1968: Politics and Economics; Praxis and Poiesis

One view of hospitality

“[Hannah Arendt’s] The Human Condition … this most systematic of her writings … [is] her answer, [as] many have observed, to Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time…” (Howard, 2007)

Todd Gitlin (2018), discussing the situation in the USA, comments that although most on the radical left thrilled to the prospect of a revolution in 1968, seeing it as a new beginning in an ongoing progressive movement, it proved more of an end than a beginning as far as political power is concerned, even taking into account the many subsequent social reforms. Thus, he suggests, it marked the end of the New Deal era of reform, which supposed that government could work for the common good; of the glory years of the civil rights movement; and of American ideals, as the indefensible Vietnam War dragged on. What emerged as the legacy of 1968, in Gitlin’s view, was a retrogressive movement, one which continues into the early decades of the 21st century, albeit by means of a non-linear unfolding. 

[Reiterating Gitlin’s view of a sense of an ending, John Harris (2018) in a review of Richard Vinen’s The Long ’68, states that,

“More generally, the traditional leftist idea that the state could be the bringer of liberation was dramatically undermined by a widespread conviction that traditional power structures were so problematic as to be almost useless.”]

[Even so, 1968 was not all endings. Christopher Hitchens (1998) comments that there were also some revitalisations: “the way that male militants treated the girls’ auxiliary … prefigure[d] the imminent revival of feminism, which essentially began that year for those reasons.”]

[Strengthening the view that 1968 was not all endings and indeed had a longer-term legacy, Richard Vinen is of the opinion that the events of 1968 helped to create a new kind of leftist politics, less ‘economic’ and, in some ways, less working class, and gave rise to issues that may not have been very important in 1968 but have become so, such as feminism, as Hitchens also notes, gay rights and environmentalism. (Harris (2018)]

Mitchell Abidor (2018), discussing the situation in France, traces some aspects of that non-linear path that leads from 1968 to the early 21st century.

Abidor stresses the disconnections among workers, students and the French Communist Party (PCF) in 1968. The average worker, Abidor notes, viewed the students and their radical demands with suspicion and distrust. Meanwhile, the students and their allies found it impossible to accept that the PCF truly represented the workers feelings and desires, believing instead that the constellation of far-left anarchist, Trotskyist, and Maoist groups which flourished in France in the 1960s, such as the influential Socialisme ou Barbarie and its offshoot Pouvoir Ouvrier, better represented the interests of the working class. They also believed that the workers supported demands for a new society and were aiming for a new world, the same new world as the students. 

In not seeking revolution, the students reasoned, the workers must be the victims of Communist misdirection.  Nevertheless, in the 1960s, 44% of the membership of the PCF was working class, at a time when 35% of the French population was defined as such. The PCF, in its turn, prior to les évènements of May 1968, issued warnings against the anarchist-leaning March 22 Movement, which had formed at the University of Nanterre and was led by Daniel Cohn-Bendit, amongst others. After les évènements had begun, the PCF, through one of its leaders, Roland Leroy, proclaimed that, “The Communists are not anarchists whose program tends to destroying everything without building anything.”

Thus, the apparent unity displayed on the huge marches that started on 13 May 1968, when the workers joined the students on strike, was deceptive.

Given their predilections, it was no surprise that, to the students and the far left, the acceptance of the Grenelle Accords, which ended the strikes by granting wage gains of 35% in the minimum wage and a 10% rise in salaries, was a betrayal of the political project, pushed through by the union leadership. Left-wing accounts of May 1968 tend to belittle the significance of these salary demands and wage gains. For example, for Cornelius Castoriadis, les évènements of May 1968 showed that the industrial proletariat was not the revolutionary vanguard of society, but rather a ponderous rear guard indifferent to everything other than economic demands. Herbert Marcuse concurs, writing in 1972, stating that “The immediate expression of the opinion and will of the workers … is not, per se, progressive and a force of social change: it may be the opposite.” The PCF, Abidor comments, understood this latent conservatism in the working class of 1968. The New Left student movement did not. 

[Aside, added 9 March 2019. Richard Vinen (2018: 89) points out a revealing difference between the political evangelism of American students in the mid-1960s and that of their European, especially French, counterparts a few years later. The Europeans were mainly interested in the working class, which meant 'factories' and their largely male workforce, that is to say, they were interested in 'the worker' or 'the working man'. The Americans, in contrast, concentrated on 'communities' and 'the street', to such an extent that some critics, such as Al Haber, suggested this amounted to a 'cult of the ghetto'. Rather than 'the working man', the Americans made contact with 'the unemployed', groups of 'alienated young people' and, often, 'street gangs'. Such a shift in emphasis, away from 'the worker' and 'labouring', although for very different reasons, can also be found in the work of Hannah Arendt.] 

This practical distinction, i.e. the relationship between the ‘political’ project and ‘economic’ concessions, or between labour-work and action, to use the language of Hannah Arendt, or between poiesis and praxis, to use the language of Aristotle, is one that much exercised Arendt. She deplored “the elevation of laboring to the highest position in the hierarchical order of the vita activa” (Arendt, 1998: 306). A fundamental concern of her political thought is how to preserve the realm of the political, defined as the place that allows people to act as free citizens.

Her point is that there is no (political) action without (political) context. Her models to illustrate this point are the Greek polis and the Roman forum. In adopting those models, she may be guilty of a certain Hellenism (Euben, 2000), Graecomania (Taminiaux, 2000) or Classicism and, as a consequence of the theatrical and performative character of Athenian politics in particular, of a certain theatricalisation of the political. She characterises the political as a separate realm, a mode of performance before an audience judged by its intrinsic excellence rather than as a substantive negotiation over distributions of material wealth and cultural power.

[Leggewie: Hannah Arendt would never approve of violent revolts, but she did feel that 1968 marked the birth of something new. 

Cohn-Bendit: Arendt saw 1968 as the liberating revolt of the next generation. She actually wrote a letter to me that was supposed to be conveyed by Mary McCarthy. The letter never made it to me, but it was later discovered. It said: “Your parents would have been proud of you. Get in touch if you need help.” (Cohn-Bendi and Leggewie, 2018)]

[The proximity of the political and the theatrical is discussed by Arendt in The Human Condition (1998: 188), where she notes that, “the theater is the political art par excellence; only there is the political sphere of human life transposed into art. By the same token, it is the only art whose sole subject is man in his relationship to others.” 

She also discusses theatrical metaphors in On Revolution (1990, c1953: 106-107), where she comments that, “[t]he profound meaningfulness inherent in the many political metaphors derived from the theatre is perhaps best illustrated by the history of the Latin word persona.” Originally, signifying the mask that ancient actors used to wear in a play, which allowed the voice to sound through (per-sona), the word persona became a metaphor and was carried from the language of the theatre into legal terminology. 

The distinction between a private individual in Rome and a Roman citizen was that the latter had a persona, a legal personality, the part he (male gendered, as was the case) was expected to play on the public stage, and through which his own voice would be able to sound, as a rights- and duties-bearing person, created by the law, and appearing before the law in a court (theatre) of law. Without his persona, there would only be an individual without rights and duties, outside the range of the law and the body politic of the citizens, such as, for instance, was the case for a slave.]

In pursuing a theatrical metaphor, Arendt is refusing the substitution of making (poiesis) for doing (praxis) in her thinking about politics, a substitution which political philosophers have practised, Canovan (1998: xviii) argues, ever since Plato. Arendt prefers to understand politics as a communal space of performance, with political action within a human plurality understood performatively, rather than politics as a craft, with political action seen as a poietic or productive act with determinate ends. 

In siding with politics and theatre, Arendt is staying with the world of appearances and of opinion (doxa), with truth emerging through negotiation and critical engagement among differing viewpoints in a polis, a term which is used, as Arendt (1998: 198) explains, to mean “not the city-state in its physical location … [but] the organization of the people as it arises out of acting and speaking together … no matter where they happen to be.” 

In staying with the world of appearances, negotiation and plurality, in other words with ethical and political praxis, she is refusing to model politics on a metaphysics of truth as knowledge, (Euben, 2000: 158) in the form of a (techne-) episteme possessed solely by philosophers or, rather, philosopher-kings, establishing her preference for a democratic view of politics, albeit one that remains to be disentangled from the Greek and Roman models she is using for the purposes of discussion, rather than an aristocratic one.

As Arendt (1998: 26) summarises, showing that her thinking, while employing theatrical metaphors, extends beyond theatre: “To be political, to live in a polis, meant that everything was decided through words and persuasion and not through force and violence.”]

She identifies Nazism and Stalinism as new types of political regimes that aim to destroy liberty totally through the elimination of any political space, as space in which to appear to others and to (inter-)act. That spatial-political annihilation, for Arendt, is a key part of their ’totalitarian’ nature. The notion of freedom that she articulates is not just that of being free from constraints, the negative freedom of modern liberalism, but also to be able to initiate something new (Auer, 2006).

[The public realm, a place of discourse and action and especially discourse as action, is of central importance in Arendt’s thinking. She sees it as a means of salvation for mortality: the achievements of men and women as unique individuals are documented, narrated, instituted, monumentalised and environmentalised and passed on to subsequent generations. 

[Theoretical aside: This is one sense in which the phrase ‘narrative environments’ can be taken: a public realm, of determinate scale, in which prior cultural meanings are cited and with which the participants engage. Arendt deals explicitly with the value of narration and story telling, but is less explicit when it comes to defining the ‘action’ that constituted environments, as active processes of contextualisation for action, are capable]. 

More importantly, for Arendt, the public realm is that through which reality is disclosed. This concern for the disclosure of reality is connected to her analysis of totalitarianism in two respects, Canovan (1992: 111) argues. Firstly, an active public realm is the means by which a citizenry may resist the ideological fictions, or invented ‘reality principles’, of totalitarian movements or any other monopolising faction that attempts to reduce the plurality of the public realm. Totalitarian movements, in Arendt’s characterisation, as noted above, seek to eliminate all public, political space, where people might gather to debate and interact freely. Secondly, the public realm represents the means by which Arendt engages with, reacts to and significantly alters the direction of the thought of Martin Heidegger, particularly his emphasis on disclosure. 

Here, a consideration of the relationship between the Arendtian and the Heideggerian problematiques becomes necessary. While Heidegger worked hard to free himself from the influences of his early thinking, he still retained the view that a large part of the meaning of Being is history, understood not as written accounts of the past, i.e. historical science as a regional ontology, but as vital tradition or destining. His conception of method as way, which is never fixed but is constantly ‘underway’, is to be understood as a process of appropriating the past along with a continuing critique of the present in light of the past (Gray, 1969: 350).

This unceasing questioning of history, to find one’s own way, does not so much imply a re-interpretation of tradition as a thinking of the ‘unthought’ in previous thinkers and epochs. This brings into view perspectives covered over in earlier times. Heidegger's conception of truth is that of an uncovering of what has been concealed. At the same time, he recognises that all uncovering occasions simultaneously a concealing. Thus, the truth of Being is never known or knowable as a totality. It is always both hiddenness and disclosure at once. 

Gradually through the 1930s, as part of his life-long endeavour to overcome the overweening subjectivism of modern philosophy since Descartes, Heidegger came to see that Sein und Zeit itself remained too much under the influence of German idealism which tended to absolutise the will and willing, a tendency at whose zenith stands Friedrich Nietzsche. This Promethean stance, emphasising the originary and foundational character of the subject, is renounced by Heidegger in favour of a disposition or ‘mood’, of listening, ‘hearing’, letting be, of a thinking that recalls, a thinking that does not force the issue nor assert the issue, but enables to to arise in its own form. 

Heidegger is henceforth, Gray (1969: 350) notes, in reviewing J. L. Mehta’s The Philosophy of Martin Heidegger, intent on assimilating Thinking to Being, not the other way round, in the manner of Hegel. He does so while simultaneously asserting the intrinsic togetherness of the two, their sameness, which is not at all to suggest that they are identical. This reversal (die Kehre), focused on Being and on Being as history, undoing their subsumption to the Idea (Thought) and the Subject, required a new kind of terminology, a virtual abandonment of the traditional language of metaphysics. Above all, it involves a rejection of representational thinking and of Hegelian Concepts (Begriffe), including much of Heidegger's own earlier ontology. 

After this gradual ‘turn’ or ‘reversal’, Heidegger is less concerned with ‘man’ or ‘human being’ than with Being and the way Being discloses itself (Canovan, 1992: 112) as history. The importance of human-being-in-the-world as part of Dasein, its particular destiny according to Heidegger, is to be the space in which Being shows itself historically. So while men and women create and establish defined spaces in which to dwell, Dasein itself is a ‘clearing’(Lichtung) in which or through which Being appears as history. Given this understanding, Heidegger asserts that freedom for human beings means to allow truth to appear in this opening, to let beings be as the beings that they are. 

While these ruminations may seem far removed from Arendt’s concerns, as Canovan (1992: 112) notes, she nonetheless adopted and transformed Heidegger’s concept of ‘world’ and ‘space’ while taking over his view of reality as that which discloses itself or is disclosed in the spaces formed by human beings. Arendt’s distinctive adaptation and development of Heidegger’s positioning is her argument that the space in which reality appears is the public and political space which plural human beings can form among themselves. In consequence, for Arendt, what is required for the disclosure of reality is a free politics, the very antithesis of the political regime to which Heidegger pledged his allegiance. 

Such political space, as space of appearance, enables each person the freedom to grasp reality by moving about among the different perspectives from which a plurality of human beings view their common world. The loss of this many-sidedness she equates with the loss of reality. It is this loss of reality that characterises totalitarianism. The thesis that reality appears only in the public realm formed among plural men and women is a constant theme of her work (Canovan, 1992: 113). 

Arendt, as can be seen, takes a different path to try to free herself from the subjectivism of the philosophical underpinnings of political theory by emphasising the in-between commonality of the public realm, the unpredictability of action taken within that realm and the contextualisation of action within a ‘polis’, Arendt’s model of a public, political realm, which such a space of appearance constitutes. 

Arendt’s assertion that reality discloses itself/is disclosed in the public realm of politics is very much a part of her ongoing debate with Heidegger, as part of her attempt to counter his espousal of National Socialism, an act which put in question his integrity as a person, the worth of his philosophy and the worth of philosophy itself (Canovan, 1992: 114). 

Nevertheless, this move left her with two sets of problems: one concerning the relation of politics to philosophy; and the other concerning the relationships among the public, the private and the social. The category of the social, Arendt saw as as obscuring the authentic meaning of both public and private, through the increasing domination of politics by socio-economic concerns. Discussion of Arendt’s view of the ‘proper’ content of politics is continued below]

[Arendt’s idiosyncratic concept of political action is explained by George Kateb (2000: 133-134). For Arendt, political action is constituted by words and deeds, most centrally speech, in the form of the exchange of views more so than formal speech-making. Through such political speech-action, issues pertaining to the public good are debated and decided. 

The problems arise with Arendt’s conception of the political, in the context of the relationship between the political (praxis) and the economic (poiesis). She thinks that political action exists to be memorable, to be the material for stories in its immediate aftermath and, in turn, the stuff of history for later generations. Political action leads to narration, and thus remembrance, in this double sense: narrative reportage and reiteration; and historical discourse and reflection. 

This implies, for Arendt, that because politics driven by (base, self-interested) material, economic interests is not memorable, and will therefore not become the stuff of reportage and history, it cannot properly be considered as political action. It should be excluded from the properly political arena and left to hierarchical and administrative processes. Therefore, in her view, the contents of political words and deeds cannot be social or economic policies, which she sees as an instrumentalisation of politics. 

Arendt lays out two conditions without which authentic politics, as she sees it, will not be possible. Firstly, ordinary people must be able to make sense of their situation and express their sensible opinions, without necessarily having extensive expert or technical knowledge. Secondly, a plurality of opinions must be co-exist. To her mind, socio-economic matters seem amenable to conclusively right answers or to the expression of preponderant will, neither of which, she thinks, are authentically political. 

Thus, when she praises the European working classes for their contribution to the chronicle of authentic politics through the creation of workers’ councils, this is not because of the benefits to economic conditions that they brought about, but rather because of the ability of working men and women to think of something other than their interests, in discovering the value of directly democratic political participation. 

Arendt’s view is that the content of authentic politics is deliberation and dispute about what policies are needed to preserve and maintain a political body, a form of government designed to carry out its business through free deliberation, discussion and dispute. In an insurgent situation, authentic politics is about the creation of a government that institutionalises the spontaneous deliberation and discussion that are trying to being it into being. The stuff of authentic politics for Arendt is therefore constitutional questions, concerning the spirit of the law or the interpretation of the laws, or changes in the political ground rules. 

In short, for Arendt, politics, when authentic, exists for its own sake. Such authentic politics cannot be contaminated by the necessary or the useful, i.e. the poietic, matters concerning labour (biological reproduction) and work (economic production). It is all the more authentic, she thinks, when it is eruptive, inaugurating an institution, rather than when it is a regular and already institutionalised practice.]

Like other social-democratic critics of Marx, Arendt refuses to accept the primacy of the economic (or of poietic production). [The insistence on the primacy of the economic is a quality that orthodox Marxism shares with Liberalism (Berman, 2018).] Such critics agree with Marx that a better world is possible, but disagree about its inevitability, as if part of a necessary historical unfolding, the telos of historical materialism. They stress, instead, its achievability and the importance of the political (the domain of ethical and political praxis) in bringing that world into being. The role of the political (praxis) is to keep alive that possibility and to keep alive the means for its potential achievability (Berman, 2018).

The events of 1968 in France bring to attention the tensions between the political and the economic as they existed at a particular moment in a particular country in the post-World War Two period, tensions that continue to trouble us in the 21st century, as Gitlin notes above, referring to the US context. Any pronouncements on the significance of those events must necessarily arise from particular positioning in relation to them. For example, from the trade union perspective at the time, likening the situation in 1968 to the general strike of 1936 was considered an ahistorical error of political analysis. The gains for workers that had been achieved in the 1930s, such as paid vacations, were granted under a socialist administration, that of Léon Blum’s Popular Front, a political context that was missing in 1968 (Abidor, 2018). 

From the anarchist perspective, after the events, it becomes possible to conceive that the beginning of the decline of the influence of Stalinist Communism and orthodox Marxism in Western Europe can be dated to May 1968, as this was the first time that a Communist Party was overtaken from the left and was seen to be a traitor to working class political concerns, by cleaving to apparently immediate economic interests. [Writing in 1998, Christopher Hitchens states, “Not entirely with hindsight, one can now identify the significance of 1968 as being perhaps the critical year in that Death of Communism that is now such a commonplace.”]

The importance of keeping in mind the distinction between the political (praxis) and the economic (poiesis) is highlighted by Abidor. He notes that proletarian discontent did not come to an end with the acceptance of economic concessions. In France and much of the West as a whole, the lives and livelihoods of working-class people have become increasingly precarious, with the emergence of ‘the precariat’ as a distinct kind of economic class. Such discontent demands expression and, in France, the far-right National Front (FN) became its advocate. In understanding and exploiting the latent conservatism of the working class, the PCF had prepared the way for the FN, who took over the PCF’s part in French politics. 

The PCF had consistently defended French jobs and French industries, all the way back, Abidor remarks pointedly, to the party’s historic leader of the early postwar period, Maurice Thorez, setting the tone for another kind of nationalist intervention, this time in the context of economic and cultural globalisation.

Although the precise path differs in each country, and the intensity of commitment to far-right and far-left causes varies, the overall trajectory remains similar in Europe and the USA, as we continue to experience the diminution of the political, through its trivialisation in various new media forms, continuing encroachment by the economic and the increasing failure to create educated publics to sustain informative media content and reinvigorated plural, public, political venues in an Arendtian sense.

References

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