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Dialectics and Alienation
(August 2009)
By Dave Winter
(Page 4 of 4 pages, added August 30, 2009; click here to go back to page 3.)
The Humanism of the Proletariat versus the “Humanism” of the Petty Bourgeois and the Liberal
The proletariat’s humanism stands in stark opposition to that of the liberal. For the revolutionary proletarian, humanism means, first of all, deep solidarity in the common class struggle to overthrow capitalism. Solidarity entails standing together in the picket lines and the battles against the class enemy. A revolutionary socialist never crosses the class line or gives any harmful information to the bourgeoisie or its petty bourgeois agents. It goes without saying that a revolutionary proletarian (and even an honest reformist proletarian) never betrays a comrade in struggle. The humanism of revolutionary proletarians also involves helping other comrades to enhance their strengths and overcome their weaknesses, while building deeper emotional solidarity in joint battles, and adhering to an unwavering commitment to overthrow capitalism and liberate humanity.
The other side of such solidarity entails being ruthless against the class enemy and its reformist collaborators, and not being afraid to use deceit and even lies to confuse and defeat the class enemy. This is the morality of the revolutionary, and this aspect of revolutionary humanism is precisely what liberalism and its petty bourgeois tails reject, because the illusionary “humanism” of liberal capitalism persists only as long as it does not harm the bourgeoisie.
Liberals and petty bourgeois may speak of humanism until they are blue in the face, but their only purpose in doing so is to promote the illusion that people can flourish personally, and embrace humanistic values, while at the same time selling their souls to Satan (capitalism). For the liberal and the petty bourgeois, humanism is abstract, a topic for dinner party conversation, while the rest of the day they promote illusions in capitalism while engaging in gossip and the enhancement of their alienated egos.
Liberals and their petty bourgeois tails live a life of duality. They talk about their “humanistic” beliefs, but they hypocritically live the alienated and brutal life imposed by capitalism, and even endorse it as something eternal that cannot be fundamentally changed by the class struggle and the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. Thus, for the liberals and petty bourgeois there is a total separation between their abstract humanism and their rejection of the class struggle.
Petty bourgeois humanists may be humanistic toward their pets, but they ignore their neighbors; treat people around them (especially working class people) as things; and, when under intense pressure from the system, support wars and the rest of the capitalist horrors. Take, for example, the petty bourgeois “humanists” who put the American flag, the symbol of imperialism, out on their front porches after the events of September 11.
For revolutionary Marxists, in contrast, humanism means that there is no separation between personal life; dialectics; and daily devotion to building the revolutionary party, participating in the class struggle, and building solidarity for the oppressed. As Trotsky wrote, “To a revolutionary Marxist there can be no contradiction between personal morality and the interests of the party, since the party embodies in his consciousness the very highest tasks and aims of mankind.” (Leon Trotsky, Their Morals and Ours)
Even though he lived 150 years ago, Marx explained the behavior of today’s alienated person of today very well , and he always linked it to capitalism, posing the struggle for communism as the only solution for the alienated person. For Marx, the alienated person loses his or her humanity because under capitalism, the alienated person’s entire world is alien:
“ . . . Thus alienated labor turns the species life of man, and also nature as his mental species-property, into an alien being and into a means for his individual existence. It alienates from man his own body, external nature, his mental life and his human life.“. . . In general, the statement that man is alienated from his species life means that each man is alienated from others, and that each of the others is likewise alienated from human life.” (From Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, quoted in Marx’s Concept of Man by Erich Fromm, pages 101, 103, emphasis in original.) [Note: By “the species life of man,” Marx means what makes humans as a species different than other (animal) species, that is, our potential to develop our humanity through love, reasoning and compassion for others.]
Thus, for Marx, achieving a non-alienated human life means restoring the humanity that is stolen from us by the brutality of life under capitalism. For Marx, the humanism of the proletariat – and its liberation – can be fully achieved only under a communist society, when the healthy balance between humanity and nature will return, and people are freed to develop their real humanity, that is, their potential. Thus, Marx describes the relationship between communism and humanism as follows:
“Communism as the positive transcendence of private property as human self-estrangement, and therefore as the real appropriation of the human essence by and for man; communism therefore as the complete return of man to himself as a social (i.e., human) being – a return accomplished consciously and embracing the entire wealth of previous development. This communism, as fully developed naturalism, equals humanism, and as fully developed humanism equals naturalism.” (Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844: Private Property and Communism.)
This is not the “humanism” of the liberal who believes that people can develop their humanism and potential under capitalism. Such people have stolen Marx’s humanism and converted it to its opposite. Marx and Engels shared our contempt for the abstract, dead humanist spiritualism and idealism of the liberals and the petty bourgeois, which is not based on the dialectic of the material world. They expressed this when they wrote these words in the Forward to The Holy Family:
“Real humanism has no more dangerous enemy in Germany than spiritualism or speculative idealism which substitutes ‘self-consciousness’ or the ‘spirit’ for the real individual man.” (Marx and Engels, The Holy Family, bold emphasis added).
Liberal petty bourgeois humanism is not merely a harmless abstraction. It plays right into the hands of the capitalists. Imperialism, the highest and most brutal stage of capitalism, long ago developed a duality that uses liberal humanism to help keep the system going. It is the duality of the carrot and the stick. The carrot consists of the façade of “democracy”: the promise that capitalism’s pseudo-democratic veneers, its popular fronts, its Bolivarian regimes (Chavez and company) will “eventually” bring the promised life of milk and honey to the masses.
When the carrot of illusions in liberal democracy does not work, capitalism and imperialism use the stick: fascism, or other straightforwardly brutal regimes. But brutal force alone cannot work for capitalism, hence the need for liberal “humanism” and the capitalist morals associated with it. This is why so much pressure is put on us to internalize all the capitalist “humanistic” values and democratic illusions without which capitalism cannot control us.This is why capitalism poisons the mind of the great majority with its so-called “values” and “morals,” which, as Marx pointed out, are alien to the human species. As Trotsky wrote of the capitalist ruling class:
“It pursues the idea of the ‘greatest possible happiness’ not for the majority but for a small and ever diminishing minority. Such a regime could not have endured for even a week through force alone. It needs the cement of morality. The mixing of this cement constitutes the profession of the petty bourgeois theoretician, and moralists. They dabble in all colors of the rainbow but in the final instance remain apostles of slavery and submission.” (Leon Trotsky, Their Morals and Ours.)
It is very difficult, if not impossible, even to understand the dialectic – not to speak about mastering it – if one does not first accomplish the necessary elementary steps, that is, breaking with capitalist system, and devoting one’s life to joining the forces that are building a genuine revolutionary proletarian international to overthrow this barbaric system that is driving humanity and the entire planet to ruin.
As I wrote earlier, there is still a battle to fight against alienation within the revolutionary movement. The struggle against alienation within our movement is essential, in order to create a cadre within the revolutionary party that has mastered the dialectic and knows when to use its sharp edges in the class struggle, and when to use its vast flexibility for the development of the next generation of cadre.
Time is running out for us to build the next generation of cadre. Our international, the International Leninist Trotskyist Fraction (ILTF), will be forged in the struggle against all variants of petty bourgeois elements, whether they are liberals, or fake Trotskyists (of the reformist or the centrist variety) who capitulate to imperialism and the bourgeoisie and who spread around the morals and “humanism” of capitalism disguised as “socialism.” During the 20th century, millions of workers and well-intentioned petty bourgeois people were ruined by Stalinism, centrism, and their petty bourgeois fellow travelers. These currents brought about the defeat of the vanguard of the working class.
Now, we have no choice but to rebuild the revolutionary party and the revolutionary international once again, in a life or death battle between the honest revolutionaries and those who stand between them and the liberation of the working class and humanity. Only through this battle can we master the dialectic, transcend alienation, and introduce true proletarian humanism and working class morals into our own ranks. Trotsky explained it vividly:
“Among the liberals and radicals there are not a few individuals who have assimilated the methods of the materialist interpretation of events and who consider themselves Marxists. This does not hinder them, however, from remaining bourgeois journalists, professors or politicians. A Bolshevik is inconceivable, of course, without the materialist method, in the sphere of morality too. But this method serves him not solely for the interpretation of events but rather for the creation of a revolutionary party of the proletariat. It is impossible to accomplish this task without complete independence from the bourgeoisie and their morality.” (Leon Trotsky, Their Morals and Ours.)