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Workers Vanguard No. 1171 |
6 March 2020 |
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TROTSKY |
LENIN |
On Hunger, Sex and Death
(Quote of the Week)
Isaac Deutscher, Marxist historian and biographer of Leon Trotsky, addressed the New York Socialist Scholars Conference in 1966. Against the New Left idealism of the time, Deutscher upheld Marxist materialism, insisting that the working class is the necessary agent of revolution, while outlining the liberating goals of socialism for all of humanity.
We do not maintain that socialism is going to solve all predicaments of the human race. We are struggling in the first instance with the predicaments that are of man’s making and that man can resolve. May I remind you that Trotsky, for instance, speaks of three basic tragedies—hunger, sex, and death—besetting man. Hunger is the enemy that Marxism and the modern labor movement have taken on. In doing so they have naturally been inclined to ignore or belittle man’s other predicaments. But is it not true that hunger or, more broadly, social inequality and oppression, have hugely complicated and intensified for innumerable human beings the torments of sex and death as well?
In fighting against social inequality and oppression we fight also for the mitigation of those blows that nature inflicts on us....
Yes, socialist man will still be pursued by sex and death; but we are convinced that he will be better equipped than we are to cope even with these. And if his nature remains aggressive, his society will give him immeasurably greater and more varied opportunities than bourgeois man has for sublimating his instinctual drives and turning them to creative uses. Even if socialist man may not be quite “free from guilt or pain” as [Percy Bysshe] Shelley dreamed he would be, he may be still “scepterless, free, uncircumscribed, but man equal, unclassed, tribeless, and nationless, exempt from all worship and awe.” The average member of socialist society may yet rise, as Trotsky anticipated, to the stature of Aristotle, Goethe, Marx, who, whatever their sexual instincts and aggressive drives, embody some of mankind’s highest achievements so far. And we assume that “above these heights new peaks will rise.” We do not see in socialist man evolution’s last and perfect product, or the end of history, but in a sense only the beginning of history. Socialist man may indeed feel the Unbehagen, the unease and discomfort, that civilization imposes upon the beast in man. Moreover, this may, indeed, be the most essential of his own inner contradictions and tensions that will impel him to evolve further and scale heights which are beyond our imagination.
—Isaac Deutscher, “On Socialist Man” (1966), printed in Marxism in Our Time (Ramparts Press, 1971)
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