I recently read Camus’ The Fastidious Assassins, and I found myself reacting with the usual uneasy admix of judgement and feeling. Camus writes wonderfully well and with considerable subtlety and depth. Yet he refuses to ‘spells things out’. This is of course a strength as well as a weakness. Its strength is the avoidance of any pretence of ‘wrapping things up’ (which I’m always banging on about, most recently and comprehensively in my Sociology, Health and the Fractured Society: A Critical Realist Account). Camus is an incomparable novelist, doing for revolution and rebellion in France and Algeria what Steinbeck did for grinding, absolute poverty in interwar America. Its weakness? Well, for a sociologist-cum-scientist at least, there is a residual hankering after an hypothesis or two and some evidence.
There are passages in The Fastidious Assassins that refer specifically, philosophically, to the concepts of revolution and rebellion, and for me they resonated with the heated sociological debates in the 1960s on ‘revolution versus reform’ on which I cut my undergraduate teeth.
‘I rebel, therefore we exist, said the slave’. Then, Camus suggests, metaphysical rebellion added, ‘we are alone’. It tried to ‘construct existence with appearances’. The following lengthy quotation comes from pp93-4:
‘after which purely historic thought came to say that to be was to act. We did not exist, but we should exist by every possible means. Our revolution is an attempt to conquer a new existence, by action which recognizes no moral strictures. That is why it is condemned to live only for history and in a reign of terror. Man is nothing, according to the revolution, if he does not obtain from history, willingly or unwillingly, unanimous approval. At this exact point, the limit is exceeded, rebellion is first betrayed and then logically assassinated for it has never affirmed – in its purest form – anything but the existence of a limit and the divided existence that we represent: it is not, originally, the total negation of all existence. Quite the contrary, it says yes and no simultaneously. It is the rejection of one part of existence in the name of another part which it exalts. The more deeply felt the exaltation, the more implacable is the rejection. Then, when rebellion, in rage or intoxication, adopts the attitude of ‘all or nothing’ and the negation of all existence and all human nature, it is at this point that it denies itself completely. Total negation only justifies the concept of a totality that must be conquered. But the affirmation of a limit, a dignity, and a beauty common to all men only entails the necessity of extending this value to embrace everything and everyone and of advancing towards unity without denying the origins of rebellion. In this sense rebellion, in its primary aspect of authenticity, does not justify any purely historic concept. Rebellion’s claim is unity, historic revolution’s claim is totality. The former starts from a negative supported by an affirmative, the latter from an absolute negation and is condemned until the end of time. One is creative, the other nihilist. The first is dedicated to creation so as to exist more and more completely, the second is forced to produce results in order to negate more and more completely. The historic revolution is always obliged to act in the hope, which is invariably disappointed, of one day really existing. Even unanimous approval will not suffice to create its existence. ‘Obey’, said Frederick the Great to his subjects, but when he died his words were, ‘I am tired of ruling slaves.’ To escape this absurd destiny, the revolution is and will be condemned to renounce, not only its own principles, but nihilism as well as purely historic values in order to rediscover the creative source of rebellion. Revolution, in order to be creative, cannot do without either a moral or metaphysical rule to balance the insanity of history. Undoubtedly it has nothing but scorn for the formal and meretricious morality to be found in bourgeois society. But its folly has been to extend its scorn to every moral attitude. At the very sources of its inspiration and in its most profound transports is to be found a rule which is not formal but which, nevertheless, can serve as a guide. Rebellion, in fact, will say – and will say more and more explicitly – that revolution must try to act, not in order to come into existence at some future date, but in terms of the obscure existence which is already made manifest in the act of insurrection. This rule is neither formal nor subject to history, it is what can best be described by examining it in its pure state – in artistic creation. Before doing so, let us only note that to the ‘I rebel, therefore we exist’ and the ‘we are alone’ of the metaphysical rebellion, rebellion at grips with history adds that instead of killing and dying in order to produce the being we are not, we have to live in order to create what we are.’
Now I jump a bit, to pp.103-5. Rebellion, Camus asserts here:
‘must be faithful to the ‘yes’ that it contains as well as to the ‘no’ which nihilistic interpretations isolate in rebellion. The logic of the rebel is to want to serve justice so as not to add to the injustice of the human condition., to insist on plain language so as not to increase the universal falsehood, and to wager, in spite of human misery, for happiness. Nihilistic passion, adding to falsehood and injustice, destroys, in its fury, its ancient demands and thus deprives rebellion of its most cogent reasons. It kills, in the fond conviction that this world is dedicated to death. The consequence of rebellion, on the contrary, is to refuse to legitimize murder because rebellion, in principle, is a protest against death.’
The rebel, in Camus’ thinking, is stuck in a world not of his (sic) making, a world admitting precariously of revision but not of absolute correction. He is necessarily compromised, living in contradiction, and may end up killing despite himself. Man is not God.
What do I take from this quasi-existentialist French-speak? Let’s go back to the revolution/reform distinction that troubled my predecessors in sociology more than it seems to trouble my consociates. Here’s my personal response and/or rejoinder to Camus in the form of discrete theses (most of them either explicitly or implicitly addressed in previous blogs):
- I accept the relevance of the kind of dialectical thinking that Camus advocates.
- I accept too an urgent need for a revolutionary shift from the social formation which is financial capitalism to a post-capitalist alternative (which might be referred to as democratic socialism). How many more cohorts, after all, can we ask to patiently tolerate disadvantage, suffering and hopelessness in the face of a rapacious exploitation and oppression underpinned by what C.W.Mills called a ‘higher immorality’?
- Camus is right to focus on the tension between: (a) the unpredictable risks of revolutionary strategic or means-ends rationality and action and (b) the likely ineffectiveness of reform-oriented ‘piecemeal social engineering’ (which has so often been neutralised by crisis management on the part of the capitalist state).
- We have already at this point arrived at the ‘contradiction’/quandry that confronted both Camus and sociologists like Gouldner back in the day: (a) revolution, with its very real attendant risks of violence, death and a short trip from frying pan to fire, and (b) reform, with a predictably long-drawn-out timeframe leading to an ultimate taming.
- The type of revolutionary activity that draws not only on absolute negation and totality but associated varieties of blueprint utopianism must be displaced by the kind of ‘utopian realism’ (Giddens) or ‘concrete utopias’ (Bhaskar) – that is, by ongoing, dynamic, public deliberations on ‘alternative futures’ (Urry) – now commended by many commentators (Marxist and non-Marxist).
- My concept of permanent reform offers a plausible and viable prospect for change, namely, a way of translating a cumulative series of pushes for reform into a revolutionary shift. Permanent reform calls for a continuing challenging of boundaries. For example, challenges to: (a) the monarchy, as Charles prepares to take over; (b) the existence of the House of Lords; (c) careerism, corruption and unaccountability amongst MPs; (d) a press propaganda operation run by non-dom, non-tax paying billionaire proprietors; (e) a national broadcaster (BBC) resolutely pro-establishment, and recently explicitly pro-Tory; (f) tax havens in British territories; (g) ‘revolving doors’ and the selling off of the NHS and public services; (h) gerrymandering; (i) the survival of charitable ‘public’ schools/Oxbridge, designed to facilitate inclusive, elite recruitment; (j) non-state schooling (‘buy an advantage for your child over others’ children’); and (k) enduring sexism and racism across all I could go on, but I trust the point is made. It’s not of course that permanent reform silences Camus’ contradictions, tensions and quandries, but maybe it offers a non-subservient coming to terms with them, a risk-reducing reform-cum-revolutionary modus operandum. Revolutionaries will disagree, and I hear them, but …