David Guest, aspiring to theory, killed in practice

"I have never felt so much the value of abstract things, of theory seen in its proper relation to practice, than just now. I think I can see things in their proper proportions. I have myself a lively and intense desire to explore whole fields of theoretical work, mathematical, physical, logical and far beyond these, when the conditions for this will become again possible."

-- Letter from Spain, David Guest, British communist mathematician, killed fighting fascism in Spain in 1938

SOURCE: Sheehan, Helena. Marxism and the Philosophy of Science: A Critical History (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1985, p. 347.

For more historical overview, see also my bibliography:

British Marxism in Philosophy, Science, and Culture Before the New Left: Essential Historical Surveys

Praxis philosophers & the disintegration of Yugoslavia

I have blogged about the Yugoslav Marxist Humanist Praxis philosophers and documented their work on my web site:

Yugoslav Praxis Philosophy Study Guide

Among Marxist humanists, critical theorists, and other anti-Stalinists, the Praxis School was in the forefront and a pole of attraction world-wide. It is also known that, sadly, their politics disintegrated along with Yugoslavia and that their leading proponents, most shockingly Mihailo Marković, were swallowed up by nationalism. Apparently there was a dimension of the inner tensions in Yugoslavia reflected in the persons of the praxis theoreticians that was not grasped by foreign enthusiasts. This article documents the dynamics of the depressing devolution:

Secor, Laura. “Testaments Betrayed,” Jacobin. “How Yugoslavia’s vibrant Marxist humanists morphed into right-wing nationalists.” Adapted from:

“Testaments Betrayed: Yugoslavian Intellectuals and the Road to War,” Lingua Franca, 1999.

Here we have a bone-chilling historical lesson in the failure of reason to be actualized in society even by its foremost representatives. This is a sobering lesson in how precarious are the prospects, if not altogether impossible under prevailing conditions, for achieving a rational society. Uneven distribution of resources, power, and loyalties foster eventual destabilization. In Yugoslavia, the uneasy balance between centralized power (dictatorial or not) and regional/national/ethnic autonomy was totally fractured, with lethal consequences. In the USA, scarcity is entirely artificial, and so barbarism must be perpetuated by even more irrational means, fueled by uneven social development, irreconcilable differences among the population, and the exploitation of competing demographics and ideologies.

The Praxis School developed general, abstract conceptions with global appeal, and also had specific objectives in reforming the Yugoslav social system. But the world view and social theory that they developed could not sustain their political practice once the social basis for it was obliterated. They have left us with advanced general ideas of continuing relevance, but if they, faced with social disintegration, could not sustain a corresponding political practice, then what hope is there for us, in a politically regressive and rapidly degenerating social order, where ideas are not valued by anybody, to actualize our most advanced rational thought and create a reasonable society?

John Shook & the banality of humanism's dead liberalism

“Humanism at its core, at the heart of its ethical project, is the statement of a difficult problem, and not an elitist ideology offering simple platitudes.”

— John Shook, “With Liberty & Justice for All,” Humanist, January / February 2013

But actually, humanism in the USA intellectually really is little more than a collection of platitudes, and John Shook's essay demonstrates this.

When the first Humanist Manifesto was issued in 1933, capitalism was awash in its worst crisis, fascism menaced the world, Stalinism was the major alternative as a global political force, and Roosevelt's New Deal was about to be born to rescue American capitalism from the other two alternatives. In this context, the left-liberal and soft socialist declarations of humanism in the USA meant something, even without a political force to back it up. The 14th principle reads:

The humanists are firmly convinced that existing acquisitive and profit-motivated society has shown itself to be inadequate and that a radical change in methods, controls, and motives must be instituted. A socialized and cooperative economic order must be established to the end that the equitable distribution of the means of life be possible. The goal of humanism is a free and universal society in which people voluntarily and intelligently cooperate for the common good. Humanists demand a shared life in a shared world.

The actual political force bringing about whatever possibilities of this being realized in the USA came from the burgeoning American industrial labor movement, with the major participation of its Communist and other left contingents. Social liberalism in the USA, more or less corresponding to what is known as social democracy in more civilized countries, became a reality for the first time.

Some of the leading humanist intellectuals were players in various reform movements. Philosophically, the works of such people as Corliss Lamont are not terribly sophisticated or interesting, though Lamont himself was active in peace and justice movements. John Dewey is the closest thing American humanists have as a philosophical patron saint. Nevertheless, one has to pursue his philosophical works beyond A Common Faith and beyond the literature proper to the humanist movement itself. The second most (undeservedly) honored philosophical personage in American humanism is Sidney Hook, but the anti-communist Hook, not the Hook who was one of the foremost among the few Marxist philosophers in the English-speaking world in the 1930s. The principle author of the draft of the 1933 Manifesto was Roy Wood Sellars, my favorite among the classic (pre-World War II) American philosophers and a man of the left, but his philosophical works are not really counted in the literature of American humanism.

All of these people were products of a different era from the generations that produced the social and cultural revolutions of the 1960s and '70s. In addition to class-based agitation, this period foregrounded the new social movements--black civil rights & black power (along with other mushrooming ethnic movements), feminism, gay rights, environmentalism, etc.  What survives of all this, however, is predicated on the destruction of the old social liberalism that was undergirded by the labor movement.  Hence what passes for liberalism now is not class-based social equality, but the equal right of members of marginalized groups to participate at all levels of class exploitation. Our black president is the logical outcome of this historical trend.

Of course, many people attached to this new liberalism in a neoliberal (i.e. the new era of unregulated capitalism) era also have an interest in class-based justice, but generational turnover combined with historical amnesia have obscured how far to the right the political order, including the empty liberal gesturing of the Democratic Party, has been pulled.

This is the social environment in which the "new atheism" and the surge of activity overall in the atheist/humanist/skeptics is functioning. What do the ideologues of "humanism," who promise to offer more than mere "atheism," have to offer to explain world developments over the past 60 years or so and what concepts do they put forward to point the way out of the current political impasse, if impasse they even see?

John Shook's vacuous essay gives us a demonstration of the overall ideological backwardness of the atheist/humanist/skeptics movements. Shook enunciates the principles of the now-dead social liberalism:

As an ethical stance, humanism focuses on the individual and at the same time concerns itself with society; both commitments must remain bonded in mutual support, otherwise humanism makes no sense. History attests to the dangers of pursuing one to the detriment of the other, producing anti-humanist results. Societies that prioritize private liberty to excess, that let individuals accumulate all the powers they can, find that vast inequalities emerge. Those inequalities congeal into hierarchical social classes and rigid castes and severely restrict freedom of opportunity for all but the privileged and wealthy. On the other hand, societies that prioritize social justice too heavily, trying to equalize everyone’s wealth and status, find that vital initiative gets crushed beyond consolation. Where bureaucracy dictates investment and commerce, creativity goes unrewarded and opportunity is wasted.

Had Shook been more forthcoming, he would have stated this as a contest between capitalism and socialism. However, characterizing the problem with self-proclaimed socialist countries as those who "prioritize social justice too heavily" is not saying much about the provenance, history, and organization of such societies and to what extent the intent of their leaders is anymore geared toward social equality than ours is to democracy and the dignity of the individual. A simple balancing act between the abstractions of liberty and equality tells us nothing about the actual basis on which the class structure of any society is based. Bourgeois liberals and conservatives alike justify their positions on the basis of the same abstractions.  And in this fake balancing act, the actual mechanisms of capitalist exploitation are safely hidden.

Furthermore, there is no accounting for the extent to which any balance towards social justice was actually achieved and why it is being taken away now. Social liberalism has been politically dead in the USA for three decades at least. Not only does Shook regurgitate platitudes, but platitudes that are utterly useless given the irreversible shift to the right of the entire American political system.

Let us continue:

Balancing liberty and justice in healthy proportions is wiser than naively supposing that both can be maximized simultaneously. Human potential is too fragile and precious to abandon it to the caprice of private liberty or to entrust it to the rules of social justice. The individual needs freedoms within a supportive society, while society needs individuals to support the whole.

The first sentence is drivel. The principled enunciated in the rest of the passage were those of the Marxist humanists of the Yugoslav Praxis School with whom Paul Kurtz once dialogued and from whom he learned nothing. And while that school went down with Yugoslavia, Shook has nothing to say to compare to what these philosophers strove for.

Shook enunciates three general principles of the interdependency of individuality and sociality and then launches into a precis of the evolution of moral habits and responsibilities from primitive tribal organization on and the emergence of humanism within various civilizations. However, the master concepts of "culture" and "ethics" do not constitute a remotely usable basis for social theory.

Shook continues:

The only reasonable humanism trying to gradually improve people’s lives is one that starts with actual people as they really are, culture and all. Humanism opposes tribalism in any form, but it can’t stand aloof from culture itself, especially because many cultures are helpful repositories of humanistic wisdom with proven practical value.

This is worse than useless as social analysis. And not the word "gradually." An utterly useless liberalism that has no teeth in confronting the world in which we actually live. A reincarnated Dewey a century on is worthless, whereas the original Dewey performed at least some function for a burgeoning progressive liberalism. With Shook the keyword is "reform" repeated over and over against utopian schemes, i.e. a code word for "revolution" or "radicalism" or "socialism," which are in essence ruled out of court as anti-humanist. Shook wants to be a good liberal, but he has nothing to offer in the fashion of the good liberals of yesteryear.

The intellectual basis of humanism was always fairly thin, but as a strategic rallying point around a complex of issues it served a purpose. It still does as long as the participants in such a movement understand that it represents an alliance rather than a unity of social principles and that such a skeletal set of principles cannot serve as the basis for a complete social philosophy or world view.  Bourgeois liberals pride themselves on being the very embodiment of reason, but they are no such a thing. They are intellectually and ideologically underdeveloped, and thus the identity they claim in the end is just one more ideology to be overcome.

Karel Kosík on the relation between past & present in cultural development

"The historical stages in the development of humanity are not empty forms from which life has evaporated because humanity has reached higher forms of development, but rather, through man's creative activity—praxis—are constantly being integrated into the present. The part concentrated in the present (in the dialectical sense, "superseded") creates human nature, that "substance" which includes both objectivity and subjectivity, both material relations and objectivized forces and the ability to "see" the world and explain it through various modes of subjectivity, that is, scientifically, artistically, philosophically, politically, etc."

— Karel Kosík, Dialectics of the Concrete

Still trying to fathom the implications of this statement.

Atheism & Humanism as Bourgeois Ideology (3)

Those who follow the atheist / humanist / skeptics blogosphere are probably aware of controversies that have erupted over the past few years, mostly in connection with accusations of sexism and the role of women within the movement, but also to some extent the priorities of black atheists in relation to established national organizations. I have no intention of questioning the validity of such concerns, but I do question the ideological basis from which many of the dissidents operate.

In my podcast Atheism & Humanism as Bourgeois Ideology I vaguely alluded to the mechanical combination of ideological labels coming from progressive movements and the atheist/etc. movement. Atheism Plus is a particularly noxious ahistorical, intellectually dishonest, demagogic, and ultimately vacuous attempt to brand a new division of the movement, or a new movement altogether. The insipidity of such gestures mirrors the insipidity of the mainstream from which the dissidents purport to distance themselves.

Such liberal or left-liberal developments are symptoms of the lack of a vigorous mass movement in the USA, more centrally, the lack of class politics. The sins of the hard left stem from the same condition. When you have a subculture of professional middle class people who are essentially spectator-tourists in the world of human suffering, bad politics and superficial accusations of self and others become the political watchwords.  Thirdworldism is one such manifestation of bad politics, which, however bankrupt, would have at least made sense in the context of the global anti-colonial anti-imperialist thrust of the '60s & '70s, but is worse than worthless now.  But just as disgusting is the politics of "privilege", perpetrated of course by the privileged, with no constituency or substantive program, against whomever is deemed more privileged, the white male being at the top of the heap, of course. But 'white male' (or female) is not a class category.  This is what left bourgeois politics gets you, and in the smattering of cases in which one finds alleged radicals participating in the organized atheist/etc. movement, this is what you get.

Naturally, given the historical and structural conditions of American society (and several others), white males are going to be at the top of the heap, and prevailing perspectives and priorities at that class level are likely to prevail, accompanied by dollops of tokenism as a gesture of balancing things out. But focusing on the obvious obscures the essentially bourgeois nature of the movement, and thus the slim chances of any anti-bourgeois perspective--wherever it might come from--of gaining the prominence, leadership role, or influence that it might merit.

While the next logical step would be to name names, I'll let you use your imagination. Instead, I want to probe the blogosphere of the hard left and see what they have to say. Left--and specifically Marxist--takes on atheism and religion vary tremendously, and thus cannot be summed up as one generality. What is wrong with various Marxist takes on religion needs to be covered in separate posts. But now I'm searching the blogs for "bourgeois atheism", and here are a few finds.

Boobquake Revisited by EDB, The Fivefold Path, 24 August 2012

While the blogger is certainly justified in adverse reactions to the atheist movement, though feeling at least in part a part of it, he is too uncritical of the demagogic propaganda stemming from certain dissidents.

Much worse is a Maoist blog. I met my first Maoist in high school at the end of the '60s. My first impulse was to punch him in the mouth--I didn't, but he would have deserved it--and my regard for Maoists has not altered since.

"Atheism and Theism" is not a Class Contradiction, M-L-M Mayhem!, 30 August 2012

Aside from the sectarian bankruptcy of the entire politics of this group, and of its take on religion, there are unqualified and unrestricted generalizations such as this:

" . . . it is a club primarily for privileged pro-imperialist petty bourgeois males who imagine that they're subversive for rejecting God while, at the same time, accepting everything capitalist-imperialist society has socialized them into believing is holy."

This characterization certainly fits a number of petty-bourgeois white men . . . also white women, black people, South Asians, and others in the movement, but as a blanket characterization, and by implication a blanket exoneration of others, it is dishonest and demagogic.  But of course such voices exist within the atheist/etc. movement as well.

Various debates are no better. Here are a couple of examples:

Bourgeois Atheism, Revleft, 8 June 2010

A Proletarian critique of 'New' Atheists, rationalia.com, 2 July 2012

We have here utter incoherence. The leftists are as confused as the "mainstream" atheists.

I'm not saying no insightful perspective can be found, but those who rise above the prevailing superficiality are going to find that whatever they choose to call themselves, they won't have as many people on their wavelength as labels might suggest.

Atheism & Humanism as Bourgeois Ideology (2)

I received a handful of scattered responses via Facebook to my podcast of last Saturday, 11/17/12 Atheism & Humanism as Bourgeois Ideology.

There is one fellow who has spread the news of my podcast far and wide among atheist/humanist and leftist circles. What he expects to come of this I do not know, or whether he is more optimistic than I about a perceptive reception. I expect nothing from either the atheist/etc. milieu or the left or both in combination.

So far I see a discussion thread on lbo-talk, the listserv of Left Business Observer:

Was something about Atheism & Humanism

So far the greatest appreciation was expressed for the opening quote from C.L.R. James & co., Facing Reality (1958):

C.L.R. James on Descartes & the Division of Labor

We shall see what else comes of this.

Atheism & Humanism as Bourgeois Ideology

For the past couple of years I have planned to do this podcast. I didn't think I could squeeze all this into an hour, but I got it all in in 3/4 of an hour. Recorded Saturday night, 17 November 2012, here is my latest podcast, installment 7 of my Internet radio show "Studies in a Dying Culture" under the auspices of Think Twice Radio:

11/17/12 Atheism & Humanism as Bourgeois Ideology 

I propose a framework in which the intellectual basis of the atheist - humanist - skeptical movement, particularly in the USA, can be seen as a progressive bourgeois ideology that, while marking an historical advance beyond pre-modern, pre-industrial, pre-technological, pre-capitalist, supernaturally based forms of unreason, addresses only one half of the cognitive sources of irrationality of the modern world, and is ill-equipped to grapple with the secular forms of unreason, which can be denoted by the term "ideology". I argue that the Anglo-American intellectual heritage of atheism has never absorbed the indispensable heritage of German philosophy and social theory from Hegel to Marx to 20th century critical theory and thus remains philosophically underdeveloped and ensconced in a naive scientism. I furthermore argue that American atheism / humanism lacks adequate historical perspective due to the historical amnesia induced by the two historical breaks of McCarthyism and Reaganism. To combat historical amnesia I highlight not only relevant intellectual history but the buried history of working class atheism. I also sketch out some relevant philosophical aspects of the history of the American humanist movement beginning with the first Humanist Manifesto of 1933. I then discuss the intellectual consequences of the political repression of the McCarthy era. From there I discuss two prominent influences of the 1960s and 1970s, atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair and humanist Paul Kurtz. I highlight Kurtz's dialogue with the Yugoslav Marxist-Humanist philosophers and his failure to learn from the encounter. Finally, I discuss the intellectual shortcomings of the so-called "new atheism" and today's celebrity atheists in the context of the depressing political perspective of our reactionary neoliberal era. I also don't spare the dissidents within the movement from my accusations of intellectual superficiality. I end on a note of bleak pessimism.

46:09 minutes 

This podcast provides a framework for thinking about the atheist/humanist/skeptics subculture in the Anglo-American sphere (and possibly beyond) which is different from anything else you are going to find on the subject.

There are some people who are going to appreciate this podcast. There are also some people who think they appreciate this podcast. There is something essential that experience has taught me about commonality: it is elusive, often illusory.

I do not expect the bulk of my readers, even those among the "progressive" liberal-left segment of the atheist/humanist/etc. community, or the hard left, to share my perspective, whether they react sympathetically or not. Note also that while I say little about the "intellectual superficiality" of the "dissidents within the movement" (i.e. the atheist/etc. movement), those familiar with the current political controversies within that milieu may have an idea of what I'm talking about, whether or not they understand where I'm coming from.  I am not optimistic.

Still, this podcast is badly needed and perhaps it will have a modest impact.

Paul Kurtz and Marxist humanism (5)

Click here for the Preface and Notes on Contributors, and eventually for other content:

Tolerance and Revolution: A Marxist-non-Marxist Humanist Dialogue, edited by Paul Kurtz and Svetozar Stojanović. Beograd: Philosophical Society of Serbia, 1970. 165, [1] pp. Contents, pp. 7-8.

 

                        TABLE OF CONTENTS

        Preface ‑ ‑ ‑ ‑ ‑ ‑ ‑ ‑ ‑ ‑ ‑ ‑   5

                      I. PAPERS AND COMMENTARIES

I.  J. P. van Praag – Causes of Alienation in Modern

        Technical Society and Their Elimination ‑ ‑ ‑         11

        John Lewis – Commentary on van Praag ‑ ‑ ‑ ‑   25

        Mathilde Niel – Commentary on van Praag ‑ ‑    27

    II. Svetozar Stojanović – Revolutionary Teleology and

        Ethics ‑ ‑ ‑ ‑ ‑ ‑ ‑ ‑ ‑ ‑ ‑ - - - - -                            29

        Andre Niel – Commentary on Stojanović ‑ ‑ ‑     49

        Staniša Novaković – Commentary on Stojanović - -   51

  III. Paul Kurtz – In Defense of Tolerance ‑ ‑ ‑ ‑        53

        Mathilde Niel – Commentary on Kurtz ‑ ‑ ‑        60

        Pierre Lamarque – Commentary on Kurtz ‑ ‑ ‑   61

  IV. Niculae Bellu and Alex. Tanase  – Perspectives and

       Contradictions in the Contemporary Development of

        Man       ‑ ‑ ‑ ‑ ‑ ‑ ‑ ‑                                            65

        Andre Niel – Commentary on Bellu and Tanase ‑ 82

   V. Mihailo Marković – Human Nature and Present Day

       Possibilities of Social Development ‑ ‑ ‑ ‑ ‑             85

        Mathilde Niel – Commentary on Marković ‑ ‑ -   102

  VI. Lucien de Coninck – Human Possibilities and Social

       Conditions                      ‑ ‑ ‑ ‑ ‑ ‑ ‑ ‑ ‑ ‑ ‑ - -        105

        Andre Niel – Commentary on de Coninck ‑ ‑ ‑     112

VII. Andrej J. Hlávek – Power and Responsibility ‑ ‑   115

VIII. Emanuele Rierso – Rights of Individuals and Demands

         of Society ‑ ‑ ‑ ‑ ‑ ‑ ‑ ‑ ‑ ‑ ‑                                   123

II. DISCUSSION SUMMARIES

1. Human Nature and Common Values ‑ ‑ ‑ ‑ ‑ ‑            131

Robert Tucker                          English section

P. Vranicki                               German section

Andre Niel                                French section

2. Humanism and Radical Change of Social Structures    137

John Lewis       English section

J. Pasman         German section

Alex. Tanase    French section

3. Participation and Bureaucracy ‑ ‑ ‑ ‑ ‑ ‑                       145

Robert Stein                             English section

L. Hansel                                 German section

Lj. Tadić                                  French section

III. CONCLUDING DIALOGUE

Participation, Bureaucracy, and the Limits of Tolerance ‑ - 153

Paul Kurtz

Mihailo Marković

J. P. van Praag

Niculae Bellu

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Paul Kurtz and Marxist humanism (4)

This article is only partially available online without a subscription to High Beam Research:

"The Survival of Humankind Is the Basic Humanist Value: An Interview with Svetozar Stojanović" by Paul Kurtz, Free Inquiry, Volume 16, Number 3, Summer, 1996.

This interview covers the history of the Praxis School as well as the later disintegration of Yugoslavia and Stojanović's political role during this period.

Presumably there is related material scattered in the archives of Free Inquiry; for example:

"A Serb's View of NATO's Bombs" by Svetozar Stojanovic, Volume 19, Number 3, Summer, 1999

Paul Kurtz and Marxist humanism (3)

In previous posts I began to document Paul Kurtz's interaction with the Yugoslav Praxis School, particularly Svetozar Stojanović. This time we will feature another leading light of the Praxis School, Mihailo Marković. He also happens to be the Praxis philosopher with whom I am most familiar. In other contexts I prefer to highlight his brilliant philosophical contributions rather than his political degeneration later in life; for example, on my web site:

“Marx and Critical Scientific Thought”

"The Concept of Critique in Social Science"

Dialectical Theory of Meaning: Part One (Extracts)

Dialectical Theory of Meaning: Part Two: Linguistic Meaning (Extract)

Dialectical Theory of Meaning: Part Three: General Definition of Meaning: The Interrelationships of the Individual Dimensions of Meaning

There are numerous books by Marković and Stojanović and at least one by Gajo Petrović in English, as well as several essays by these and other Praxis philosophers in English in print and on the Internet, not to mention the secondary literature. (See for example the Praxis Group in the Marxists Internet Archive.) I just want to mention these books:

Crocker, David A. Praxis and Democratic Socialism: The Critical Social Theory of Marković and Stojanovic. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press; Brighton, Sussex: Harvester Press, 1983.

Marxist Humanism and Praxis, edited, with translations, by Gerson S. Sher. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1978.

Sher, Gerson S. Praxis: Marxist Criticism and Dissent in Socialist Yugoslavia. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977.

The Praxis School is compared with related philosophical dissidents in Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia in:

Satterwhite, James H. Varieties of Marxist Humanism: Philosophical Revision in Postwar Eastern Europe. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992. (Series in Russian and East European Studies; no. 17)

But back to the philosophical interaction between Marković and Kurtz. I refer now to an interesting volume which contains the contributions itemized below:

Humanist Ethics: Dialogue on Basics, edited by Morris B. Storer. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1980.

Comment by Mihailo Marković on Kurtz [“Does Humanism Have an Ethic of Responsibility?”], pp. 31-33.
Reply by Paul Kurtz to Marković, pp. 33-35.
“Historical Praxis as the Ground of Morality” by Mihailo Marković , pp. 36-50.
Comment by Paul Kurtz on Marković Article, pp. 51-54.
Reply by Marković, pp. 54-57.

When I am able to secure the full text, I will report in greater detail.

Crocker, who incorporates analytical philosophy into his analysis of Marković and Stojanović, devotes some space to a critique of “Historical Praxis as the Ground of Morality.” In a couple of places he mentions disagreement between Marković and Kurtz:

It must be admitted that Marković appears to have two minds about what this “appeal to history” amounts to. On the one hand, he says that three normative attitudes to the course of history are possible and that if soft procedures fail to bring consensus, then “discrepancy in value judgments cannot be overcome” (HP 40). Moreover, in responding to Paul Kurtz, who takes Marković to be trying to deduce the Ought of praxis from the Is and Was of history. [44] Marković says, “It [Praxis] cannot be derived from any factual judgment (which would constitute the naturalistic fallacy) but it is linked with a basic factual assumption—'Praxis is enente of history,' or more clearly: ‘Praxis is the specific necessary condition of all historical development’” (HP 57). On the other hand, both in HP proper and in his response to Kurtz, Marković appears to have something close to hard justificatory intentions. In the latter Marković claims that ethical pluralism gives rise to the need for “a foundation of ethical values” (HP 55). That is, because “various groups or individuals have genuine moral convictions with implicit claims to universal validity,” and because “these convictions are different or even incompatible,” one must ask oneself, “What is the ground on which his implicit claim to universal validity rests?” (HP 55). [p. 214]

. . . with this footnote:

44. Kurtz charges, “Marković seems to be committing one form of the naturalistic fallacy by defining as intrinsically ‘good’ one aspect of human history (praxis) and then reading that into the process as a ground for his preferences.” “Comment,” in Humanist Ethics: Dialogue on Basics, ed. Morris B. Storer (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1980), p. 52. [p. 223]

And here is the other comment:

Because people are used to a dichotomous either‑or (or to compromise positions), they (like Paul Kurtz) are likely to construe Marković’s procedures in terms of the dichotomy [of relativism and absolutism/dogmatism]. To the hard justificationist and skeptic, Markovic’s approach will look like no justification. To the absolutist, Markovic’s soft procedures will appear relativistic. After all, Marković does not demonstrate praxis and proceeds on the assumption that there is no way to get conclusive proof that one ethical outlook should hold for all people at all times. Moreover, what else is relativism but an unhappy compromise that weds skepticism to the view that each moral outlook is true (for its group)? And do not Marković’s procedures entail that any group (or individual) that employs them will emerge with what is ethical truth for it (him and/or her)? [p. 219]

These are, of course, only fragments of Crocker's presentation. In Storer's volume itself there are main essays by both Kurtz and Marković, and exchanges between the two on both of them. I will save further commentary for a future post.

Paul Kurtz and Marxist humanism (2)

Here are a couple of more pertinent references.

Re-enchantment: A New Enlightenment, Editorial by Paul Kurtz, Free Inquiry magazine, Volume 24, Number 3.

Here are two quotes:

The Enlightenment's quest for knowledge inspired numerous scientists, philosophers, and poets, including Goethe, Bentham, Mill, Darwin, Marx, Freud, Einstein, Crick, and Watson.

And:

Regrettably, post-World War II Parisian savants spawned a vulgar post-modernist cacophony of Heideggerian-Derridian mush. Incoherent as some of their rhetoric may be, it has been influential in its rejection of the Enlightenment, the ethics of humanism, scientific objectivity, and democratic values. This literary-philosophical movement had made great inroads in the academy, especially within humanities faculties (though, fortunately, it is already being discredited in France itself). But it has taken a terrible toll, undermining confidence in any progressive agendas of emancipation. In part such thinking is an understandable response to the two grotesque twentieth-century ideologies—fascism and Stalinism—that dominated the imagination of so many supporters in Europe and betrayed human dignity on the butcher block of repression and genocide. "After Auschwitz," wrote Theodor Adorno, we cannot praise "the grandeur of man." Surely the world has recovered from that historical period of aberrant bestiality. However, many intellectuals are still disillusioned because of the failure of Marxism to deliver on the perceived promises of socialism, in which they had invested such faith. Whatever the causes of pessimism, we cannot abandon our efforts at reform or at spreading knowledge and enlightenment. We cannot give in to nihilism or self-defeating subjectivism. Although science has often been co-opted by various military-technological powers for anti-humanistic purposes, it also can help fulfill ennobling humanitarian goals.

1962-1975: High expectations, lean years | International Humanist and Ethical Union

The IHEU member organizations undertook a program of dialogues in the '60s:

In the mid-sixties a series of 'dialogues' was started. The main dialogues were those with the Roman Catholics and Marxists, but many others were attempted-though only few attempts were successful. The dialogues were meant: 1 to clarify ideas and correct misunderstandings about the other party; 2 to bridge ideological gaps-not by minimizing differences but by establishing modes of communication; 3 to support humanist minorities within for example the Catholic Church. 'By our communication we say: you are not alone'; 4 as 'a critique of our own self-righteousness [...] We learn that humanism is not the sole possession of an "elect"; that our "wisdom" is only wise in confrontation and [...] before the continuing question'.

On the dialogues with Marxists:

Dialogues with Protestant Christians have never been very successful. Since 1967 IHEU approached the World Council of Churches (WCC) to discuss the possibilities of constructive co-operation, and in 1968 the IHEU Chairman and Secretary personally visited Geneva for talks with the WCC. To no avail, the Council turned out to be not interested. On the other hand, an IHEU dialogue with the Marxists seemed more promising. In the late 1960s, several Eastern European countries tried to carve out a more open and progressive political course that was less dependent on the Soviet Union than before. In particular Dubcek's Czechoslovakia (until 1968), Tito's Yugoslavia and Ceauescu's Romania showed various forms of 'communism with a human face'. This seemed to make a dialogue with them interesting. After several prominent Marxists had been approached in 1967 and 1968, three dialogues took place: Vienna 1968, Herceg-Novi 1969, and Boston 1970. Subjects discussed were alienation, bureaucracy, tolerance, freedom, human nature, social structure, revolution, and social change. The Marxists professed being 'humanists with a Marxist flavor' rather than 'Marxists with a humanist flavor', yet there were profound differences:

'The Marxist humanists were inclined to condone less humane means for the achievement of high purposes and ideals, the non-Marxists from principle did not want to resort to inhumane means, at the risk of not realizing their ideals.'

The hoped-for establishment of a separate section for humanism and ethics by the national philosophical societies succeeded only in Yugoslavia. This Humanist and Ethical Section of the Yugoslav Association of Philosophy (HESYAP) became an associate member of IHEU in 1970 and was promoted to consultative status one year later, apparently as a token of support. In 1970 the dialogue with the Marxist humanists could be continued in Boston, though on a small scale, as only a few Eastern Europeans were able to participate. After that, the dialogues were hampered by increasingly uncooperative Eastern European authorities, and planned dialogues in 1972-1974 were cancelled. Not until 1979 would there be another meeting. However, IHEU found other ways to support the Marxist humanists in their struggle for human rights. When in the early 1970s the HESYAP group was put under increasing pressure by the Yugoslav authorities, IHEU intensified its support, both by issuing public declarations, and by choosing HESYAP figurehead professor Mihailo Markovic as an IHEU co-chairman.

A positive outcome of the dialogues is assessed:

Some humanists have expressed doubts regarding the usefulness of the dialogues. Paul Kurtz, however, who has been present at nearly all the dialogues with Marxists and Catholics, is convinced that they were constructive and they had a significant influence. The dialogues with Marxists, he says, have 'in a modest way helped to convince intellectuals about the importance of humanism. [...] In retrospect, Stojanovic and other philosophers believe that Marxist Humanism had an important role in moving communist countries away from Stalinism and towards democracy.' 

Paul Kurtz and Marxist humanism (1)

Historical amnesia in the USA is quite severe. There are two breaks in historical continuity that directly affect us today. The first was the Cold War McCarthyite repression of the 1950s; the second was the Reagan counterrevolution that took power in 1981. The atheist/humanist movement also suffers from this historical amnesia. The intellectual capital of atheism and humanism in the USA, and perhaps to a slightly lesser extent in the rest of the anglophone world, is severely restricted, yet it too once operated on a larger playing field.

There is no strain of humanism that was ever more intellectually sophisticated than the Marxist humanism generated by Eastern European intellectual dissidents, and, independently in many instances, anti-Stalinist Marxists in the West. Now I want to focus on the East Europeans, who entered into a symbiotic relationship with western humanists. (The Wikipedia articles are not perfect, but they are convenient entry points.) Most influential were the members of the Praxis School in Yugoslavia and various philosophers in Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Hungary.

The documentary record of interaction between western and East European anti-Stalinist Marxist humanists (note that the Stalinists and orthodox Communist Parties also called themselves humanists) is all over the place. There is one book on the subject I need to track down:

Tolerance and Revolution: A Marxist-non-Marxist Humanist Dialogue, edited by Paul Kurtz and Svetozar Stojanovic. Beograd: Philosophical Society of Serbia, 1970.

In the interim, I began to research Paul Kurtz's interaction with the Marxist Humanists on the web. I have found this most interesting and my picture of Kurtz is slightly altering in the process. Kurtz apparently flirted with the left in the 1930s and seeing what Stalinism had wrought, became a mainstream liberal in the Cold War period. In technical terms, he is best classified as a social democrat, which is the more advanced European equivalent of what Americans called liberalism from FDR's New Deal up to LBJ's Great Society. Kurtz's age matters, for his memory reaches back more than eight decades, and can gain more sympathy with his personal philosophical orientation (apart from his functioning in an institutional capacity) from reading his reminiscences. I will begin with some samples in this post and continue in future posts.


Secularism and Religion in America by Paul Kurtz

I am happy to return to Yugoslavia. This is my fifth visit. My first was in the mid 1960s when my wife and I drove as tourists from Italy to Zagreb in Croatia on a sight-seeing expedition. The second was on the occasion of the first Marxist non-Marxist Humanist dialogue, held in Montenegro, in Herzeg Novi on August 11-16, 1969. This dialogue followed an earlier open dialogue in Vienna in 1968 at the World Congress of Philosophy on a similar theme.

The Herzeg Novi dialogue was sponsored by the Yugoslav Philosophy Association, the Serbian Philosophy Association, and the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU). Participating in that dialogue from Yugoslavia were Svetozar Stojanovic, Stanisa Novakovic, Mihailo Markovic, P. Vranicki, and Ljubomir Tadic. There were participants from the United States, Germany, Belgium, France Great Britain, Italy, The Netherlands, and from Czechoslovakia and Romania in Eastern Europe. [1]

A second Marxist/non-Marxist humanist dialogue was held at Boston University in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1970; a third dialogue in Dubrovnik in 1973, and a final fourth dialogue, again in Dubrovnik, in 1979. At these dialogues we discussed tolerance, human rights, self-management, and democratic participation. They were important because they helped crystallize an intellectual and democratic opposition to totalitarianism in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and in a modest way they contributed to the eventual overthrow of dictatorships.

The Praxis Group of Eight philosophers were under constant fire from Tito, who needed Western support in his conflicts with the Soviets. Many people thought Yugoslavia was the most liberal Eastern European country because it permitted some degree of dissent. We in the West supported the Praxis philosophers and provided a constant barrage of letters and press releases to the Western press on their behalf. We thought Sveta Stojanovic was especially courageous for his heroic stance against repression and for democratization. The socialist humanists of Eastern Europe at that time pointed out the contradictions between socialist ideals and reality. They focused on the early Marx in order to defend the principles of humanism. But this is all past history.

[1] The papers of this conference were published in Serbia in a book here entitled Tolerance and Revolution, edited by Paul Kurtz and Svetozar Stojanovic (Philosophical Society of Serbia, Beograd, 1970). Incidentally, this was the very first book published by Prometheus Books, which had just been founded in the United States. Prometheus has since published some 2,500 books and has become a major publishing company.

Note the essay "Humanism and the Freedom of the Individual" in Toward a New Enlightenment: The Philosophy of Paul Kurtz, by Paul Kurtz, edited with an introduction by Vern L. Bullough and Timothy J. Madigan (New Brunswick : Transaction Publishers, 1994), pp. 49-62. "This chapter was originally delivered at the Marxist-non-Marxist Humanist Dialogue held on September 6-7, 1968, in Vienna, at a meeting of the World Congress of Philosophy. Published in The Humanist (January/February 1969), and In Defense of Secular Humanism."

In Defense of Eupraxophy by Paul Kurtz: Kurtz analyzes the failure of Soviet Marxism-Leninism and Soviet atheism. While he judges Marxism a failure in practice, he nonetheless states:

After a century of Marxism—and Marx was no doubt the greatest humanist thinker of the nineteenth century—and after the patent failure of Marxism, the question can now be raised, Where does atheism now stand?

Furthermore:

Humanism must address itself to the heart and the passions; it must have some relevance to practice and conduct; and it must have some effect upon how we live. I submit that broadly conceived the freethought movement has failed in that direction. Marxism was an effort to apply humanism to practice, and indeed Marxsaid that atheism was merely abstract, that it only became meaningfully expressed when it was realized in terms of Communism; and so Communism offered a program and an agenda for the future liberation of mankind. The Marxist-Leninists failed because they developed a new tyranny. And so we now see that Marxism without freedom is not an authentic humanism. But we must not give up on Marx's basic insight that humanism only has meaning if it is related to practice.

And here is the concluding paragraph:

We need to step up to a new plateau, and that, I submit, must be a plateau that defines a new eupraxophy that is relevant to the human condition, can inspire human beings to commitment and action, and provide meaning to their lives. This task is all the more pressing given the apparent collapse of Marxism, and the great vacuum in the world for inspiring ideals. Unless an authentic, democratic, scientific, and secular humanism can be identified as a viable alternative, then we may again be threatened by a new outburst of orthodox theism, and new cults of irrationality are most likely to emerge to plague humankind.

The Secular Humanist Prospect: In Historical Perspective by Paul Kurtz, in Free Inquiry magazine, Volume 23, Number 4: Kurtz traces the rise and fall of humanism around the world. Kurtz identifies six major ill-boding changes since the 1970s contributing to the decline of humanism. Note:

The third factor that emerged to challenge freethought and the secular movement was the near-total collapse of Marxism. For a good part of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Marxist-humanist ideals had influenced intellectuals; with Marxism’s eclipse, anticlericalism and indeed any open criticism of religion have all but disappeared.