|
|
|
|
Preface to Daniel Singer's Deserter from Death
|
 |
 |
 |
|
|
|
|
|
Daniel Singer's political consciousness spans the half century from the second World War to the great demonstrations in Seattle against the World Trade Organization in 1999. In this collection we observe that consciousness at work, bringing the perspective of history and philosophy to events of the moment.
His boyhood was a time of tumultuous, indeed astounding change: the swallowing up of his native Poland by both Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, and the annihilation of almost all the Jews of that country, while he miraculously escaped to France and Switzerland. And then the apparently invincible German armies stopped at the gates of Moscow, Leningrad, Stalingrad, and being destroyed in the East while a Western front opened up in France.
Studying in England after the war, watching the division of Europe into American and Soviet spheres of influence, he began to develop the political ideas that were to mark his writings. What stands out, in his essays over the years for the Economist, the International Socialist Review, the Times Literary Supplement, The Nation, is his rock-like refusal, in the midst of the most bitter and even violent clashes, to declare loyalty to any ideology, any party, any country.
This independence of dogma did not mean that he held no solid positions in the social struggles happening all around him. On the contrary, what stands out as you read Daniel Singer's work is his unshakable commitment to the idea of socialism, but a socialism uncorrupted either by Stalinist cruelties or by liberal timidity in the face of capitalist power.
He had no use for those who called themselves "Communists" but violated the spirit of a humanistic communism by behaving like thugs. Khrushchev's startling revelation of Stalin's crimes at the 20th Party Congress in Moscow led Togliatti and the Italian Communist Party to break with the Soviet Union. And other Communists around the world were shaken. In the United States, many members of the Communist Party left as a result of Khrushchev's speech, and the invasion of Hungary later that year.
The French Communist Party, however, remained Stalinist to the core, and Daniel Singer, reporting on the Party Congress in Paris that year, was biting in his criticism of the French Communist leader Maurice Thorez. and characterized the French Party as "the crudest" of the Stalinist parties.
Six years before, in 1950, in the "Times Literary Supplement" he had reviewed a novel of the Party stalwart Louis Aragon and found it "empty and stereotyped...not even good propaganda." He wrote wryly: "Some efficient and orthodox party maid seems to be watching that none of his puppets escape from the respective black and white pigeon holes."
Singer stood to the left of the French Communist Party, which he concluded was not truly a revolutionary movement He found this illustrated powerfully in the events of May-June, 1968. For him that extraordinary moment in the history of France, when students went on a nationwide strike, and then were joined by the workers, in an exciting display of solidarity, presented a unique opportunity for radical change.
The student cry "Soyez realiste, demandez l'impossible" (Be realistic, demand the impossible) was betrayed by the insistence of the Communists that realism demanded stopping short of radical transformation of the system. The major trade union confederation, the CGT, dominated by the Communist Party, channeled the enormous energy of the strike into demands for higher wages. This was more "practical", more realizable, but Daniel Singer felt it was a betrayal of the spirit of revolution that flowered in the universities and in the streets that spring.
The government had been overtaken by events, and the Communist Party was overtaken on its left, which it apparently could not tolerate. Ultimately, the Communists were seen by "the rebels of Nanterre" (where the first strikes arose) as "part of the Establishment". The events of May-June '68 exposed the weakness of the capitalist state, but that weakness was not taken advantage of. History, Singer concluded, "has no soft spot for grandchildren who keep missing their opportunities."
Despite his persistent criticism of the Soviet Union and the Communists who followed the Stalinist line, Singer never allowed that to diminish his anger against colonialism and the capitalist system. He saw France's eight year war (1954-1962) attempting to crush the Algerian independence movement as "a steady poison in the French body politic".
One learned to depend on Daniel Singer's thoughtful, complex evaluation of events and individuals. When de Gaulle died in 1970, he commented: "Nothing is more sickening than is the outpouring of love on funeral occasions." He recognized de Gaulle's monumental contribution in extricating France from Algeria, but also saw that the general's exalted status was "only by contrast with surrounding dwarfs."
Singer was not naive about nationalist movements for independence. He understood that they were only a first step, often violent and corrupt, towards a decent society. The Algerian revolution, from the start, he pointed out, had been a revolution from above.
If there was one insistent note in his political analysis, it was that movements for independence, for peace, for social justice, must be based, if they are to fulfill their moral promise, on the mass mobilization of people, and not on the leadership of an individual or a party.
Daniel Singer was unswerving in his rejection of violence carried out in the name of revolution. The Red Brigades in Italy had kidnapped the Christian Democrat Aldo Moro in 1978, and executed him fifty five days later when their demands were not met. Singer condemned "violence by a self-appointed vanguard...which substitutes itself for the people." He said: "The search for a historical shortcut, gun in hand, usually leads to a dead end, and often a bloody one at that."
Here, too, his repudiation of violence by a revolutionary elite did not lessen for a moment his rejection of capitalism and the way it connected with nationalism both historically and conceptually.
He noted, in a 1967 appraisal of Andre Malraux's "Antimemoires" the descent of Malraux, who had been a flier in the Spanish Civil War, and written the remarkable novel "Man's Fate", from internationalist to nationalist.
Malraux, Singer said, with more sadness than anger, had made the journey from fellow traveler to anti-communist. He had once been a "man of action". Now, he was a "voyeur".
This was only one instance of intellectuals whose thought processes were so dislodged by the revelations of Stalin's crimes that they became allies of the existing order. They either turned to the right, or they pretended to neutrality. In an article in 1983 "The Rise of the Nouveaux Liberals" Singer remarked: "Nothing is louder than the silence of intellectuals.
An instance of Daniel Singer's nuanced appraisal of individuals, was his reaction to Jean-Paul Sartre's death, in an article, one of his last, for The Nation in 2000. Sartre had once been reluctant to criticize the Soviet Union, but the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 offended him. The subsequent crushing of the Czech "socialism with a human face" in 1968 caused his final break with the French Communist Party, convincing him decisively that the party was not truly revolutionary.
Sartre was, Singer recognized, a rare figure of intellectual integrity, who refused the blandishments of the bourgeois West and also the dogmatism of the Soviet Union. He had turned down the Nobel Prize for Literature. He also said that Stalinism was "incompatible with the honest exercise of the literary profession."
Daniel Singer was, by his own account a "non-Jewish Jew", He could never forget the fate of Jews in Poland, from which he had barely escaped. Yet, when long after the war, the French put on trial a Nazi collaborator named Rene Bosquet, Singer understood that: "The punishment meted out to old men like Bosquet has been irrelevant for some time". This and other trials of collaborators, he understood, substituted for a real examination of the institutions that fostered the collaboration. Liberation from the Nazis had come, but: "A veil was discreetly spread over the awkward past."
Where the past was not veiled, it was turned into something useful for the Established order. In 1989, the French government celebrated the bicentennial of the French Revolution, and Daniel Singer wrote about this with delicious irony: "But the climax will come, naturally, on July 14, when French President Francois Mitterand will be accompanied by such iconoclastic sans-culottes as George Bush, Maggie Thatcher, and Helmut Kohl - a party that appears more suited to honor Marie Antoinette than commemorate the storming of the Bastille."
Living in Paris, Daniel Singer and his wife Jeanne, an intrepid activist, observed the rise of the anti-immigrant, racist Le Pen. Writing in 1992 in "The Nation" Singer pointed out that it was the absence of a socialist alternative that left a vacuum into which someone like Le Pen could flourish. Lacking such an alternative, Singer wrote (with remarkable prescience, we must say, looking at the world in 2004) "the dangerous mixture of race, religion and ethnicity" becomes dominant.
Singer found the spirit of the "rebel sixties", challenging the consumer society and "the rulng religion of growth" rising once again in the great demonstrations in Seattle in 1999 against the World Trade Organization. In his article "Seattle From the Seine" ("The Nation", January, 2000) he pointed to the simultaneous demonstration in Paris, and its insistence that "the world is not a commodity".
In the events of May-June 1968, he had been uplifted by "the vision of a radically different society. Thirty years later he still held on to that vision, wrote about a "realistic utopia". As crucial elements of this vision he suggested a drastic reduction in labor time, a true internationalism in defiance of globalization, an equalization of wealth worldwide, and democracy - self-management - in every aspect of social life.
His faith was always in people's movements, not in electoral politics, which he called "a trap for bloody fools". He was undaunted by the failed revolutions he saw around the globe. He would have agreed with the American farmer-philosopher Wendell Berry, who said: "Be joyous, even if you know all the facts." He could believe this, because he knew all the facts had not yet played themselves out. The old order, as he liked to quote Rosa Luxemburg, was "built on sand". There were imponderable, unpredictable things to come.
Howard Zinn
November 2004 |
|
|
|
Home 
Essays & Commentary 
