Castoriadis and Critical Theory

Crisis, Critique and Radical Alternatives

Christos Memos

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781137034458
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137034465
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Filosofia politica

By exploring the concepts of 'crisis' and 'critique', this study offers a thought-provoking re-examination of the political and social thought of Cornelius Castoriadis in light of the current world crisis and with regard to his radical critique of both the traditional Left and contemporary capitalist societies.

1

Origins: Early Years in Greece, Migration and Life in France

The aim of this chapter is to illuminate Castoriadis’ early stages and initial influences following his transition from Greece to France. His formative years were very significant for his future intellectual and political evolution. The ideas that he developed later were definitely related to his social environment and were inseparable from the cultural and historical process. More specifically, this chapter examines the concrete historical circumstances, the sociopolitical background and the intellectual milieu in Greece and France that influenced the early Castoriadis. He went through unique experiences that formed his personality and his intellectual background. Growing up in Greece, he lived under the dictatorship of 4 August 1936 and the Nazi occupation of Greece (1941). He also joined the Greek communist-Trotskyist movement. He realized from experience what Stalinism and Trotskyism meant and he experienced the very beginning of the Greek civil war (the armed conflict of December 1944), as well as the intervention of British imperialism. The chapter goes on to investigate the distinctiveness of Castoriadis’ migration and outlines the political and intellectual context in post-war France, where he experienced the developing intellectual ferment and opened himself up to other radical influences and intellectual currents. In this regard, the chapter concludes that his early years in Greece, the existentialist experience of his migration and, later on, the intellectual milieu in France decisively shaped his intellectual distinctiveness and were reflected in Castoriadis’ later theoretical and political trajectory.

1.1 Formative years and the historicopolitical setting in Greece

Cornelius Castoriadis was born on 11 March 1922 in Constantinople (Istanbul), but he grew up in Greece, as the Greek Turkish conflict forced his father to relocate the family to Athens. Cornelius’ father, Caesar, was a Francophile, an admirer of atheist Voltaire and a rabid anti-royalist. His mother, Sofia, had a great interest in music and imparted to her son her love for the arts. She developed symptoms of schizophrenia after 1933, no doubt an unpleasant situation for young Castoriadis’ emotional wellbeing. Both parents had a strong influence on Castoriadis’ intellectual habits and cultivated his curiosity and critical thinking. Castoriadis was 13 years old when he expressed a strong interest in philosophy and began to read classical philosophical texts by himself. At the same time, the social conditions and the Greek political developments fostered his involvement in political issues.

During that period, Greece was marked by profound social changes and political upheavals, which were accelerated due to the military defeat by the Turks in 1922, the ‘National Disaster’ and the collapse of the ‘Great Idea’. The military collapse caused a massive wave of refugees from the Near East to Greece, whose urgent need for re-establishment, integration and welfare accelerated the land reform and led to rapid urbanization and industrialization. The rapidly increasing industrial expansion, however, was not accompanied by analogous technological advances. There was no heavy industry and working-class incomes remained extremely meagre. The working conditions in the factories were awful and the economic achievements did not entail an improvement in working-class standards of living. Greece remained an agrarian and petty bourgeois country, and its economic growth was coupled with an authoritarian parliamentary system and political instability. The dominant bourgeoisie was represented by two major political parties: the liberals (Venizelists) and the populists (anti-Venizelists). Their struggle to seize political power and establish liberal political institutions was based on charismatic leadership and repressive political measures in order to preserve the bourgeois order. This period was also marked by military coups and dictatorships. Among them, Pangalos’ (1925–1926) and Metaxas’ (1936–1941) dictatorships not only led the institutions of bourgeois democracy to collapse but also involved mass political persecutions and established concentration camps (Metaxas) for leftist and Communist Party members. Both parliamentary and dictatorial governments under the pretext of the threat of communism imposed their political terrorism in order to oppress and control the Greek labour movement.

Within this political context and around the same time as the beginning of his philosophical engagement, Castoriadis started to express his political interests through the reading of the communist publications and texts by Marx that were available in Greece in the years before the outbreak of the Second World War. Philosophy and politics would constitute the two pillars upon which Castoriadis’ intellectual course would be based, and they would determine the content and nature of his scholarly work. Castoriadis was attracted to Marxism due to his ‘very strong feeling about the absurdity and injustice of the existing state of affairs’,¹ and his mode of thinking was arguably marked by the political milieu in Greece and his participation in the Greek working-class and communist movement. Though fragmented and weak at its very beginning, the Greek labour movement was organized at a national level in 1918, thanks to the foundation of the Greek General Foundation of Labour. The formation of the Greek Communist Party (KKE) and its Bolshevization in 1924 was a turning point in the course of the labour and leftist movement. Throughout the interwar period the Greek Communist Party was prosecuted, oppressed and, from time to time, outlawed. The dictatorship of 1926 signalled the beginning of a period of systematic persecutions and underground political activities for the members of the party. The ‘Idionymon Law’ of 1929, passed by the liberals, introduced punishment for communist ideas and resulted in the imprisonment and the exile of thousands of communist members and leftists. Given the fact that the labour movement gained strength during these years (e.g. mass strikes and bloody demonstrations in Thessalonica, May 1936), Metaxas’ dictatorship (August 1936) dealt a devastating blow to the Greek leftist movement. Not only communist and leftist citizens but also republicans were arrested and exiled to islands and concentration camps. At the same time, basic bourgeois civil rights (e.g. freedom of speech, expression, association and the press) were abolished.

The role of the Communist Party at that time should be understood in a double sense. On the one hand, it reflects the international developments of the Communist movement and more particularly what happened to the USSR, especially after the intervention of the Comintern and the Stalinization of the Greek Party in 1931. Due to the fact that there was no other mass radical alternative to the bourgeois policy during the interwar period in Greece, the Communist Party capitalized on the initial achievements of the Russian Revolution. On the other side, the course of the Communist Party reflects the development of the Greek Labour movement with its difficulties and contradictions. More emphatically, however, it shows the great heroism and self-sacrifices of the Greek communists, which attracted many young intellectuals who rallied round the Communist Party, among them Cornelius Castoriadis, who had joined the underground Greek Communist Youth in 1937. He thus first became familiar with the practice of Marxism through the political activities of the ‘orthodox’ and Stalinist Greek Communist Party. Later on, after the beginning of the Nazi occupation, Castoriadis expressed his opposition to the ‘chauvinistic policy’ of the Greek Communist Party (KKE). With some of his comrades, he endeavoured to alter the policy of the Communist Party, but he very soon came to realize that this was far from being a realistic goal.² Having been disillusioned, he established relationships with the Trotskyists and, more specifically, he joined the Trotskyist group of Stinas in 1942.

Stinas was a leading member of the Greek Communist Party, but later on he espoused Trotskyism and led several Trotskyist groups that resulted from the fragmentation and numerous splits of the Trotskyist Greek movement. Despite their sectarian policy and their political marginalization, all of these minor groups kept alive a critical attitude, particularly concerning the nature of the Soviet system. Even under the hard times of lawlessness, exile or imprisonment, the Greek Trotskyists continued a critical dialogue on ‘Stalinism’ and the ‘Russian question’. In this context, Stinas’ political and theoretical thought had contributed to a large extent to Castoriadis’ intellectual progress.³ According to Castoriadis, Stinas was for him ‘a model fighter’, ‘a fighter without political taboo’.⁴ Having been under the influence of Trotskyism and Stinas’ ideas, Castoriadis formed the basic core of his later critique of the Soviet system. The following questions raised by Stinas designated Castoriadis’ early thinking and shaped his theoretical itinerary: Why did the Russian Revolution degenerate? Why did Lenin and Bolshevism emerge? How did they win the working class’s confidence? Why did Luxemburg’s critique remain a voice in the wilderness? And finally, did Marx’s theory include from the very beginning some elements that rendered possible this development and allowed bureaucrats and ‘executioners’ to make use of it?⁵ One could clearly see in Castoriadis’ writings in France an attempt to provide a satisfactory reply to Stinas’ agonizing questions.

In this climate, Castoriadis argued that the armed conflict between the National People’s Liberation Army (ELAS) and the British Army (in December 1944) arose from the totalitarian and bureaucratic policy of the Greek Communist Party, which aimed at seizing absolute power.⁶ He criticized the chauvinistic policy of the Greek Communist Party, its centralism and bureaucratization, and characterized the conflict of December as ‘the first Stalinist attempt of a coup d’état in Greece’.⁷ In this context, in early 1945, Castoriadis went on to claim that the political activities of the Greek Trotskyist group that he belonged to did not accord with Trotsky’s theory of the USSR as a ‘degenerated workers’ state’. Hence he suggested that the group had to dismiss Trotsky’s analysis.⁸ Stinas’ Trotskyist group made an effort to apply Luxemburg’s internationalism to the specific conditions in Greece and did not draw any distinction among Germans, British, French, Russians and Greeks. Hence for this policy the Greek Trotskyists, with, of course, Castoriadis among them, were persecuted by the Germans, the Greek Stalinists and later on by the British Army and the right-wing Greek government.⁹ In other words, Castoriadis experienced not only the fight against fascism and British imperialism but also the fight between ‘comrades’, since the Stalinist Greek Communist Party carried out assassinations of Greek Trotskyists and socialists. He thereby obtained a very strong taste of orthodox Marxism in practice through Stalinist ideology, the bureaucracy and dogmatism of the KKE. He also ran the risk of being arrested and murdered by the Greek Stalinists, and undoubtedly this experience caused him obsessions or traumas, which proved to be crucial in forming the ground of his later critique of Marxism and Marx.

1.2 Cultural milieu and intellectual influences

Throughout this early period in Greece, Castoriadis not only had unique practical-political experience but he obtained a very strong flavour of the vulgar, codified and mechanistic Marxism of the Greek Communist movement. The transmission of Marxist ideas was undoubtedly linked with the level of Greek capitalist development and the organization of the labour movement, as well as with the political and ideological class struggle that was taking place in those circumstances. Unlike in other advanced countries, Greek Marxism was to a large extent formed and transmitted in underground conditions and more specifically in prisons, places of exile and concentration camps. A truly dogmatic and oversimplified Marxism based on the eclectic reading of texts was circulated and reproduced among the militants and used as a theoretical tool for political and social struggles. Economism, determinism and many aspects of the mechanistic and instrumental materialism that characterized the theory and practice of the Greek Communist movement derived from that period. In a repressive context of censorship and punishment of Marxist and leftist ideas, the Leninist and Soviet version of Marxism was the dominant one.

Yet the political and ideological dominance of the Communist Party in the domain of the Greek Left did not mean that the other leftist groups had no theoretical and publishing activity.¹⁰ The most significant contribution that these political groups made was the transmission of Marxist ideas to Greece during the interwar period. Both the minor socialist and Trotskyist groups sought to make the Greek people familiar with an alternative Marxist literature and aspects of Marxism that were opposed to the dominant Stalinist policy and ideology of the Greek Communist Party. Nevertheless, their political and theoretical elaborations remained within the boundaries of the orthodox Marxism of Trotskyism or of the Second International. According to Castoriadis’ personal testimony,

Under the Metaxas dictatorship all left-wing books were burnt. And then there was the occupation. So one was not really in touch with the literature. Still, in 1942–1943 in Greece, I had the good luck to find copies of Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed, Victor Serge, Ciliga’s book and Boris Souvarine’s Stalin.¹¹

Castoriadis did not make clear in which language he read the above books, but there is little doubt that he did so in French or in English, since there were no Greek translations of these books at that time, except for Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed. At any rate, the number of translations of Marxist texts that Castoriadis had available before 1945 was limited. The first translations of works relating to ‘scientific socialism’ appeared at the beginning of the 1920s. They were mostly translations that were aiming to popularize socialist theory, transmitting the ideas of Marxism, Leninism and educating the cadres of the labour and tradeunionist movement theoretically.¹² In 1911 the Communist Manifesto was published, and in 1921 a summary of Capital by P. Lafargue and both Wage, Labour and Capital and Wages, Price and Profit. The Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy was published in 1927, followed by volume one and the first six chapters of volume two of Capital in 1927–1928, and Value, Price and Profit in 1928.¹³

In a parallel way, in 1923 the journal ‘Aρχε´ιoν τ oυ Mαρξισ μo ´υ’ (Marxist Archive) started to publish Marxist works in order to instruct the workers and improve the intellectual level of the communists. For this reason, in its first volume in 1923, it published Lenin’s State and Revolution and Imperialism, Varga’s Dictatorship of the Proletariat, Kautsky’s Erfurt Program and Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program. In its second volume in 1924–1925 it published Lenin’s Left Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder and Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, Engels’s Anti-Dühring and Marx’s The Civil War in France and the Poverty of Philosophy. Finally, in its third volume, it published, among others, Lenin’s What is to be Done?, Bogdanov’s Short Course of Economic Science and Trotsky’s Europe and America and Where is Russia Going?¹⁴ In addition, the following were available: Marx’s On the Jewish Question (1933), Engels’s Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1920), Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1920) and Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of German Classical Philosophy (1927), Bukharin’s Lenin as Marxist (1927), Trotsky’s Terrorism and Communism (1921), Kollontai’s Sexual Relations and the Class Struggle (1933), Kautsky’s Economic Doctrines of Marx (1927) and Ethics and the Materialist Conception of History (1923), Sombart’s The Proletariat (1921) and The Future of Capitalism (1933) and Luxemburg’s Reform or Revolution (1945).¹⁵

These translations were made under particularly difficult circumstances due to the persecutions against the labo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Reading Castoriadis Politically
• 1. Origins: Early Years in Greece, Migration and Life in France
• 2. The Critique of Totalitarianism
• 3. Subversive Praxis, Open Crisis and Critique
• 4. Marx in Question
• 5. The Crisis of Modern Societies and the Revival of Emancipatory Politics
• Conclusions
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index