Where are we in the swirling ocean currents of history? Postmodernism has gotten us used to speaking of and distancing ourselves from the so-called “grand narratives”: the narratives of continual progress or revolution or regression. We could carry this metaphor of narrative structure further by attending to the motifs or recurring plot figures that historical actors impose in enacting history or scribes invent in recording it. Like any narrative, history is conflict and hence opposition. One can no more deny the presence of opposition than one can deny the passing of time. But the shape or terms of opposition are as invented or imposed as the “grand narratives” themselves. I will offer two examples.
A staple of our lore of the Middle Ages has it that a great heretical movement of Albigensians or Cathars arose in the Languedoc region of southwestern France and was annihilated in a bloody crusade instigated by the pope. Their suppression was one of the great atrocities of medieval history. The heretics appear to have embodied the antithesis of medieval Christianity. As dualists, they believed in a material and a spiritual world, the former created by an evil deity and the latter by a good god. By present standards, they were cool. They refrained from eating meat, allowed women to perform sacred functions, and achieved salvation by a renunciatory rite called the consolamentum. The Church saw them as archrivals. And as if to justify the Cathar notion that the Church was subservient to an evil god, the pope and his minions launched a crusade that decimated the supposed Cathar cities and slaughtered great numbers of alleged heretics.
The slaughter is factual; but if the heretics appear as the nemesis of the Church, this is probably because their image was crafted by Catholic authorities who extrapolated it from St. Augustine’s report of an ancient Manichean religion. When the consolidating Church met with resistance in its far-flung episcopacies, it hereticized its opponents and cast them in a role of its devising. Ironically, the Cathar heresy is now a source of regional pride and a lure for tourism in southwestern France. Not unlike other mysterious oppositional movements, the Cathars are largely an invention. R. I. Moore’s War on Heresy1 examines the provenance of documents pertaining to the received notion of the Cathar heresy and concludes that their profile emerged late, through the interpretation of churchmen with partisan motives for imposing the Manichaean template upon the anomalies and dissatisfactions of medieval dissenters. The persecuted themselves included weavers, women, itinerant preachers, pious lay people, and independent natives of a mountainous, tradition-bound region. A young girl working in a vineyard refuses the advances of a cleric. He accuses her of belonging to some heretical sect. An older, learned woman who has counseled the girl is also condemned to the flames but flies off by means of sorcery like that of Simon Magus (3-5). Diverse projections abound. Weavers who disdain the wealth of their betters and adhere to an “apostolic” ideal of shared poverty are accused of doctrinal error (51-52, 91, 171). Opportunistically, a charge of heresy is used to challenge a rival ruler whose sacred duty is the preservation of the Catholic faith (30). Lay folk make preaching and the Bible central to their devotion (220). Such events appear lurid in orthodox chronicles. The Albigensian heresy is evidenced, not by the earliest testimony of the accused, who often only adhered to local loyalties and traditions, but by later chroniclers who were writing after confessions and denunciations had been extracted by torture and “heretics” slaughtered or burned at the stake (200). Marginalized women, independent-minded clergy or layfolk, Jews, and Muslims fell under the pall of the Church’s punitive zeal (96-97, 125, 147-49). The targets were all those whose beliefs departed from standards that were becoming narrower and more oppressive. To single out distinct histories of persecution of women, Jews, or free spirits is questionable, doubly so when we base our view of Cathars or witches on the word of their persecutors. The persecutors, not the victims, conferred the identities, which we should be cautious of confirming. The common denominator of the persecuted was surely their encounter with the contradictions and hypocrisies of hegemonic power and authority. In identifying with the persecuted, we long for a more concrete self-definition and embrace terms imposed by the persecutors in declaring ourselves neo-pagan, Wiccans, or revived Cathars. This allows us to take a stand on the side of the oppressed, but it distracts from the broadest common denominator of their oppression. This is one way in which the motifs of historical imagination determine the self-image of the opposition and perhaps undermine it.
A second example of a motif projected and enacted by the opposition seems more superficial, yet it possibly directs us to a deeper and more perennial form of oppression. It is a staple of our image of urban insurrection that the people set up barricades and fight for control of their streets. We owe the image to dramatic representations of mid-nineteenth-century revolutions universally familiar from a Delacroix painting or Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables. Historians tell us that the barricade was rendered obsolete by the massing of firepower and the widening of city streets. Yet the image and tactic are so influential that I can recall how during a million-person Washington anti-war demonstration of 1970, a burning barricade was set up on Pennsylvania Avenue opposite the White House. It was of course absurdly susceptible to flanking maneuvers by the police. The tactic of “taking back the streets” still preoccupies demonstrators in the most recent protests, often contributing to their failure. Even in the heroic era of the barricade in 1848, it was not as central as we might think. Jonathan Sperber’s history of the midcentury revolution observes that in the earliest phase more of the action took place in forests and meadows. Traditionally, rural people had gone into forests to gather firewood and graze their pigs on acorns. With industrial development, the dead wood which had been common property became a valued commodity needed to power the engines of workshops, factories, and railroads.2
I have mentioned before that Raoul Peck’s film The Young Marx incorporates silly elements of the buddy film, but Peck was astute in his research. One can observe this in the opening scene where a clutch of poor people clandestinely gathers firewood in a forest. They hear the rumble of hoofs. A posse of club-wielding constables rides them down, striking this way and that. The scene alludes to an injustice that the young Marx addressed in print before he became the champion of industrial labor. The issue is more relevant than his theory of surplus value. Access to natural resources which should belong to all is a matter of dispute in the Carta Foresta of 1217, a corollary of the Magna Carta which addressed access to firewood and grazing rights for the common people. Fair access to air, water, and space is no less critical today. What the young Marx recognized regarding the appropriation of forest wood by capital therefore both pre- and postdates the industrial revolution and reflects the reduction of all things to commodity status under capitalism. The barricade is a dated dramaturgy of opposition. The contested commons are a perennial and pressing ground for opposition.
Our opposition adopts archetypal tactics ranging from the clandestine society to the barricade, but it also embraces grand narratives which come freighted with structures and traditions. These shape the consciousness and guide the strategies of the opposition century after century. Elsewhere, I argued that in 1843, when Marx seized upon the proletariat as the ultimate humanity-transforming class, he subsumed an apocalyptic narrative in accordance with which “the last should become first.” He did so without knowledge of political economy he had yet to study, and with no close acquaintance with the social and psychological conditions of the French or German working class. Several factors, none involving religious faith, predisposed Marx to assimilate an apocalyptic scenario. Hegel’s Philosophy of History had incorporated Christianity into the history of the unfolding Spirit. Feuerbach, Marx, and Engels had set out to invert Hegel’s philosophy of history. But inverting a narrative doesn’t erase its structure. It informs the structure with new content. Influenced by traditions of revolution, Marx and Engels proceeded radically to apply what Bruno Bauer called “the terrorism of pure theory.” This meant that Marx inverted Hegel, by secularizing, the Christian apocalypse as a final struggle between the polarized forces of progress and regression. The struggle would resolve history as class conflict and bring forth a new age in which the most reduced would prevail and bring to a close the pre-history of humanity, just as the Second Coming was to establish a thousand-year realm of peace and harmony.
After 1850, the hope for an imminent world-deciding conflict was frustrated. Alluding to the calm that followed the storm of 1848-50, Marx wrote in footnote 25 of Capital, that, “China and the tables began to dance when the rest of the world stood still—to encourage the others” (“Man erinnert sich, daß China und die Tische zu tanzen anfingen, als alle übrige Welt still zu stehn schien—pour encourager les autres”). The dancing tables refer to the then fashionable table-thumping séances; China to the Taiping Rebellion (“The Taiping Rebellion, which is also known as the Taiping Civil War or the Taiping Revolution, was a massive rebellion or civil war that was waged in China from 1850 to 1864 between the established Qing dynasty and the theocratic Taiping Heavenly Kingdom”—Wikipedia). The Chinese revolutionary leader Hong Xiuquan likewise adopted the apocalyptic model of opposition. This can hardly be due to the influence of Marx, and only incidentally to the impact of the Christian missionaries who introduced him to the idea of Jesus’s apocalyptic return. It was above all the shared universal era of radical change and conflict that elicited apocalyptic thinking in Europe or China. Intellectual historians including Karl Löwith, Rosemary Radford Ruether, and Yuri Slezkine have associated Communism with a tradition of end-time utopianism, the enactment of which led to political polarization and violent persecution.3
The Leftist variant of the apocalyptic grand narrative incorporates various subordinate motifs: the world-historical drama of the final struggle, the choice between moral absolutes that transcend the individual circumstances of the actors, and some great leader such as Stalin or Mao. The apocalyptic narrative confers on its righteous actors’ heightened significance, readiness for self-sacrifice, and group solidarity. It is at root collectivist and deterministic. True adherents of Mao in Europe or China were capable of devoting themselves to this narrative to the fullest. However, the early Sixties also favored a very different narrative with contrasting motifs that complemented and intensified the neo-Marxism of the decade. This was Existentialism in its left-wing variant associated with Jean-Paul Sartre. Marxism and Existentialism appear incongruent to the point of being mutually exclusive. The one is focused on material determinants, the other on subjective freedom. Yet they were complementary to the degree that both reinforced the stance of the nonconformist who broke with bourgeois society.
Because Existentialism was rooted in phenomenology, it validated the individual’s immediate experience, divesting it of the prejudices and abstractions imposed by a conformist society. It revealed the bleak alienation and moral absurdity of an existence cast into the world but not of a piece with it. These were not neurotic symptoms to be medicated or therapied away. Anguish or anxiety were clues to the mystery of our being-in-the-world. Like mysticism, Existentialism forged a shortcut from the immediate to the ultimate. The anxiety you experience in a stairwell into which you might suicidally leap is your intuition of the freedom at the core of your existence. The bad faith that allows you to go along while knowing better adumbrates the nothingness which is the internal space of human freedom. Freedom is not a gift. We are condemned to be free. Even in remaining passive, we choose and in choosing, we decide for humanity. We must choose, though in doing so we inevitably become guilty. Sartre famously offered the example of a young man torn between staying with his abandoned mother in France or escaping to England to join the Free French and perhaps die fighting against the Nazi occupation. Resistance and passivity both result in guilt and suffering. This outlook resonated with a generation that broke with mainstream society to oppose injustice and war. Despite the inconsistencies of leftist Existentialism, it at least precluded the self-righteousness of our opposition that congratulates itself on its virtuous thinking and acts as if it were taking its stand with the angels. Along with freedom, Existentialism acknowledged ambiguity and refused to credit good intentions or political correctness. The only meaningful intention is the one acted upon. In acting, we choose our existence and at the same time manifest our responsibility for humanity. The narrative of Existentialism is more an invitation to craft a narrative that is austere, individualistic, and perhaps inadvertently heroic.
Following the example of Sartre’s radical engagement, the impact of Existentialism blended into Marxism and infused a personal meaning into the latter at variance with its utopian, economic, or prognostic associations. Reading Capital with Existentialism in mind, one might be swayed less by the debates about whether Marx accurately predicted the crisis of capitalism and immiseration of the workers or the questionable validity of surplus value or the falling rate of profit. Those are technical questions. The Existentialist reader might instead recognize in Marx’s concept of labor and commodification the deep wounds of alienation. A young person studying or finishing university faces the reality of seeking employment on the terms of those in control of the system of employment. That young person might discover that all her efforts, personality, qualities, and even desires are subject to commodification. In every sphere of life, she might ask what she is worth and realize that her value is determined by supply and demand reduced to the lowest common denominator. To read Marx with Existentialism in mind is to perceive oneself reduced to a commodity.
What conclusions should be drawn from this critique of the invented narratives of history in the making? Perhaps the point is not that we must suppress our penchant for reenacting past drama. History properly understood not only offers us exemplary figures to learn from; it discloses to the present an ample array of tactics and strategies to adopt from the past. A chess player could certainly benefit from an abundant awareness of past moves and their consequences. The point, I think, should be that one must choose one’s own strategy and tactic, not in order to gain stylistic satisfaction, not for the sake of the grand gesture, but rather with the present constellation of forces and consequences in mind. If the point is winning, under no circumstances should one allow one’s opponents to dictate one’s game, as tends to happen when the other side resorts to self-righteous outrage and contagious violence. This not only makes for a bad game; it makes it virtually certain that we will lose.
It does seem as if history had transitioned from the tidal pull and fluvial flow of earlier times to the swirling currents and boundless seas of the present. No doubt earlier times felt the same. To ignore conflict is to live with one’s eyes closed. To oppose falsehood and injustice, if necessary against the most powerful opposing currents, is to orient oneself by the only lodestar we can know.
Signed,
Andrew (Weeks)
- R. I. Moore, The War on Heresy (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012), on St. Augustine’s template of Manichean heresy, see p. 19; on the scholarly dispute and revision, see pp. 332-36 (“Afterword: The War among the Scholars”).
- Jonathan Sperber, The European Revolutions, 1848-51 (New York: Cambridge UP, 2005).
- See “Marx: The Secular Apocalypse,” in Rosemary Radford Ruether, The Radical Kingdom: The Western Experience of Messianic Hope (New York: Harper & Row, 1970, 93-109. Recently, the apocalyptic structure at the root of Stalin’s purges has been argued in theory and documented in practice in Yuri Slezkine, The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2017).
Normal Thoughts 