The Thinking Reed

Of greatest interest was the article by G. Batishchev, ‘The Active Essence of Man as a Philosophical Principle’, in which he declared that Marxist philosophy ‘is the philosophy of man in his entirety, with his whole content intact, as a system’.38 Both nature and society are fields for Marxism, in so far as man himself is both a natural and a social being. In contrast to the determinist-teleological fatalism of the official ideology, which sees the history of mankind as proceeding in accordance with a sort of strict schedule (the stops on the line nearest to us being capitalism, socialism and Communism), and people as merely slaves of objective forces, Batishchev sees humanity as free, and grasping the world through active behaviour and choice. The human personality is in principle creative, and whenever this creative principle is artificially restricted we encounter alienation and depersonalization. The creative process of mankind as a whole is ‘a cultural-historical process’:39 not only growth of the productive forces but also development of mankind as a whole, of ‘human nature’. In so far as freedom constitutes the essence of man ‘as a self-acting subject’, it cannot be merely ‘freedom from’ or ‘freedom for\ This twofold definition given by Fromm is, for Batishchev, not radical enough, for freedom ‘can have a purpose in itself alone’.40

He attacks simultaneously both capitalism and ‘barracks-Communism’, the bourgeoisie and the bureaucracy, to whom he counterposes Marxist ‘humanist revolutionariness’.41 Incidentally, he stresses that ‘barracks-Communism’ is even worse than capitalism, since it expresses the attitude of those individuals and classes who, in Marx’s words, have ‘not only failed to go beyond private property but [have] not yet even reached it.’42 In general, Batishchev develops Karyakin’s ideas and at the same time makes them concrete emphasizing that ‘barracks-Communism’ is ‘reactionary, being orientated on patently pre-bourgeois forms and re-establishing the “Asiatic mode of production”.’43 He insists that both capitalist and bureaucrat are ‘secondary personages’ because they rule over production without participating in it, are external factors counterposed to free creative activity. Their own roles are irrational, especially if they are also estranged from the direct process of management: Their activity is formal, it is pursued only on the basis and within the limits of alienated roles which radically separate them from the cultural-creative process.’44 Worst of all, though, are not these people but ‘secondary personages’ of the second order, who are alienated from direct participation in alienated activity — ‘all sorts of utilitarian-institutional pen-pushers and security-and-punitive functionaries (including also the honoured group of reliably venal specialists in “brain-work”, the ideologues)…45

Thus contemporary society, both Soviet and Western, seems to Batishchev a world of universal alienation, an anti-human and ‘false’ society which needs to be fundamentally transformed on the principles of freedom and socialism. All these ideas are splendidly inserted into a framework of critical theory as conceived by Marcuse or Adorno, although in this case Batishchev takes up a position on the theory’s extreme left wing. Taken as a whole, the philosophical works of our Marxist theoreticians at the end of the sixties, which complement each other, form a fully integrated picture. Nevertheless, the question arises of how original these ideas of theirs are: after all, the ‘Frankfurt School’ had already formulated them earlier and more completely (of course, neither Marcuse nor Fromm had to worry about a censor).

In the field of the philosophy of nature Soviet thinkers have evidently been somewhat more original, as Western scholars acknowledged. Graham notes that: