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Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist Problem

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Maurice Merleau-Ponty's "Humanism and Terror" was intended, in 1946, to be an answer from the intellectuals still associated with the 'official' Communists to Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon: A Novel. Merleau-Ponty summarizes the book, addresses the challenge Koestler poses, and attempts to judge the USSR by the standards of "Marxist humanism" as he sees it. Nevertheless, the book is a very mixed bag.

The interesting thing about this book is that the preface, in which Merleau-Ponty does not address Koestler directly but instead deals with the trouble of Communism during the Stalinist period, the attempts to weigh means and ends, the desire for honesty vs the desire for pragmatism, the failure of people to face the dilemmas of history and the lack of seriousness on the part of liberal critics in this, and so on, is the most interesting part. This is all excellently written and clearly set out in unmistakable terms, at least for a Parisian philosopher.

The part of the book which discusses Koestler's thesis, however, is really poor. Merleau-Ponty ascribes to Koestler himself the views that Rubashov and his inquisitors share, namely a sort of Hegelian-mechanistic interpretation of History as the infallible guide of politics, and the risks and destructiveness this implies - but as is clear from an elementary reading of Koestler's book, he himself does not share this view at all, and precisely wrote the book to attack this viewpoint. It is really odd that someone with the philosophical and literary training of Merleau-Ponty does not see this.

In the subsequent discussion of Koestler's problematic itself, namely whether one can support communism but not communist policy, whether one can be a communist outside the Party, whether there can be such a thing as a democratic socialism, whether economic development is a prerequisite of such democratic socialism or not and what sacrifices are valid to achieve it, etc., Merleau-Ponty does not make this error as much. Yet here he makes a different error: especially in the discussion of the Moscow Trials, which take up the middle part of the book, he completely and uncritically adopts the Stalinist line. He believes every word in the 'confessions' of the accused to be actually intended and seriously meant by them (not writing a word about the torture applied before the Trials began), and he also uncritically adopts the Stalinist line that the suppression of all opposition was necessary to defend the USSR against foreign aggression. On the other hand, he clearly does not believe the actual charges themselves, for which there was blatantly no evidence whatever, as he freely admits. For Merleau-Ponty, the question is then reduced to why people like Bukharin and Trotsky would argue for the Party that 'had to' destroy them. An interesting dilemma, but an irrelevant one, since it is by no means necessary to adopt this assumption in the first place. Koestler's book is clearly superior to Merleau-Ponty's in this, since it makes no such assumption.

The last part of the book is the author's attempt to reconstitute the meaning of Marxism and its philosophy of history. Here, he does criticize the USSR quite strongly (for someone with sympathy for socialism in 1946), and his discussion of the merits and demerits of Trotsky's commentaries on this problem is quite good, if meanderingly written. There is still a lot of vague chatter about the dialectic and the proletariat in an abstract philosophical way, but it leads to several quite good points nonetheless, and advocates taking up a position that supports the Revolution of 1917 as well as communism in general, but without being uncritical towards the USSR or any specific form of Communist Parties and the like, and not binding oneself to having to defend it against better reason. He also engages the philosophical analysis undertaken by Koestler in The Yogi and the Commissar and Other Essays, and undertakes some effective and well-considered critiques of Koestler's metaphysical views in it, while admitting Koestler's own critiques as useful and valid, as it should be.

Here Merleau-Ponty concludes with the famous statement: "Marxism is not a philosophy of history; it is _the_ philosophy of history, and to renounce it is to dig the grave of Reason in history. After that there remain only dreams and adventures."
That, at least, is and remains true.

This is an amazing document to read in the 21st century. It amounts to a full-throated defense of the Moscow show trials used in the late 1930s by Stalin to purge all his potential rivals from the party and the government (usually by executing them). Specifically, Merleau-Ponty, who was one of the great philosophers of the 20th century, is arguing here contra-Koestler and "Darkness at Noon." Merleau-Ponty is quite right in arguing that liberal societies hide the violence (and terror) that they use to enforce their own order - an argument that come critics of Globalization, such as the outstanding R. Radhakrishnan, have deployed to excellent and edifying effect. However, most of the time, "Humanism and Terror" reads like a document from the inquisition in which the ideological backdrop of demonic possession, witchcraft and satanic heresy are taken at face-value and completely seriously by the author. In other words, it belongs entirely to another era. And of course, Merleau-Ponty`s continuous reliance on the judgement of history would tend to suggest that he and his arguments were "objectively incorrect" while the defendants were "proven right" (assuming, of course, that they were in some sense disloyal to the Soviet state).

Maurice Merleau-Ponty may have been a competent philosopher. Politically, he was - to put it mildly - very misguided indeed. While Martin Heidegger supported the Nazis, Merleau-Ponty became a Communist fellow traveller. Or rather, a very specifically Stalinist one. Maybe this was "understandable" in post-war France, since the French Communist Party had fought the Nazis and entered the democratic provisional government after liberation.

Maybe.

And then, maybe not.

The problem with Merleau-Ponty's book "Humanism and Terror" is that it goes far beyond any legitimate idea about an alliance of all Frenchmen (including Communists) against the Nazi occupation. It also goes further than a simple criticism of Western hypocrisy concerning "democracy" (at the time, France and other Western nations still had colonial empires). No, the comrade philosopher positively embraces and excuses Stalin's regime in the Soviet Union, including the Great Purges and Moscow show trials! He does it with a breathtaking cynicism as well, almost a caricature of the official Communist position.

At least I think that's what he does. "Humanism and Terror", first published in 1947, is written in that inimitable and impenetrable quasi-intellectual style which a certain kind of philosophers seems to love. It's not an easy read. Ostensibly, we are dealing with a series of essays criticizing Arthur Koestler's novel "Darkness at noon". The more "sophisticated" arguments revolving around existentialism and dialectics were lost on me. However, the other arguments sound familiar...

Merleau-Ponty defends the Moscow show trials, and claims that the defendants were guilty. But guilty of what? It's not clear whether he believes that Bukharin actually was a Nazi agent. Occasionally, it sounds that way. But on other pages, Merleau-Ponty seems to support a more sinister position: Bukharin was a good-intentioned critic of Stalin, but this in itself aided the Nazis "objectively" speaking. Since "nobody is wholly innocent" before the tribunal of history, Stalin did the right thing when he had Bukharin shot. Indeed, it seems as if the author criticizes Vyshinsky for wanting to prove that Bukharin was guilty of real acts of sabotage, rather than conducting a purely political trial based on the "objective" danger! Presumably, our philosopher really wants Bukharin to be executed for his *opinions* rather than some concrete acts.

Merleau-Ponty attempts to sugercoat his position by pointing out that there are situations when disinterested opinions are as dangerous as actual acts, that good intentions aren't an excuse if the consequences are bad, and that the Western democracies are hypocrites who base their system on violence. This, admittedly, is quite true. But how on earth does it justify Stalin's regime in Russia? Indeed, the very same arguments could be used to justify Hitler or Vichy! Here, Merleau-Ponty has very little to say, as long as he speaks as an existentialist. After all, the existentialist "ethic" sees life as a risk, where we never know the outcome of our choices, and thus the only thing to do is bravely embrace whatever course of action we deem best, and stand for it in both failure and success. A collaborator in Vichy France might have reasoned in exactly the same way.

To square the circle, Merleau-Ponty must adopt a Marxist perspective, which he does quite explicitly in the second part of his book. Marxism (which he treats as in effect unfalsifiable) has divined the meaning of History. The future belongs to the proletariat and the collective economy. Somehow, this justifies Stalinist violence in the present. Although the author constantly tells us that one cannot *really* divine the future, the whole thing nevertheless comes back to this: sacrificing the present in the name of the future. And since nobody is wholly innocent, what's so special about supporting Stalin anyway? Merleau-Ponty waxes especially ironic when discussing Trotsky, quoting liberally from Trotsky's "Terrorism and Communism" to show that The Old Man wasn't really that different from Stalin. So with what right does *he* complain? (This is the only fun part of the book.)

Naturally, Merleau-Ponty has to accept the Stalinist propaganda without question. The forced collectivization of Soviet agriculture was supposedly necessary to build up an industrial base, without which the Soviet Union would have been easy prey to Nazi Germany. Not a word about the fact that collectivization started before Hitler took power, nor about the sectarianism of the Communist Party in Germany, which may have contributed to Hitler's victory. Not a word about the extensive US aid to the Soviet Union during the war, which showed that Soviet industry left much to be asked for. The author also accepts the lie that the Great Purges rid the USSR of potential collaborators, thereby aiding Soviet victory in the future war. Not a word about Communist "collaboration" during the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, or the enormous number of collaborators in the Ukraine, Belarus, Crimea and the Caucasus (Stalin seems to have shot all the wrong people!). I also tend to be a consequentialist in matters ethical, but its precisely the consequences which makes political support and apologias for Stalin's Russia out of the question. Was it right to form an alliance with the Soviet Union during the war? Undoubtedly yes. Was it a tragedy that the great powers couldn't co-operate after the war? Perhaps. But that is something else than Maurice Merleau-Ponty's sycophancy. I never read Koestler's novel, but apparently the main character Rubashov "voluntarily" sacrifices himself for the good of the Party. Somehow, Merleau-Ponty believes that Rubashov did the right thing!

Somebody might argue that our Frenchman simply didn't have access to all the relevant facts. The book, after all, was published in 1947. I disagree. The author seems well versed in the writings of Trotsky and the International Left Opposition, and must have had access to many other critical sources about the Soviet Union as well.

His pimping for Joe Stalin was a conscious one. Existentialism, it seems, is an anti-humanism.