Cornelius Castoriadis's work

...Not only Stalin but Khrushchev and Tito are subjected to a withering critique...

...What it will be in positive terms is still very unclear, and the dangers are no less evident than the opportunities...

...In fact, it is one of his major contentions, reiterated with almost numbing frequency, that both communism and capitalism share the same essential logic, that of ever-increasing bureaucratic domination...

...And rather than demand the smashing of parliamentary representation in the name of direct democracy or call for the supersession of the alienated market by workers' control, the successors to the bureaucratic pseudosocialists whose fall Castoriadis so long anticipated have given up all of his yearnings for total social redemption...

...Not even the dream of socialism with a human face, which was still alive in the 1960s, has the capacity to move them...

...For despite certain fundamental flaws in their positive vision, to which I will return, they contain some remarkably acute and prescient analyses of the crisis of communism that has come to a head in the past year...

...The crisis of bureaucratic "socialism" may have begun with an uprising of workers in the shipyards of Gdansk, but Solidarity was a trade union that wanted to reinstall an articulated civil society rather than absorb the state into a homogeneous network of self-managing councils...

...At least in this regard, the planet he inhabited displays an uncanny resemblance to our own...

...Bold enough to flesh out his utopian vision, Castoriadis devoted several articles to the "content of socialism," in which the specifics of a fully autonomous society were delineated in some detail...

...Its theoretical problems have been demonstrated by commentators like Jürgen Habermas, who trenchantly criticizes Castoriadis in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity for positing a monolithic ontology that lacks an appreciation of social differentiation...

...It is, in short, the world of Western European, in particular French, radicalism in the twenty-five years after the end of the Second World War...

...In particular, Habermas charges him with failing to grasp the importance of the intersubjective interactions that cannot be assimilated to a unified notion of self-institution...

...For all the datedness of his political analysis, for all the flaws in his vision of utopia, it is Castoriadis's stubborn refusal to forgo critique for apology that allows him to survive the debacle of his world and still have something to say to our own...

...o open the pages of these two volumes is to breathe the stale air of a distant and remote planet...

...In Castoriadis's later, explicitly post-Marxist work, such as The Imaginary Institution of Society (1975) SUMMER • 1990 • 401 Books and Crossroads in the Labyrinth (1978), the same model can still be found, this time with what he calls the "social imaginary" of the "self-instituting society" assuming the role of collective historical subject...

...Even after his progressive disenchantment with Marxism, Castoriadis remained convinced that the proletariat was capable of rising up and smashing its chains...

...only then would alienation end and the grip of the "dead labor" of the past over the "living labor" of the present be broken...

...Initially marginalized and unheeded, he finally found an audience in the late 1960s, not so much among the workers whose redemptive role he trumpeted as among the students and intellectuals attracted by his integrity and fierce, anti-authoritarian denunciation of all versions of repression...

...400 • DISSENT The result is that Castoriadis is not likely, as Curtis frankly admits, to become the next fad in the American reception of European thought, at least not on the basis of these early essays...

...Bureaucracy, whether economic, political, or cultural, is for Castoriadis the ruling principle of our new dark age, an age in which barbarism appears in the guise of the faceless apparatchik and the corporation man...

...and while stubbornly remaining a revolutionary, he moves beyond his theoretical roots, ultimately discovering Freud and rediscovering Aristotle as new sources of radical inspiration...

...Lacking a more nuanced sense of the varieties of human action, Castoriadis has to fall back on a faith in society as a kind of primordial self-creating demiurge whose descent into alienation cannot be satisfactorily explained...

...His youthful communist sympathies already behind him, the first allegiance he manifests is to a heterodox version of Trotskyism...

...If bureaucracy was the master concept that characterized all that Castoriadis loathed in modern society, self-management served as its positive counterpart...

...It provides as well an opportunity to witness the evolution of a first-rate critical intelligence through a series of successive positions, without the sacrifice of moral integrity...

...And some of his most effective polemics are directed at the apologetic acrobatics of fellow-travelers such as the Merleau-Ponty of Humanism and Terror and the Sartre of The Communists and the Peace...

...In the immediate postwar years, he grimly insisted that the contradictions of bureaucratic domination were such that a third world war was inevitable short of a global workers' revolution...

...At the center of his positive vision was a simple premise: humans are essentially defined by their role in the production process, and virtually all of the discontents they suffer are a function of its hierarchial division into managers and managed...

...No less fervent a critic of bureaucracy than the most rabid defenders of laissez-faire economics, he goes them one better by contending that the rationalizing imperatives of the capitalist firm— expressed, for example, in Taylorist methods of increasing workers' efficiency—are of a kind with the most repressive controls of the state planning bureaus...

...In the early 1970s, the scattered texts written in the previous quarter century, often published under pseudonyms and known only to his most ardent followers, were collected and made available to a wider readership...

...The only laughter that emanates from these volumes is that of belittling sarcasm aimed at enemies...

...For in so fervently repudiating socialism of any kind they risk losing the still emancipatory residues of a body of thought and practice that was by no means homogeneous...

...For unlike the earlier exemplary episodes in the history of modern revolutionary activity, such as the Paris Commune, the establishment of soviets in 1917 and its aftermath, and the Hungarian revolt, no workers' councils have yet to emerge spontaneously in the great European revolution of 1989-90...

...But perhaps even more fatally, his utopian vision has been called into question in the arena to which Castoriadis himself so often pointed for confirmation: that of practice...

...There could be no compromise with the extension of direct democracy to all facets of political, social, and economic life...

...Although Castoriadis made his living as an economist for the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, his real life was spent as a militant of the French ultraleft...

...Then the failures of Marxism itself, in particular its economic analysis, became manifest to him...

...Although the radical hope for socialism as a fully redeemed form of life, so passionately promoted by Castoriadis for much of his career, can now be allowed to fall into oblivion, the memory of more specific socialist hopes should not be lost...

...However powerful the grip of the new barbarism, Castoriadis never concluded that its tenure will be unlimited...

...A number of his essays express his faith that such events as wildcat strikes in the American auto industry, English strikes against automation, and the Hungarian revolt of 1956 are the harbingers of the final struggle...

...402 • DISSENT...

...It is a world inhabited by intellectuals of prodigious energy, undaunted moral fervor, and intransigent political righteousness...

...Although he soon abandoned the more apocalyptic version of this prediction, he held on to the formula he had inherited from Engels via Rosa Luxemburg's Junius Pamphlet: only genuine socialism could be the alternative to barbarism...

...This soon proves insufficient, however, and he breaks with the Fourth International to embrace a more libertarian Marxism reminiscent of the council communism of Anton Pannekoek and Herman Gorter, whom he nonetheless manages to fault for living in the past...

...Among them are the harsh tones of polemical battles in which leftist enrages selfconfidently proclaim the rightness of their analysis, heap ridicule on their opponents, and predict the direst of consequences if their views are not accepted...

...Now, under very different circumstances, when their author has himself undergone changes no less drastic than those of the social context in which they reappear, they are translated with considerable brio by a young American admirer who earnestly hopes they will still be of use in the political struggles of our time...

...Instead, today's revolutionaries seem intent on improvising a future that will be neither socialist in any traditional sense of the term, nor barbaric...

...And yet Castoriadis's political and social writings do have more than historical interest...

...Socialism would come, he affirmed, only when direct control was assumed by the workers themselves, the state was absorbed into society, and a federated structure of councils replaced all other forms of social organizations...

...Once this split is overcome, the organization of society will become transparent to those who collectively organize it: Either the real social life of society, in all its aspects, will become identical with a single network of institutions, the councils, or else the traditional institutions— Party, State, the management of the economy and of the factories—separated from the mass of the people and thereby from the real life as well, will rise up anew above society, and having become again the incarnation of a particular social category, will dominate it...

...But whatever will emerge from the current upheaval, it will certainly not be that barbarism that called itself socialism, against whose horrors Cornelius Castoriadis so tirelessly warned...

...The smaller and less influential the sect on this planet, the more overheated the level of its rhetoric and the more uncompromising the demands it places on a recalcitrant society unwilling to satisfy them...

...Another more familiar sound, however, begins to dominate as the essays accumulate, that of scales gently falling from the author's eyes...

...Along the way his partnership with Lefort dissolves and other Socialisme ou barbarie stalwarts like Jean-Francois Lyotard go off on paths of their own...

...Among the figures towering over the landscape of this planet is the author of these essays, Cornelius Castoriadis, who was born of Greek parents in Constantinople in 1922 and settled in France after the postwar collapse of Greek communism...

...Short of the wholesale reabsorption of all "alienated" institutions into the "real life" of the collective producer of history, only barbarism will result...

...Unlike so many other radical intellectuals in postwar France, Castoriadis had absolutely no illusions about the emancipatory pretensions of communist regimes...

...A visit to his now seemingly remote world must, therefore, be judged as more than an exercise in nostalgia...

...Indeed, even certain of his erstwhile admirers on these shores have turned against him, if the splenetic diatribe in a recent Telos by its editor Paul Piccone —hiding behind his alter ego, Moishe Gonzales—is any indication...

...Amidst the ruins, there are surely shards of emancipatory energy worth salvaging...

...Well before the Brezhnev era, he noted the tendencies toward stagnation in command economies that merely perfect the techniques of exploitation already advanced by capitalism...

...Here we have in as strong a form as it has appeared in radical theory in our century what might be called the agenda of redemptive politics...

...Along with Claude Lefort, he was the mainstay of a group called Socialisme ou barbarie, which published a journal of the same name from 1949 to 1966...

...This model, which was the inspiration for much Western Marxist theory after Lukács, has, however, lost virtually all of its allure today, which explains the "residues of a lost world" effect of reading Castoriadis's texts...

...The air wafting from these pages not only gives off a musty smell but is also filled with strange sounds...

...Castoriadis, moreover, was not seduced by the contention that despite its political limitations, communism delivers the economic goods...

...In both cases, the fundamental premise is that a redeemed society will produce an objective world it can recognize as its own unalienated creation...

...Such noises seem peculiar to ears grown accustomed in the last decade or so to the hesitant murmurings of a chastened and insecure left uncertain of virtually everything but its own past failures...

...Divided into warring sects, they are utterly convinced of the superiority of their vision and blisteringly contemptuous of their competitors for the role of true vanguard...

...For Castoriadis himself underwent a succession of disillusionments, which are recorded with unflinching honesty in the essays reprinted from Socialisme ou barbarie and its affiliated journal, Pouvoir ouvrier...