M. Petrosyan's Humanism is a book that sets out to win an argument the Soviet state was losing. Its claim is stated on the first page and never afterwards doubted: that a "social system in which concern for man is the supreme law has won through," that socialism is not merely compatible with humanism but is its only genuine form, and that everything else calling itself humanist — liberal, religious, existentialist — is counterfeit. The book is learned, wide-ranging and, in places, a serious piece of philosophical exposition. It is also, read against the year in which it appeared and the country that produced it, one of the most self-refuting documents this series has reprinted. It proclaims socialism the home of human dignity in the same months that its state was sentencing a young man to prison for having documented how that state confined dissenters in psychiatric hospitals.
Establish the date first, because it is the whole of the argument. The spine reads 1972 — the year of the English translation issued by Progress. But the book itself tells us it is older and younger than that. In the introduction the author explains that this is "a substantially revised and expanded version of the original work put out by Mysl Publishers in 1964" (Mysl, "Thought," was a Moscow house). The core, then, is a de-Stalinisation-era book of the Khrushchev thaw. The revision, however, is not cosmetic. Its latest anchor is the Twenty-Fourth Congress of the CPSU of March–April 1971, quoted repeatedly and at length, with Brezhnev cited by name on scientific-technical progress and on the "fullest possible satisfaction of the people's material and cultural requirements." Its datable references cluster in 1968–71; its five-year-plan figures run forward "to 1975." So the text we are reading is a work of the early Brezhnev years, rewritten around 1971 from a 1964 foundation. It reads like its real date: confident, consolidated, past the openness of the thaw and settled into the long official freeze.
Who wrote it, and for whom? Petrosyan writes in the collective voice of the Soviet philosophical establishment. The book cites the reports of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, the journals Problems of Philosophy and Philosophic Sciences, and the documents of the 1969 International Meeting of Communist and Workers' Parties in Moscow. It is a monograph in a genre the introduction names explicitly: the "general and detailed exposure of contemporary bourgeois and other brands of quasi-humanism" as "one of the first and foremost tasks of Soviet and other philosophers." This is a commissioned intervention in an international ideological contest, aimed at readers — Soviet and Western — who might be tempted by a rival account of what Marxism has to say about the human being.
To see what Petrosyan is doing, you have to know what he is against. The 1960s had produced, inside and outside the communist world, a revival of what was called "Marxist humanism," built on the rediscovery of the young Marx — above all the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, with their theory of alienated labour. For a generation of thinkers this early Marx offered a Marxism about the human being rather than about iron laws of history: Erich Fromm's 1965 symposium Socialist Humanism; Roger Garaudy, then still the philosophical star of the French Communist Party; the Yugoslav Praxis school around the Zagreb journal of that name; the Polish philosopher Adam Schaff. To Soviet orthodoxy this current was dangerous precisely because it spoke Marxism's own language. It could ask whether alienation had really ended in the USSR, and answer no.
What is striking, and to Petrosyan's credit as an author, is that he does not ignore these figures or dismiss them with a slogan. He engages them by name and at length. Adam Schaff, who had suggested that "in the course of its development Marxism has simply ignored the problem" of the individual, is quoted and rebutted. Garaudy's Marxisme du XXe siècle and Lénine are read closely and attacked for wanting to "enrich" Marxism with Fichte and with Sartre. Fromm is engaged over a dozen pages on the theory of "social character." The Praxis thinkers are quoted directly — Gajo Petrović's charge that "the theory of reflection contradicts Marx's understanding of man as the essence of practice" is set down and answered. Petrosyan even fights on a second front: against Louis Althusser, who from the opposite direction was expelling humanism from Marxism altogether, "separating humanism ... from scientific Marxism." Petrosyan wants neither the humanist revisionists' young Marx nor Althusser's anti-humanist science. He wants to claim the whole of humanism for Soviet orthodoxy and leave his opponents with nothing.
His verdict on the revival is that it is an illegitimate splicing job — "an amalgam of 'early' Marxism" with existentialism and neo-Freudianism — and that the men who attempt it are "revisionists" seeking "'irreconcilable contradictions'" where none exist. Where the humanists find in the young Marx a standard against which existing socialism falls short, Petrosyan finds only a stage in the growth of a doctrine that existing socialism has already fulfilled.
The positive teaching is "real" or "socialist" humanism, and its structure is simple. Pre-Marxist thought, Petrosyan argues, rested on "the concept of man in the abstract, man in general, divorced from all socio-political, economic, legal and other relations." Marxism replaced this abstraction with a man defined by his social relations — a worker, "a creative being, and, as such, the highest of all values." From this it follows, the book says, that humanism cannot be realised in thought or moral exhortation but only in practice: it "proceeds from the necessity of abolishing private ownership of the means of production." Real humanism is therefore not an ideal held against the world but a programme carried out in it — and, on this account, already carried out, in the USSR. "This is what Karl Marx had in mind," Petrosyan writes, "when he linked the concept of real humanism with communism."
Against this stands everything the book files under "abstract humanism": the Renaissance "cult of man," the religious humanism of the churches, the existentialist humanism of Sartre, and the bourgeois individualism it charges with associating "personal freedom with 'absolute freedom.'" The repeated charge is that these are all hypocritical or illusory — a humanism in words that leaves the actual worker "reduced to the level of a commodity." The book's own summary image, from its opening pages, is of capitalism as "a social leopard changing its spots": a system "inherently hostile to man" that "deafens the world with its proclamations about humanism."
It is worth pausing on how much of Marx this transmits accurately, because a reader told that the whole book is worthless would be misled. Petrosyan's exposition of the 1844 Manuscripts is genuinely competent. He dates them correctly, notes that they lay unpublished until 1927, and reconstructs Marx's argument with care: that a society "dominated, as it is, by private property ... leads to the enslavement of the worker by the products of his own labour"; that the worker's own activity becomes something alien, so that "it belongs to another; it is the loss of his self"; and — the crucial move — that Marx's "historic merit lies in the fact that he revealed not only the economic but also the social basis of the process of alienation." Petrosyan sees clearly that Marx made us "see beyond economic categories to the relations between people." This is the real content the book carries, and it is carried honestly. A student who read these chapters would come away understanding what alienated labour meant to the young Marx.
And that is exactly where the book breaks. Having expounded alienation as the loss of the worker's control over his own labour and its products, Petrosyan must ensure that the concept can never be pointed at the society he is defending. The manoeuvre is explicit. When Western writers extend alienation to the socialist countries, he treats it not as an argument to be met but as an outrage to be denounced. The concept, he complains, is "mechanically extended to socialism, and its elimination is pronounced the 'cardinal problem' of socialism." The German commentator Klaus Mehnert, who observed during the events of 1968 that alienation — "that 'brainchild of Marx'" — had come home to roost in the socialist states, is jeered at rather than answered.
This is the hinge on which the whole book swings, and it is worth stating plainly what has happened. Marx's category of alienation describes the condition of a producer who has lost command over the process and fruits of his work to a power standing above him. Petrosyan grasps this and teaches it well — for capitalism. He simply forbids the question of whether a Soviet worker, in a state where (as we shall see) the trade unions were appointed from above and independent thought was a criminal matter, stood in any comparable relation to a power above him. The tool the book so ably describes is one it is not permitted to use. Real humanism, here, functions as an alibi: because socialism is real humanism by definition, no actual condition of actual human beings under it can count as evidence against the claim.
The same closure governs the book's treatment of its own history. Petrosyan is not silent about Stalinism, but the shape of his acknowledgement is the finding. The Stalin period appears twice, and both times only as a problem of theory. "The conditions created by the cult of Stalin's personality," he writes, "inevitably affected the theoretical elaboration of the problems of humanism in the USSR" — affected the books, that is, not the people. Elsewhere the Terror surfaces only as material for the enemy: anti-communists are accused of "making profit out of the events connected with the cult of Stalin's personality," and of continuing to "speculate on certain negative phenomena of the past." "Certain negative phenomena of the past" is as near as a treatise on the value of the human person, written in the country of the labour camps, will come to naming what was done to millions of human persons. And the sentence's real work is the deflection that follows: the critics, we are told, "draw a veil of silence over mass repression in the capitalist world." The camps become a rhetorical debt owed by the West.
Then there is 1968. A book about humanism published in 1972 could hardly avoid the Prague Spring, whose own slogan — "socialism with a human face" — was a humanist claim made by communists against the Soviet model. Petrosyan meets it head-on and reveals everything. The Czechoslovak reform, he writes, was a matter of "counter-revolutionary forces endeavouring to abolish the socialist order," and the phrase "socialism with a human face" an "inflated propaganda myth about the suppression of personal freedom by socialism." The tanks that entered Prague in August 1968 are thus enrolled in the service of humanism. A doctrine that can describe the crushing of a movement for a more human socialism as itself an act of humanism has told you precisely what its humanism is worth: it is whatever the state does, redescribed.
Hold the book's central claim — that under socialism "concern for man is the supreme law" — against the calendar of its own publication. On 5 January 1972, in Moscow, Vladimir Bukovsky was tried. His offence, in substance, was that he had assembled and smuggled to the West documentation showing that Soviet psychiatry was being used as a political weapon — that sane dissenters were being declared insane and confined. He was sentenced to seven years' detention and five of internal exile. This was not a secret buried in archives that Petrosyan could not have reached. It was an international cause célèbre in the very months the revised edition was being prepared, and it went to the heart of his subject: the treatment of the individual human being by the socialist state.
The contrast is not a rhetorical flourish; it is a test the book fails. A treatise proclaiming socialism the fulfilment of human dignity is at no point measured by its author against the actual dignity, liberty, or safety of the human beings in whose name it speaks. The "personal freedom" whose suppression under socialism is dismissed as a "propaganda myth" was, that January, being suppressed in a Moscow courtroom. The book's humanism is never once brought into contact with the human being under the Soviet bureaucracy — and it is the refusal of that contact, not any single false statement, that is the deepest thing wrong with it.
The reply the book invites comes, first, from the very source it transmits — the young Marx — turned the way its own logic forbids. Marx's alienated labour is not a disease specific to private property in the narrow legal sense; it is the condition of the producer separated from control over his work by a power above him. Whether that power is a shareholder or a Ministry, the worker who cannot criticise, organise independently, or dispose of the product of his labour is alienated in Marx's precise meaning. Petrosyan expounds this and then rules the application out of bounds. The tradition of revolutionary Marxism ruled it back in.
Its classic statement is Leon Trotsky's The Revolution Betrayed (1936), written thirty-six years before this book and answering it in advance. Trotsky's subject is exactly the "crying divergence between program and reality" that the Soviet philosophers, he wrote, "do not even raise the question of the causes of" — so "we will try to do this for them." His analysis is not moral outrage but social anatomy: the USSR had given birth to a privileged ruling stratum, a bureaucracy that "has turned into an uncontrolled force dominating the masses," raised above society and consuming the lion's share of it. This is Thermidor — Trotsky's term, borrowed from the conservative reaction that ended the radical phase of the French Revolution — the moment the apparatus rises over the people who made the revolution.
On the precise ground Petrosyan claims — the free development of the personality — Trotsky is devastating and specific. The Soviet bureaucracy, he wrote, "ruthlessly suppresses the progressive side of individualism in the realm of spiritual culture (critical views, the development of one's own opinion, the cultivation of personal dignity)." Every item in that parenthesis is a good that Petrosyan's book promises as the fruit of socialism; every one is a good that Trotsky, from inside the tradition, showed the bureaucracy destroying. Where Petrosyan writes that under socialism the human person flowers, Trotsky observed that the regime "provokes protest at every step, a protest the more burning in that it is repressed," and that "no new values can be created where a free conflict of ideas is impossible." The condition Petrosyan calls the fulfilment of humanism, Trotsky calls the alienation of the producer under a new master — and he does so in the language of Marx that Petrosyan himself had taught.
And the reply is not only retrospective. The anti-Stalinist left answered this book's claims in real time. In the same weeks as the Bukovsky trial, the American revolutionary-socialist weekly Intercontinental Press was reporting it closely; its issue of 31 January 1972 printed the full text of "Vladimir Bukovsky's Speech to the Court," in which Bukovsky told his judges that "on the instructions of the KGB psychiatric reprisals are set up against dissenters" and described having been held in psychiatric hospitals "without trial or investigation and contrary to medical evidence of my mental health." Here was the human being under the Soviet state speaking for himself, in the year Petrosyan's book appeared, on the very question the book declared closed. One text tells us socialism has made concern for man the supreme law; the other is the voice of a man that law was being used to silence.
None of this cancels the book's real merits, and honesty about them is the price of being believed about the rest. Petrosyan's account of the formation of Marx's humanism — the movement from Feuerbach's abstract man to a man defined by social relations, the reading of the 1844 Manuscripts, the insistence that alienation has a social and not merely an economic root — is a genuine contribution to the exposition of the young Marx, and a reader will learn from it. His engagement with Fromm, Garaudy, Schaff and the Praxis school, whatever its polemical purpose, at least does them the courtesy of quotation and argument, which is more than most volumes in this series manage with their opponents. The book is a serious performance by a serious mind.
But its humanism is a humanism with one question permanently ruled out of order — the question of the human being in front of it. It can describe alienation with precision and forbid you to look for it at home; it can promise the flowering of personality and call the crushing of a movement for a freer socialism an act of humanism; it can make concern for man the supreme law and never notice the man in the dock in Moscow. What Marx gave the world was a method for measuring any society, including one that flew his flag, against the concrete fate of the people who laboured in it. That is the humanism worth keeping, and it is why this book, which teaches it so well and then refuses to use it, is worth reading — as evidence.