June 15, 2006: Self-Emancipation and Truth
I have previously overlooked a striking defense of self-emancipation by the French theorist and activist Guy Debord. In his 1967 manifesto, Society of the Spectacle (trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith [NY: Zone Books, 1995]), Debord argued that
"Self-emancipation in our time is emancipation from the material bases of an inverted truth. This 'historical mission to establish truth in the world' can be carried out neither by the isolated individual nor by atomized and manipulated masses, but--only and always--by that class which is able to effect the dissolution of all classes, subjecting all power to the disalienating form of a realized democracy--to councils in which practical theory exercises control over itself and surveys its own action. It cannot be carried out, in other words, until individuals are 'directly bound to universal history'; until dialogue has taken up arms to impose its own conditions upon the world" (Thesis 221, p. 154).
In this thesis Debord reminds us that self-emancipation is not just a matter of good strategy and morally preferable to "emancipation from above." Rather, collective action by the oppressed in pursuit of their own interests enables them above all to realize a more adequate understanding of themselves and their social reality. Whose truth? Our truth!
Comments
Trotsky's great History of the revolution shows how this works. Trotsky's book is structured as a novel, with the Petersburg working class as protagonist. They experience an intensified process of political maturation under the pressure of events. Trotsky traces the evolution of their thinking through each of the "phases" of the great struggles of 1917.
Many of us who've worked in large movements have experienced something similar. In Free South Africa in 1985 you could watch the rapid evolution of self-styled movement "liberals" to the left, as they experienced the manipulativeness of the university administrations and the opposition of the racist right. In pointing this out I'm suggesting that this kind of compressed self-education by mass struggle isn't strictly a class phenomenon. When the Marxist tradition privileges the working class, it's not because Marxists believed that workers have some kind of special consciousness or aptitude for truth. Rather that the structural position of workers as originators of values is strategically primary under capitalism.
Posted by: Mark Phillips | June 16, 2006 07:54 PM
P.S. thanks for posting this, Ted. Really interesting.
Posted by: Mark Phillips | June 16, 2006 07:55 PM
I was struck by your observation that Trotsky's history "is structured as a novel," since Marx also wanted Capital to have a polished literary quality, something akin to Dante's Divine Comedy. (In this regard I wish two books were better known: S.S. Prawer's Karl Marx and World Literature and Robert Paul Wolff's Moneybags Must Be So Lucky: On the Literary Structure of Capital.)
In a curious way, could we talk about these great works as novels "without a subject"?
Posted by: Ted | June 18, 2006 08:14 AM
In Trotsky's case I'm really not sure. Seems to me there is a subject: the Petersburg working class, whose consciousness undergoes "development" in a way which is straightforwardly Realist.
BTW there's interesting discussion of Trotsky's literariness in Literature of Revolution by our old chum Stormin' Norman Geras. If I remember, Geras points out Trotsky's technical similarity to both Tolstoy and Eisenstein. All three of them have a charactersistic mode of moving from crowd panorama to the details of individuals within the crowd -- a way of humanizing scenes which would otherwise seem so large-scale as to be almost landscape.
Posted by: Mark Phillips | June 18, 2006 11:12 PM