Matt Treacy on the strained relationship between Albert Camus and the Left.

 
Albert Camus, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1957, was an early left critic of Marxist totalitarianism. He had been a member of the Communist Party of France and the Communist Party of Algeria in the1930s but rejected both the philosophy and reality of what Communism meant when it became the state ideology in the Soviet Union.

Why I left the Left: Camus – the conscience of the French Left
 
He edited the Resistance newspaper Combat during the German occupation, and opposed the Communist Party’s bid for power after Liberation. The Communists attempted to portray themselves as the leaders of the Resistance even though they only began to oppose the Nazis after the German invasion of the Soviet union in June 1941. Some Communists did ignore their leaders’ adherence to the Stalin/Hitler Pact before that.

Although Camus still considered himself to be of the Left, he and Combat effectively supported de Gaulle in his facing down of the Stalinists in 1947. His 1951 book The Rebel, an incisive dissection of the totalitarian Left, led to his final break with Sartre who remained an apologist for Stalinism and its imitators until his death in 1980.

Camus, like our own Samuel Beckett, displayed genuine courage in opposing the Nazis. Sartre had his dreadful book Being and Nothingness approved by the Nazi censors and his play The Flies was performed in what was known as an “Aryanised theatre.”

Sartre was typical of an intelligentsia that often allowed its worldly affectations of cynicism to override any moral sense. While some denied the existence of the Gulags, Sartre’s attitude was not to deny them, but to pose the question: “Why should they embarrass us.” Although Camus did not name Sartre, he was undoubtedly thinking of him when he described another fellow traveller as a “servant of the concentration camp universe.”

Camus exposed the core of totalitarianism as the use of terror to force “refractory citizens” to be good, and to punish them when they failed to live up to an impossible ideal. The more that the prophecies of Marx were proven to be wrong, the more brutal became his disciples as they clung to the “mystic idea which claims to be scientific,” that “one day, far away in the future, the end will justify all.” Which makes no more sense than contacting a clairvoyant to ask him or her who is going to win the last race at Pontefract.

Camus’s prescience among the European Left in identifying those innate flaws of “scientific socialism” earned him the undying enmity of the Communists and their sneaking regarders. It may even have led to his death. The Czech poet Jan Zabrana recorded in his diary what he believed was a reliable claim that the KGB had interfered with the car in which Camus was killed in a crash in 1960.

Perhaps of more topical relevance is that Camus also dealt with the origins and implications of nihilism. That pertains to the aims and composition of the Black Lives Matter and Antifa rioters in the United States, and to their admirers among the far left here and in other countries. BLM is remarkable for such a powerful movement in that it confines itself to simplistic racially based slogans. The BLM website does not sell books; only tee shirts and other accessories. MTV meets the Black Panthers.

In common with Extinction Rebellion, which is also remarkable for the almost total absence of any strategy to bring about its aims, Antifa have more in common with the myth based Nazis than the traditional far left. They are of course happy to hitch their star to those wagons as they realise their almost complete lack of appeal to the “square” working class.

The roots of contemporary nihilism lie not in the bankrupt ideas and catastrophic failures of Marxism but in the Russian and European anarchist terrorists of the 19th century. Camus identified Sergei Nechayev as the chief ideologue of political nihilism. In his 1869 Catechism of a Revolutionary, Nechayev described the revolution as the enemy of all order, morality and tradition, dedicated to the “science of destruction.”

While it is doubtful that many of the rioters and looters in America are familiar with Nechayev or anything that doesn’t appear on rap tracks and video games, they are the criminal types who constituted the nihilists ideal of the creatures who would destroy the social order. We know that from their icons and the types of people arrested for violent activities.

Like the Nazi Brownshirts, they believe that it is “better to be criminal than bourgeois,” and they abide by what Camus described as the “ethics of the gang.” Some of their spokespersons celebrate looting and mugging as “reparations.”

Behind the Nechayevs are those like Dostoyevsky’s Chigalev: ostensibly believing in absolute equality, but resigned to it only being possible under conditions of “unlimited despotism.” Camus’ great service was to demonstrate how one led to the other.


Matt Treacy has published a number of books including histories of the Republican Movement and of the Communist Party of Ireland.
He is currently working on a number of other books; His latest one is a novel entitled Houses of Pain. It is based on real events in the Dublin underworld. Houses of Pain is published by MTP and is currently available online as paperback and kindle while book shops remain closed.

Why I Left The Left: Camus – The Conscience Of The French Left

Matt Treacy on the strained relationship between Albert Camus and the Left.

 
Albert Camus, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1957, was an early left critic of Marxist totalitarianism. He had been a member of the Communist Party of France and the Communist Party of Algeria in the1930s but rejected both the philosophy and reality of what Communism meant when it became the state ideology in the Soviet Union.

Why I left the Left: Camus – the conscience of the French Left
 
He edited the Resistance newspaper Combat during the German occupation, and opposed the Communist Party’s bid for power after Liberation. The Communists attempted to portray themselves as the leaders of the Resistance even though they only began to oppose the Nazis after the German invasion of the Soviet union in June 1941. Some Communists did ignore their leaders’ adherence to the Stalin/Hitler Pact before that.

Although Camus still considered himself to be of the Left, he and Combat effectively supported de Gaulle in his facing down of the Stalinists in 1947. His 1951 book The Rebel, an incisive dissection of the totalitarian Left, led to his final break with Sartre who remained an apologist for Stalinism and its imitators until his death in 1980.

Camus, like our own Samuel Beckett, displayed genuine courage in opposing the Nazis. Sartre had his dreadful book Being and Nothingness approved by the Nazi censors and his play The Flies was performed in what was known as an “Aryanised theatre.”

Sartre was typical of an intelligentsia that often allowed its worldly affectations of cynicism to override any moral sense. While some denied the existence of the Gulags, Sartre’s attitude was not to deny them, but to pose the question: “Why should they embarrass us.” Although Camus did not name Sartre, he was undoubtedly thinking of him when he described another fellow traveller as a “servant of the concentration camp universe.”

Camus exposed the core of totalitarianism as the use of terror to force “refractory citizens” to be good, and to punish them when they failed to live up to an impossible ideal. The more that the prophecies of Marx were proven to be wrong, the more brutal became his disciples as they clung to the “mystic idea which claims to be scientific,” that “one day, far away in the future, the end will justify all.” Which makes no more sense than contacting a clairvoyant to ask him or her who is going to win the last race at Pontefract.

Camus’s prescience among the European Left in identifying those innate flaws of “scientific socialism” earned him the undying enmity of the Communists and their sneaking regarders. It may even have led to his death. The Czech poet Jan Zabrana recorded in his diary what he believed was a reliable claim that the KGB had interfered with the car in which Camus was killed in a crash in 1960.

Perhaps of more topical relevance is that Camus also dealt with the origins and implications of nihilism. That pertains to the aims and composition of the Black Lives Matter and Antifa rioters in the United States, and to their admirers among the far left here and in other countries. BLM is remarkable for such a powerful movement in that it confines itself to simplistic racially based slogans. The BLM website does not sell books; only tee shirts and other accessories. MTV meets the Black Panthers.

In common with Extinction Rebellion, which is also remarkable for the almost total absence of any strategy to bring about its aims, Antifa have more in common with the myth based Nazis than the traditional far left. They are of course happy to hitch their star to those wagons as they realise their almost complete lack of appeal to the “square” working class.

The roots of contemporary nihilism lie not in the bankrupt ideas and catastrophic failures of Marxism but in the Russian and European anarchist terrorists of the 19th century. Camus identified Sergei Nechayev as the chief ideologue of political nihilism. In his 1869 Catechism of a Revolutionary, Nechayev described the revolution as the enemy of all order, morality and tradition, dedicated to the “science of destruction.”

While it is doubtful that many of the rioters and looters in America are familiar with Nechayev or anything that doesn’t appear on rap tracks and video games, they are the criminal types who constituted the nihilists ideal of the creatures who would destroy the social order. We know that from their icons and the types of people arrested for violent activities.

Like the Nazi Brownshirts, they believe that it is “better to be criminal than bourgeois,” and they abide by what Camus described as the “ethics of the gang.” Some of their spokespersons celebrate looting and mugging as “reparations.”

Behind the Nechayevs are those like Dostoyevsky’s Chigalev: ostensibly believing in absolute equality, but resigned to it only being possible under conditions of “unlimited despotism.” Camus’ great service was to demonstrate how one led to the other.


Matt Treacy has published a number of books including histories of the Republican Movement and of the Communist Party of Ireland.
He is currently working on a number of other books; His latest one is a novel entitled Houses of Pain. It is based on real events in the Dublin underworld. Houses of Pain is published by MTP and is currently available online as paperback and kindle while book shops remain closed.

8 comments:

  1. A thought provoking and erudite piece from Matt

    And yet I believe its appropriate, if we are to have a more rounded understanding of who Camus was in the world, to integrate his observations on the conflict that was closest to him and in all likelihood most deeply understood by him in a felt sense rather than an intellectual way.
    As Pied Noir and Catholic by birth (and who according to Methodist pastor Howard Mumma sought another secret baptism in the months previous to his death) observed that the Algerian War was;

    "as unavoidable, as it was unjustifiable"

    When it came to his own backyard Camus was able to forego moral judgement and implicitly allow that most folk only do what makes sense to them, do what makes sense to them subject and dependent upon their level of understanding. Many of the readers here, including yourself Matt, can surely grasp the import of that.

    I am not a literary man but I am a student of life and a professional observer of people. To that end I participated in an evening course in 'Existential Philosophy' at the local University several years ago; Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, Nietzsche through to Sartre and Camus. The distillation of those enjoyable evenings, pre-Enlightenment essence (soul or spirit) before experience to Existentialism ... experience before essence.

    Taking that distinction on board it seems to me that your experience Matt, that of disaffection with the 'Movement' and your distancing from the left defines your of-late & current essence ... one of essentially counter-enlightenment reactionary romanticism.

    Off to feck with you to Iona

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    Replies
    1. Henry Joy - interesting observation and as witty riposte to Matt at the end who I think will have the good humor to laugh with it.

      Like much else from the pen of Matt, this is a well written piece which we do not have to agree with in order to get something from.

      I think his embrace of the right is wholly wrong. Had he not made that move his critique of the totalitarian left would in my view have considerably more purchase.

      I have long liked the insight of Camus, much preferring him to Sartre. I thought Conor Cruise O'Brien's attempted take down of him in his Modern Masters book was weak and O'Brien ended up being much more reactionary than anything he was capable of throwing at Camus.

      I treat the Pastor with scepticism. It reminds me too much of Lady Hope spoofing about the deathbed conversion of Darwin. The pastor has said he also embellished Camus' words - I don't know if it was in reference to the alleged secret baptism.

      We could do much worse than read a even a quote from Camus each day and reflect on it. It is very nourishing to the insight.

      Delete
    2. Worthwhile suggestion
      Here's my pick for today,

      "The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion"

      Delete
    3. Here's my own:

      "The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants."

      Delete
  2. The puppet 'left wing' groups such as BLM/antifa fail to realise that their toadying up to black rap artists etc prolongs the mistreatment of black women especially. I.e theres no respect for black women or even men in these 'artistes' work. It's like an anti paedo group toadying up to jimmy saville or an anti abortion group toadying up to Margaret Sanger(she wasn't fond of 'coloured' either but that's another story).
    The 'left' has been dumbed down that much they can't see that their spokespeople are actually paid by the state they rail against. Reminds me of SF I.e their fans swear blind to their leaders despite the evidence being they are upholding partition.

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    Replies
    1. MickO

      The content of some drill and rap output does gave somne cause for concern in trelation to misoygny and, in the case of Wiley, antisemitism.

      But you provide no evidence that BLM toadies up to these artists just a crude assumption. The principle musical advocate for young black people, in the UK at any rate, is Stormzy who is very far from being misoynisitic in his lyrics or treatment of black women.

      BLM (although i have criticism of their dalliance with antiziionism in the UK) are an authentic response to decades of structural and instiutional racism on both sides of the Atlantic. They are not paid for by the slate; a slur for which you provide nor evidence. But if you are a full-time conspiracy theorist you are under no obligation to do so.

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  3. Barry, have you got the horn for 'anti semitism' or is that just another conspiracy theory?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Conspiracy theories, most notoriously that ot the forged Learned Protocols of the Elders of Zion was well as the Blood Libel, deicide and Israeli involvement in 9/11, formk much of the bedrock of antisemitism.

      Delete