Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist Problem. John O’Neill translation. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969.
In 1947 France, the Communist Party faced a crisis. Arthur Koestler’s novel, Darkness at Noon, published in 1940, had sold some 400,000 copies in France, many of them after the war, as the Cold War was beginning. With his main character, Rubashov, and obvious stand-in for Stalin’s former ally, Nikolai Bukharin, Koestler advanced the persuasive claim that the false confessions extracted from Soviet Communist Party officials during the show trials of the late 1930s derived from the defendants’ acceptance of the premises of Soviet ideology, especially from the claim of vanguardism. According to the ‘Party line,’ the leader of the Communist Party, Josef Stalin, marched in the forefront of inexorable historical forces; ergo, he must be right; ergo, if he accuses me of crimes against the Soviet state, the accusation must be right, and I must confess. The French educated classes being nothing if not devotees of logic, such a false syllogism, once exposed, offended their sensibilities, undermining the prestige of Marxism and of the Communist Party in France. With parliamentary republicanism now reinstated, including an anti-fascist, anti-monarchic Rightist party, Charles de Gaulle’s Rassemblement du Peuple Français, the Fourth Republic seemed poised to leave the Communists in history’s dustbin. More, U.S-Soviet relations had broken down, and the American Marshall Plan threatened to enhance American prestige in Europe: What was to be done? Merleau-Ponty sought to revivify a Marxism in peril. To do so, he (and even more famously, Sartre) mixed with it elements of the most fashionable doctrine of the time, Existentialism. “Existentialist philosophy, they say, is the expression of a dislocated world. Indeed, and that is what constitutes its truth”—its recognition of “radical contingency,” of “the human world [as] an open or unfinished system.”
Merleau-Ponty begins with a ‘You’re another’ argument. Liberalism is just as violent as Communism. The European commercial republics practice imperialism; the American commercial republic imposes ‘law and order’ upon its underclasses. Thus, “there is mystification in liberalism”—the attempt to cover violence with high-seeming principles, exemplified in France by the neo-Kantianism that had animated the Third Republic and now animated the Fourth, which had merely returned many of the old pre-war parliamentarians to power. But “the purity of principles requires violence” because reality resists ideals.
Marx, he writes, provides “a formula for the concrete study of society which cannot be refuted by idealist arguments” such as those favored by the neo-Kantians of the noncommunist French Left. “Machiavelli is worth more than Kant,” as both Marx and Engels saw. Marxists evaluate a given society by the criterion of “the value its places upon man’s relation to man”—a ‘concrete’ rather than an abstract or ‘idealist’ relation, to use Marxist language, a relation of economic and social equality. Merleau-Ponty regards Marx’s materialism as “debatable,” but the attempt to look beyond “the temple of value-dolts”—where devotees idolize their paper constitutions, their monuments, their fine ideals—stands as crucial to understanding politics. What one scholar of Marxism has called “the unity of theory and practice” overcomes mere idealism, and rightly so, since “principles and the inner life are alibis the moment they cease to animate external and everyday life.” Anticipating Herbert Marcuse’s notion of liberalism’s “repressive toleration,” Merleau-Ponty charges that “a regime which is nominally liberal can be oppressive in reality,” whereas “a regime which acknowledges its violence might have in it more genuine humanity.” Therefore, “any serious discussion of communism must therefore pose the problem in communist terms, that is to say, not on the ground of principles,” those excrescences of bourgeois idealism, “but on the ground of human relations.” To “brandish liberal principles in order to topple communism” doesn’t “establish among men relations that are human.” The problem with this argument is obvious: what is the criterion for human relations? If it isn’t abstract, distinct from ‘praxis,’ then must it not be ‘the end of history,’ the final state of historical development, as historicist philosophers, including Hegel and Marx, proclaim? And indeed, for Bukharin to have dissented from the accusations leveled at him at trial would have “endanger[ed] the revolution,” “betray[ed] the gains of October 1917,” Merleau-Ponty avers. Marx claims that the final state of historical development will be communism, not because communism conforms to an idea or an ‘ideal,’ but because the conflicts or ‘contradictions’ between socioeconomic classes will cease and no subsequent revolutions will occur. But no subsequent revolutions will occur only if no critical mass of people become dissatisfied with communism. If so, ‘history’ isn’t ‘progressive’ but cyclical. And it isn’t clear whether that is good, either.
But, as one says, concretely, “if one wants to understand the communist problem it is necessary to start by placing the Moscow trials in the revolutionary Stimmung of violence apart from which they are inconceivable.” Merleau-Ponty distinguishes a historical “period”—from a historical “epoch”—a time of revolutionary change. An epoch is “one of those moments where the traditional ground of a nation or society crumbles and where, for better or worse, man himself must reconstruct human relations.” Such an epoch usually entails violence. The violence is necessary if “capable of creating human relations between men.” This formula requires a definition of “human.” “Marxism looks toward the horizon of the future in which ‘man is the supreme being for man.'” This principle cannot be turned into “the first principle of political action” because an atheist pacifism under capitalist conditions “reinforces established violence or a system of production which makes misery and war inevitable” At the same time, he rejects Trotsky’s lauded “permanent revolution”—violent transformation without end—because it is anti-humanist, destructive of men, inconsistent with the supremacy of man for man. “Thus the essential task of Marxism is to find a violence which recedes with the approach of man’s future”—in Marx’s view, “proletarian violence,” the only kind that can produce the universal peace of communism. This being the case, Koestler and other (so to speak) premature humanists disregard Marx’s point, that “cunning deception, bloodshed, and dictatorship are justifiable if they bring the proletariat into power and to that extent alone.” In terms of its ruling offices or institutions, “Marxist politics is formally dictatorial and totalitarian.” By contrast, republicanism under present conditions only represses and does violence to the proletariat and so must be terrorized into oblivion. A true “universal ethics” will be “restored in the new universe of the world proletariat,” but only then. Until that consummation, the cutting edge of history must cut. Or, in a phrase much invoked by Communists at the time, if you want to make an omelet, you must break some eggs.
Regrettably, Soviet Communism under Stalin no longer embodies this proletarian consciousness, although Trotsky goes too far in condemning it. “Terror no longer seeks to advance itself as revolutionary terror” (emphasis added). Whereas the “Marxist critique of capitalism is still valid,” the “Revolution has come to a halt,” for now. Merleau-Ponty calls for a new Popular Front, a coalition of Communists and Social Democrats in France, an end to the internecine vituperation among Leftists. In what looks very much like a far-Left appropriation of Gaullism he avers that French “cannot confound our future either with that of the USSR or the American empire.” To counter the critique of Communism by Social Democrats, he replies that “we have never said that any policy which succeeds is good” but rather “that in order to be good a policy must succeed.” Ideals that go perennially unrealized are false ideals, given the Marxist aim to unite theory and practice. The problem is that “to govern is to foresee,” and in Marxism at least “the politician cannot excuse himself for what he has not foreseen,” even though “there is always the unforeseeable.” Yet the (historicist) politician’s claim to govern is based on his position at history’s cutting edge. “There is the tragedy”: “the curse of politics is precisely that it must translate values into the order of facts” and it cannot do so without a violence that may turn out to be worse than useless.
While we Marxists “have never subordinated the state of validity to the existing state,” we have also “refused to locate it in a nonexistent”—that is, ideal—state, as Socrates seems to do in Plato’s dialogue or as Augustine seems to do in The City of God. “The gravity of politics” is that “it obliges us, instead of simply forcing our will, to look hard among the facts for the shape they should take” (emphasis added). That is, Merleau-Ponty seems to come close to advocating what the classical philosophers called phronēsis or prudence. But not so, because he embraces Marxist historicism, a framework for prudential reasoning that ultimately deranges prudential reasoning, lending itself to Stalin’s purges. Without Marxian dialectical materialism, without ‘History’ marching towards a future in which the ideal of man will be realized materially on earth not in Heaven, “the contingency of the future, which accounts for the violent acts of those in power, by the same token deprives those acts of all legitimacy, or equally legitimates the violence of their opponents.” That is, rulers command violent acts, acts of terror, because they don’t know what the future will bring, and they want to shape it; yet that holds for all rulers and for all acts of violence. Violence can only be vindicated if it really moves humanity toward the end of violence seen in genuine humanism, communism. In the meantime, “the most honorable causes prove themselves”—demonstrate that they are indeed possible, not utopian—by “means that are not honorable.” ‘Idealists’ who pretend otherwise defend “the irresponsibility of political man.” Unlike strict Marxists, Merleau-Ponty concedes that “the human condition may be such that it has no happy solution,” that “political man” in any epoch must suffer “an unhappy consciousness,” as suggested by Socrates’ bad end and by Oedipus Rex. That is, both philosophy and tragedy may point to the ruin of Marxist hopes. Merleau-Ponty’s heterodoxy on this point and others, eventuated in his break with his friends Sartre and Beauvoir, who tried to be loyal advocates of communism throughout the post-World War Two decades until they died.
This notwithstanding, “communism does not invent violence but finds it already institutionalized”; “for the moment the question is not to know whether one accepts or rejects violence, but whether the violence with which one is allied is ‘progressive’ and tends toward its own suspension.” Violence itself “is only appealing in imagination in art and written history”; intrinsically, it causes only anguish, pain, and death. The “exalted sympathizer” of violence “refuses to see that no one can look violence in the face,” while anti-communists like Koestler refuse “to see that violence is universal.” Merleau-Ponty would escape the dilemma by denying that Marxism is thoroughly materialist/mechanistic, as both Koestler and the Stalinists claim, that it regards man as a mere reflection of his socioeconomic status, that it holds history to be a science explained authoritatively by the Communist Party. On the contrary, Party leaders deliberate and therefore may commit errors. Marxist history is “the living element of man, the response to his wishes, the locus of revolutionary fraternity,” not “the sheer force of fact. “Marxism discovered, apart from scientific knowledge and its dream of impersonal truth a new foundation for historical truth,” namely, “the spontaneous logic of human existence,” which consists of “the proletariat’s self-recognition and the real development of the revolution.” To confirm this, he quotes Marx: “History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends,” a citation that doesn’t really confirm what he wants to show but at least does not refute it. His Marxism, at any rate, rests “on the profound idea that human perspectives, however relative, are absolute because there is nothing else and no destiny. We grasp the absolute through our total praxis, if not through our knowledge—or rather, men’s mutual praxis is the absolute.” He calls this “intersubjective truth,” “subjectivity and action committed within a historical situation.” “Intersubjectivity” would have a fairly long life among subsequent historicist thinkers.
Crucially, Merleau-Ponty claims that “the only history we are entitled to speak of is one whose image and future we ourselves construct by means of equally methodical and creative interpretations.” Outside “the movement of history,” so defined, ‘dialectically,’ “values remain empty words and have no other chance of realization.” This points to the ‘Nietzschean’ or ‘existential’ dimension of his version of Marxism as in part a philosophy of creativity, lauding “man’s creative force in history.” History as the past, including such matters as whether or not Bukharin/Rubashov actually did any of the things he was accused of doing, must sacrifice itself, must sacrifice the likes of those accused, on the altar of a conjectured future. Unlike Nietzscheism, however, “the Marxist revolution is not irrational because it is the extrapolation and conclusion of the logic of the present” as (allegedly) perceived concretely by the proletariat.
“We have left Plato’s dialectical universe for the fluid universe of Heraclitus.” If mutual praxis among human beings is the absolute, not God, ideal Platonic or Kantian, or any other standard outside of ‘history’ so defined, but Marxian history isn’t a materialist version of Hegelian dialectic either, if Koestler is wrong, and the communism that now really exists is not true Marxism, “is there in reality any alternative between efficacy and humanity, between historical action and morality?” (emphasis added). That is, is true Marxism as Merleau-Ponty conceives it true? He now considers the Moscow Trials and the case of Mikhail Bukharin.
Bukharin had been a Stalinist, supporting the Man of Steel against Trotsky in their 1920s power struggle. He fell out of favor for advocating the continuation of Lenin’s New Economic Policy after Stalin had turned against it, then was rehabilitated a few years later. His trial and execution on obviously trumped-up charges of treason against the Soviet Union turned Koestler, and not only Koestler, against Stalin and the Party. Merleau-Ponty admits that the Moscow Trials, which “are in the form and style that belong to the Revolution,” “never approach what is called ‘true’ justice, objective and timeless.” That is because there is no such thing. The trials, in his formulation, “bear upon facts still open toward the future, which consequently are not yet universal and only acquire a definitively criminal character when they are viewed from the perspective” of the revolutionary, who “judges what exists in the name of what does not yet exist but which he regards as more real.” Whereas “bourgeois justice adopts the past as its precedent”—asking, did Bukharin and the other defendants actually commit the crimes, as alleged?—communist or “revolutionary justice adopts the future,” judging “in the name of the Truth that the Revolution is about to make true.” The proceedings of revolutionary justice “are part of a praxis which may well be motivated but transcends any particular motive,” a praxis that asks, ‘Is the accused’s conduct revolutionary or not? ‘ “They posit the absolute validity of the Stalinist perspective on Soviet development.” Since history isn’t “steered by the will of determined individuals” but by the concatenation of all thoughts, wills, and actions, “political man would be wrong to decline responsibility for the movements he makes use of, just as it would be wrong to impute to him their detailed direction.” Therefore “it is possible to have to answer for acts of treason without having intended them,” since the revolutionary judge hands down not “a judgment of a person but the appraisal of an historical role, ” attempting “to act in such a way that in all this confusion the forces of progress might prevail.”
In each individual person, there is “a dialectical relation” between “what a man is for others and what he is for himself,” a tension which “the true nature of tragedy” consists of. Tragedy invokes terror and pity. Such terror exists “in each of us,” and this “split between the man and himself” is “the whole secret of the Moscow confessions.” Elaborating on the thought of that man of the French Terror, Louis Saint-Just, he writes that “in a period of revolutionary tension or external threat there is no clear-cut boundary between political divergences and objective treason.” Under such conditions, the conditions of an epoch, “humanism is suspended and government is Terror,” a form of violence that, by forthrightly calling itself violence instead of hiding behind “the judicial dream of liberalism,” will, perhaps, be driven “out of history,” not institutionalized as it is under liberal regimes. Merleau-Ponty’s choice of Saint-Just to make this point must be deliberate. Saint-Just was Robespierre’s close ally and most prominent ‘theoretician’ of the Terror. Bukharin had been that to Stalin. Merleau-Ponty uses Saint-Just as a surrogate Bukharin to refute Bukharin and his defender, Koestler. Translated into Marxism, “man’s creative force in history” refutes the liberal claim that the social contract “enunciate[s] an immutable truth of Human Nature.” On the contrary, the social contract is “nothing but an historical product” to be scrapped when man’s creative force pushes beyond the property rights asserted by liberalism. And beyond the legal rights posited by liberalism, legal rights justified by the natural rights that historicism refutes.
“All legality and reason” have “passional and illegal origins” at the moment of revolution. For example, in World War II and after “men condemned one another to death as traitors because they did not see the future in the same way.” This ‘historicizes’ the conflict not only between historicists (the Nazis and the ‘progressivist’ liberals in alliance with, then opposed to, the Soviet Communists) but the conflict between historicists and the non-historicist defenders of natural right, or Kantianism, or some form of Progressivism—all of whom Merleau-Ponty regards as deluding and self-deluded bourgeois idealists. Those who uphold natural rights as the foundation of justice do not oppose the historicists because they see the future differently but because they see nature differently. But Merleau-Ponty, as a historicist, regards ‘History’ as the “tribunal,” when it comes to judging guilt. If liberals say ignorance of the law is no excuse, for him ignorance of the historical outcome is no excuse. You do indeed have “freedom and judgment”; that is why you are responsible for your acts before History’s “tribunes.” The “dialectical relation” between what a man is for himself (innocent) and what a man is for others (guilty of anti-progressive, anti-revolutionary conduct), this “split” “between the man and himself,” is “the whole secret of the Moscow confessions,” which partake of “the true nature of tragedy.” “History has not ceased to be diabolical.” It will cease to be someday, perhaps, but only at the ‘end of History,’ communism. Meanwhile, “History is Terror because we have to move into it not by any straight line that is always easy to trace, but by taking our bearings at every moment in a general situation that is changing,” entering a “dialectic of the subjective and the subjective, which is not a simple contradiction which leaves the terms it lays on disjointed” but a circumstance which “makes political divergencies irreducible and cunning, deceit, and violence inevitable” as revolutionaries make a humanity that does not yet exist. On this point, “Trotsky, Bukharin, and Stalin are all opposed to the liberal ethics because it presupposes a given humanity whereas they aim at making humanity.”
Merleau-Ponty adds a swipe at Trotsky, another Bolshevik rival Stalin put to death, albeit without the legal fiction of a trial. Trotsky had complained about the trials. But Trotsky’s acquaintance with the individuals concerned in the trials “hides from him the historical significance of the events.” Fundamentally Kantians, not Marxists, Trotsky and his kind “have such a tenacious belief in the rationality of history that when it ceases for a while to be rational, they throw themselves into the future they seek rather than having to deal with compromises and incoherencies.” They are utopians. They diverge from Lenin, for whom “the Party leads the existing proletariat in the name of an idea of the proletariat which it draws form its philosophy of history and which does not coincide at every moment with the will and sentiment of the proletariat at present”; Marxist science clarifies their revolutionary praxis but it does not replace it, since the Marxist understands that “history is not comparable to a machine, but to a living being.” It is not simply organic, either, instead being a living being that makes. “Our praxis introduces the element of construction rather than knowledge as an ingredient of the world, making the world not simply an object of contemplation but something to be transformed”—echoing Marx’s famous dictum in his Theses on Feuerbach, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways,” while “the point…is to change it.” “History is Terror because we have to move into it not by any straight line that is always easy to trace but by taking our bearings at every moment in a general situation that is changing.” All revolutionaries believe that “the contingencies of the future and the role of human decisions in history makes political divergencies irreducible and cunning deceit, and violence inevitable” in order to make a humanity that does not yet exist. Bukharin, Trotsky, and Stalin alike regarded Terror as a form of action to be used in “realiz[ing] a genuinely human history which had not yet started but which provides the justification for revolutionary violence.” “There is a great deal of distrust”—to say the least—among Marxists, “but at the same time a fundamental confidence in the spontaneity of history.” They oppose “the liberal ethics because it presupposes a given humanity”—a human nature—whereas “they aim at making humanity” (emphasis added) a project that “provides the justification for revolutionary violence.” “There is a meaning to such violence—that it is possible to understand it, to read into it a rational development and to draw from it a human future.” (This elides the difference between understanding, on the one hand, and “reading into” and “draw[ing] from,” on the other, precisely the difficulty with a philosophy of ‘creativity.’) They differed only in terms of the decisions resulting from their several deliberations about specific means to that justified end. How, then, to distinguish among them, among their chosen means? “If Marxism is a theory of violence and a justification of Terror, it brings reason out of unreason, and the violence which it legitimates should be a sign which distinguishes it from regressive forms of violence.”
In his attempt to ‘humanize’ Marxism, Merleau-Ponty asserts that Marx doesn’t reduce “philosophical and human problems to problems of economics”; he “draw[s] from economics the real equivalents of these questions.” Merleau-Ponty would downplay the determinism of Marxism, mixing it with Husserlian elements in the manner of Sartrian existentialism. The “element of violence and Terror” in Marxism derives from its agreement with Hegel, who writes, in The Phenomenology of Spirit, that “each self-consciousness aims at the destruction and death of the other.” But to aim is not to achieve, and Merleau-Ponty quotes Lenin saying that socialists do not promise that communism will be achieved. Instead, recalling Lenin’s critique of ‘bourgeois’ imperialism, he writes: “The Revolution takes on and directs a violence which bourgeois society tolerates in unemployment and in war and disguises with the name of misfortune. But successful revolutions taken together have not spilled as much blood as empires. All we know is different kinds of violence and we ought to prefer revolutionary violence because it has a future of humanism.” It is simply a matter of choosing “between different kinds of violence,” since “inasmuch as we are incarnate beings, violence is our lot.” “Violence is the common origin of all regimes.” To those who would grant that but reply that what kind of regime you aim at matters, he has his reply ready to hand: Marxism “accords a privilege to the proletariat,” taking them as “the only ones in a position to realize humanity.” This valorization of the proletariat is “the core of the doctrine” of Marxism, distinguishing Marxist politics from “all other authoritarian politics.”
What gives the proletariat the exclusive privilege to good violence? The proletariat is “the objective premise underlying the revolution.” Economics is now worldwide, making everyone dependent upon everyone else. Both capitalists and proletarians are worldwide classes, but the proletarians are far more numerous, and they do the real work. This new economic condition “induces the proletarian to become conscious of his condition, the very act of living that way motivates the awakening of consciousness,” recognizing his alienation from capital in a way the old noblemen and the new bourgeoisie have not. Proletarian universality is therefore a universality that is lived, not merely conceived, as with ‘humanitarianism.’ As Marx puts it, proletarians are “world-historical, empirically universal individuals,” not ‘abstractly’ universal, like the capitalists who exploit their labor while preaching compassion and scattering crumbs to the poor. Thus, the proletariat, in partaking of the universal intersubjectivity of humanity, enjoys “the sole authentic intersubjectivity because it alone lives simultaneously the separation and union of individuals.” A revolutionary leader may undertake Terror or work for compromise so long as the choice he makes raises, intensifies this proletarian consciousness. “Marxist Machiavellianism differs from pure Machiavellianism inasmuch as it transforms compromise through awareness of compromise, alters the ambiguity of history”—the dialectic clarified but not generated by Marxian science—through “awareness of ambiguity, and makes detours consciously—calling them detours.” Marxist Machiavellianism knows “where one is going and why”; its dialectics may reverse course, even reverse ‘values,’ but always for a reason, “the cause of the proletariat.” But even with the Machiavellian windings of Marxist leaders, that “cause” is “so universal that it can tolerate truth better than any other. Why else would the Russian Communists call their primary newspaper Pravda, which means Truth? (One might think that they are ‘making’ propaganda, but let that pass.)
“It is the theory of the proletariat which radically distinguishes Marxism from every so-called ‘totalitarian’ ideology.” The term ‘totalitarian’ was coined by Mussolini. Fascism in its Italian and even in its National Socialist manifestations, “retains everything of Bolshevism except what is essential, namely, the theory of the proletariat.” Fascism substitutes “race” or nation for the proletariat. Its goal is a “military state,” not a universal society. It is commendable in its anti-liberalism, detestable at its core. Marxism will achieve “the values of liberalism” but in the only effective way, by the means of “the concrete vehicle of values,” the proletariat. The proletarian life, the life of production upholding (as does liberalism) the labor theory of value and the other principles of utilitarianism, embodies “a style of coexistence at once of fact and value, in which the logic of history joins the forces of labor and the authentic experience of human life.” It removes the contradiction, the dualism, if ‘ideal’ and ‘real’ because it is the “working logic” of history, neither rejecting the core of liberalism like fascism, or flailing futilely (or hypocritically) in an impossible attempt to secure the core of liberalism in real life, an attempt liberal regimes themselves have failed to achieve. Indeed, it is “through the historical activity of the proletariat that Marxism resolves the famous problem of ends and means.”
For all his talk about proletarian intersubjectivity, in the end Merleau-Ponty doesn’t stray too conspicuously from Communist Party loyalty. “At present the revolution relies less upon the development of a national and world proletariat than the clairvoyance of the Party, the effectiveness of its plans and the discipline of the workers”—disciplined, of course, by the Party because socioeconomic conditions have yet to ripen into full humanity, full consciousness, among the proletarians themselves. Given “the actual state of affairs” in 1947, “today’s Communists are unlike those of yesterday” because “they have fewer illusions” about the prospect of near-time success. “They are working for a more distant result, they expect all sorts of mediations”; they are for the moment “unable to believe in that historical logic according to which the construction of a socialist economy and the development of production rests upon work-class consciousness which [historical logic] reinforces.” And so, the Communist Party has indeed become “a new class,” one that downplays “working class consciousness” in favor of embodying the working class’s “permanent interest.” Absent the right consciousness in the working class, “from all evidence only the leaders possess information necessary to determine the long-run interests of the workers.”
None of this, Merleau-Ponty assures his readers, makes Marxism “outdated.” Marxism “cannot be surpassed” as a “critique of the present world and of alternative humanisms.” Its doctrine of historical materialism, “the idea that morals, concepts of law and reality, modes of production and work, are internally related and clarify each other” will never be superseded. In both Kant and Hegel, there exists “an a priori or inner structure of life and history”—for Hegel, the Absolute Spirit, for Marx, historical materialism—of which “empirical events are the unfolding” and “man is the agency.” Even if it is incapable of shaping world history,” Marxism “remains powerful enough to discredit other solutions.” It is “the only humanism which dares to develop its own consequences,” namely, the revolutionary need for terror. He concludes with a bit of astonishing drivel, worthy of Pravda: “Within the USSR violence and deception have official status while humanity is to be found in daily life. On the contrary, in democracies the principles are humane but deception and violence rule daily life.” There came a time when even he couldn’t believe those things, anymore. “One is either for Communism or against it. For a long time to come, at least, there can be no third position.” With that allusion to Jesus words, now phrased as an atheist prophecy, Merleau-Ponty replaces God with himself, providence with ‘History.’ In the end, his strained loyalty to the Communist Party parodies Christians’ disappointment in the delay of the parousia, with its consequent elaborate institutionalization of the Church. Since Christianity understands divine providence to operate on God’s time, while Marxist apocalyptic operates on human time, Christians are likely better to sustain their patience.
Some years later, after Stalin’s death and the ossification of the Communist Party bureaucracies in Russia and its satellites, Merleau-Ponty would distance himself further from ‘orthodox’ Marxism, in his book Adventures of the Dialectic. There, he would also offer a critique of the revision of Marxism offered by the most famous French ‘intellectual’ of his time, Jean-Paul Sartre.
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