An interesting review, from a year ago of a volume of writings by Hannah Arendt that would have gone into the book on Karl Marx that she never completed.  I don't know why I didn't notice this review till now--it's pretty rich.

What an interesting work this is.  When I begin paying serious scholarly attention to Hannah Arendt, almost 30 years ago, her criticisms of Marx were not an object of a great deal of scholarly attention.  Marxism at that point was not considered a live option. How the decades have changed.  Now, I would say that Arendt and Marx are two of the most influential of political thinkers, at least among a certain group.  I do think that Arendt's work on revolution remains underappreciated today, but perhaps that is as it must be, in an age that wants so strenuously to be revolutionary.  In any event, any attempt to come to grips with Arendt's efforts to come to grips with Marx is certainly welcome, and this review offers a lot to think about on those matters.

I had several responses to this review.

First, it seems more sensitive to the promptings of this moment then Arendt herself ever was. I take this to be an intellectual failing on the part of the reviewer, who lacks the courage of his convictions, or perhaps just lacks the intellectual conviction that, in Arendt, he has found a truth that the times do not generally share.  Particularly on the estimation of the French and American revolutions, and on the possibility that Stalinist regimes really were evil in a way more analogous to National Socialism then was, say, Italian fascism.  In the age of Jacobin and a continual forgetting of the horrors of communism in power (and a continual confusion of the opposition of the United States to Stalinism with an opposition to social democracy), this is unsurprising but not helpful.  

Second, it notes Arendt’s deep grappling with Marx, and the way that, for her, a response to Marx must register the importance of the new vocabulary and language he provided for politics, and offer an alternative vocabulary of its own.  (Interestingly, Aristotle in the Politics seemed to suggest this too, and other major thinkers throughout history have done the same--namely, that we don't simply need to change our views on politics, or our arguments, but also the words and categories by which we think.)  I think we often underappreciate the value of vocabulary changes; but it seems to me very important to have the right kind of language to bring interview the force is shaping our world.

Third, it rightly identifies context and the issue over which she most fundamentally disagreed with Marx, as a philosophical-anthropological one. It's about the nature of human beings. On her reading, Marx really thought that humans were essentially laboring and productive creatures. Arendt thought we were not just other than, but more than that.  She was unapologetic in affirming that a political human, a discursive human, is better than a animal laborans.  The author doesn’t seem to realize it, but this is a long-standing preoccupation of Arendt’s, maaybe going back to her time with Jaspers, even perhaps to Heidegger, and appearing as it does in her formulation, in the Epilogue to Origins of Totalitarianism, that “human nature is at stake” in these times.  The formulation came from the Epilogue there, but in fact I think the concern predates the writing of that Epilogue itself (which was, I think (?), written in 1957 or so), and suffuses the whole of OT as well as elsewhere in her early post-World War Two writings, such as “The image of Hell” and “We Refugees”.  In all these works, and others, Arendt is clear that there is a basic issue of what the human is that is at stake in our debates these days.  It may be a vestige of her old Humanistik education, I don't know; but I find it a powerful insight.

And this suggests a really nice formulation by the reviewer that I have never encountered before. He suggests that Arendt registered in Marx a perception that the latter never quite formulated crisply, namely, that there is some deep tension between labor’s traditional role of managing human necessity—ever since the agricultural revolution ten thousand years ago, we might say (though Marx didn’t have that idea)—and labor’s role in the modern world not so much of reproduction but of productivity, of creation of durable wealth and power, and “the freedom of productivity.”  This kind of vision of freedom looks a lot like natality.  But Arendt insists it is different.  I think she is right--exegetically about Marx, and philosophically about freedom.

Along with rejecting Marx, as the reviewer says, “Arendt instead seeks a path that would extend political freedom without erasing the difference between politics and the economy.” She rejects Marx’s strategy of revolution, but “there are hints in this volume of forms of Arendtian politics that could challenge capitalism.”  He finds those hints especially in her concept of natality, the idea of humans as creating newness, and that newness itself creating the ontological conditions for a new world which all of us must enter.  (And it's nice that he notes she learned this, or discerned it, in Augustine.)  He doesn't really do much with the insight, though.  He writes:

the normative task Arendt elaborates is an individual responsibility for the world manifested in the collaborative activity of political life. The revolution of natality is one in which all, mutually, take responsibility for the world, where judgment is exercised in public discourse on political questions.

This is a considerably different political program than “Workers of the World, Unite!” Yet she implicitly agrees with much of that slogan. Perhaps the closest we can come to a meeting of Arendt and Marx is to imagine an Arendtian revision of the Marxist formula to seize the means of production. Arendt would argue that we instead ought to say, seize the means of exercising responsibility for the world. In the invocation of a great deed, Arendt holds out a hope for novelty, for the birth of something new that allows for political beginning. And in the present moment of apparently catastrophic climate change, where seemingly no politician either wants to take action or be held accountable, her notion of responsibility has an appeal, despite the word having often been tarnished by conservative diatribes.

 

I don't think Arendt is adequately captured as a revisionist Marxist.  She is after far larger quarry.  (In fact the only Marxist I wish she had seriously encountered is Raymond Williams, whose Marxism and Literature ends with an emphasis on creativity, an emphasis that is perhaps a bit too Romantic in origins and a bit too eisegetical rather than exegetical of Marx, but still is pretty interesting.)  But this piece gives me some new thoughts, about Arendt, about Marx, and about politics, and for all that I am grateful.