Marxist-Christian Monologue (Special Book Review)

...Now the campaign for France is beginning...

...It offers everything that Christianity or Judaism does, although in secular style (like Nuns without habits, priests in sport shirts...

...The book was for him, he confesses, a kind of personal exorcism, the conclusion to an internal wrestling match in which he (and his wife) had been gripped for many years...

...But as an independent human vision--as a theoretical construct--and as a praxis, it seems to be a crashing failure...

...The limb he took hold of was everyman's form of analytic philosophy, not in an especially erudite form, but in the simple form of conceptual analysis...

...But many of the same readers who once applauded the "Marxist-Christian dialogue" exemplified in Cox, Garaudy, and Bloch are now devotees of Segondo, Gutierrez, and others...

...There were serious problems of method to be faced next...

...It better "fits" our state of soul...

...They had bad consciences on both counts...

...The Marxists, from a position of strength, observe certain admirable elements in Christianity which might enhance the future glory of Marxism...

...It does not...

...It is a self-described system of praxis...

...These are not good times for Christianity...

...Softness triumphs...

...The myth that the state is, or can ever be, the servant and instrument of "the people" flies in the face of human psychology and experience...

...Why not take up their 18 The Alternative: An American Si~ectator June/July 1977 work and map its logic...

...Particular arguments might have been fought out in more detail...

...red rose...

...they are not the work of a .22 at close range...

...So hostile are they to "Anglo" culture, and so foreign do they find its concepts and its ways, that they systematically misperceive its nature...

...Indeed, current democratic socialist theorizing has taken refuge in the mists of "economic democracy...

...We owe Vree gratitude for his...

...But not, I think, about the central point...

...Few, for example, are as secular as public pressure inclines them to present themselves...

...Latin American theologians are writing about Marxism as though it had no history worthy of their sober contemplation...

...His posters boldly depict the Gaullist Cross of Lorraine emblazoned upon the revolutionary bonnet of 1789...

...The religious passion of the present age, Vree allows us to see, is more powerfully expressed by socialism than by Christianity...

...He was a member of an independent left-of-center group and did not by any means always go along with the old socialists of the SFIO...

...Secondly, I wish Vree had treated more extensively of "liberation theology" in Latin America, for it is in Latin America that the "Marxist-Christian dialogue" is presently having its strongest, most naive, and least critical vogue...

...One such falsehood is that the religious impulse in the human mind may simply wither, atrophy, and disappear...

...Throughout the 1950s, r~any liberal intellectuals, even some who were anti-Stalinists and plainly democratic, continued to argue as if Communism were an errant progressive movement, only much more extremist and fanatical than i~ ca!!ed for--a movement basically in harmony with the liberal and humanistic instincts of the West, along a continuum from liberals (center) to socialists (left) to Communists (extreme left...

...Somewhat quixotically, since he had no large political organization, Mitterrand stepped in and to everyone's astonishment forced de Gaulle into a runoff, finishing with some 45 percent of the votes...

...Marxism is useful as a point of view...

...but this social reality only confirms, without being the basis of, his analysis of the inherent conceptual logic...

...II Actually, the campaign for France has been going on for such a long time that one may wonder what the French would be like without it...

...We may hope that he prompts each reader to think, and then another, and another, until good people stand fast together and launch a counterattack that will carry us beyond the present inadequacies of democratic capitalism and the present inadequacies of democratic socialism, to a vision more worthy of free and creative peoples...

...For fear of being "misunderstood," many do not state their whole case...

...They break out in rashes of transcendence...

...When the purges of the thirties, and then the Nazi-Soviet pact, demonstrated conclusively that the intellectuals who saw in Communism the end of alienation were mistaken, many could not admit the depth--and the horror--of their misjudgment...

...not to entertain the hard notion that human beings can be in utterly fundamental (and even, at the ultimate, death-dealing) disagreement, was to be naive about human reality, and to place far too much trust in reason and love...

...Their intentions had been so pure...

...It does so not through metaphorical parallels but through feeding the deep impulse in human nature to believe in some cosmic movement larger than the self...

...Mitterrand has been making his way, true enough, he may yet be president of France and has an excellent crack at the premiership, and he and his ideas have all the relevance and excitement of a wet sock...

...Well, then, does it work...

...Is not "democratic socialism" a faintly bogus term, at least as much as is "democratic capitalism," a partial contradiction in terms, a euphemism...

...The cultural soil is not fertile...

...Here...

...If one can tell by the form of the argument which party considers its case the weaker, Vree illustrated fairly clearly that the failure of nerve quivers in the hearts of the Christians...

...Some time within the next year the French will choose a new legislature, and according to the weekly L 'Express, if the pattern that revealed itself locally translates nationally, the present governing majority will shrink to 219 seats, while the combined leftists will get 271...

...So some liberals would never, even in principle, go nearly so far as the extremists, even though they shared with them a similar leftward dream...

...the process cannot be "planned...

...The Soviet empire is riven with dissent and a most severe crisis of legitimacy...

...The consequence is that the secular mode of discourse is canonized in public, and disguises in its ample folds nests of falsehoods...

...For others, the details might have been handled differently, even the whole conceptual scheme might have had a different shape...

...Right, left: they cannot live, evidently, without the archaic symbolisms expressed by these political terms which have their origins in the National Assembly of the revolutionary period...

...Long contemplating this review, I envisaged a schematic summary of Vree's argument...

...Here, too, good will and "openness" exceed respect for harsh historical closures...

...Marxist ideology is wrong not only as praxis, perhaps, but also as theory...

...Permit me, instead, to work around the edges, and to harvest some of the nicer conclusions his efforts lead to...

...Or will it, too, go the way of the rest of the creed...

...They surrendered to a sentimental liberal myth of "understanding...

...Their implicit image was that Communists were more ruthlessly radical than socialists or liberals...

...This success, together with his poskion as a vociferous anti-Gaullist since the beginning of the Fifth Republic, won him the respect of liberal anti-Gaullists like Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber and JeanFrangois Revel...

...The authoritarian practices it regularly becomes ensnared in are inherent in its many mistakes--mistakes about the nature of social life, the texture of political life, and the creative forces of economic life...

...It works best as a parasitic, vision, piggybacking on and modifying democratic capitalism...

...The Soviets, who claim that ideas are secondary, in practice fear nothing so much as dissent and intellectual freedom...

...The following, I believe, have been renounced in recent years: (1) submission of national foreign policy to the judgment of the International, i.e., to the Party in the Soviet Praesidium...

...An intelligent reaction to Cold War rigidities is not to go limp like applesauce...

...not even the Light of the world was permitted to do so...

...3) the nationalization of industry...

...Vree's book, it should be said, is important, not because it completes the task but because it defines it, focuses it, and com...

...Next, Vree works out three touchstones of what should count as orthodox Christianity, based upon what has been taught and believed down the ages, and three touchstones of what should count as orthodox Marxism, based upon publicly enforced commitments of Marxist theory and practice...

...And is not socialism, too, inherently authoritarian in practice...

...Those who took part in the Christian-Marxist dialogue exhibited an excess of optimism, of openness, and of the dialogic frame of mind...

...Judgment is the intellectual's chief claim to superior moral worth...

...6) the imposition of rig]'d egalitarianism, such that each person is paid only in proportion to need or in proportion to public service, and in strict equality to everyone else...

...In the meantime, the antiCommunists are squabbling...

...He asked himself some breathtakingly clear questions: What are the conceptual commitments of Marxism and of Christianity, and in what respects are they compatible or incompatible...

...Let them choose as they will The Alternative: An American Spectator .June/July 1977 19 choose...

...he was committed to decolonization, for example, before they were...

...While President Giscard d'Estaing tries to conciliate the social-democratic left, Jacques Chirac, leader of the Rassemblement pour la Rtpublique (Gaullist Party) and newly elected mayor of Paris--he defeated the President's hand-picked candidate in the first round of voting--is sounding the old alarum, "To arms, citizens...

...What the state bites off it swallows...

...2) submission of national domestic planning to the national Party...

...But Vree took them up in a reasonably felicitous manner...

...They are driven, despite themselves, to invest the arts, or enlightenment, or intellectual status, or politics, or sex, with errant religious passion...

...Michael Novak is Professor of Reh'gton at Syracuse University and author of The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics...

...There is a complicating facet to American reality not often brought to the surface...

...So instead of policies the French present their colors, and there is almost nothing they enjoy telling you more than whether they are men of the right, or men of the left...

...He makes auxiliary remarks about other figures, like Leslie Dewart, but basically his focus is clean and simple...

...Can anyone of sound mind believe-in both...

...He is somewhat aided in this task by the recent public ejection from the Party of those Marxists who took part in the dialogue...

...One cannot understand socialism in America--constituted by all two thousand members of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, led by Irving Howe and Michael Harrington--without grasping its religious energy...

...Conflict, pressure groups, and divided interests must compete...

...Superior, too, in common kindness, as were the Irish servants who cared for Miss Hellman...

...Who today studies Marxist texts in order to learn how to live well...

...4) the expropriation of all property by the state...

...Perhaps he felt the mud pressing on his lungs, he was gasping for broathmparticularly after personal experiences in East Germany--but, in any case, he grasped for a limb, took hold of it, and slowly pulled himself free, the wet viscous stuff slipping slowly from him, dripping away...

...In a non-Marxist way, Vree gives ideas primacy, rather than "underlying" political-economic realities...

...His arguments are not exegetical...

...Each single voice counts...

...They are, rather, at the distance of howitzers--he concentrates, as it were, on the shape of the landscape, the movement of the tanks (specks there ahead on the dust), and not upon the buttons on the uniforms of a particular enemy, the way that enemy combs his hair, his mannerisms, his ties...

...and warning his countrymen of the collectivist menace...

...Strictly as a praxis, what is one who is a Marxist or a socialist committed to...

...At times, it is displaced...

...The average Frenchman has an astounding ineptitude when it comes to defining what he wants in matters of public policy, mostly because he spends so much of his time grumbling about the way things are--as well he might: The only thing he knows for sure is that the top-heavy, excessively centralized, meanly bureaucratic government is constantly stepping on his toes and every janitor in the post office thinks of himself as some kind of Napoleon...

...How, precisely, is Soviet imperialism different in practice from the empire of the Czars...

...9 Q q Q 6 6 S t q ~ q l t ~ Q O ~ O Q ~ 6 ~ g e U ~ Q I ~ O ~ S t l W O W V ~ n t ~ . . . . . U . . . . . . I O D O I O ~ Q Q t O Q ~ I ~ m O ~ O O ~ * t O ~ Q ~ b ~ I ~ I O ~ . . . . ~ a O ~ U i J . . . . . O ~ I ~ U W ~ I ~ O ~ . . . . . ~ EMINENTOES by Roger Kaplan Frangois Mitterrand" The Glamor of Tedium May 12, 1977 The campaigns for the more than 38,000 municipalities of France are finished and the candidates of the Union de la Gauche (the Socialist-Communist alliance) have won a resounding victory, gaining control of some two-thirds of the cities of over 30,000 inhabitants...

...They had meant so well...

...Many are far more deeply religious, and with some precision of detail, than they allow to show in public...

...In 1965 their southern chieftain, Craston Deferre, stumbled on his way to challenging Charles de Gaulle in the presidential election...

...Trust in reason and love is no part of Christian faith...

...There are six variables, three each for Marxism and for Christianity, and three central authors...

...For those who disagree with the book's analyses and conclusions, there are ample openings for rebuttal...

...It offers a moral dream...

...The more a democracy becomes socialist, the more--necessarily-it becomes authoritarian and bureaucratic...

...Strangling might be a better way to put it, but the Socialists, who won about 30 percent of the votes (the Communists received just under 20 percent and the small parties affiliated with the Union about 4 percent), want very badly to appear stylish and contemporary and attuned with reality...

...And does it work...

...Next to race, Communism has long been the greatest source of dishonesty in American life...

...The nation is so publicly pragmatic in its discourse, on the one hand, and so intensely pluralistic, on the other, that individuals seldom voice in public the true private springs of their own moral passions...

...Against this appeal to France's national traditions, the left is countering with its own, and for a year the walls will be plastered with the clenched fist grasping a Roger Kaplan, a native of Paris, is a doctoral candidate with the Committee on the History of Culture at the University of Chicago...

...Socialism does...

...The public language, therefore, is far more secular in tone than private realities...

...their destiny is theirs...

...It gives history meaning and direction...

...We have been taught to desire an earthly Messiah...

...The principal campaign poster of their leader, First Secretary of the party, Frangois Mitterrand, shows him serenely walking along a beach in a raincoat, under a legend: "Socialism, an idea making its way...

...It offers vision...

...Socialism is a name for historical direction and personal moral desire and communal transformation...

...The more religion is driven out, the more energy available for (say) socialism...

...One by one, the classic pillars of that thought have been discarded...

...it is, rather, to look for the exact points of divergence...

...This is not a spy novel, but a wide-open battle...

...In AngloSaxon culture, supposedly committed to the primacy of ideas, the conviction that traditions, institutions, and the concrete imperatives of organic history safely contain ideas permits ample intellectual liberty...

...We want the new men, and the new women, and the end of alienation now...

...It assigns roles in the cosmology of evil to capitalism, corporations, profits, and property...

...severe logic was in the Communists' favor...

...he is profoundly and sincerely a man of the left...

...Indeed on the level of praxis, profound contradictions emerge in Communist and in socialist thought...

...I wish, indeed, that Vree had taken up two other tasks, which he did not...

...Christianity offers no such meaning within history...

...One may recognize in advance that so much bloodshed, past and yet to come, indicates unmistakably hard and edgy conflicts...

...Among the Christians, Vree chose Harvey Cox, and among the Marxists, Roger Garaudy and Ernst Bloch...

...It offers transformation into a new society, the new human type, the new socialist men and women...

...His most recent book is The Joy of Sports...

...Could the lowliest Irish pol in the lowliest Holy Name Society have been more correct than many intellectuals about the fundamental intellectual issue of their time...

...But logic had to be tempered by sentiments of compassion, sensitivity, and morality...

...They nourished Communist dreams and liberal scruples...

...Francois Mitterrand, born in 1916, loves to tell it as much as anyone and repeats it endlessly...

...Vree's treatment is itself brief and to the point...

...One would rather invest enormous energies in putting down common Americans for their political naivet& The paranoid style of American intellectuals has not made honesty easy...

...To summarize this network of relationships would weaken its conceptual force and detract, essentially, from Vree's handiwork...

...I have decided against it...

...Is "democracy at the work place" a practical device for increasing productivity and blissful lack of alienation...

...For "the people" are not monolithic, but pluralistic...

...Not even Communists invest in their own texts the hope of their own future...

...Vree, in a word, has fired only an opening shot in what is shaping up as the great intellectual struggle of the decade of the '80s (which will include 1984...

...Precocious youth from a solid, bourgeois, and Catholic family, he played an active and courageous role in the Resistance, studied law, entered politics, and became the youngest minister in the musical-chairs governments of the sad Fourth Republic...

...That makes socialism seem more authentic...

...5) the necessity of total "socialist planning...

...The "Christian-Marxist dialogue" is fifteen years old now...

...They demand that Marxism abandon its excesses, but not that it cease being Marxism...

...That invitations to tyranny should parade under the flag of "liberation," however, is an irony too heavy to bear...

...But not to confront direct incompatibilities...

...Public discourse, especially among the enlightened, is often a kind of lie...

...Dale Vree is the first Christian thinker to pull himself back from this recent drift of events, this rolling wall of mud pushing before it everything in the ravine...

...The quotient of religious energy in the human breast remains relatively constant...

...On any given point, Vree notes, it is the Christians who desire to yield, and to show that Christianity can be adapted to Marxism...

...First, I wish he had confronted Marxism on the practical plane...

...No merely sunny contemporary good will is apt to melt the human heart...

...There was obviously hope that he would work to build a responsible left opposition, something the much admired Pierre Mend~s-France had never quite pulled off for the simple reason that he always seemed to prefer being a minor20 The Alternative: An American Spectator June/July 1977...

...mences it...

...To treat with each civilly, to address each other in conversation, was--as Vree notes--neither morally nor intellectually wrong...

...it highlights certain methods for interpreting the relation'of economic life to political life...

...And it is the Christians who are beseiged and encircled...

...But then most non-religious people develop symptoms...

...Many were prevented by their liberal hearts from embracing the icy pragmatism of terror...

...And some liberals would regard as an attack upon themselves any attack upon Communists, not just because a violation of civil rights in any part is an attack upon the whole, but also because they could so well "understand" (since they shared them) the motivations and the dreams of the Communists, without being able to stomach the rigorous logic or the "direct methods" of the Party...

...it has a history, and several paradigmatic figures...

...The history of twentieth-century intellectual life in America, Robert Warshow once wrote, pivots upon one issue: how to judge the reality of Communism...

...Is there not room, then, for "dialogue" between socialism and Christianity, or indeed between the more extreme cousin of socialism, Communism, and Christianity...

...It is exceedingly difficult for an intellectual (Lillian Hellman, for example) to admit to a seriously flawed judgment...