A-Infos (en) Death of a Marxist (obituary)

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Comelius Castoriadis, who has died at the age of 75, was
one of the most impressive and influentual intellectuals on
the French left, travelling over half a century from
Stalinism through Trotskyism and Leninism and finally past
Marxism itself, away from prevailing fomls of socialism
towards a more autonomous and libertarian approach to
politics altogether. He was best known to English-speaking
anarchists as the ideological inspiration of the Solidarity
group during the 1960s and 1970s. 

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OBITUARY - COMELIUS CASTORIADIS


Comelius Castoriadis, who has died at the age of 75, was
one of the most impressive and influentual intellectuals on
the French left, travelling over half a century from
Stalinism through Trotskyism and Leninism and finally past
Marxism itself, away from prevailing fomls of socialism
towards a more autonomous and libertarian approach to
politics altogether. He was best known to English-speaking
anarchists as the ideological inspiration of the Solidarity
group during the 1960s and 1970s. 

Kornelios Kastoriades was born on 11th March 1922 to a
francophile Greek farnily in Istanbul which soon moved to
Greece, and he grew up in Athens where he studied law,
economics and philosophy. He was drawn to left-wing
politics as a boy and joined the Young Communists in 1937
and the Communist Party in 1941, but he soon turned against
the party line and joined an extreme Trotskyist fraction in
1942. He was also involved in the resistance movement
against the German occupation of Greece. He ran into
personal danger from enemies on either side, and in 1945 he
made his way to France, where he spent the rest of his
life. 

By profession he was a statistical economist, and from 1948
he worked as a senior official at the OECD (Organisation
for Economic Co-operation and Development) in Paris. But by
vocation he was a revolutionary propagandist, and during
the same period he wrote prolifically for left-wing
publications and held regular meetings in Paris. In 1946 he
joined the French section of the Trotskyist Fourth
International, the Parti Communiste Internationaliste, but
he fommed a dissident fraction which left it in 1948. He
became a founding editor of the paper Socialisme ou
Barbarie, which from 1949 acted as the focus of one of the
most active groupuscules of the New Left, campaigning
against all actually existing forms of socialism, whether
reformist or revolutionary, and for a new form of socialism
which would bring real liberty, equality and fratemity. As
'Pierre Chaulieu' or 'Paul Cardan' or 'Jean-Marc Coudray',
he produced a series of essays which appeared as articles
and then as parnphlets, were translated into several
languages, and reached small but active groups in other
countries. 

In this country his influence was exerted through the
Solidarity group, founded in 1960 which attempted to play a
similar part in the British left (and whose main leader
coincidentally came from a Greek family and used various
pseudonyms). During a period of more than twenty years,
conscientious translations of the writings of 'Paul Cardan'
(often improved versions of the originals) appeared as
articles in Solidarity magazine or as Solidarity pamphlets
or books, and introduced his ideas to the English-speaking
world - and beyond, since they were widely read not only in
Britain and America but in many parts of both Westem and
Eastern Europe. Revolutionary and libertarian socialists of
all kinds in all places were impressed by such texts as
Socialism Reaffirmed S ocialism or Barbarism, The Meaning
of Socialism, The Crisis of Modern Society, Modern
Capitalism and Revolution, History and Revolution,
Redefining Revolution, History as Creation, and were
stimulated to rethink their ideas. 

His key doctrines were that class society is divided not
according to the ownership or control of property but
according to the possession or exertion of power
(essentially between ordergivers or directors and
executants or ordertakers), that the various attempts at
political and social revolution (especially by Communist
Parties) have succeeded only in replacing the old
bureaucracies by new ones, that Marxist analysis itself
shows that all the varieties of Marxism (including that of
Marx himself) cannot succeed, and that other ways must be
found for individuals to take power over their own lives,
based on the principles of autogestion- self-management -
and autonomy. 

His influence was most obvious in the 'events' of 1968 in
France, many of whose leaders especially Daniel Cohn-Bendit
- were impressed by his critical approach to all old
politics, though as it happened the Socialisme ou Barbarie
paper and group had ceased a couple of years earlier. In
particular his concept of autogestion had a wide appeal for
the rebels outside the established political parties.
Eventually he abandoned not only Marxism but socialism, and
by the end of the 1970s he adopted the term 'autonomous
society' instead. His line clearly converged with that of
anarchism, but although he made occasional references to
the anarchists, like many former Marxists he had little
respect for them, and in return anarchists took little
notice of him. This was probably a mistake, since many of
his positive as well as negative ideas are highly relevant
to the work facing the anarchist movement in the
contemporary world. 

In 1970 he retired trom the OECD and became a French
citizen. He turned to psychology and became a psychoanalyst
in 1974, associated with the 'Fourth Group' of dissident
Lacanians. He began to achieve recognition as a leading
intellectual, was an editor of two leading magazines -
Textures (1971 - 1975) and Libre (1976-1980) - and in 1980
he became a director of studies at Ecole des Hautes Etudes
en Sciences Sociales at the University of Paris. He
conducted an ambitious programme of work and, at last able
to write freely under his own name, he produced a score of
books. A series of cheap collections of his early writings
appeared from 1973 to 1979, accompanied by L'Institution
imaginaire de la societe in 1975, and followed by a series
of collections of later wri tings under the general title
Carrefours dans la labyrinthe from 1978 to 1997. 

At the same time he became better known in the
English-speaking world with the appearance of American
translations of some of his writings - Crossroads in the
Labyrinth (1984), The Imaginary Institution of Society
(1987), a three-volume collection of Political and Social
Writings ( 1 988- 1 993), an anthology of Philosophy,
Politics, Autonomy (1991), World in Fragments (1997) - and
another anthology, The Castoriadis Reader (1997), just
before his death. But he was still virtually ignored by the
political and intellectual establishments in the
Englishspeaking world. 

Towards the end of his life he turned increasingly to
linguistics and mathematics, ancient history and pure
philosophy. He developed an idiosyncratic humanist position
which emphasised the part played by individual imagination
and creative culture in human affairs and which included a
remarkable 'ethic of mortality', arguing that the absence
of any kind of divinity above humanity and of any kind of
existence after death made it all the more important to
accept a tragic sense of both private and public life and
to concentrate on the development of autonomous individuals
in an autonomous society here and now. He always opposed
all kinds of intellectual obscurantism, though he never
escaped the obscurity of modern discourse in French, and
his style became increasingly esoteric and neologistic. At
his worst he might be arrogant and abstract, but at his
best he could be inspiring and realistic. He always had a
wide circle of friends, to whom he was known as 'Corneille'
and with whom he enjoyed furious arguments, and he also
earned increasing respect from a larger public. He will
probably be remembered for his negative work, which helped
to destroy some of the most harmful myths of our time,
rather than for his positive work, which tried to construct
a new world in their place; yet now that the former task is
completed, the latter task becomes increasingly urgent.
"Whatever happens", he said at the end of his life, "I
shall remain first and foremost a revolutionary". Other
revolutionaries still have much to learn from him. 

Cornelius Castoriadis died in Paris following a heart
operation on 26th December 1997, and was the subject of
long obituaries in the French press. Obituaries appeared in
this country in The Guardian and The Times (the latter
being an abridged and expurgated version of the present
article). 

NW 

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