The title tells you what kind of book this is before you open it. Marxism and the Renegade Garaudy is built on the frame of Lenin's The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky (1918), and the echo is deliberate. "Renegade" is not a description; it is a verdict — apostasy from an orthodoxy, betrayal rather than error. Khachik Momjan, an Armenian philosopher writing from within the Soviet ideological establishment, spends some seventy-seven thousand words arguing that Roger Garaudy has committed that apostasy, and the reader is meant to leave persuaded that a once-eminent Marxist has "gone over openly to the camp of anti-Sovietism."
Who was the man in the dock? By any measure the most important philosopher the French Communist Party ever produced. Garaudy sat on its Political Bureau, directed its Centre for Marxist Studies and Research, and was for two decades the party's public face in the "dialogue" between Marxists and Christians and its chief theorist of what he called a Marxist humanism. He was not a marginal heretic but the intellectual centre of the largest Communist party in Western Europe — until, in 1970, that party expelled him. The immediate cause of the break was Czechoslovakia. Garaudy had condemned the Warsaw Pact's crushing of the Prague Spring in August 1968, had gone on to champion a pluralist, parliamentary road to socialism and a "socialism with a human face," and had turned his criticism on the Soviet model itself. This book is Moscow's reply, and it is worth reading closely precisely because it is a better book than most of its kind — and because the shape of its argument, once seen, is unmistakable.
The copyright page reads © Progress Publishers 1974, and for once the internal evidence agrees with the spine. Momjan quotes Garaudy's Reconquête de l'espoir and Toute la vérité, both published in 1971, and treats the 1970 expulsion as a settled fact behind him; the manuscript cannot be earlier than 1972. This is a book of the early 1970s, and its enemy is a live one. Garaudy had just been cast out, his recent books were selling in the West, and the currents he spoke for — the ones that would shortly acquire the name Eurocommunism, as the French, Italian and Spanish parties edged toward autonomy from Moscow, the parliamentary road and open criticism of the Soviet Union — were rising. The book never uses the word "Eurocommunism"; the term was not yet current. But that is exactly what it is fighting. Garaudy is attacked as an early and unusually candid symptom of a disease Moscow could already feel spreading through its Western sections. The commission is plain from the object: this is export ammunition, printed in English for circulation to Western Communist parties, meant to inoculate their cadres against the argument their own most distinguished theorist had just made.
Begin where this series usually finds its sharpest evidence: does the book quote the man it is named after, or only characterise him? The recurring pattern in the Progress catalogue is an opponent who is denounced on every page and quoted on none — a doctrine set inside quotation marks with no source, so that the reader cannot check the charge against the text. The International Working-Class Movement volumes cite Luxemburg's collected works sixteen times and Kautsky nine while quoting Trotsky, the villain of the piece, not once.
Momjan does not do this, and it must be said plainly, because it is unusual and because credibility on everything that follows depends on saying it. He quotes Garaudy constantly and by the page. The footnotes carry something on the order of seventy-five separate references to Garaudy's actual books — Marxism in the Twentieth Century, The Turning-Point of Socialism, Pour un modèle français du socialisme, Lénine, Toute la vérité, Questions à Jean-Paul Sartre, Garaudy par Garaudy — cited in the English editions where they existed and the French where they did not, with page numbers a reader could look up. Long passages of Garaudy's own prose are reproduced before they are attacked. On the mechanical form of the citation test, this book passes, and passes better than almost anything else in the series. It is genuinely a book about Garaudy's texts, not merely about his name.
That makes it a more serious object, and it moves the real question elsewhere. A book can quote scrupulously and still argue by amalgam. The test that matters here is not whether Momjan lets you see Garaudy's words, but whether he lets you see the event those words were a response to.
He does not — and this is the finding.
The reflex expectation would be that a Soviet book of 1974 simply suppresses Czechoslovakia 1968, the way earlier volumes in this catalogue fall silent on the Terror or the Pact. That is not what happens, and reporting it would be false. "Czechoslovakia" appears in these pages roughly forty times; "1968" a dozen and a half. The book is saturated with the event. Momjan devotes pages to it, quotes a Rudé Právo article of July 1968, quotes Gustáv Husák, quotes Waldeck Rochet condemning Garaudy for it. Czechoslovakia is not the silence in this book. It is the theme.
What is absent is the invasion. Search the whole text for the thing Garaudy actually denounced — the half-million Warsaw Pact troops who crossed the frontier on the night of 20–21 August 1968 — and you find nothing. The word "invasion" occurs zero times. "Warsaw Pact": zero. "Soviet troops," "tanks," "occupation," "military intervention," "armed forces": each of them, zero. The single most consequential act of Soviet power in the period the book covers — the act that made Garaudy a dissident — is not described, not defended, not even denied. It is simply not there.
In its place stands an inversion. What happened in Czechoslovakia in 1968 was, in Momjan's telling, not a reform movement suppressed by tanks but a "quiet counter-revolution," a plot by "anti-socialist, right-wing elements" to "destroy the socialist order," a "witches' sabbath" of slander against the USSR. The Prague Spring is the aggressor; the reader is invited to be relieved that it failed, without ever being told how it failed or by whose hand. Garaudy's crime is that he "welcomed the words and deeds of blatant enemies of the Czechoslovak people," that he called the counter-revolution "the flowering ... of socialist humanism." He is condemned, in short, for the conclusions he drew from an event the reader is forbidden to see.
This is the amalgam in its most refined form. The cruder version, familiar from the rest of the catalogue, works by omission — you cannot object to what you are never told. Momjan's version is subtler and more effective: it names the event on every page, and empties it. The reader is handed the word "Czechoslovakia" so often that the sense of a suppression never arises, while the one fact that would let him judge the quarrel — that Garaudy was protesting an invasion — is the one fact withheld.
Two questions this series has learned to put to any such passage make the point exact. First: is the accusation attached to a described act that could be shown not to have happened? The "counter-revolution" is never cashed out into a deed. There are no dates, no organisations, no seizures of power — only an essence, imputed and unfalsifiable. Second: could the category ever be turned on the author's own side? "Anti-Sovietism," "counter-revolution," "renegade" — in this book these are things that happen to the CPSU and are combated by it. That the Soviet state might itself have committed an act of force worth naming is not a thought the book's vocabulary can form. A "no" to that second question is the finding, and here the answer is a flat no.
The book presents the world as a straight fight — orthodox Marxism-Leninism against a renegade. The anti-Stalinist left saw a third position, and its view of Garaudy was double: it shared his opposition to the invasion and rejected almost everything he proposed in its place.
The sharing came first, and it was on the record within hours. On 22 August 1968, one day after the tanks rolled, the United Secretariat of the Fourth International issued a statement — carried in Intercontinental Press of 2 September 1968 under the cover line "End the Soviet Occupation!" — that "condemns the military occupation of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic by the nations of the Warsaw Pact." The same statement demolishes, in advance, the entire premise of Momjan's book. Where Momjan builds everything on the reality of a counter-revolutionary danger, the Fourth International wrote that "the truth is that the 'counter-revolution danger' cited by the Kremlin did not exist." (The archival scan corrupts the phrase across a column break; the wording is verified against the surrounding text.)
But — and this is what separates the revolutionary-Marxist position from Garaudy's — the same statement refused to idealise the Prague reformers. "What did unquestionably exist," it went on, "was a right-wing course of the Czech leaders similar fundamentally to that practiced by the Soviet leaders themselves." The Fourth International did not see, in Dubček's Czechoslovakia, the "socialism with a human face" that Garaudy saw. It saw a bureaucratic leadership drifting rightward, frightened above all — the statement is explicit — by the way "the first beginnings of workers' democracy" in Prague were stirring the vanguard in Poland, Hungary, East Germany "and above all the Soviet Union itself." The occupation, on this reading, was not a defence of socialism against counter-revolution and not the martyrdom of a liberal experiment; it was the bureaucracy defending its monopoly of power against the one thing that genuinely threatened it, the self-activity of the working class.
That gives the three corners. Moscow orthodoxy, in this book: a counter-revolution justly defeated by a force too obvious to mention. Garaudy: a democratic socialism betrayed, to be recovered through pluralism, a multiplicity of "models," and dialogue with the Christian and liberal West. The Fourth International: against the invasion and against the illusion, holding that what the Czech workers had begun to build was worth defending precisely against both bureaucracies. Momjan's book cannot see this third corner because his method does not permit it; every critic of the Soviet act is, by construction, an agent of counter-revolution.
There is a further irony the book half-discloses. Garaudy was not expelled by the Kremlin but by his own party, and the French Communist Party under Waldeck Rochet had itself formally disapproved of the invasion. Momjan quotes Rochet's October 1969 charge that Garaudy "is again trying to exploit the events in Czechoslovakia in order to feed anti-Sovietism" — which concedes, without meaning to, that Czechoslovakia was the ground of the whole affair, and that even the PCF leadership needed to hold Garaudy at arm's length from a criticism it had, in muted form, made itself. The Fourth International watched the break in real time and named it early: Intercontinental Press of 2 February 1970 ran a piece on Garaudy titled "Can You Be a Garaudyist Today?" — a play on his own Peut-on être communiste aujourd'hui? — and its report from the PCF's congress six weeks later noted that Garaudy was, for the first time in thirty-five years, an outgoing member of the leadership defeated over his theses rather than quietly expelled beforehand.
On what Garaudy positively proposed, the anti-Stalinist reply was not indulgent, and it is important not to enlist him as an ally he was not. The "plural socialism" Momjan attacks, the enthusiasm for the Yugoslav and even the market "models," the parliamentary road that "does not contain a hint of socialist revolution, the dictatorship of the working class, the abolition of the state machine" — these were, from the revolutionary standpoint, a reformist and ultimately class-collaborationist programme, and Ernest Mandel would spell out the objection at length in his From Stalinism to Eurocommunism (1978): that the Western parties' turn to the parliamentary road and their accommodation with their own bourgeoisies was the bitter fruit of the theory of "socialism in one country," the same nationalisation of the workers' movement that had produced the bureaucracy Garaudy was right to criticise. Garaudy diagnosed the disease and prescribed more of the cause. Momjan is not wrong that his "French model" evades the question of power. He is wrong about almost everything else, and wrong above all in what he will not say.
This is not a series of denunciations, and the honest reader owes this book a real debt on one front. Strip away the political frame and there is a genuine philosophical argument underneath, and on it Momjan often has the better of the exchange.
Garaudy's later work did drift toward idealism, and the drift is exactly where Momjan puts his finger. The heart of the book is a defence of the materialist theory of reflection — the proposition that consciousness copies, however actively and imperfectly, a world that exists independently of it — against Garaudy's attempt to demote reflection in favour of the "project." Momjan quotes the offending formulations at length and in context. "In Marx," Garaudy had written, "consciousness is not the reflection of something given, but the anticipation of something possible." Knowledge, on Garaudy's account, does not begin from the real; "the movement of cognition begins," he wrote, "by way of myth," through the construction of models and hypotheses borrowed, as Momjan correctly notes, from Sartre's "project" and Adorno's "negative dialectic." Against this, Momjan insists on what is genuinely sound in the materialist position: that new knowledge never arises "out of the blue," that every advance in science departs from and sublates the accumulated relative truths before it, that a consciousness "orientated predominantly towards that which does not exist" cuts itself loose from reality and becomes "a source of sociopolitical myth-making." That last phrase is sharper than Momjan knew. Garaudy's trajectory over the following decades — into an increasingly mystical and religious revisionism — bore out the warning about a philosophy that begins in myth. On the pure question of whether Garaudy was sliding from materialism toward idealism, the Soviet philosopher was right, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise.
The rescue carries its own irony, and the irony indicts the orthodoxy more than it rescues it. A decade before this book, Garaudy had been the great Communist defender of the theory of reflection. In December 1961, before six thousand people in a Paris auditorium, he debated Sartre on whether the dialectic is a law of nature as well as of history, and he took the materialist side. The American Trotskyist George Novack, reviewing the published debate in the International Socialist Review of Summer 1964, credited him without reservation: "Garaudy correctly observes"; "Garaudy points out"; it was Garaudy who insisted, against Sartre's agnosticism, on clearing up what Novack, summarising him, called the misunderstanding Sartre played upon — that the term "reflection" "does not signify that knowledge is a passive phenomenon which merely duplicates the object, like a mirror image." The Garaudy whom Momjan convicts in 1974 of dissolving reflection into myth is the same man an anti-Stalinist reviewer had praised in 1964 for defending it. That is the real measure of Garaudy's evolution, and it is visible from every point on the compass — which is precisely why Momjan's philosophical case lands, and why it cannot be waved away as factional reflex.
Yet even the rescue has a floor under it that the reader should see. Momjan defends reflection in the name of an orthodoxy that treats Lenin's Materialism and Empirio-Criticism as scripture and regards any suggestion that Lenin deepened his position in the Philosophical Notebooks — precisely the argument Garaudy made — as heresy. But Lenin himself made that move: it was Lenin who, reading Hegel's Logic in 1914, wrote that no one who had not studied it could understand Capital. Garaudy's sin, philosophically, was to take one half of Lenin against the other; Momjan's answer is to deny the tension exists. The theory of reflection is worth defending. It does not need to be defended by canonising one book and anathematising a man for reading a second.
A last word on how the book fights, because the manner is part of the evidence. When argument fails, Momjan reaches for the vocabulary of the security organ. Garaudy has allied himself with "Trotskyite provocateurs, traitors and defectors"; he supports "the slanderers like Sinyavsky and Daniel" — the two writers tried and imprisoned in 1966 for publishing abroad, whom the book treats as self-evidently contemptible — and "all manner of Zionist riff-raff." The Trotsky who appears here is the stock figure of the genre: the wrecker who "borrowed Menshevik dogmas" to deny that socialism could be built in one country, the false "democrat" whose defence of inner-party democracy was mere factional cover. None of this is argued; it is deployed. It sits oddly beside the careful page references and the real philosophical chapters, and the contrast is itself instructive. It shows a writer who could argue when he chose to, resorting to denunciation exactly where the argument was hardest — over the country whose tanks he could not name.
Read Marxism and the Renegade Garaudy, then, as two books bound together. One is a competent materialist philosopher's case against a colleague's genuine slide into idealism, and it deserves to be taken seriously on those terms. The other is an act of political erasure: a book that condemns a man for the conclusions he drew from an invasion, over three hundred pages, without once admitting the invasion took place. The first is why the book is worth keeping. The second is why it needed answering — and why the answer was already in print, dated the day after the tanks arrived.