a marxist intellectual: interview with michael löwy
TRANSCRIPT
A Marxist intellectual: Interview with Michael Löwy*1
* From: Tempo. Rio de Janeiro, vol. 1, n. 2, 1996, pp. 166-183. Translated by V. S. Conttren, February 2020. DOI 10.17605/OSF.IO/FPQ7W.
1 Michael Löwy is a researcher at the Centre National des Recherches Scientifiques (CNRS) in Paris. He gave this interview to professors Ângela de Castro Gomes and Daniel Aarão Reis on September 11, 1996, at the Fluminense Federal University, in Niterói.
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Your name is very well known throughout the academic circles of Brazil, the country where you were born, but we do not quite know your intellectual trajectory. Where did you graduate, where did you begin to structure your own conceptions?
Let's start from the beginning. I was born in São Paulo on May 6,
1938, into a family of Jews emigrated to Brazil in the 1930s. My family came
here essentially because my father was unemployed, facing a crisis, and
here there was opportunity for work. I suspect that there was also some
connection with the near civil war that took place in Austria in 1934, with
social democracy being crushed, but fundamentally for economic reasons.
My father had contacts in São Paulo, mainly with his family, and he settled
there. I did my gymnasium and my scientific studies in a public school, and
then joined a social science course at the Faculty of Philosophy, Sciences
and Letters of the University of São Paulo, on Maria Antônia Street, in 1956.
Some of my classmates were Roberto Schwarz, Francisco Weffort and
several others.
Why the Social Sciences?
I already had a socialist militancy, and for me the social sciences were
what had more to do with my concerns: the workers' movement, Marxism,
and socialist ideas. Weffort came first in the admission exam. I came
second, together with a girl named Evelyn. In our class I think we had
between 25 and 30 students.
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Who were the teachers?
Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Otávio Ianni, who at the time were
very close to each other; Florestan Fernandes, who at the time did not
appear to be the most politically advanced, was perhaps one of the most
eclectic, so to speak; Azis Simão, to whom I felt closest. Azis Simão was the
only one who was most directly interested in the workers' movement,
especially the sociology of the workers' movement. I had a very strong
connection with him. My first works were more or less inspired by Azis
Simão.
And what were those first works?
My first study was about class consciousness among metallurgical
workers in the state of São Paulo. I did this research with the help of
DIEESE,2 where I worked as a volunteer. DIEESE did a survey on the cost of
living by distributing consumer notebooks to working families, and I
collaborated with them. With their help I elaborated a questionnaire that I
distributed in a congress of the Metallurgical Union of São Paulo. There
were several questions that tried to assess levels of class consciousness,
besides questions about where the syndicalists came from. There was also
a more direct political question, about which were the best union leaders:
the trabalhistas,3 socialists, anarchists or communists? The answers were
2 T.N.: Inter-Union Department of Statistics and Socio-Economic Studies.
3 T.N.: Trabalhistas were those who followed the theoretical and practical tendencies aligned with Getúlio Varga’s governance—predicated on a sort of national developmentalism, corporatist state structures, and “populism,” regarding the ‘modernization’ process of Brazil.
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anonymous and many answered on the DIEESE official letterhead. Cross-
checking the data, I started the work. Another question was about the
Union: is the Union intended to provide dental and hospital care, or is it an
organ of workers' struggle in defence of their own interests? If the union
delegate answered that the union served to give assistance, I no longer
qualified him. It was a first attempt at sociological research on the subject.
And to my great satisfaction and eternal glory, I received the first prize
from the Social Science Students' Research Center, or something like that.
Then I made a slightly more sophisticated version of the same material,
which was published in France at the Cahier International de Sociologie. The
Brazilian version was published in the Revista de Estudos Políticos in the
early 1960s.
Did the results of this research, besides pleasing your colleagues, please your militant conscience at the time? Did the working class emerge as a promising class from a political point of view?
Yes, one could see that there were several levels of consciousness, and
that there was also a political consciousness. Political conscience, for me,
had all those who identified with either communists or socialists or
anarchists. These had class consciousness. Those who said they were in
favour of the trabalhistas, no. That was the opinion I had, inspired a little by
Azis Simão.
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Was Azis Simão a good professor?
He was a very good professor, very friendly, pedagogical. The teachers
we got along with best were him, Fernando Henrique, Otávio Ianni and
Antonio Cândido, these four. Florestan too, although already further away.
It was a question of generation. And curiously, he seemed to be the least
politically committed to Marxism. I say curiously because afterwards he
would be the opposite, but at the time that was how we saw him.
The climate in the Social Sciences course was very politicized— people participated in social movements?
No. Few of them participated. And those were seen as curiosities by
the other students. There was political interest, there was interest in
Marxist theory, but political militancy, no, it was very limited.
Who were the political participants?
Weffort and another one or two who were also communists, I can't
remember their names now. And I think that' s all. In the next group came
the Sader brothers, Eder and Emir.
Wasn't Leôncio Martins Rodrigues in the class?
Leôncio was a few years older, he was a few classes above. When we
joined, he was still a Trotskyist militant. I remember he was distributing the
Fourth International magazine in French.
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Did your classmates meet outside the university?
Yes, but not all of them. We were three friends: Roberto Schwarz,
Gabriel Bolaffi and me. We saw each other often and we were always
together. They called us “The Three Musketeers.” Some participated in a
course given by Anatol Rosenfeld on the history of philosophy, if I am not
mistaken, at Roberto Schwarz's house. I attended a few times.
Did you have any magazines at school?
No. There was a magazine, I don't remember the name, of students
who I don't think were even from the Social Sciences. It was a small
magazine, which had a vocation for politics and aesthetics. I remember I
wrote an article there about FIARI: International Federation of Independent
Revolutionary Artists. In 1938, when Trotsky, Diego Rivera and Breton met
in Mexico, the surrealists decided to create a federation of revolutionary
artists, independent from the Third International. Trotsky and Breton wrote
the text, which was signed by Diego Rivera. This document is interesting
because it seeks to analyze the revolutionary role of the artist.
You told us that when you entered college you were already a socialist militant. What kind of militancy was that?
Before entering university I participated, for a short time, in the
Socialist Party and after in the famous Independent Socialist League. It was
a very small group—minuscule, microscopic—inspired by Rosa Luxemburg,
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of which Paul Singer, Rocha Barros, Sachetta, Sader were part at the
beginning. In fact, I considered myself a disciple of Paul Singer. It was he
who initiated me in the work of Rosa Luxemburg. I remember that around
1953-54 he was in the Socialist Party and distributed a pamphlet protesting
against the invasion of Guatemala. But after a year he was disappointed
with the Party, and there discussions began to form a new group, the
Independent Socialist League. I have the impression that in conversations
and discussions with Paul Singer I learned as much as at the university.
From the point of view of an intellectual and political Marxist formation, he
was something of a private university to me.
How would you define Paul Singer in intellectual terms at the time?
Someone who at the same time had a solid Marxist economic
background, knew Marx perfectly well, Rosa Luxemburg too, and had a
very strong union, worker, and political commitment. He was concerned
with maintaining a link with the Union and the trade unionists, with the
workers' struggles and with the left, seeking a Marxist political alternative
outside the cadres of the Communist Party and of Social Democracy, as it
was exotically represented by the Socialist Party.
What ties did Paul Singer maintain with the unions and trade unionists?
He was mainly in contact with the Metallurgical Union, with an
opposition tendency towards the leadership. There was a small tendency
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that aimed to reform the union structure, to unbind the union from the
State, to put an end to the union tax. Nevertheless, my relationship with
the Union went through the student's movement, through the State
Students Union (UEE). I integrated there a kind of syndicalist secretary and I
attended union meetings as a student representative. I remember going to
several assemblies of striking workers, bringing the students' word of
solidarity.
It was during your time as a university student that this group, which has a certain importance in the intellectual trajectory of several Brazilian professors and politicians, was formed, the so-called "Capital Group"?
The “Capital Group” appeared at that time. When we were finishing
college, in 1959 or 1960, those responsible for the group, Fernando
Henrique and Paul Singer, invited us. We were considered to be sufficiently
mature to participate. However, we caught the trolley moving already.
When we joined, I think they were already at the end of the first volume or
at the beginning of the second. I attended the meetings for a year or so.
There were teachers from various disciplines, it was an interdisciplinary
group: philosophers, economists, historians, sociologists. Fernando Novais,
Giannotti, Rui Fausto, Otávio Ianni, Fernando Henrique…
Where did your meetings take place?
At Giannotti's house, if I'm not mistaken. Every week a chapter of
Capital was read. Those who knew German read it in German, the others
read the Spanish translation. One person made the summary and
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commentary of the chapter, and then it was discussed. I started in the
middle, as I said, and left for France before finishing. But I was able to
catch a decent piece.
Regarding the theoretical references, you spoke about Marx and Rosa Luxemburg. Lenin and Trotsky were not common currency between yourselves?
No. Lenin was seen as an authoritarian character, who had been
criticized by Rosa Luxemburg for the authoritarian bias he had brought to
the revolutionary movement, and as the one responsible, to some extent,
for what happened afterwards in the Soviet Union. Within my strictly
Luxemburgist political background, Leninism was seen as something at
least ambivalent and objectionable. And Trotsky was criticized for being a
Leninist. Although several of our companions were of Trotskyist origin,
such as Sachetta, we had reached a critical assessment regarding Trotsky.
Outside the Marxist camp, was there any other theoretical references for the “Capital Group”?
There was. To most of my colleagues there was a very wide openness
to sociology and all forms of thinking. In fact, the most dogmatic was me.
The idea that a non-Marxist thinker could bring something interesting, for
me, was hard to accept. I remember some very violent discussions with
Roberto Shwartz because he would say that Huizinga was right in saying
that, deep down, what determined human beings was more a game than
an economic infrastructure. That was totally absurd to me. I also remember
another episode with a political science teacher of ours named Paula
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Beiguelman. She had given us a text from Mannheim about conservative
thinking, which she herself translated, mimeographed and distributed. At
first, I resisted, but she told me: "You don't have to stop being a Marxist.
You read Mannheim and then you go back to reading Marx. No problem.
But see if there are other things outside of Marxism too." I was very
sceptical, but I ended up reading Mannheim and even found it interesting.
My state of mind was a bit like that: there's still so much to read in Marx,
Engels and other Marxists, for me to waste my time reading Durkheim,
Mannheim... I thought it was a waste of time. I read because I was obliged
to, but with the controversial intention of deconstructing these authors, to
prove them all wrong from the Marxist point of view.
Did your non-Marxists colleagues become enamoured with these other references?
They were interested. They were more open, more eclectic. They didn't
have this concern, this animosity against bourgeois thought. Their attitude
was different. It generated a certain tension between me and even my
closest friends.
Still on the “Capital Group:” was the objective to study Marx only for academic development, or was there the intention to form an intellectual advisory group or to participate in some political project?
It was not an academic spectacle, nobody was there because of their
thesis or their academic career, but neither was it something with a
common political objective, advisory or whatever. It was neither one nor
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the other. There was a desire for self-illustration of each person according
to their own objectives. Some were more academic, others more
theoretical in the broad sense, and others with proper political objectives.
There was a great diversity, but everyone there agreed that it was
important to return to the source and read The Capital.
Did the friendship between the participants remain beyond the “Capital Group”?
I think so. There were already friendship ties between us before,
Fernando Henrique, Otávio Ianni, Paul Singer, Giannotti. Those who were
invited already had ties of friendship that naturally were strengthened later
in the group. And they remained. For me maybe less, because I walked
away, I went away, but for those who stayed I think so. Although naturally
there were ruptures, like that of Fernando Henrique with Otávio. Even then,
somehow a kind of intellectual community was created.
You graduated in 1959 and then went to France. Before that did you have any professional experience in Brazil?
Yes. When I was still finishing university, during the last year, I was
invited by Wilson Cantoni, a sociology professor, whom I met through the
Socialist League, to be his assistant at the Faculty of Philosophy, Sciences
and Letters of São José do Rio Preto. It was a very interesting experience. I
met a very friendly group and, among others, I encountered my former
philosophy professor, I don't remember his name now, who had been a
Trotskyist and was teaching there. But what struck me the most at the time
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was the relationship with the peasant movement. A Peasant League was
being organized in the region of Santa Fe do Sul, whose leader was called
Jofre Correia Neto. This man was constantly being persecuted, in and out of
prison. Me, Wilson Cantoni and other colleagues were very interested in
this movement. We went to Santa Fé do Sul to support it and brought a
delegation of several hundred peasants to São José do Rio Preto to
participate in an act in defence of public schools. There was a very strong
relationship between us and this movement in Santa Fé do Sul.
Why did you go to France?
My idea of going to France first arose from a fascination with French
culture from my teenage years. Surrealism had always been a strong
influence on me. I also had a certain mythical image of Paris as the city of
revolutions. But, more concretely, for me it was a capital discovery to read
the work of Lucien Goldmann, something I owe to Gabriel Bolaffi. Indeed, I
will never forget this scene: one day, I think we were in the second or third
year of college, Gabriel Bolaffi said to me like this: “I'm reading an
interesting book and I won't tell you which one, because you're already
annoying, but if you read this book you'll become an intelligent annoyance,
it'll be unbearable.” Bolaffi and I were arguing because I was a nagging
Marxist, and he was much more eclectic, more open, uncompromising. He
ended up confessing that the book was Lucien Goldmann's La Ciencia
humana y la filosofia. Naturally, I hurried over the book to see if it made me
an intelligent annoyance, and I was dazzled. I was dazzled because it was a
very different style of Marxism than the one I had seen hitherto. There was
a strong criticism of bourgeois sociology, but at the same time a rather
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non-dogmatic, open Marxism. To me it was enlightening. From then on I
began to read other things by Lucien Goldmann and decided: I am going to
France to do my doctoral thesis with Lucien Goldmann. I asked for a French
scholarship and when I was already working in San José from Rio Preto
came the positive response. So I went to Paris. I went in 1961, shortly after
Jango took over.
What was the moment of Jânio's resignation and João Goulart's inauguration like for you, a political militant?
I remember that we were very sympathetic to Brizola. We went out in
the street shouting: ”Brizola, get them!” At that time I was already in
another political organization, because in 1960 a part of the staff that was
in the Independent Socialist League united together with other little
groups and created an organization called Polop4—this one is more well-
known. I think the Independent Socialist League was only known by our
friends... I participated in the foundation of Polop together with Paul
Singer, the Sader brothers, Juarez Brito, Teotônio dos Santos and Rui Mauro
Marini.
Was going to France an aspiration that you shared with other people or was it something unusual in your group?
I think France was an interest for many in the group. Some had
already studied there. Philosophy students were more interested than
sociologists. Those who studied philosophy automatically would continue
4 T. N.: Revolutionary Marxist Political Labour Organization.
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their studies in France, the relationship was very strong. In sociology, it
wasn't that strong. I think it was just me and Rui Fausto.
When you left for France to do your doctoral thesis with Lucien Goldmann, did you also have the idea of fulfilling a political mission? How was it defined in your head?
I had the idea of doing a thesis on Marx and going back to Brazil. I
had already started working on Marx in Brazil. I even wrote three articles
for Revista Brasiliense, one on the agrarian question, “Notes on the agrarian
question in Brazil”—which was not lacking in pretension—another on the
young Marx and the other on the Marxist Party theory. A classic discussion
between Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin. Going to Paris to do a doctorate on
Marx was a task both political and intellectual.
How was your intellectual trajectory in France?
I wrote my thesis with Goldmann. At the time I remember Althusser
was starting to emerge, and the students split up. Rui Fausto, for example,
was more attracted to Althusser; I, to Goldmann. At Goldmann's seminar
there were figures like Herbert Marcuse. He spent a year by Goldmann's
invitation giving seminars at the School of High Studies. Other times
Goldmann invited Henri Lefebvre to give some lectures. Anyway, it was a
place where interesting things happened. Aside from Goldmann's
seminars, I attended other courses, such as Touraine's. I attended both
philosophy and sociology courses. I went to the courses, for example, of
Hippolyte on Hegel and Raymond Aron and Gurvitch, who taught sociology
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at the Sorbonne. I followed their courses with great reserve. They were two
teachers who were insufficiently Marxist for my taste, but, anyway, I
learned things, especially with Aron, who was a very intelligent guy, who
taught Marx very well. There was another interesting seminar, that of
Georges Haupt, historian, on international socialism.
While you were there, did you follow the events in Brazil?
Yes, I followed very closely and had a correspondence with my friends
in Brazil, Paul Singer and the Sader brothers. I followed the internal
discussions at Polop. I considered myself a Polop militant in Paris and took
part in the activities of the French left, particularly the Unified Socialist
Party, in the Sorbonne cell.
Was there the idea of establishing a link between the PSU and Polop? There was an analogy between them, from the point of view of questioning Party orthodoxies, wasn't there?
If there was any idea, nothing ever materialized. Anyhow, I read the rest of
Goldmann's work that I didn't know yet and developed my thesis on the theory
of revolution in Marx's work, methodologically inspired in Goldmann. But
Goldmann did not agree. To summarize the thesis: I related Marx's work to the
workers' movement at the time, trying to show that the theory of revolution in
the young Marx was a formulation based on the concrete experiences of the
workers' movement, of which Marx considered himself to be somewhat of a
spokesperson. To my understanding, there was a relationship between the class
and its intellectual, whilst Goldmann was very sceptical about this. For him,
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there is no working class in the 19th century, there were artisans, and Marx
represented indeed the left-wing of the bourgeoisie. Then, I would joke that I
considered myself a left-wing neo-Goldmannian. On the day of my thesis defence,
Goldmann criticized me a lot. In one of his articles he wrote that a student tried
to demonstrate Marx as the class expression of the proletariat, and that he was
not very convinced. But finally, methodologically my thesis was strictly
Goldmannian, in the sense of trying to articulate social classes, ideology and
culture: it was a kind of sociology of culture.
When did you defend your thesis?
In March 1964. I finished my thesis and at this moment a rather
strange parenthesis opens up in my itinerary: I end up in Israel due to
circumstances neither political nor intellectual, but strictly family related.
My father had passed away, my brother already lived in Israel and my
mother moved there. So I decided to try the future in Israel. After finishing
my doctorate, I spent a year studying Hebrew in a kibbutz and working half
the day. After a year of study, I was invited to teach History of Political
Ideas, first at the University of Jerusalem, then at Tel-Aviv University. I spent
four years in Israel, one year as a student and three as a professor. I also
had some contact with Brazil, especially with the Sader brothers. Then
came May 68 and it gave me a great desire to return to Europe. At that
time I also came into political conflict with the director of the Department
of Political Sciences of the University of Tel-Aviv, where I worked. A small
scandal was staged at the university, with many protests. Even the
newspapers discuss whether the professor's discharge was for political
reasons or not. A friend of mine who had lived in Israel but was in England,
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the historian Theodor Chamu, writes an article in the New Statement
denouncing what he calls “McCarthyism at Tel-Aviv University.” A friend of
Chamu, a teacher in Manchester named Peter Worsley, called him a few
days later saying: “We read your article and decided, in solidarity with your
friend who is a victim of discrimination, to invite him to teach here in
Manchester.” For me it was the opportunity to leave, because I was already
feeling suffocated in Tel-Aviv.
In those four years that you spent in Israel, was there any growth from an intellectual or living point of view?
The important growth was that, in order to be able to give the course I
gave, I learned very well the history of political ideas: Machiavelli, Hobbes,
Locke, Tocqueville, Hegel. It was a good learning experience.
Confirming that adage that says that the professor is the one who learns the most…
He's not the one who learns the most, he's the only one who learns.
How was your contact with Jewish culture?
Interestingly enough, throughout my stay in Israel I was never
interested in any aspect of Jewish culture. I never studied, I never wrote
anything! Total indifference. I only became interested in Judaism and Jewish
culture ten years after I left Israel.
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Was there any investment in terms of valuing Jewish culture within your family?
My family was enthusiastically Zionist. So much so that my brother
and mother went to Israel. My education had a lot of Zionisms and
socialism, but my decision to go to Israel was not because of Zionism, it
was, as I said, for family reasons.
During this period when you were in Israel, Brazil was becoming more and more closed. Did you nurture the desire to return to Brazil at some point?
Yes, in the four years that I lived in Israel I had the strong conviction
that I would return. I remember that in 1968 I wrote to Azis Simão saying
that I was thinking of going back and asking if there was any chance to
work in any university. Azis wrote back saying, “Don't come back, don't set
your feet here. Arriving here you're going to be arrested right away. Your
name is well-known, several of your friends have already been arrested.
Don't come back! Please, stay there in Europe!” I was frustrated, but I
thought he was right. Years later, when I first came back to Brazil, Azis
Simão was under the impression that I had broken up with him because of
his negative statement. He tried to apologize, but I said, “You were right!”
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Did you ever think of going back to Brazil to join the Polop as a clandestine political leader? That's what Sader was doing, isn't it?
Yes, but the idea of going back clandestinely was complicated. There
wasn't much structure. There was even a split in the Polop. The people I
was most connected to had created a new organization called POC
(Communist Workers Party) and were approaching the Fourth
International. At that moment Emir Sader came to Europe. We both
discussed and came to the conclusion that the Fourth International was
interesting. But the idea of returning to Brazil was not there, as far as I can
remember.
Besides the teaching activity, did you develop any other research after you left France?
I concluded my thesis on the theory of revolution in the young Marx in
1964, but unfortunately I could not publish it because I went to Israel. That
was a great frustration. Six years later, when I returned to France, I looked
for an editor, François Maspero, talked to him and Georges Haupt, and my
thesis was published. I did very little research in Israel. The climate was not
very favourable to research. My greatest effort was in teaching, in
preparing classes on the history of political ideas. I even wrote a few
articles in Israel, but the only interesting research work was one on Kafka
and anarchism. It's a study in which I've been working for years and never
really finish. In Manchester, I worked on a political sociology course with
Peter Worsley and started studying Max Weber. Anyone who gives a course
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on Max Weber has to study Max Weber. I started researching him and even
wrote an article that was a Marxist criticism of Max Weber. But my main
research at that time, 1968-69, was really more political than academic: a
book about Che Guevara's thought. As a matter of fact, I started this work
by writing articles about Guevara in Israel. I continued my research in
Manchester, and the book was published in 1970.
Before going to England, still in Israel, I had already applied for a
scholarship in France. A year later my application was accepted. I left
Manchester in 1969, landed in Paris and met my old friend Emir Sader, who
was working as an assistant in Paris-VII with Professor Nicos Poulantzas.
He introduces me to Poulantzas and says he is leaving for Chile. Poulantzas
then had me hired as an assistant. From then on I started to work as a
course administrator, chargé de cours, a person who did not have a
contract, who earned by the hour. It was a bit precarious, but I was able to
maintain myself.
What did you think of Poulantzas?
A very friendly guy. We got along very well, but we didn't agree on
anything. Neither politically nor theoretically. He was a Maoist, I was a
Trotskyist; he was an Althusserian, I was a Kantian. Total divergence and
perfect friendship. In the first or second year he proposed that we made a
course together. It was funny, because every week one spoke and the other
criticized. The students loved to see us disagreeing, though very amicably.
Each class was a total disagreement.
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The students must have learned a lot.
They might have. I think the first course we made together was about
Marxism and the national question. I remember from that course I had the
idea to prepare an anthology on Marxism and the national question. I went
to talk about it with Georges Haupt, who had published my book on Marx,
he said that he had the same idea and suggested that we should do it
together. This anthology was published in 1974. Meanwhile, Goldmann
died, unfortunately, leaving me orphaned. When I was in Israel I had little
contact with him, but when I returned to Paris I resumed contact, and
attended his seminars again. Through Goldmann I met Lukács, decided to
do my second doctorate, the State thesis, on Lukács, and would do it with
Goldmann, but he passed away. In the 1970s, I worked on my thesis on
Lukács and wrote some articles: one was a polemic against Althusser,
called “The historicist humanism of Marx or To Read The Capital.” I bought
the Lukácsians' fight against Althusser. Another article I wrote was
“Objectivity and Class Viewpoint in the Social Sciences.” It was the embryo
of a work on the sociology of knowledge. These articles and several others
were first published in Brazil by a friend of mine, Reginaldo de Piero, under
the title Dialectical Method and Political Theory, by Paz e Terra.
After all, I did this thesis on Lukács, travelled to Hungary several times,
worked in the Budapest archive, met Lukács' disciples. The thesis was
published in France with a somewhat strange title: For a sociology of
revolutionary intellectuals. Here in Brazil it also came out with this title.
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At the moment you come back to France many people are also arriving from Brazil.
Exactly. And I integrate directly into the colony of Brazilian exiles.
Although I was not an exile, I identify with them and try as much as
possible to make my small contribution to the defamation of Brazil abroad.
I remember that in 1970 me and a Brazilian friend went to visit Sartre and
ask him to launch a protest by French intellectuals against the tortures in
Brazil. Since we were still very naive, instead of taking a ready-made text,
we took only the idea. He was the one who had to sit down and write the
text. Then he called the other intellectuals to sign it, and the protest came
out. I was at every meeting with Violeta Arraes, who was the main
organizer.
You revealed to us that from university onward you had a rather orthodox thought. Years later, while studying in Paris, having contact with this rather heterogeneous group of Brazilian exiles, how would you evaluate your intellectual positions? Was there any change?
The big change for me was the discovery of Goldmann and Lukács. I
went from an orthodox Marxism to a more open Marxism. As for the exiles,
there was a kind of unity against the dictatorship, a general sympathy for
the armed struggle. My political reference was the POC, which no longer
existed in Brazil—it was therefore a more imaginary than real reference.
The last attempt to reorganize the POC failed in 1971, when a friend of ours
returned to Brazil from Paris and was killed by the dictatorship.
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Did you still think, at that time, that you would return to Brazil?
Frankly, less and less. Among other reasons, there was a personal
one: I had got married. I mean, I didn't completely dismiss the idea, but it
got even more complicated. Then two children were born in France and my
return became more and more unlikely.
Your professional commitment to France should also count.
Yes, but that wasn't the biggest obstacle. Eventually, if the Brazilian
regime changed, I would get a job at a Brazilian university. It was more this
personal problem. And at that time they also confiscated my Brazilian
passport. I went to the embassy to renew my passport, and they explained
to me that I was persona non grata. I had no legal way to return to Brazil.
After they confiscate your passport, how do you stay in France?
In a tight spot. I had applied for French naturalization at the same
time, which was refused. In 1975, I found myself without a Brazilian
passport and without French naturalization. Then I remember my Austrian
ancestors. I go to the Austrian embassy with my father's birth certificate
and I get an Austrian passport. For several years I was Austrian. It was only
after many years that I got French naturalization. I went to see a lawyer,
and he said to me: “Give up, if the presidency changes and the left wins, we
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will return to the subject.” After Mitterrand's election in 1981, I went to see
the lawyer again, and he finally succeeded, but it wasn't easy. A lot of
branches had to be broken.
In the 1970s there was a resumption of intellectual production in Brazil with the implementation of post-graduate courses. Did you accompany this process?
No. My accompaniment of the academic activity in Brazil is zero! The
last thing I followed was at the end of the 60s at USP, when the left-wing
guys published that magazine Teoria e Prática. I sent them a chapter of my
thesis on Marx, and they translated and published it. They were Rui Fausto,
Sader, Schwarz. Later, most of them went into exile. Roberto Schwarz was
in Paris; Emir was in Chile and then went to Cuba; Rui Fausto went to Chile
and then came to Paris, where I got him a job. Many of my friends were in
Paris, I was no longer at USP. So I had no idea what was happening.
Did you have any contact with the CEBRAP5 experiment? CEBRAP is from 1969, Fernando Henrique Cardoso was there.
Of course, I heard about the CEBRAP, but there was no direct
connection. I was more familiar with the latest splits at VAR-Palmares...6
5 T. N.: Brazilian Center of Analysis and Planning.
6 T. N.: Palmares Armed Revolutionary Vanguard
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A Marxist intellectual: interview with Michael Löwy
From when did you resume contact with Brazil?
In 1980 there was a chance to visit Brazil. I don't know how, someone
here in Brazil set up a business for me to go on a UNESCO mission to help
set up a post-graduate program in the city of Belo Horizonte. Thus, in 1980,
after 19 years of absence, I resumed contact with Brazil. It was a culture
shock. I felt that everything in Brazil had changed and everything was still
the same. Everything changed because everything got bigger, everything
expanded. Things that were references to me no longer existed. My house
had been demolished, my gymnasium had been demolished, Maria
Antônia was no longer Maria Antônia. From that point of view I was really
feeling kind of lost. But the people and the Brazilian lifestyle were the
same, it was the old Brazil.
And you liked it?
I liked it and I felt like going back. I didn't come back soon because the
occasion didn't come up, but from 1984 on I started coming back regularly
every two years and resumed university, personal, family contacts.
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In which way does Brazil hold a place within you today?
Being Brazilian has always been a fundamental part of my identity. If
my identity is a kind of brick building, the foundation is Brazilian. But in this
building also comes France. After so many years in Europe we end up
Europeanizing ourselves. But now, for the first time, I am working with
Brazilian themes: the issue of religion and politics in Brazil and Latin
America, surrounding Liberation Theology.
Before getting to that point, let's pick up on your trajectory: Marx, Goldmann, Lukács... Starting from when is there a broadening of horizons?
There's a moment that I think it's important to highlight, which is my
work on the sociology of knowledge. There I finally read Mannheim again—
my dear friend Paula Beiguelman was right, we need to read Mannheim—
and I did a contest project to enter the CNRS—Centre National des
Recherches Scientifiques. Miraculously, I was accepted. I say miraculously
because in order to enter the CNRS projects had to be based on empirical
research, social phenomena were studied empirically. And I was the only
one who submitted a project on sociological theory. Apparently they liked
it. I joined the CNRS with this project and did a study on the sociology of
knowledge that was published in France and translated in Brazil with the
pompous title, half ironic, of The Adventures of Karl Marx against the Baron
of Münchhausen. It is the only book of mine that has had a certain success
in Brazil. It was also published in France, but had much less impact. During
this period I took a step beyond Goldmannian-Lukácsian Marxism. This
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A Marxist intellectual: interview with Michael Löwy
step was taken with the discovery of Walter Benjamin in 1979-80. He gives
me tremendous enlightenment, and a new horizon opens up for me: the
Frankfurt School and the theme of romanticism, which I had already been
working on from Lukács, but which is beginning to interest me more. This
forces me to review a number of things from Marxism and to have a much
more heterodox vision. The interest in the relationship between religion-
Christianity-revolution also begins, hence that book of mine, Redemption
and Utopia.
Do you establish any relation between your inclination for Walter Benjamin and the recognition of the failure, at least in the short term, of the revolutionary project in Brazil?
No. Only in a very indirect way, in the sense that Walter Benjamin is
someone very concerned with the history of the defeated and has a very
strong sensitivity towards it. This can subjectively correspond to the feeling
of sympathy for the victims of the repressive process, and for Brazil itself.
Only if it is very indirectly.
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There is a clear correlation between Gramsci's discovery and the rediscovery of the subject of democracy by the Brazilian left from 1974 onward. Already from the 80's there is a general inclination toward Walter Benjamin. That is, at the moment when the revolutionary project is considered closed, Benjamin's works are translated in Brazil and everyone reads Benjamin.
It may be that the choice for Benjamin in Brazil was made in this
context, but my personal was not like that. On the contrary, I took
Benjamin from his messianic and revolutionary side. On the question of
democracy, for me, the reference was still Rosa Luxembourg. There was no
need for that passing through Gramsci.
Walter Benjamin also helps you reach the referential universe of Jewish culture?
Yes, of course. It is through Benjamin that I discover Judaism and
religion. Both Jewish messianism and religion in general, religion as a
revolutionary culture. My current affiliation with the CNRS passes through a
centre that studies the sociology of religion. Obviously, from the point of
view of someone who is not religious, but observes the phenomenon with
great interest.
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A Marxist intellectual: interview with Michael Löwy
How do you position yourself in relation to the critique that views Marxism as a secular religion?
Put in those terms, of critique, I think it's a punctured, superficial
thesis. It does not realize what Marxism is as a materialistic theory.
However, on another deeper level, no longer as a critique, but as a positive
claim, I find the thesis legitimate. I refer to the level that is studied by
Lucien Goldmann in that book of his about the hidden God, when he
compares Pascal's bet with Marx's bet. He says that both in the case of
religion in Pascal and in the case of socialism in Marx there is an element of
faith, that is, an element that cannot be demonstrated empirically. Both
rely on a wager. Pascal bets on the existence of God; Marx bets on the
possibility of the realization of communism. And that bet necessarily
implies the risk of not succeeding. But the individual has to bet, he is
already onboard, there is no escape. As Pascal says, “we're already
onboard,” you can't look from the outside.. You are obligated to bet on one
thing or another. If you don't bet on God's existence, you guide your life
according to that hypothesis. The Christian, on the other hand, directs his
life according to the other one. The same goes for socialism, we all have to
bet. In this sense there is an affinity, or a structural homology, between
religion, at least a certain type of religion, which is that of Pascal, and the
socialism of Marx. There is an element of faith, an ultimate principle that
cannot be scientifically demonstrated and is based on a wager. Therefore, I
find the comparison between religion and Marxism legitimate, but not in
the superficial, journalistic sense.
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In closing, I would ask you to assess the current state of Marx's thought. You, who have always had the reference of Marxism, how do you face this current movement that claims that Marx was a great author, but from the 19th century, and that it is an anachronism to keep him as a reference?
I'd start by remembering an old quote: “Marx died to humankind.”
Benedetto Croce, 1960. This thesis that Marx is finished is not very new. In
fact, what we are seeing today in France and elsewhere is a phenomenon
that the press itself calls “the return of Marx.” And I think it is quite
predictable, because to try to understand capitalism and, even more, to try
to transform this world, Marx is necessary. Inevitably, sooner or later, he
will return to the agenda, until the moment when it is no longer necessary,
when capitalism no longer exists. As Rosa Luxemburg and Gramsci had
already said, in a post-capitalist, socialist, classless society, the categories
of Marxism will be overcome.
Having said that, I think that a criticism of Marx is obviously in order.
The two aspects of criticism that seem to me the richest to explore are the
libertarian and the ecological approaches. Any libertarian criticism of
Marx's conception of the State and Marx's illusions about the State
deserves to be explored, it is a fertile problem. And the other criticism that
seems interesting to me is the ecological one. It calls into question the
whole doctrine of progress, the whole conception of history based on the
development of productive forces, that is, the core elements in terms of
Marxism, particularly a certain Marxism which, to sum up in one sentence,
I would describe as “the Marxism of the Preface of 1857.” Therein lies an
element that needs to be relocated, and it is not a mere detail, it is a rather
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central element of Marx's theory. I think that a critical revision of Marxism
passes through this, but in the sense of deepening its radical nature and
negativity in relation to capitalist modernity. The majority of criticisms or
revision proposals made to Marx today go in the opposite direction, trying
to dilute radicality and reconcile Marx with capitalist modernity. In my
opinion, what is interesting is precisely to deepen the critical dimension,
putting into question those elements of Marx's work that are insufficiently
critical in relation to the model of Western, industrial and patriarchal
civilization.
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