explained by one of the greatest moral authorities of the FSLN,
Necessity is a hard school. A school where any aspiration to reward-either moral or material— was not tolerated. There was a law, and a just one. Do things well, and you find it tough just to do your duty. And if you do things badly, then you are breaking the law and you'll know about it... There is a continuity in the way the Front teaches values. It teaches the values of the fallen of the Sandinista Defence Army: Sandino,
Miguel Angel Ortiz; education in the best values this country knows: nationality, independence, sovereignty, to stand up as Nicaraguans. The Front was intolerant when faced with irresponsibility, intolerant when faced with objections. If you were given a mission you did it-full stop. You went on foot, by bus, by car, you hitched on a star or swung from a vine, or whatever you had to do to get it done. Necessity was the hardest teacher.
Before entering the FLSN there was an initial preparation and swearing in. You had to read and discuss the statutes, which were very hard. Punishments went from private warnings to being shot for treason... Tardencilla's history of toughness just reflected the fact that the Front, through its militants and its actions, had to give an example to in a chain. Now you have a different situation, people need moral stimuli and reinforcement for what does good and what doesn't, because the phenomenon is being 'massified"
... The fact that you carry a militant's papers and merit a badge doesn't make you automatically better, because they aren't like holy water. Because militancy is an indicalled 'great men' actions to God, today he alienates to 'Society' recognition, and so on.
the people... The actions of Julio _
, Marxism has laid greater stress on the history of
Comandante Guerillera, comrade Doria Maria Tellez:
-, of Ricardo and Oscar _
Morality and revolution in everyday life 25
, or the 'Ruling Class' all were links
26 International Marxist Review vidual quality, which you wake up with, bath with, go to work or the cinema with, go to bed with and dream of. It's the quality of the individual, not a 'document'. "
In revolution as in any other project we meet a doctrine, an organization or an institution, values, vanguard cadres and a school which propagates the doctrine. Another revolutionary with great moral authority, Che Guevara, also expressed his preoccupation with the importance of individual morality, the importance of a school to perpetuate, on a daily basis, the morality cultivated during political combat.
During this process, in which there were only the seeds of socialism, man was a fundamental factor. He was trusted, individualised, specific, with a name and a surname, and on his capacity for action depended the triumph or failure of the act he was entrusted with... This vanguard was the catalyzing agent, which created the necessary subjective conditions for victory. Also in this vanguard, in the process of proletarianization of our thought, of the revolution which operated on our habits, on our minds, the individual was the fundamental factor ... Finding the formula for perpetuating this heroic attitude in everyday life is one of our fundamental tasks from the ideological point of view ... The new society in formulation has to compete very hard with the past. This made itself felt the economic cell of capitalist society: while it exists, its effects are felt in the organization of production and thus in consciousness... This is why the instrument for mobilising the masses has to be chosen so carefully. This instrument must be of a fundamentally moral character without forgetting a correct use of material stimuli, particularly those of a social nature. As I already said, at the moment of extreme danger, it is easy to set moral stimuli in motion; to maintain their sway, you need to develop a consciousness in which values take on new categories. Society as a whole has to become a gigantic school. 12
As can be seen, the morality contemplated by Guevarism or Sandinism is rooted more in the implicit morality of Marx than in the political scientism of a Kautsky, who even dared to criticise Marx for having included a moral ideal in the proletariat's struggle, which might thereby part company from science. For Kautsky, science is outside morality'3 , thus denying any other way of knowing the world, including art, literature and even normal human practice. Such a conception leads political morality to shed all individuality and in the worst cases to impose an alienated subordination on the individual in the name of what could become an idée fixé, whether you call it God, People, Class, State or Party.
We do not want to imply that morality has no connection with science, but we want to recuperate the Marxist tradition of the concept of ethics, as Mehring says:
Moral consciousness is active to an extraordinary degree in the modern workers' movement and it has great tasks to accomplish in the proletarian class struggle. But while it acts in a purely instinctive way, it can lead to great errors. First of all, we are not speaking here of those people who content themselves with the statement that historical materialism excludes ethics as an effective historical force, in some absolute manner.
Whoever holds this opinion has not even understood the ABC of the genial introduction to history founded by Marx and Engels. 14
Morality and revolution in everyday life 27 Revolutionary morality and the transformation of daily life The Sandinista revolution has great moral authority; in fact we could almost say we are, morally speaking, a world power. Ihis morality was founded in practice by the heroism of our heroes and martyrs, and it teeds on the political and social values of the revolution. This authority is most to self-determination. These values do not depend on the degree of economic development or on the material conditions of life or work. Internally, political, social and economic changes wrought by the revolution have had their effects on the most entrenched redoubts of any society, such as psycho-mental structures and individual daily life. In this sense, it has politically called into question the old morality of the Somocist-imperial exploitative and oppressive order. However, and simultaneously with the political motives of Sandinista morals, the daily life of Nicaraguan society traverses a common individual behaviour, mixing revolutionary norms with the traditional inherited norms of millenia. And it is on this unspecialized world, as well as the internalised and not even conscious norms of daily habits, that we want to focus our analysis, conscious that there could be a contradiction between institutional and public authority on the one hand, and moral and daily authority on the other, wearing down the individual and eventually wearing down the revolution itself, in whatever phase of the process the Sandinista revolution might be passing.
The morality of transforming daily life is a human morality whose objective is the gradual disappearance of the contradiction between social values and individual necessities. We know that while under the reign of necessity' it is with difficulty that we enter the 'reign of liberty", but we believe that even under the limitations of Nicaraguan underdevelopment there is room to avoid these conflicts. The day before yesterday it was God who took up the individual's space; yesterday it was a class or group of individuals who brought closer the possibility for material and spiritual realization for all individuals; today the issue is that of responding to the needs of each and every one of the individuals who make up the people. Universally, the conditions for this already exist. There are sufficient material riches to resolve the problems of hunger and material maladies, when and if the problem of international relations between imperialism and the imperialised countries, in which all humanity is foundering, can be resolved. On the other hand, 'the volume of the so called natural necessities, as well as the means of satisfying them, are themselves a historical product which depends to a large degree on the cultural level of the country'15. Of course as things are now, it is the culture of the consumer society which determines how much time there is to work and what is consumed.
Our point is that just as revolution was possible in Nicaragua without waiting for it to reach the technological level of Germany, just as parti-
28 International Marxist Review cipatory and representative democracy has been possible in our country without having to wait for the economic development of the United States, so it is possible to begin transforming daily life with the actual and present level of the productive forces. We are in favour of the class struggle, of material equality as envisaged by historical materialism, but as Fidel Castro says: "We are not going to create consciousness with wealth; we are going to produce wealth out of consciousness' . The Sandinista revolution is pledged to produce more rice, but it isn't rice or the lack of it which will determine the revolution's usefulness. Even with all today's economic and material limitations, we are convinced that the revolution and socialism are superior to Somocismo and capitalism; we know that the transition will carry its economic costs, that disobeying the American embassy, defending our sovereignty, the struggle for national identity, to change social relations, to try and live in another way, to try and eliminate material and cultural alienation, etc., etc., that all this will carry its costs, and that in order to understand this what you need is not good commodities but a stubborn and undeviating morality. We are for the elimination of exploitation and of sweated labour, we are for peace, but we are conscious that an exceptional effort will be needed to win the war.
A short time ago we said to the workers that they had conquered freedom, but that this did not consist in liberty to work less, but to work more, to go forward in the economic survival process we are going through. This is a liberty, but as it is an ideological problem; at times it is not understood and in the conditions of aggression we are living through we cannot use classical liberty. 16
Love of revolutionary freedom, just like all motives, is the subject of new values, new norms of conduct, a new identity between the social and the individual, individual ideological conviction, individual acceptance of these things, of a revolutionary morality.
Formerly the individual limitation on reaching the promised land was to be found on earth. With capitalist technological development individual limitations were to be found in social structures. Given that society and classes are formed of individuals, and that in the last instance the goal of struggle is happiness and the development of individual creativity, social liberation can only reach revolutionary morality when it becomes a tool for an individual belonging to the popular classes or the class which is the bearer of social liberation. It does not make revolutionary sense to fight for agrarian reforms if each peasant has no access to the land, it makes no revolutionary sense to fight for the socialization of the means of production if the workers do not have access to control or to existing social wealth.
It makes no revolutionary sense to fight for the social liberation of women if women continue to live an alienated and prostituted division of labour in the hearth or in a machisma culture. It makes no revolutionary sense to fight for popular power if the inhabitants or neighbours of a country or a locality do not take part in the local or national structures of power or in the local and national distribution of existing goods. And this revolutionary symbiosis between the social and the individual is what makes
Morality and revolution in everyday life 29 possible real and concrete Sandinist hegemony in the revolution. Just as in the time of Protagoras, 'Man is the measure of everything', everything else has to be a means, including the revolution.
The nature of liberation is primarily a qualitative question, even in countries with big quantitative limitations. For a long time the underdeveloped countries killed themselves believing that the problem of their income was a question of dedicating more and more hectares to cotton—which it also is—and not a question of the terms of trade which is fundamental. In the same way the bourgeoisie makes us believe that the problem of individual income rests fundamentally on a greater self-sacrifice by workers, in order to produce wealth, and not on the distribution of social wealth. Today the qualitative changes wrought by the revolution permits us to confront together the tasks of production and exchange, and in spite of the aggression we can state that we are resolving this better than other countries which have a better development of productive forces. In the same way, transformations in daily life constitute a qualitative question. It is not greater wealth which will resolve alienation between man and woman, it is not with more money that the man will dedicate his daily life to drinking less alcohol, that the worker will take part in more sports. It is not with more land or capital that the co-operatives will be better organised. Advances in organization, or mobilization, of consciousnessraising, were neither under Somocismo nor during the revolution a question of economic potential or a question for the rich. On the contrary it was the dispossessed who were most involved in the tasks of transformation, and the difference lies in the morality of one and the morality of others.
We have already said that we are in favour of technological and economic development, but conscious that it will resolve only the animal aspect of human beings, the 'reign of necessity' and that we must accept that 'man does not live by bread alone' , above all in a world bread is only to be had by wanting it and struggling for it. However, there is no mechanical correlation between the solution of material problems and the solution of spiritual problems, or the developed countries would be freer and happier than ours. We simply propose that it is necessary and possible to walk on two legs as a normal individual does. That is to say, material and social liberation can only be undertaken by free individuals, and individual liberation can only be undergone by appropriating (as individual members of a determinate class) social and material transformation.
The transformation of everyday life begins with the transformation of the individual. Many values, principles, customs, habits, and traditions of daily life have remained unchanged for centuries, independently of the means of production, the classes to which individuals belong, or the technological level which a society has reached. In spite of the influence which social changes have in the daily life of individuals, when we come to try and change what has not changed in centuries, when we are trying to be more active in our history, when we are trying to 'educate the
30 International Marxist Review educators', so much more must the social be a means for each and every individual. If not, the idées fixés which Stirner speaks of will continue to subordinate the individual. Whether these idées fixés are called God or The People, neither can become human until incarnated daily in actual masses of people and in the humans in particular.
The great limitation of Christianity was not that it fastened its hopes on individual salvation, since to the extent that each individual is saved, everyone is saved. The limitation lies in its failure to recognize the social terrain. The great limitation of Marxism, although not of Marx, was the overestimation of the social and its hope that the individual would be achieved automatically and arithmetically, which is true only to the extent that each one of the individuals belonging to a revolutionary class becomes conscious and has been better able to expropriate the values of Marxism than the latter has been able to understand some Christian values. The proof lies in the development of the so-called "Theology of Liberation' which proposes the liberation of humanity through the class struggle, and through the struggle against capital. In this way the Christian doctrine is brought to earth, is socialised and blends with the real world taking political positions, although without daring to attribute to humanity the virtues confiscated by God. In the same way, Marxism must appropriate, as it has done with democracy, the individual aspects of the class struggle.
The transformation of daily life can only arise when the individual finds or seizes, in daily life, time and space for his or her individuality. If society is not revolutionary, the individual has no interest in competing in time and space with the social, for example when we take free time from alienated labour and can moreover use free time to develop and realise our individuality. At moments such as insurrection, the revolution experienced situations in which there was a great coincidence between the social and the individual, and where the level of maximum socialization of life coincided with the maximum level of individual life. It was a moral act, since individual needs, desires and motives were subordinated to the necessities of the social struggle against the dictatorship, and above all because individuals interiorised the demands, the values, and the norms of social change; it was an act of revolutionary morality because social actions were the expression of, and a means of satisfaction for, each and every individual of the popular classes. And all this was possible because there was no contradiction between one thing and the other, to fight for one was to fight for all, and to fight for others was to fight for one's individual life.
Today the transformation of daily life has to come about in two respects: wresting time and space from the social and appropriating the social-the former because not all labour time satisfies all dimensions of the individual and the latter because individual consciousness has still not ended in the appropriation of the social dimensions of individuality.
In the same way in politics, revolutionary transcendence begins when the realm of contradiction advances towards the realm of alliances. In the project of creating a human morality and transforming everyday life, the
principal alliance is between the individual and the social, the revolutionary project in alliance with the project of subjective individuality which can only come about within a collective movement, the alliance of life against the alliance of death, the alliance between the need to survive and the desire to live. As Saint-Just says, 'each one fights for the thing he loves: this is what is called speaking in good faith. To fight on behalf becomes a class for itself when it subordinates its immediate material and economic interests to the political and strategic interests of its goals, so the individual only acquires human and revolutionary morality when subordinating his or her material interests to social liberation, and demands of social liberation that it develop as a function of the interests of transforming daily life, of subjective creativity. The values of this morality are rooted in the principles of realization, communication and participation.
The passion of creation, the passion of love, and the passion of the game are to life what the necessities of feeding and protection are to survival. The passion of creation establishes the goal of realization, the passion of love establishes the goal of communica-
Just as there are people who maintain that moral issues are for the religious, abandoning workers to the mercies of the religious moralists which compete with revolutionaries in every district of Managua over their concept of the world—a conception which in many cases, such as the protagonists of the hierarchy, blesses hundreds of millions of dollars for the counter-revolution in God's name--in the same way there are people who say that the things of daily life are not part of reality at this point in the revolution. These are the same people who deny the problems of women because they live off the pyrrhic victories of underdeveloped machismo, who deny the problem of the double day's work for proletarian women because they have resolved their family problems by employing one or two domestics, who downplay the importance of entertainment for workers and their children because they have resolved them in their own way corresponding to their own standard of living. For them the problem of double standards and the need for a morality of daily life has no relevance because they feel content to declare themselves Marxists and send their sons to religious colleges; for them the problem of the irritability of workers facing unimportant questions is not within the sphere of competence of politics since their individual policy is not to bother with the workers' morality; for them love is a weakness because they do not suffer the pain of the mothers of the fighters; for them waste, dehumanising hierarchy, arrogance and the depreciation of human dignity don't fit between the great events, except when they themselves encounter these
Pleasure, love and friendship constitute indispensable elements for human morality, elements stressed by all authentic revolutionaries.
Let me tell you, at the risk of seeming ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided for justice and truth to avoid falling into dogmatic extremism or cold scholasticism in of everyone is just the consequence of this' tion, the passion of sharing establishes the goal of participation."
everyday relations.
by great feelings of love..
Morality and revolution in everyday life 31
. Just as the proletariat only
. one needs a great dose of humanity, a great dose of feeling
32 International Marxist Revien isolation from the masses. All the time one has to fight for this love for living humanity to be transformed into concrete actions, actions which serve as an example. which serve to mobilise. 18
We again confirm that between the individual and the social there must be no contradiction, as long as we carry the moment of love into all possible situations, as long as we favour collective experiences of individual realization; if things are seen thus, pleasure is the principle of unification, love is the passion of unity in a common moment, and friendship, the passion of unity around common goals. The contrary expression of this love for humanity or the people is expressed in the inability to love and in the individual depreciation of the actual persons with whom we live, the product of resentment, of mediocre insecurity, conceited vanity cultivated in resentment, of masochistic fidelity to the role picked fom the shop window of one's class, or of the veneration of authority whose grace is denied to the majority of the closest individuals, frightened that to appreciate another would squander virtues reserved for oneself. This typically petty bourgeois attitude contrasts with the attitude of workers and poor people who do not hesitate to offer care and friendship without feeling mutilated by it. Whatever magnificent appeals were made to great transformations, the absence of the cultural aspirations of the masses would continue to stand in the way of building a new society.
Love, work and knowledge are the founts of life, and must as such govern it. 19
Human morality implies transforming spiritual energy alienated from individuals into a will to transform daily life, to transform themselves. We are not talking about the energy of the social tasks of the revolution such as voluntary labour or the defence of the revolution, but the energy which is today spent in individual aggression, in alcoholism, or in individual demoralization, that is, in everything which the Sandinista Front characterises as the behaviour of the capitalist system, such as opportunism, individualism, 'amiguismo', personal ambition, impatience, arrogance, bad language or slander, adulation, racial prejudice, and all forms of discrimination and other deformations and vices of the capitalist system. One of the most radical and human manifestations of what we understand as the alliance for life is expressed in the material and spiritual communion between men and women. In this case, we do not believe that the fundamental contradiction is born in the mode of capitalist productions, but in the way everyday life has for millenia organised the patriarchal family structure. This is independent of the fact that the capitalist system or more accurately any alienated system of exploitation benefits from such a structure; nor do we agree with certain sectarian feminist currents who believe that contradictions can be resolved by provoking petty bourgeois resentment and the actual separation of embittered recluses.
The lack of consciousness or the nonexistence of a subjective goal in the revolution ends up undermining the revolution itself and deepens the alienation of daily life which we want to change. The subjective enthusiasm of the Sandinista youth is not the same as the obstinate sadness of an
Morality and revolution in everyday life 33 embittered or neurotically unsatisfied functionary, reproducer of the most authoritarian traditions of the past, all due account taken of the different social tasks they perform. Example in public work is not the same as exemplary work which has to be carried out in everyday life. The morality of transforming daily life is based on individual joy in collective tasks, in enthusiasm for crystallising revolutionary ideas daily, on the individual practice of mass actions, in summary in offering individual passion to historical reasons for the social goal which we aim at, without distancing the gratification of one's own subjectivity.
If the insurrection signified a concentration of individual wills arising out of subjective behaviour patterns, liberation today has to provide these Wills with revolutionary nourishment in the vanguard detachments. The battlefield is each and every aspect of daily life, and the result will only be expressible as the synthesis between the social and the individual. Now, just as the initiative to break the contradiction between the soul and the slave can only come from the slave, so the initiative for the alliance between the individual and the social can only come from the subjective consciousness of individuality, a consciousness which we aspire to cultivate in a revolutionary way. We have to add that in a class society, which ours remains, relations of hierarchy and subordination demand that the revolutionary who wants to transform everyday life as well as social, economic and political life must liberate not just the soul but the slave: must reject prostituting him or herself to a power relation, a relation of adulation, of servility, authority, of sale-and-purchase, whether or not he or she may get the better in such an alienated relation.
Though combined with much other conduct to which we have drawn attention, the morality we refer to is already evident enough in the daily practice of our revolution: individual conviction in voluntary labour; overfulfilment of norms by workers who struggle to change the society they live in; the solidarity and fraternity of combatants who feel individually identified with the collective defence of the revolution and feel no shame in confessing that what they most yearn for is the individual love of their sweethearts or families; material and moral stimulus which the revolution offers individual workers as recompense for their individual creativity; the revolution's concern to create rural creches to alleviate the family tasks of peasant women; the spirit and the values of the revolution expressed in the draft constitution; and respect for individual freedoms through the rights and guarantees of the Nicaraguans, human rights, civil rights ‹the right to life, to personal freedom, freedom of expression, freedom to mobilise, freedom of conscience, the right to enjoy constitutional guarantees), political rights (the right to meet, to assemble, to mobilise, the right to organise political parties), family rights (equality of both partners, equality for the children, protection of paternity, protection of old people and minors), social rights (protection of combatants, the right to education and health, to food, to means of life, to recreation and relaxation, to information and religious freedom), labour rights (participation,
the right to strike, trade union freedom, the right to social security,
At the start of this work we indicated that one characteristic of any morality is that individuals interiorise and accept those norms which are considered legitimate. This implies political work of a cultural and ideological character to translate the above constitutional precepts into everyday conduct, and on the part of individuals a subjective and revolutionary appropriation of the above rights. We have conquered the social instruments, the constitution, the party, organizations, and so on. The
• issue now is to place them at the service of the concrete subjectivity in which the masses live out their lives: if we do it for each, we are doing
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LUIS VITALE