TAKES UP THE MOSCOW-PEKING DISPUTE
By Fernand Charlier
The Fobruary issue of Les Temps Modernes, the Paris magazine edited by Jean-Paul Sartre, carries an article by the well-known Hungarian theoretician Georg Lukacs. The author, who was minister of culture in 1919, at the time of the first Hungarian revolution, and again in 1956, in the Imre Nagy government, entitled his artioloe @Contribution to the Debate between China and the Soviet Union,"
Lukacs, who has been kept under surveillance since he left the Yugoslav embassy where he was granted refuge in November 1956, is resolutely and unconditionally in favor of N. S. Khrushchev and his "de-Stalinization."
Since his article is presented in the form of theoretical observations, it is necessary to present a short summary of his main points.
In the opinion of Lukacs, who bases his conclusions on a study of
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the letters exchanged between the central committees of the Soviet and Chinese Communist parties, the position of the Soviet leaders is the only one that has any validity. Khrushchev, he maintains, enriched Leninism by proclaiming at the time of the Twentieth Congress that wars are no longer inevitable, -
Let us note in passing that the theory of peaceful coexistence, including the theory that it is possible to avoid war between the socialist and imperialist camps, was advanced long before the Twentieth Congress. Stalin held in 1952, in his Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR(1) that it was necessary to maintain "the thesis of Lenin on the inevitability of wars in general between imperialist countries" and on the contradictions between these countries, more important than the contradiction between the socialist camp and imperialism, From this he drew the conclusion that wars botween the two social systems were avoidable, because “the capitalists, while they accuse the USSR of aggressiveness, do not believe it thomselves." From that, the possibility of peace fronts with a part of the bourgeoisie, for whom their internal contradictions take precedence over their hostility to the socialist system,
At present Khrushchev maintains this deduction despite having abandoned the thesis about interimpcrialist contradictions taking precedence, The ideology of the bureaucracy in its decline could not but lose the consistency which, it must be recognized, it had in the days of Stalin, -
Lukacs consequently places the Khrushchev who has enriched Leninism on the game plane as Lenin when the latter revised "the thesis of Marx, according to which probltarian revolutions could begin only in the most developed countries and succeed only on an international level."(2)
In addition to the apologetics for the man who sent the Soviet tanks against the revolutionary Hungarian masses, it should be notod that Lukacs still attributes to Lenin -- in accordance with Stalinist and post-Stalinist Soviet orthodoxy -- the invention of the theory of “socialism in one country,"
Khrushchev'!s main merit therefore, according to Lukacs, is to have given humanity the hope of avoiding nuclear war, while the Chinese maintain -- still according to Lukacs -- that an "'inevitable! world war is the only road to world socialism,"(3)
(1) pages 36-47 in the French text: Les Problémes Economiques du. Socialisme en URSS,
(2) tes Temps Modernos, February 1964, Page 1482,
(3) hoe, cit,
There is not space in this short article to refute, on the basis of texts, such a presentation of the "big debate." As we see it -in the Light of the content of the documents presented by the two sides ~~ the debate does not concern the “avoidability" or otherwise of a world war but rather the means of doing so,
Of more interest is Georg Lukacs!t judgment of the Chinese posi-~ tions, As he sees it, the Chinese positions are in complete accord in their characteristics with the essential features of Stalinism, These are: sectarianism (which is evident in “empty, abstract deductions"), "revolutionary phrases," subjectivism, Again and again, Lukacs describes Stalinism both politically and organizationally in this way. "We speak here naturally of the most important features of Stalinist politics and organization, of its subjectivist-sectarian traits,"(4)
With the concern for probing deeply which everyone recognizes in him, and which we were the first to salute when it was more apropos, Lukacs declares that. the infatuation of western intellectual circles ovér the Chinese theses is symptomatic of petty-bourgeois impatience and despair. He holds that it is even this same attitude which ex- Deets) popularity of such contemporary authors as -- Samuel Beckett. (5
“One cannot help being reminded here of the official "philosopher" of the French Communist party, Roger Garaudy, when, in the name of | confidence in the masses, he sought to brand Jean-Paul Sartre as des~ pairing when he said: that he was ready to pack his bags and join the Algerian National Liberation Front. (6)
"Subjectivist-dogmatism," "sectarian sub jectivism, a "fanatic subjectivism," "equally sub jective credulity" (Lukacs refers to Stalin who aia not wish to believe in the imminence of the Nazi invasion in 1941) -- this is the essence of Stalinism and of Maoism, according to the author of the article, to whom “a theoretical counteroffensive, a war against Sino-Stalinist sectarianism ought to be the practical political demand of the day,"
This is the essence of Lukacs! essay.
A more worthy "contribution to the debate" could have been hoped for from the author of one of the most interesting -- although contro-
°93 (4)on, oit., p. 1484 et seq. | 7
(S)op, oit., p. 1483,
(6 Roger Garaudy in "Questions for J-P, Sartre." (Collection Clarté, 1960, Pages 20-21,
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versial = Marxist works on alienation.
The alienation of the Stalinist world is a subject which could provide fruitful theses for young Marxist researchers, The fact is that this latest essay by Lukacs only muddles matters,
In our opinion, Stalinism constitutes a pseudo Marxist ideology characterized by an attitude that is the exact opposite of "subjectivism," of the “abstract phraseology" or ultraleft wishful thinking which Lukacs attributes to the Chinese leaders, Stalinism, with its doctrinal foundation in the "theory of the construction of socialism in one country" constitutes a revision in the opposite direction, Far from fitting the description given by Lukacs, the fundamental philosophical trait of Stalinism is much closer to objectivist fatalism,
For the young Stalin, a mediocre interpreter of Marxism, "the development. of consciousness is preceded by the development of the material side, by that of external conditions: first of all changing the external conditions, the material side, and then changing consciousness accordingly. This was how Stalin defined Marxist mater~ ialism in 1906.(7)
In his uncompleted work Stalin, Leon Trotsky explained why this mediocre Marxist was exactly the man the bureaucracy needed:(8) the’ wily empiricist, the opportunist who improvised his policies "from day to day,“ who compelled his adherents to make abrupt turns, and. whose'policy was aimed at maintaining the international status quo in which the tired, isolated revolution found itself,(9) This was not the politics of an “abstract revolutionary phrasemonger,'" but the very antithesis: a conservative, opportunistic bureaucrat,
As for the Chinese leaders, didn't they say -- this was, it is true, in the epoch of the “Hundred Flowers" -- that the "errors" of Stalin had “gnoseological" [concerning the theory of knowledge] roots, perhaps indicating in this way the Stalinist philosophical ideas to which we have just referred?(10)
The fundamental explanation for Lukacs! error in judgment cannot be explained otherwise than by the impossibility for him to utilize the arm of criticism (as the Hungarian workers utilized the criticism of arms in 1956) against the social foundations of Stalinism; that is,
(stalin, Complete Works, Vol, 1, pp. 262 et seq. (French edition, )
(8)trotsky. Stalin. Pp. 538-540. (French edition.)
(9)the article by Lukacs is followed by an article by Isaac Deutscher which cites both Stalinist and Khrushchevist examples of this "peace~ ful coexistence," (10)See the article in the People's Dail "Once Again on the Historic Experience of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat,#
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the ruling bureaucratic caste. Thus he is obliged to describe the Stalinist terror as the "maintenance of methods of government which could be justified during the period of civil war,"(11) without explaining why the bureaucracy (which he cannot name) was compelled to use force against the Russian Bolshevik cadres and the proletariat of the USSR.
The old philosopher has sought through strategem to meet all the self-criticisms imposed on him since the very birth of Stalinism -- Zinoviev was the first to excommunicate him, He is now reduced to adulating Khrushchev, the very one who, one morning in the summer of 1958, ordered his butchers to send their bullets crashing through his comrade Imre Nagy.
It is only in rare places -- and perhaps we are mistaken in this -~ that Lukacs indicates in a hesitant way that he would like to. see.a settlement of accounts with Stalinism, For instance, he says that a theoretical counteroffensive "ought" to be the demand, Again, he says that the conflict with the Sino-Stalinists offers "the possibility" for such a settlement of accounts,
The old fox put things sufficiently well in 1957 in his foreward to the Italian edition of his Contribution to the History of Esthetics, when he explained how "a Marxist author, in times past, found himself more than once under the necessity of making a oompromise in order to publish his own works and to exercise influence," and how "these com-. promises were centered around the person and the work of Stalin," Perhaps we are wrong in suspecting that similar considerations are involved around the person and works of Khrushchev. . .
No, it is not to Lukacs to whom we must ascribe the poor essay which Jean-Paul Sartre published, It must be credited to the Soviet tanks, to Kadar and to Nikita Sergeyvitch, And we hope that Lukacs will live to see the day when the young Hungarian workers will tell him, like the old revolutionary hym of 1871: "No, the Commune is not dead|"
CIT op, cit., pe 1499.