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I wonder if anyone else here has read Albert Camus' 'The Rebel' recently?

It's interesting. It is very clearly of it's time - a polemic within the debates that consumed the French left after the war, about how to react to the emerging picture of Stalinist repression - but what's interesting is just how old-fashioned it seems alongside more recent economic and cultural interpretations of Marx.

Camus critiques Marx principally for what he took from Hegel - for example the idea of a historical dialectic - rightly focusing on how teleological philosophies always contain the seeds of 'the ends justify the means' rationale for inhumanity. In taking this approach, he ignores almost entirely the economic and cultural analysis of the mature Marx, which via the Frankfurt School, Structuralism, Piketty, etc, now dominate left views of Marx. Camus spends many pages pulling apart the idea of the historic mission of the proletariat, for example, without any mention of the increasing socialisation of production - or indeed any of the economic concepts, such as alienation, commodity fetishism, even use, exchange and surplus value, that now seem central to us.

Most interestingly, perhaps, he focuses on Marx's 'prophesies' in a way that now feels outdated, not just because they constitute such a very small part of Marx's writing - but by events. Camus writes as if his own time was the end of history, which had already delivered its verdict - whereas from our perspective it has become much harder to pronounce on whether trends within capitalism identified by Marx - such as increasing accumulation by a smaller and smaller elite - were indeed mistaken. Now we tend to think: 'Hmmm... maybe he was right after all...'.

At the time I would I'm sure have been on Camus' side - like Orwell inclined more to anarchism that communism - but now perhaps Sartre's inclination not to polemic, but to reconcile existentialism and marxism, seems more considered.

#camus #existentialism #marxism #anarchism #philosophy #politicaleconomy