Liberalism and Marx: An interview with Domenico Losurdo
Pam C. Nogales C. and Ross Wolfe
On
March 17, 2012, Ross Wolfe and Pam Nogales of the Platypus Affiliated
Society interviewed Domenico Losurdo, the author, most recently, of Liberalism: A Counter-History (2011). What
follows is an edited transcript of their conversation. Full audio and
video recordings of the interview can be found by clicking the above
links.
Ross Wolfe: How
would you characterize the antinomy of emancipation and de-emancipation
in liberal ideology? From where did this logic ultimately stem?
Domenico Losurdo: I
believe that this dialectic between emancipation and de-emancipation is
the key to understanding the history of liberalism. The class struggle
Marx speaks about is a confrontation between these forces. What I stress
is that sometimes emancipation and de-emancipation are strongly
connected to one another. Of course we can see in the history of
liberalism an aspect of emancipation. For instance, Locke polemicizes
against the absolute power of the king. He asserts the necessity of
defending the liberty of citizens against the absolute power of the
monarchy. But on the other hand, Locke is a great champion of slavery.
And in this case, he acts as a representative of de-emancipation. In my
book, I develop a comparison between Locke on the one hand and Bodin on
the other. Bodin was a defender of the absolute monarchy, but was at the
same time a critic of slavery and colonialism.
RW: The
counter-example of Bodin is interesting. He appealed to the Church and
the monarchy, the First and Second Estates, in his defense of the
fundamental humanity of the slave against the “arbitrary power of life
and death” that Locke asserted the property-owner, the slave-master,
could exercise over the slave.
DL: Yes,
in Locke we see the contrary. While criticizing the absolute monarchy,
Locke is a representative of emancipation, but while celebrating or
legitimizing slavery, Locke is of course a representative of
de-emancipation. In leading the struggle against the control of the
absolute monarchy, Locke affirmed the total power of property-owners
over their property, including slaves. In this case we can see very well
the entanglement between emancipation and de-emancipation. The
property-owner became freer, but this greater freedom meant a worsening
of the conditions of slavery in general.
RW: You
seem to vacillate on the issue of the move towards compensated,
contractual employment over the uncompensated, obligatory labor that
preceded it. By effectively collapsing these two categories into one
another—paid and unpaid labor—isn’t there a danger of obscuring the
world-historical significance of the transition to the wage-relationship
as the standard mode of regulating social production? Do you consider
this shift, which helped usher in the age of capitalism, a truly epochal
and unprecedented event? What, if any, emancipatory possibilities did
capitalism open up that were either unavailable or unthinkable before?
DL: It
was Marx himself who characterized the so-called “Glorious Revolution”
of 1688–1689 as a coup d’état. Yes, the landed aristocracy became free
from the king, but in this way the landowners were able to expropriate
the peasants and inaugurate a great historical tragedy. In this case,
too, we can see this dialectic of emancipation and de-emancipation.
After the Glorious Revolution, the death penalty became very widespread.
Every crime against property, even minor transgressions, became
punishable by death. We can see that after the liberal Glorious
Revolution the rule of the ruling class became extremely terroristic.
RW: Insofar
as the de-emancipation of the serfs led to the development of an urban
proletariat (since the peasants thus uprooted were often forced to move
to the cities, where they joined the newly emerging working class), to
what extent did this open up revolutionary possibilities that didn’t
exist before? Or was this simply a new form of unfreedom and
immiseration?
DL: Of
course, you are right if you stress that the formation of an urban
proletariat creates the necessary conditions for a great transformation
of society. But I have to emphasize the point that this possibility of
liberation was not the program of the liberals. The struggle of this new
working class needed more time before starting to have some results. In
my view, the workingmen of the capitalist metropolis were not only
destitute and very poor, they were even without the formal liberties of
liberalism. Bernard De Mandeville is very open about the fact that to
maintain order and stability among the workers, the laws must be very
strict, and that the death penalty must be applied even in the absence
of any evidence. Here too we can speak of terroristic legislation.
I
also describe the conditions in the workhouses as approximating later
internment camps and concentration camps. In the workhouses there was no
liberty at all. Not only was there no wealth, or material liberty;
there was no formal liberty either.
RW: You
compile some disturbing passages from Locke, Mandeville, and Smith in
which they liken workers to horses and other beasts of burden. You also
offer a selection from one of Abbé Sieyès’s private notebooks in which
he refers to wage-laborers as “work machines.” Hobbes claimed that there
was a sensate understanding “common to Man and Beast,” and La Mettrie
famously wrote of the “machine-man.” Might this language reflect these
thinkers’ encounter with British and French materialism just as easily
as it might indicate deliberate dehumanization?
DL: With
the dehumanization of the working class in the liberal tradition, I
don’t believe that this has to do with the materialistic vision of the
world. These liberal theorists, on the one hand, dehumanized the
working-man, while, on the other hand, they celebrated the great
humanity of the superior classes. I quote in my book a text by Sieyès, a
French liberal who played a considerable role in the French Revolution,
in which Sieyès dreams of the possibility of sexual relations between
black men and apes in order to create a new race of slave. That is not a
materialistic vision. On the contrary, it is a futuristic, idealistic,
and eugenicist vision to create a new race of workers who can increase
productivity but who would be forever obedient to their masters.
Pam C. Nogales C.: In
the seventeenth century, at least in England, doesn’t private property
become the grounds on which certain demands of liberty can be made
against the order of the king? Was it merely a historical necessity that
demands of liberty could only be made through this particular form of
private property? Or was this already a reactionary position to take,
even in the seventeenth century?
DL: I
would continue to stress this entanglement of emancipation and
de-emancipation. The statement according to which men have the right to
think freely and convey their opinions is of course an expression of an
emancipatory process. But we must add that this class of
property-owners, once free of the control of the government, could
impose a new regime of control over their servants and slaves. In the
first phase of the bourgeois-liberal revolution, the servants were
without even liberal liberty, as well. I have quoted, for instance, that
the inhabitants of the workhouses were deprived of every form of
liberty. The [indentured] servants who were transferred to America, they
were more like slaves. They were not modern wage-laborers. For
instance, Mandeville writes that the worker must attend religious
services. That is, they were not free in any sense of the word. On the
workhouses, I quote Bentham at length, who claimed to be a great
reformer, but was truthfully a great advocate of these workhouses. He
envisioned the formation of an “indigenous class” of workers born within
these workhouses, who would therefore be more obedient to their
masters. This has nothing to do with modern wage-workers.
Marx, arrested: Brussels, 1848. Sketch by N. Khukov, 1930s.
PN:
This gets back to the question of whether or not capitalism offers new
forms of freedom while simultaneously posing new problems of unfreedom.
On the one hand, we live in a most unfree moment. One could highlight
the historically unprecedented living conditions for the worker in the
crowded tenement houses of Manchester, or point out that his employer is
only interested in gaining profit and not in granting him any form of
freedom. But is the formation of a working class not at the same time a
historical transformation of the conception of a subject in society that
has implications beyond its manifestation in its present moment? After
all, the worker is not identical with his social activity. He, as a bourgeois subject, has the right to work. Does bourgeois right point beyond itself and is thus not reducible to how it immediately appears?
DL: Of
course I agree with you that some theorists from the ruling class end
up inspiring other classes that were not foreseen as participants in
liberal right. Consider Toussaint Louverture, the leader of the slave
revolution in Santo Domingo, which later became Haiti. How can we
explain this great revolution? We see in France theDeclaration of the Rights of Man.
In the original version of this document, the Rights of Man did not
include colonial peoples or the blacks. But we see Toussaint Louverture
who read this proclamation and claimed these rights for the blacks, as
well. And we have this great revolution as a result. This is not a
spontaneous consequence of liberalism, however. On the contrary,
Toussaint Louverture was obliged to struggle against the French liberals
of the time, who admired the conditions that obtained in the southern
United States of America and strove to continue the oppression of the
black slaves. In Santo Domingo, the slaveholders were at first
positively impressed by the French Revolution. They thought this meant
freedom from the control of the king, such that they could now freely
enjoy slavery, and their property, the slaves. Toussaint Louverture drew
the opposite conclusion, and thus became the organizer of one of the
greatest revolutions in history.
PN: Concerning
the radical inspiration for the framework you set up between Toussaint
and the French Revolution, the striking thing about the Haitian
Revolution is that it caused a division within France. It was not simply
Toussaint versus the French liberals; the Haitian Revolution actually
caused the French liberals to split and led to disarray. It raised
another problem: Insofar as France could militarily continue to defend
itself from counterrevolutionary forces in Europe, at this particular
moment, it still depended on colonial production. It therefore seems to
me that the Haitian Revolution posed the problem of the radicalism of
liberalism straightforwardly and there were a number of responses. Is it
possible to call Toussaint a liberal because he believed in the
promises of liberalism?
DL: No!
Toussaint was a Jacobin. Between the Jacobins and the liberals there
was a great deal of struggle. If we read all the authors who are
generally classified as liberal—for instance Constant, de Tocqueville,
and so on—they spoke very strongly against Jacobinism. For these liberal
authors, Jacobinism was something horrible. I don’t agree, therefore,
with your claim that there was a “split” within the liberal parties of
France. Jacobinism is in my interpretation a form of radicalism, because
they appealed not only to the liberation of the slaves “from above,”
but struggled together with the slaves in order to overthrow slavery.
After the fall of the Jacobins in France, the new government began to
immediately work for the restoration of slavery. The French slave-owners
had acclaimed the first stage of the French Revolution, since they
thought they could then freely exercise control over their slaves. After
the advent of Jacobinism and the radicalization of the Revolution, the
liberals went to the United States and expressed their admiration.
RW: Could
you elaborate on the historical and conceptual distinction you draw
between liberalism on the one hand, and radicalism on the other?
DL: Even
if we conceive of radicalism as the continuation of liberalism, we
should not forget that, for instance in the United States, even the
formal abolition of slavery was the consequence of a terrible conflict, a
war of secession. We don’t see a direct continuity between liberalism
and the abolition of slavery, because this liberation was only made
possible by a protracted Civil War. But Lincoln, too, was not a
representative of radicalism because he never appealed to the slaves to
emancipate themselves. Only in the final stage of the war of secession,
in order to add more soldiers in the struggle against the South, did
Lincoln agree to let some black soldiers fight.
It
is another fact that in the history of liberalism, Robespierre is not
considered a liberal, but a strong enemy of liberalism. In the French
Revolution, it was Robespierre who abolished slavery, but only after the
great revolution in Haiti. He was then compelled to recognize that
slavery was over.
The
author who makes the best impression on the issue of slavery is Adam
Smith. Smith was for a despotic government that would forcibly abolish
slavery. But Smith never thought of the slaves as catalysts of their own
liberation. So on the one hand, Adam Smith condemns and criticizes
slavery very harshly. But if we asked him what was in his eyes the
freest country of his time, in the final judgment, Smith answers that it
is England.
If
we look at the history of the American continents, we can ask: Which
was the most liberal country? I believe it was the U.S. But now, if we
ask the question: Which was the country that had the greatest difficulty
in the emancipation of the slaves? Again, it was the United States.
But
if we consider the succession of emancipation in the American
continents, we see Haiti first, followed by the countries of Latin
America (Venezuela, Mexico, and so on), and only later the United States
of America. If we read the development of the world between the United
States and Mexico, in the middle of the nineteenth century, the United
States—after defeating Mexico, after annexing Texas—reintroduced slavery
into these territories where it had already been abolished. This, in my
eyes, demonstrates that we cannot consider the abolition of slavery as a
consequence of liberalism.
RW: How
would you account for the admiration of Marx for a figure like Lincoln,
who created the conditions (through war) for the emancipation of the
slaves?
DL: Of
course Marx was right in his admiration for Lincoln. Lincoln was a
great personality, and Marx had the merit to understand that the
abolition of slavery would bring about great progress. Why do I say
this? Because in utopian socialism, there were those who constructed
this argument: “Yes, capitalism is slavery. Black slavery is only
another form of slavery. Why should we choose between the Union and the
Confederacy? We see in North and South only two different forms of
slavery.” Lassalle, for instance, was of this opinion. Marx understood
very well that these two different forms of slavery—wage-slavery and
slavery in its most direct form—were not equivalent. The South was for
the expansion of slavery.
Marx in 1848
PN: For
Marx, what was really at stake in the Civil War were the historical
gains made by the bourgeois revolutions, on which any proletarian
revolution would have to depend. And insofar as liberalism in its
post-1848 moment had begun to undermine the promises of the bourgeois
revolutions, it was no longer revolutionary. Do you think that with the
relationship between Marx and the American Civil War, there was a
certain promise that, insofar as slavery could be abolished, bourgeois
right could potentially be radicalized?
DL: I
am critical of some ideas of Marx, but not the enthusiasm with which he
greeted the struggle of Lincoln or the Northern Union. In this case
Marx was correct. But Marx spoke of the bourgeois revolutions as
providing political emancipation. Perhaps he didn’t see the aspect of
de-emancipation. We can make a comparison with the middle of the
nineteenth century: the U.S. and Mexico. In Mexico, no bourgeois
revolution took place. In the U.S. we must say that the American
Revolution was a form of bourgeois revolution. Comparing these two
countries, we see that in Mexico, slavery was abolished. In the U.S.
slavery remained very strong. Why should we say that in the U.S. the
political emancipation was greater than in Mexico? I don’t see why.
RW: In
explaining the manifold “exclusion clauses” that restricted the
application of bourgeois rights to certain privileged groups or
individuals, you use the old dichotomy of the “sacred” and “profane.”
According to this model, those fortunate enough to live inside the
boundaries of this “sacred space” at any given moment can be said to
inhabit the “community of the free,” while those who fall outside of its
domain are meanwhile relegated to the “profane space” of unfreedom. Why
do you associate freedom with sanctity, and unfreedom with profanity?
DL: In
this religious analogy, the “sacred space” is, of course, the space
that is more highly valued than any other. With liberal ideology, we see
a religious attitude. But that isn’t the most important point, because
even in normal language, “sacred” has a more positive meaning.
Regardless of whether one is religious, when people speak of something
that is “sacred,” what this means is that this thing has a particular
importance.
RW: How
do you account for the rise of nationalism, the role it played in
carving out the “sacred space” of the “community of the free”?
Nationalism goes virtually unmentioned in your account. Lost, then, is
the patriotic particularity that emerged opposite Enlightenment
universality at the outset of the eighteenth century. In your work on
Heidegger, you draw on the sociologist Tönnies’s distinction between
“society” [Gesellschaft] and “community” [Gemeinschaft] to explain the
exclusivist connotations of the ideology of the national or folk
community (the Volksgemeinschaft promoted by the Nazis).[1] Insofar
as it displaced the spiritual energies traditionally invested in
religion to that of the nation, might this be the root of the “sacred
space” that you associate with the (national) “community of the free”?
DL: Regarding
“sacred space” and “profane space”: I make a comparison with religion
because religion proceeds in this way. Profane derives from a Latin
word. Fanum was the temple or church. Profanum was what was outside the
church. That is the distinction that we find already in the first phase
of religious consciousness. Liberalism proceeds in the same way—we have
the fanum, or temple, which is the space of the community of the free.
Profanum is for the others, those outside of this space.
Why
do I use this formulation for the community of the free? I don’t
believe that the category of “individualism” is adequate to the
description of liberal society. “Liberalism” and “individualism” are
self-congratulatory categories. Why? If we consider individualism, for
example, as the theory according to which every individual man or woman
has the right to liberty, emancipation, and self-expression—that is not
what we see in liberal society. We have spoken of the different forms of
exclusion, of colonial peoples, of workingmen, and women. Therefore,
this category is not correct.
RW: But
is it liberal society or the national community that is free? In your
study on Heidegger, you distinguish between the more universal category
of “society,” the socius or Gesellschaft, and the more particular
category of “community,” the communitas or Gemeinschaft. Isn’t this
distinction useful here?
DL: If
we consider the history of liberalism, we see on the one hand a
“community of the free” that tends to be transnational. But on the other
hand, we already see nationalism in this liberal society. For instance,
Burke speaks of “the English people,” a people in whose “blood” there
is a love of liberty. There is a celebration of the English people. The
ideology of nationalism was already present in liberalism.
England—though not only England—claimed to be a special nation, a nation
involved in a project of liberty. Of course in the twentieth century we
have a new situation, where Heidegger celebrates the German nation.
PN: Isn’t
the transformation of concepts like nationalism symptomatic of a deeper
problem in liberalism itself? Doesn’t the shift that takes place in
1848 indicate the conservative (and thus reactionary) transformation of
the liberal tradition, because a latent conflict within bourgeois
society was only now being historically manifested? Since you raised the
criticism of how Marx conceived of bourgeois revolutions, I would like
to talk about the relationship of liberalism to Marxism, specifically in
the moment of the mid-nineteenth century. To what extent would you say
that the success of a radical or Marxist conception of revolution be the
negation of liberal society, and to what extent would you say that it
would be the fulfillment of liberal society?
Maximilien Luce, Une rue à Paris en Mai 1871 ou La commune, oil on canvas, 222.5 cm x 151 cm, 1903–1905 (Musée d’Orsay).
DL: One
can find a new definition of liberalism and say that the October
Revolution of 1917 was a liberal revolution—why not? But in normal
language, the October Revolution is not considered a liberal revolution.
All the liberal nations of the world opposed the Bolshevik Revolution.
Marx
does not speak at any great length about liberalism. He speaks about
capitalism and bourgeois societies, which claimed to be liberal. I
criticize Marx because he treats the bourgeois revolutions
one-dimensionally, as an expression of political emancipation. Marx
makes a distinction between political emancipation and social
emancipation. Social or human emancipation will be, in Marx’s eyes, the
result of proletarian revolution. On the other hand, Marx says the
political emancipation that is the result of bourgeois revolution
represents progress.
Again,
I don’t accept this one-sided definition of political emancipation,
because it implied the continuation and worsening of slavery. In my book
I quote several contemporary U.S. historians who claim that the
American Revolution was, in reality, a “counter-revolution.” Why do I
quote these historians? They write that if we consider the case of the
natives or the blacks, their conditions became worse after the American
Revolution. Of course the condition of the white community became much
better. But I repeat: We have numerous U.S. historians who consider the
American Revolution to be, in fact, a counter-revolution. The opinion of
Marx in this case is one-sided. Perhaps he knew little about the
conditions in America during the American Revolution. He knew the War of
Secession well, but perhaps the young Marx was not familiar with the
earlier history of the U.S.
Another example of the one-sidedness of the young Marx can be found in On The Jewish Question.
He speaks in this text of the U.S. as a country of “accomplished
political emancipation.” In this case, his counter-example is France. In
France, he claimed there was discrimination based on wealth and
opportunity. This discrimination was disappearing, and was now almost
non-existent, in the U.S. But there was slavery in the U.S. at this
time. Why should we say that the U.S. during the time of slavery had
“accomplished political emancipation”?
RW: “Radicalism,”
as you have been defining it, would be liberalism without exclusion. If
one were to get rid of the division between the “sacred space” and
“profane space,” it would just be liberalism for all. Insofar as
radicalism purports to remove any distinction between those who are
inside and those outside the realm of freedom, and thereby bring
everyone into the “sacred space” of freedom, wouldn’t radicalism to some
extent just be universal liberalism?
DL: It
is impossible to universalize in this way. For instance, colonial wars
were for the universalization of the condition of the white
slave-owners. That was the universality proclaimed by colonialism. The
universalization of liberal rights to excluded groups was not a
spontaneous consequence of liberalism, but resulted from forces outside
liberalism. These forces were, however, in some cases inspired by
certain declarations, for instance of the Rights of Men.
In
speaking of the enduring legacy of liberalism, I have never said that
we have nothing to learn from liberalism. There two primary components
of the legacy of liberalism. First, and perhaps the most important
point: Liberalism has made the distinction between “sacred space” and
“profane space” that I have spoken about. But liberalism has the great
historical and theoretical merit of having taught the limitation of
power within a determined, limited community. Yes, it is only for the
community of the free, but still it is of great historical importance.
On this score, I counterpose liberalism to Marxism, and rule in favor of
liberalism. I have criticized liberalism very strongly, but in this
case I stress the greater merits of liberalism in comparison to Marxism.
Often,
Marxism has spoken of the disappearance of power as such—not the
limitation of power, but its disappearance—the withering of the state
and so on. This vision is a messianic vision, which has played a very
negative role in the history of socialism and communism. If we think
that power will simply disappear, we do not feel the obligation to limit
power. This vision had terrible consequences in countries like the
Soviet Union.
RW: So
you believe that historical Marxism’s theorization of the eventual
“abolition” of the state, or the “withering away” of the State—as Lenin,
following Engels, put it—was misguided?
DL: Totally misguided!
RW: So
do you feel that society can never autonomously govern itself without
recourse to some sort of external entity, something like the state? Must
the state always exist?
DL: I
do not believe society can exist without regulation, without laws.
Something must ensure obedience to the laws, and in this case the
“withering away” of the state would mean the “withering away” of rights,
of the rule of law. Gramsci rightly says that civil society, too, can
be a form of power and domination. If we conceive the history of the
United States, the most oppressive forms of domination did not take the
shape of state domination, but came from civil society. The settlers in
the American West independently carried out the expropriation,
deportation, and even extermination in more extensive ways than the
state. Sometimes, even if only partially, the federal government has
tried to place limits on this phenomenon. Representing civil society as
the expression of liberty—this is nonsense that has nothing to do with
real Marxism.
Marx
himself speaks of the despotism in the capitalist factory, which is not
exercised by the state, but rather by civil society. And Marx, against
this despotism, proposed the interference of the state into the private
sphere of civil society. He advocated state intervention in civil
society in order to limit or abolish this form of domination, in order
to limit by law the duration and condition of the work in the factory.
RW: That’s
the famous passage where Marx describes industrial capitalism as
“anarchy in production, despotism in the workshop.” In other words,
haphazard production-for-production’s-
DL: On
the one hand, Marx speaks along the lines you just laid out. In many
texts, Marx and Engels say that the state is the expression of one
class’s domination over the other. But at other times, they speak of
another function of the state. They write that the state functions to
implement guarantees between the different individuals of the ruling
class, the individual bourgeois. And I don’t understand why this second
function of the state would disappear. If we have a unified mankind, in
this case too there is the necessity of guarantees between individuals
within this unified mankind.
Furthermore,
we are not allowed to read the thesis of Marx and Engels in a
simplistic way. Sometimes they speak of the “withering away” of the
state. In other circumstances, however, they speak of the “withering
away” in its actual political form. These two formulations are very
different from one another. But in the history of the communist
movement, only the first definition was present, the most simplistic
definition: the “withering away” of the state as such. The other
formulation is more adequate: the “withering away” of the state in terms
of today’s political form.
RW: And the other great legacy of liberalism?
DL: The
other great legacy of liberalism exists in its understanding of the
benefits of competition. And here I am thinking of the market, too,
about which I speak positively in my book. We must distinguish different
forms of the market. For a long time, the market implied a form of
slavery. The slaves were merchandise in the market. The market can
assume very different forms. Not that the market is the most important
fact. We cannot develop a post-capitalist society, at least for a long
time to come, without some form of competition. And this is another
great legacy that we can learn from liberalism. |P
Transcribed by Ross Wolfe
[1].Domenico Losurdo, Heidegger and the Ideology of War: Community, Death, and the West (Humanity Press, Amherst NY, 2001).
