The Rebel
Or L'Homme Révolté.
I've been reading Camus' novel-length essay on rebels, rebellions, and revolutions, and have found it to be very fascinating. Reading Camus is really a treat because his arguments are some of the most concise and logical arguments I have ever read. Not only are they accurate and to the point, but they are often so effective that they render any counter-arguments moot. His "Reflections on the Guillotine" worked this way as well; in fact, even more so.
So back to The Rebel. The section I am currently on (and that I have found to be by far the most interesting) is "State Terrorism and Rational Terror," an examination of Marxist doctrine, both theoretically and in actuality. I just want to mention a few things I found to be especially noteworthy in the section. Of course, I would recommend that you read it yourself as well.
One of the crises of Marxist thought in the 1950's (when Camus was writing) was the question "Why hasn't the revolution come?" Marx had argued that conditions would become worse and worse as capital was concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, and eventually conditions would be so untolerable as to make revolution inevitable. In fact, the opposite was happening. While workers were by no means rich, and equality between the proletariat and bourgeoisie was not even visible on the horizon, conditions had improved through reform since the time that Marx had written his works. Following Marxist doctrine, these reforms had set back the revolution, and therefore should have been opposed. "The logic of such an attitude," Camus writes, "leads to the approval of everything that tends to increase working-class poverty. The worker must be given nothing so that one day he can have everything." The problem was especially acute with government welfare. As Camus puts it, "it is not a good thing that future revolutionaries should be put in the situation of expecting to be fed by the State."
And of course there is more. Marx railed against religion, "the opiate of the masses." He rightly concluded that any system that convinced people to work so that they could have an eternal, utopian afterlife was exploitative, disingenuous, and, more to the point, vile. And yet we have the Revolution, where the workers first fight a bloody war to overthrow the capitalists and institute the "dictatorship of the proletariat" (one of my favorite paradoxical phrases), which they then must unquestioningly obey and slave for, so that one day there will be a stateless Utopia where everyone is free and there is no coercion or oppression at all. The fiercely anti-religious Marx has declared a system in which the workers are exploited for a better future. Even worse than the Christian heaven, Marxist workers won't get to partake in this glorious utopia, having died long before it materialized.
There is also the most common attack against authoritarian communism from the left (and one which I have long found decisive), which is the entire concept of the state melting away after saving the worker from the evil capitalists. Never once in history has a government voluntarily dissolved itself, especially when it is a dictatorship (whether "of the proletariat" or not). As Camus writes:
...Lenin spoke with a precision which left little doubt about the indefinite continuation of the proletarian super-State. "With this machine, or rather this weapon [the State], we shall crush every form of exploitation, and when there are no longer any possibilities of exploitation left on earth, no more people owning land or factories, no more people gorging themselves under the eyes of others who are starving, when such things become impossible, then and only then shall we cast this machine aside. Then there will be neither State nor exploitation." Therefore as long as there exists on earth, and no longer in a specific society, one single oppressed person and one proprietor, so long the State will continue to exist. It also will be obliged to increase in strength during this period so as to vanquish one by one the injustices, the goverments responsible for injustice, the obstinately bourgeois nations, and the people who are blind to their own intersts. And when, on an earth that has finally been subdued and purged of enemies, the final iniquity shall have been drowned in the blood of the just and the unjust, then the State, which has reached the limit of all power, a monstrous idol covering the entire earth, will be discreetly absorbed into the silent city of Justice.
(Notice the skepticism at the end).
I think that about says it all.
I've been reading Camus' novel-length essay on rebels, rebellions, and revolutions, and have found it to be very fascinating. Reading Camus is really a treat because his arguments are some of the most concise and logical arguments I have ever read. Not only are they accurate and to the point, but they are often so effective that they render any counter-arguments moot. His "Reflections on the Guillotine" worked this way as well; in fact, even more so.
So back to The Rebel. The section I am currently on (and that I have found to be by far the most interesting) is "State Terrorism and Rational Terror," an examination of Marxist doctrine, both theoretically and in actuality. I just want to mention a few things I found to be especially noteworthy in the section. Of course, I would recommend that you read it yourself as well.
One of the crises of Marxist thought in the 1950's (when Camus was writing) was the question "Why hasn't the revolution come?" Marx had argued that conditions would become worse and worse as capital was concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, and eventually conditions would be so untolerable as to make revolution inevitable. In fact, the opposite was happening. While workers were by no means rich, and equality between the proletariat and bourgeoisie was not even visible on the horizon, conditions had improved through reform since the time that Marx had written his works. Following Marxist doctrine, these reforms had set back the revolution, and therefore should have been opposed. "The logic of such an attitude," Camus writes, "leads to the approval of everything that tends to increase working-class poverty. The worker must be given nothing so that one day he can have everything." The problem was especially acute with government welfare. As Camus puts it, "it is not a good thing that future revolutionaries should be put in the situation of expecting to be fed by the State."
And of course there is more. Marx railed against religion, "the opiate of the masses." He rightly concluded that any system that convinced people to work so that they could have an eternal, utopian afterlife was exploitative, disingenuous, and, more to the point, vile. And yet we have the Revolution, where the workers first fight a bloody war to overthrow the capitalists and institute the "dictatorship of the proletariat" (one of my favorite paradoxical phrases), which they then must unquestioningly obey and slave for, so that one day there will be a stateless Utopia where everyone is free and there is no coercion or oppression at all. The fiercely anti-religious Marx has declared a system in which the workers are exploited for a better future. Even worse than the Christian heaven, Marxist workers won't get to partake in this glorious utopia, having died long before it materialized.
There is also the most common attack against authoritarian communism from the left (and one which I have long found decisive), which is the entire concept of the state melting away after saving the worker from the evil capitalists. Never once in history has a government voluntarily dissolved itself, especially when it is a dictatorship (whether "of the proletariat" or not). As Camus writes:
...Lenin spoke with a precision which left little doubt about the indefinite continuation of the proletarian super-State. "With this machine, or rather this weapon [the State], we shall crush every form of exploitation, and when there are no longer any possibilities of exploitation left on earth, no more people owning land or factories, no more people gorging themselves under the eyes of others who are starving, when such things become impossible, then and only then shall we cast this machine aside. Then there will be neither State nor exploitation." Therefore as long as there exists on earth, and no longer in a specific society, one single oppressed person and one proprietor, so long the State will continue to exist. It also will be obliged to increase in strength during this period so as to vanquish one by one the injustices, the goverments responsible for injustice, the obstinately bourgeois nations, and the people who are blind to their own intersts. And when, on an earth that has finally been subdued and purged of enemies, the final iniquity shall have been drowned in the blood of the just and the unjust, then the State, which has reached the limit of all power, a monstrous idol covering the entire earth, will be discreetly absorbed into the silent city of Justice.
(Notice the skepticism at the end).
I think that about says it all.
posted by Jimmy at 3:20 AM
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