Anarchism, Socialism, Avant Garde and Emile Zola

Émile Zola was an influential French writer. He was born in Paris in 1840. He is the most important exemplar of the literary school of naturalism, an important contributor to the development of theatrical naturalism. He is also a major figure in the political liberalisation of France and in the exoneration of the falsely accused and convicted army officer Alfred Dreyfus which is encapsulated in the renowned newspaper headline J'Accuse.

J’Accuse was one of the most controversial articles written by Zola. "In making these accusations, I am fully aware that my action comes under Articles 30 and 31 of the law of 29 July 1881 on the press, which makes libel a punishable offence," Zola wrote challenging. Alfred Dreyfus (1859-1935) was a French Jewish army officer, who was falsely charged with giving military secrets to the Germans. The trials quickly developed into a ideological struggle, or as Anatole France wrote, "rendered an inestimable service to the country by bringing out and little by little revealing the forces of past and the forces of future: on the one side bourgeois authoritarianism and Catholic theocracy; on the other side socialism and free thought." Dreyfus was transported to Devil's Island in French Guiana. The case was tried again in 1899 and he was found first guilty and pardoned, but later the verdict was reversed. "The truth is on the march, and nothing shall stop it," Zola announced, but during the process he was sentenced in 1898 to imprisonment and removed from the roll of the Legion of Honour. He escaped to England, and returned after Dreyfus had been cleared.

Zola died on September 28, in 1902, under mysterious circumstances, overcome by carbon monoxide fumes in his sleep. According to some speculations, Zola's enemies blocked the chimney of his apartment, causing poisonous fumes to build up and kill him. At Zola's funeral Anatole France declared, "He was a moment of the human conscience." In 1908 Zola's remains were transported to the Panthéon. Naturalism as a literary movement fell out of favour after Zola's death, but his integrity had a profound influence on such writers as Theodore Dreiser, August Strindberg and Emilia Pardo-Bazan.


European Marxism, 1848-1989

'A specter is haunting Europe -the specter of Communism,'' wrote Karl Marx in January 1848. It took a century for that red specter to become iron-grey reality in Eastern Europe. Yet just weeks after the 29-year-old German philosophy student wrote those words, Europe was swamped by a continental wave of liberal, nationalist revolutions. The upheavals of 1848 gave birth to European Marxism. Now, a strikingly similar wave of revolutions appears to signal its death.

The events of 1848 began with January revolts in Austria's Italian provinces. The movement gained force in February, when mass demonstrations in Paris forced France's last Bourbon King to abdicate. Vienna's turn came in March. Crowds in the Hapsburg capital brought down the mighty Prince Metternich, architect and symbol of Central Europe's post-Napoleonic order. The protest drew strength from enthusiastic university students. The Prince was gone in a matter of mere days.

Marxists reassured themselves that history was on their side that continued industrial revolution would bring political and social revolution as well. They envisioned an ever-larger army of workers, turned into socialists by the circumstances of proletarian life, who would finally cast off capitalist chains and harness industry's power for social ends. Such was the Communism that so recently haunted much of Europe. But, in an irony that Marx the revolutionary might have appreciated, the system bred its own gravediggers. Instead of the hoped-for socialist man, Communist rule produced a new generation of democratic revolutionaries, whom four decades of frustration made all the more committed to liberal freedoms. Today, the Communist states are the faltering ''old regimes.'

The Gold Rush started at Sutter's Mill, near Coloma On January 24, 1848 James W. Marshall, a foreman working for Sacramento pioneer John Sutter, found pieces of shiny metal in the tailrace of a lumber mill Marshall was building for Sutter, along the American River. Marshall quietly brought what he found to Sutter, and the two of them privately tested the findings. The tests showed Marshall's particles to be gold. Sutter was dismayed by this, and wanted to keep the news quiet because he feared what would happen to his plans for an agricultural empire if there were a mass search for gold. However, rumours soon started to spread and were confirmed in March 1848 by San Francisco newspaper publisher and merchant Samuel Brannan. The most famous quote of the California Gold Rush was by Brannan; after he had hurriedly set up a store to sell gold prospecting supplies, Brannan strode through the streets of San Francisco, holding aloft a vial of gold, shouting "Gold! Gold! Gold from the American River!" With the news of gold, many families trying their luck at Californian farming decided to go for the gold, becoming some of California’s first miners.

On August 19, 1848, the New York Herald was the first major newspaper on the East Coast to report that there was a gold rush in California; on December 5, President James Polk confirmed the discovery of gold in an address to Congress. Soon, waves of immigrants from around the world, later called the "forty-niners," invaded the Gold Country of California or "Mother Lode." As Sutter had feared, he was ruined; his workers left in search of gold, and squatters invaded his land and stole his crops and cattle.

The Prussians surrounded and besieged Paris during the terrible winter of 1870-1871, beating off French armies raised in the rest of the country. Parisians suffered starvation, bombardments and disease, and balloons and pigeon post provided the only contact with the outside. British public opinion switched from support of Prussia to sympathy for the French. Paris was surrendered and the Prussians entered the city on March 1 1871. The new government of President Thiers passed legislation demanding rents from Parisians and withdrawing the pay of the National Guards. The government was established at Versailles. It tried to seize the cannon belonging to the city. The insurrection in Paris began in March when the Parisians kept their cannon by force. The Commune was proclaimed on 28 March, with its seat in the Hôtel de Ville, and its symbol the red flag. A civil war was fought between the Commune and the troops of the Versailles government. The Commune was suppressed by government troops during the last week of May 1871, known as the 'Semaine sanglante'.

It is difficult to categorise Hume’s political affiliations. His thought contains elements that are, in modern terms, both conservative and liberal, as well as ones that are both contractarian and utilitarian, though these terms are all anachronistic. His central concern is to show the importance of the rule of law, and stresses throughout his political Essays the importance of moderation in politics. This outlook needs to be seen within the historical context of eighteenth century Scotland, where the legacy of religious civil war, combined with the relatively recent memory of the 1715 and 1745 Jacobite risings, fostered in a historian. Hume formed a distaste for enthusiasm and factionalism that appeared to threaten the fragile and nascent political and social stability of a country that was deeply politically and religiously divided. He thinks that society is best governed by a general and impartial system of laws, based principally on the "artifice" of contract; he is less concerned about the form of government that administers these laws.

Hegelian dialectic

It is Hegel’s well-known achievement to have introduced the fully developed notion of a dialectical movement through a necessary progression. Rather than being the result of a confrontation between two independently existing entities, thesis and antithesis, the dialectical movement in Hegel’s thought appears more as an internal potential or as a necessary movement due to latent contradictions inherent to all entities, mental and material. In his sweeping overview, ranging from logic to history and world affairs, Hegel tries to show that each finite entity has within itself the germ of its own negation. This negation, however, does not lead to actual destruction but to sublation (Aufhebung) into a higher entity, the synthesis.

Hegel describes a dialectic of existence: first, existence must be posited as pure Being; but pure Being, upon examination, is found to be indistinguishable from Nothing; yet both Being and Nothing are united as Becoming, when it is realised that what is coming into being is, at the same time, also returning to nothing (consider life: Old organisms die as new organisms are created or born). Existence is the synthesis of two opposites – at the teleological historic and cosmic level.

Though Hegel rarely uses the terms of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, he uses a variety of triadic expressions, such as affirmation, negation, negation of negation; in-itself, for itself, in-and-for-itself. Hegel insists that the true meaning of the dialectic had been lost for most of philosophy’s history. For him, Kant rediscovered the triad, but in his thought it remained “lifeless.” Since, for Kant, ultimate reality was still perceived as transcendent and unreachable, it could not possibly yield a conclusive synthesis. Hegel attempted to move the dialectic back into the mainstream with the idea that it was the Absolute itself that gradually achieved full self-awareness through a dialectical movement culminating with the human mind.

Hegel uses the term speculation to describe the process by which the hidden progress of the dialectic is made explicit in philosophy. In his thought, therefore, speculation has an entirely positive connotation.

Marx on Hegel’s dialectic - “Dialectical Materialism” K. Marx calls his system “dialectical material” (e.g., in his book The German Ideology) or sometimes “the materialist conception of history”.

Karl Marx (The Young Hegelians) – embraced the idea of change in Hegel, because they were liberals, and revolutionaries in the wake of the French revolution. They loved the idea ‘everything changes’ – only change is permanent (this much has stuck from Hegel) – it anticipates quantum mechanics for example where we now think that the very act of making an observation changes the nature of matter.

Marx agrees, but goes forward. All philosophy to date (inc. Hegel and Feuebach) is a waste of time when it is a matter of contemplation and reflection. Humans act upon the world, and this action is the source of knowledge – it neither arises like a Zeit (Hegel) from matter; nor does it exist in a platonic realm of eternal ideas (such as the idea of god). Knowledge arises when humans act upon the world.

The state both Hegel and Marx see as the vehicle of historical change. The state is an instrument for the domination of one class by another; thus democracy is a sham – he sees it in term of Machievlli (it is the dictatorship of capital – “the iron fist inside the velvet glove” – revealed during 1848 (and especially 1870 – the Paris Commune which brings us to the milieu of Zola. In history there are two different types of people there is the Thesis which is the Ruling Class. The Antithesis which was the Slave Class/Working Class. This is what leads to the Synthesis, which is the revolution

Idealism is a philosophical movement in Western thought, and names a number of philosophical positions with sometimes quite different tendencies and implications in politics and ethics, for instance; although in general, at least in popular culture, philosophical idealism is associated with Plato and the school of Platonism.

Materialism holds that only things that exist is what matters; that all things are composed of material and all phenomena (including consciousness) are the result of material interactions. In other words, matter is the only substance. As a theory, materialism is a form of physicalism and belongs to the class of monist ontology. As such, it is different from ontological theories based on dualism or pluralism. For singular explanations of the phenomenal reality, materialism would be in contrast to idealism and to spiritualism.

Instrumentalism is more of a pragmatic approach to science, information and theories than an ontological statement. Often instrumentalists (like pragmatists) have been accused of being relativists, even though many instrumentalists are also believers in sturdy objective realism.

Germinal was Zola's masterpiece.14 whereas L'Assommoir had shown a working class just emerging from an older world of small workshops, Germinal shifted to the coal mining industry, a central source of energy for France's developing capitalism. Mining, with a large, disciplined labour force herded into pit villages and facing the dangers of underground work, produced a class for which solidarity was the key value.

The novel took its title from a month in the revolutionary calendar introduced in 1792. Germinal fell in springtime (March-April), the month of germination and hope; but on 12 Germinal Year III (1 April 1795) hungry crowds had rioted, demanding 'bread and the 1793 constitution'. The events of Germinal inspired Babeuf, the first revolutionary socialist, to establish his secret organisation of Equals. In the novel Zola argued that the bourgeoisie, having made its own revolution, now wished to suppress any further revolution from below.

While academics often miss the point about Germinal, it has been properly appreciated in the working class movement. During the 1984-1985 British miners' strike a militant miner saw direct parallels between the novel and the current struggle. There are many similarities between the events in the book and what is happening in the current miners' strike. In both cases management provoked the strike deliberately, confident that the miners would lose, in order that they could reinforce their power. Both sets of miners put too much faith in one man, Etienne and Scargill. The French miners paid the price, defeat. Although the miners were beaten by lack of organisation, hunger and bullets, they were changed by the struggle. No longer content to accept their lot in life, the seeds of revolt were sown.

Various Sources Used