October Revolution

Marxism and legal theory

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For Marx, law or right [Recht] would wither away with the shift to communism. Even among avowed Marxists, this sort of reification of the law is increasingly common. Domenico Losurdo, a Stalinist political philosopher, has abandoned the Marxist doctrine of the progressive dissolution of the state. If scholars like Losurdo feel Lenin was too “leftist” for upholding this principle, others find Lenin’s commentary on the character of the state too conservative or bound to Second International conceptions. My friend Pavel Minorski wondered how “the figure who most clearly exposed Social Democratic opportunism and provided the clearest statement of the need to smash the bourgeois state could then go on to write about how the dictatorship of the proletariat would be ‘the bourgeois state without the bourgeoisie’.”

Nevertheless, I think that Lenin’s line of reasoning was correct regarding “the bourgeois state without the bourgeoisie.” Marx talked about the persistence of bourgeois law or right [Recht] up to the advent of a higher form of communist society. From this conclusion it follows that the state administering legislation would be the Rechtstaat, i.e. the modern class state that emerged gradually out of the wreckage of the ancien régime (the Standestaat, which was based on unique privileges of special estates). Here is Lenin’s gloss on the passage by Marx in the Critique of the Gotha Program, which in turn appears in State and Revolution:

In its first phase, or first stage, communism cannot as yet be fully mature economically and entirely free from traditions or vestiges of capitalism. Hence the interesting phenomenon that communism in its first phase retains “the narrow horizon of bourgeois law”. Of course, bourgeois law in regard to the distribution of consumer goods inevitably presupposes the existence of the bourgeois state, for law is nothing without an apparatus capable of enforcing the observance of the rules of law. It follows that under communism there remains for a time not only bourgeois law, but even the bourgeois state, without the bourgeoisie!

This may sound like a paradox or simply a dialectical conundrum of which Marxism is often accused by people who have not taken the slightest trouble to study its extraordinarily profound content. But in fact, remnants of the old, surviving in the new, confront us in life at every step, both in nature and in society. And Marx did not arbitrarily insert a scrap of “bourgeois” law into communism, but indicated what is economically and politically inevitable in a society emerging out of the womb of capitalism.

Strictly speaking, there is a certain redundancy in the term “bourgeois right,” though it’s helpful to reiterate at times. “Right” itself is bourgeois, something universally possessed by free and equal citizens who have reached a certain age (some positive rights are reserved for adults, like voting or drinking or whatever). Classically, right would be opposed to privilege, explicitly tied to title or rank within a noble or priestly order. This is why those who reduce Marxism to “fighting for equal rights,” or for “human rights,” are so profoundly mistaken. Marxism aims at the transcendence of right altogether.

Marxist legal theorists debated many of these same issues in the first decade following the October Revolution. You can read a few exemplary pieces illustrating this below. What is perhaps most striking about these texts is the incredibly high level of debate, both the theoretical subtlety and practical urgency that saturate them. They are taken from an old book released by Johns Hopkins on Soviet Political Thought. Download the rest of them this link: Michael Jaworskyj, Soviet Political Thought: An Anthology (1967). Not only are they of merely historical interest, either. They have a very contemporary relevance as well, insofar as many seem to believe that Marxism is preoccupied chiefly with social justice, economic inequalities, and redistribution of wealth. Goikhbarg’s piece destroys these misconceptions.

Also see Evgenii Bronislavovich Pashukanis, The General Theory of Law and Marxism and Franz Neumann and Otto Kirchheimer, The Rule of Law under Siege: Selected Essays for more on Marxist theories of law.

the constitution

“Law and right are inherited like an eternal disease”

Pëtr Ivanovich Stuchka
October Upheaval and Proletarian
Dictatorship (Moscow, 1919)
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If, in considering the law, we have in mind only its bourgeois meaning, then we cannot speak of a proletarian law, for the goal of the socialist revolution is to abolish law and to replace it with a new socialist order. To a bourgeois legal theorist, the term “law” is indissolubly tied in with the idea of the state as an organ of protection and as an instrument of coercion in the hands of the ruling class. With the fall or rather the dying away of the state, law in the bourgeois meaning of the term also dies away. When we speak of a proletarian law, we have in mind law of the transition period, law in the period of the dictatorship of the proletariat, or law of a socialist society, law in a completely new meaning of the term. For, with the abolition of the state as an organ of oppression in the hands of one class or another, the relationships between men, the social order, will be regulated not by means of coercion but by means of the conscious good will of the workers, that is, the will of the entire new society.

In this respect the tasks of bourgeois revolutions were considerably easier than the task of a socialist revolution. Voltaire’s revolutionary statement is well known: “If you intend to have good laws, then burn the old and create new ones.” We know that this requirement was not fulfilled by any bourgeois upheaval, not even by the great French Revolution. The latter mercilessly burned feudal castles and the titles to these castles, liquidated privileges and the holders of these privileges, and replaced the feudal system with a bourgeois one. Notwithstanding, the oppression of man by man survived, and some old laws remained unburned and binding. The legal monument of the French Revolution — Napoleon’s Civil Code — came into being only ten years after the Revolution (1804), and only after the victory of the counterrevolution.

In one of his earlier writings (1843), Marx vividly outlined the basic difference between bourgeois and socialist revolutions: “A bourgeois revolution dissolves old feudal forms of organization through the political emancipation of independent persons, without tying and subordinating them to a new economic form… It divides the person into man and citizen, whereby all the socioeconomic relationships of citizens belong to the sphere of their private affairs which are of no interest to the state… Man appears to be leading a double life, a heavenly and an earthly life, in the political community, where he is a citizen, and in a bourgeois society, where he acts as a private person and either looks upon other men as means, or lowers himself to a means or a toy in the hands of others.” Private interests are indifferent, for, regardless of whether a man in bourgeois society is satisfied or hungry, whether he is physically fit or incapacitated, whether he has time to satisfy his spiritual needs, this is his private affair, the egoistic interest of each separate person, with which the state does not interfere. “The state can be turned into a free state without turning man into a free man.”

What the bourgeois revolutions did was merely to put into power a new class in place of the old one, or along with the old, and to change the form of the organization of state power. The mode of oppression was freely changed without changing the text of old laws. The continuity of law seems to be the essence of the stability of human society, which is based on the principle of exploitation of man by man. Thus, the laws of slaveholding Rome survived not only the feudal system but even all phases in the development of capitalism, imperialism included:

Es erben sich, Gesetz und Recht
Wie eine ewige Krankheit fort.1

Bourgeois revolution did not always adhere to Voltaire’s words; it did not burn old laws as resolutely as it should, and when it burned them it failed to eradicate them from the minds of the people. As pointed out by Renner, “The human mind is a reliable storehouse in which Moses’ stone tables with his commandments are as real as any recent decree issued by the government; in it the ancient historical elements are interwoven with contemporary elements into a single reality.” This is the source of all theories of the divine origin of such institutions as sacred property, the “inborn” character of class privileges, the “natural right” of the master to the services of the worker, etc.

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A black man in Turkmenistan: Langston Hughes’ 1932 account of Soviet Central Asia

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Below are scans of the communist and Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes’ copy of his own short tract on Soviet Central Asia, from 1932. It was published under the title A Negro Looks at Soviet Central Asia, and includes copious editorial notation and marginalia around the text. Hughes was known as something of a perfectionist, so it’s not surprising at all that he would submit something he wrote to such rigorous scrutiny.

The introductory remark provided by the publisher is slightly misleading, reflecting a political policy adopted by the Stalinist Comintern toward the black population in the Southern United States. Describing Hughes as “the son of an oppressed nationality,” the brief note suggests that he will testify to “the achievements of formerly oppressed nationalities under the banner of the Soviets.” At the time, Moscow’s line on “the Negro question” in the US was that blacks in the South — especially along the so-called “Black Belt,” areas where they held a sizable majority — constituted a separate nation which ought to be granted autonomy, i.e. the right of national self-determination.

Readers can learn more about this disastrous official stance here in Benjamin Blumberg’s excellent essay “Race and the Left in America: An Unmet Challenge.” For now, we turn to the text. What were Hughes’ impressions of life in Soviet Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan?

Langston Hughes, mellon-sellers in the market of Tashkent. Soviet central Asia, U.S.S.R

Many of his attitudes and opinions, it must be said, would likely shock and offend today’s self-proclaimed “Marxists.” Hughes unabashedly celebrated the secularization process then underway in these territories, inaugurated by the Soviet authorities working in tandem with local communists and fellow-travelers. The struggle against religious tradition was not restricted to gender integration and secular education in school reform, but extended to the public sphere and culture in general.  “Illiteracy, not only of children but of adults, has been greatly reduced,” wrote Hughes, enthusiastically. “The cells of the madrases are empty, and the schools of the state are overcrowded. Already to the youth today, Allah is only a legend and the Koran is forgotten. Marx, Lenin, chemistry, economics, mathematics, scientific agriculture, electricity, and hygiene are new realities to millions who once knew only the sleepy teachings of priestcraft” (33).

Such talk would likely get one branded an Orientalist or Islamophobe by Marxists writing in recent years. According to Houria Bouteldja and the indigènes of France, religion is not the opiate of the masses but rather an authentic expression of non-Western ways of life. Worldviews rooted in atheistic materialism are imports of the decadent, liberal, bourgeois West. Downtrodden peoples living along the periphery cannot be expected to live without the comforting illusions of religious ritual. Perhaps Hughes was simply unaware of radical cultural difference, irreducible Otherness, and similar French theoretical nonsense. Now, thank G-d, we know better than those naïve revolutionaries of the past.

But Hughes had a more immediate reason for associating faith and religiosity with oppression. Citing Mencken — i.e.,  “America’s lovable literary buffoon” — he notes that “Across the water, on the mainland, the god worshipers are legion. Mencken…calls the South ‘The Bible Belt’ because there are so many churches, preachers, and prayers there. Yet it is in this same Bible Belt that hundreds of Negroes are lynched, race riots are organized, peonage and chain gangs and forced labor of all forms are found, women are exploited in the cotton mills, and farces of justice like the Scottsboro trial are staged” (27).

Langston Hughes, women in yashmaks in Tashkent (Central Asia), as all were before the Soviet revolution. The majority are now unveiled

Little wonder, then, that Marx’s 1875 program “to liberate conscience from the witchery of religion” would appeal to someone like Hughes. He poetically recalls,

In industrial cities in the Northern Unites States, hundreds of thousands of black and white workers walk the streets hungry and unemployed in the shadows of skyscrapers… And in the churches, the bosses pray, and the ministers are one in denouncing communism — and calling on God — like the mullahs of Bukhara when the Emir ruled. I walk through the streets past crumbling walls of sun-dried brick, beneath empty towers and minarets beside palaces and mosques. I remember how, as a boy in far-away Kansas, I dreamed of seeing this fabulous city… And now here I am, traveling with a Soviet newspaper, seeing for myself all the dusty and wonderful horrors that monarchy and religion created in the dark past, which have now been vanquished by socialism. (28)

What impressed Hughes the most, however, was the liberation of women brought about by the Bolsheviks. And not just Russian ones, either, but partisans hailing from every Soviet republic. Following the Emir’s overthrow, he explains, came “an opening of doors to women and the death of Allah…Now the brass bed of the Emir still stands in the summer palace, but his wives are free from the harem, and the whole estate is shortly to become a rest-home for the workers of the sovkhozes. Peasants will sleep where they could not enter before, and women will stroll unveiled beneath the grape arbors where once they walked only in paranjas guarded by eunuchs” (25). Continue reading →

Anatole Kopp (1915-1990): the Engaged Architect and the Concept of Modern Architecture

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by Anat Falbel
University of Campinas, Brazil
anatfalbel@uol.com.br

The bulk of the biographical data amassed below comes from an essay by a Brazilian professor, Anat Falbel, so much so that it has been appended in full. It’s rather awkwardly translated, in parts, so I’ve taken the liberty of purging some bits where he equivocates about which word to use. Beyond that, it’s a serviceable enough piece — rather weak in its gloss on Kopp’s politics despite its attention to his party membership, but filled with helpful facts and information throughout.

On engagement

The Petit Robert dictionary defines engagement as “the act or attitude of an intellectual or artist who, aware of his condition as a member of society and of the world of his time, renounces his position as a mere spectator and puts his thinking or his art to the service of a cause.” While he was still a high school pupil, at a time when the ideological debate in France was polarized between right and left, Anatole Kopp become engaged with the French Communist Party (FCP). For the son of Russian Jewish immigrants who was raised between cultural boundaries that permeated and nourished each other, and who faced the chauvinistic and xenophobic France of his youth, the October Revolution signified a new universality, a society free of social as well as national differences, suggesting affinities between Jewish messianic aspiration and a social utopia interpreted as on ethical enterprise.

Record of Anatole Kopp's birth information

Record of Anatole Kopp’s birth information

Kopp’s engagement and awareness of his role as a militant and Modern architect is illustrated in the excerpt below, taken from the 1952 letter he sent to the French Architectural Board that had been refusing his membership since 1947 because of his militant activities. The passage indicates the emergence of on early idea of a modern monument:

…As for as I am concerned, it is the social aspect of architecture that played a crucial role in the choice of studies I have mode. I believe that the path leading to architecture through the Villejuif School, the proletarian towns in Vienna and the great Dam of Dniepr is just as worthy as the way through the Parthenon, the Farnese Palace or the Louvre Colunatta.

…it is widely known that we cannot transform society through architecture or urban planning. To believe in that would be confounding cause and effect…

This study seeks to understand Kopp’s historical work based on his career as an architect and his role as an engaged intellectual. It recognizes his personal struggle with one of the problematic aspects of the militant’s engagement: the need to recognize the primacy of the revolutionary process and the hegemony of the political entity it personified, namely the Communist Party, a primacy that proved increasingly unsustainable in the late 1950s. Continue reading →