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Paul Lafargue and the Founding of French Marxism 1842-1882, L. Derfler (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1991), x + 285 pp., $39.93 cloth.

Leslie Derfler’s long-awaited study of Paul Lafargue analyses with admirable detachment and lucidity the contribution made by this colourful character to the dissemination of Marxian ideas in France in the years between 1865 and 1882. Many commentators have noted that Lafargue, rather than his collaborator Jules Guesde, was the intellectual and ideological motor behind the party which nevertheless took Guesde’s name, the Parti auvrier. Most have nuanced that judgment with an observation to the effect that this was really not saying very much and that, despite Lafargue’s first-hand contact with the founding fathers, his ‘Marxism’ was vulgar and inconsistent rather than sophisticated and coherent. It is, for instance, the judgment of Guesdism’s historian, Claude Willard, that the ‘theoretical inadequacy of Marxism in France, certainly before the turn of the century, strategically and doctrinally weakened French labor’. What Derfler sets out to do (in addition to providing a highly readable biography of the first half of Lafargue’s life) is to consider his contribution to Marxist theory in the context of the France-and the Europe-of the late nineteenth century. This he does extremely well. The problem is that, if Lafargue was such a failure (as many have suggested), why bother with him? If he was a success, why has it taken so long for that success to be recognised?

As a medical student under the Empire, Lafargue, like virtually every other radical of his generation, was influenced both by Blanqui (at a political level) and by Proudhon (from a moral and philosophical perspective). Yet both Blanqui’s politics (putschist and insurrectionary) and Proudhon’s philosophy (idealist, pluralist and very French) were diametrically opposed to everything Marx stood for. Lafargue himself claimed that, on first meeting Marx in March 1866 after he moved to London following his expulsion from the University of Paris, he was ‘seduced and conquered [. . .] as though a veil had been torn from [his] eyes.’ Yet Marx himself never ceased to regard Lafargue as a closet anarchist with a deep lingering fondness for both Proudhon and Bakunin; and Derfler is scrupulously honest in noting the more condemnatory comments made by Marx about the ideological waywardness of the man who, in April 1868, was to marry his daughter Laura. Nevertheless, Lafargue was quite capable of reproducing the main planks of Marxist analysis in a fairly coherent, albeit simplistic manner. Thus, in a series of articles under the generic title ofLa Lutte Sociak in the summer of 1866, he combined materialism and positivism with economic determinism and a notion of class struggle to produce what Dertler describes as ‘the first prolonged exposure to Marxist thought in any French periodical since 1843.’ He also showed sufficient originality to come up with an early and very embryonic version of what later, through Gramsci, was to be called ‘hegemony’. Lafargue was probably the first French theoretician to attempt to ‘apply a materialist analysis to art and literature and to relate cultural and political domination’ (pp. 52-53). Wisely, Derfler avoids making any attempt to gauge the impact of these writings.

After virtually living in the Marx household from 1866 to 1868, Lafargue returned to Paris in October 1868. From then until 1872, he was actively engaged in revolutionary politics, but more as an agitator than as a theoretician. Mixing in Blanquist circles in Paris, he attempted to ‘convert’ his comrades to the basic ideas of Marxism, but Deffler is candid in recognising that he had no success whatsoever. He then turned his attention to the International Working Men’s Association (First International) which was utterly dominated in France by Proudhonian ideas and sympathisers. Here again, his attempts to argue in favour of organised political action fell largely on deaf ears, while his own latent sympathies for Proudhon led his future collaborator Gabriel Deville to remark: ‘You have had the fortune to meet Marx; if you had not, you would have been one of our most brilliant anarchists’ (p. 71). Although Lafargue’s writings at this time focus mainly on atheism, with some dabbling in both literary criticism and feminism, there is, once again,

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precious little evidence that he made any mark, either on the International, or on political theory. In September 1870, after the collapse of the French armed forces, he fled to Bordeaux, where his family had properties, and involved himself in republican agitation. However, the two main political concepts which surface from his activities were poles apart from Marxism: on the one hand, he was a staunch advocate of national defence, on the other hand, after the February 1871 elections, he insisted that, from a revolutionary perspective, the restoration of an Orleanist monarchy would be preferable to the bourgeois Republic. On this issue, there was a fundamental divide in France between genuine Marxist analyses which saw the bourgeois Republic as the historically necessary precondition for the full flowering of class struggle and the consciousness it would generate (such a line was forcefully argued, for instance, by Edouard Vaillant) and those ‘catastrophists’ who felt that historical stages could be skipped.

Lafargue’s role during the Paris Commune was negligible but, as Marx’s son-in-law, he was on every police arrest-list. Consequently, he slipped into Spain where he attempted to act as the mouthpiece of the London General Council in the conflict between Marx and Bakunin. Although highly active inspanish politics from September 1871 to July 1872, he failed totally to prevent the International in that country from falling further under Bakunin’s influence. Derfler carefully records the views of both contemporary and later commentators, virtually all of whom describe as crucial Lafargue’s role in converting to a form of Marxism a small number of significant individuals, such as Jose Mesa and Pablo Iglesias, who were later to found the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE) (p. 143). The big unanswered questions have to be: would such men have remained anarchists without the presence of Lafargue? And how important is the impact of a single individual on such historical processes? Since Lafargue was only in Spain for just over nine months, it is difficult to imagine that he changed the course of Spanish political life.

From September 1872 until about 1879, Lafargue effectively gave up political activism and tried (very unsuccessfully) to earn a living for himself. In the spring of 1879, he began a correspondence with Jules Guesde which Derfler considers ‘was to prove momentous for the beginnings of Marxism in France’ (p. 161). There is no doubt that Lafargue was instrumental in ‘correcting’ or deepening Guesde’s understanding of basic Marxism. There is equally little doubt that his writings for the ‘Guesdist’ paperL’EgaZite, in which he first published the raw Marxism later to appear as Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, were widely read and had some degree of impact on the nascent socialist movement. Basically, though, Lafargue remained too much of an original thinker, too recalcitrant to the discipline required by Marxist categories, too iconoclastic, too unpredictable to warrant inclusion in the Pantheon of seminal Marxists (which probably does not include a single Frenchman anyway). His major theoretical piece in these years is the polemical pamphlet Le Droit ci la Paresse (1880), a bitingly ironic denunciation of the alleged addiction to hard labour of working-men, a celebration of life itself, a hymn to pleasure. Kolakowski has dismissed the pamphlet as Rabelaisian hedonism, although Derfler sees the work as closer to the ideas of Kopotkin. It was, for decades, the most extensively translated socialist pamphlet after The Communist Manifesto (and was indeed translated into Chinese before the Marx-Engels classic-is this significant?). What the French working-class made of the pamphlet, it is very difficult to say. Derfler recognises that, in many ways, it was a hundred years ahead of its time, anticipating many of the themes of the contemporary ecology movement. One thing is certain: if it represents ‘Marxism’, it is probably one of those writings which led Marx, apropos of the ideas of, among others, his son-in-law, to declare that he himself was clearly not a Marxist!

Lafargue’s other function in these final three years prior to his return to Paris, was to participate-from a distance-in the establishment of the infant socialist movement. Here, his taste for polemic and his penchant for paradox usually got the better of him and, although they continued to value the occasional Lafarguist ‘gem’, Marx and Engels

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remained extremely wary both of his tongue and of his pen, Marx remaining convinced right up until his death that Lafargue was ‘in fact, the last student of Bakunin, believing in him earnestly’ (p. 207). It is clear that, in his rather senseless polemics with men like Paul Brousse and Benoit Malon, not only did Lafargue come off second best, but he also succeeded in putting off more recruits to the party than he attracted. France was nowhere near ready for Marxism, neither sociologically, nor cultuially, nor indeed politically (has it ever been?). Derfler is unblinking in describing the Guesde/Lafargue party of the 1880s as ‘little more than a messianic sect’ (p. 217). Nevertheless, he is also led to conclude that this ‘barebones’ Marxism gradually played a key role in shifting the centre of gravity of the French left away from anarchist or Proudhonian ideas and towards a more ‘scientific’ understanding of historical and social forces. ‘Lafargue’s aim was to make Marx accessible, and if his party reduced much of his father-in-law’s thoughts to fundamental schema and almost completely ignored Marx’s dialectical view of the world, so complex and foreign to the tradition of French thought, Lafargue nevertheless succeeded (p. 222). Quite so. What, for this reviewer, Derfler’s book demonstrates beyond much doubt is that ‘Marxism’, however understood, has only ever been a peripheral phenomenon in the ideological and political life of France.

University of Bath Jolyon Howorth

Just War Theory, Jean Bethke Elshtain (Oxford, Blackwell, 1992), x+336 pp., g35.00 cloth, gl2.95 P.B.

A new collection in the recognised textbook series ‘Readings in Social and Political Theory’, this book gathers ten essays, all previously published since 1960, around the gist of the American Roman Catholic Bishops’ 1983 pastoral letter.

The focus is on understanding the ‘just war tradition’ (JWT) as a specimen of the problematics of social ethical method. The deep roots of the tradition in Augustine are interpreted by Paul Ramsey, and the tradition’s evolution since the middle ages is traced by Michael Howard; otherwise the concern is contemporary.

The most important interlocutor challenging the JWT from the outside is ‘realism’, according to which moral restraints cannot really govern the behaviour of states; this debate runs through most of the texts. In Elshtain’s own essay the effort is made to broaden the picture by means of gender awareness and the analysis of war as ‘discourse’. Pacifism is not present as an interlocutor, but as a silent observer; pacifists Robert Holmes (philosopher) and Stanley Hauerwas (Christian ethicist) contribute essays about the internal complexity of the JW system.

The internal challenges which are given the most attention have to do with how the several kinds of criteria which comprise the system interlock with one another. For some thinkersjus ad bellurn (how war is justified at all) and jus in be/lo (how justly to wage war) are separate and independent systems, both needing to be satisfied. For others, one is swallowed up in the other. Vattel, Ramsey and Johnson attend only to in hello, since in a world of sovereign nations and incommensurable value systems there is no way to adjudicate ad bellurn. Others (cf. in Holmes, pp. 222ff.) consider that if a war is justified all necessary means are also legitimate. Other more modern internal challenges arise in the face of deterrence: is it moral to threaten an action which it would be immoral to commit?