If history is bound to end in the proletariat's victory, why should anyone lift a finger? Shore compares it to the Calvinist's puzzle about predestination. The route follows the answers given inside Marxism, and how the question turns, after Stalinism, into one about personal responsibility.
The question is a theme Shore returns to across the course. The route through it, its stages and the summaries are our reading.
Read down. Each claim is our paraphrase; the time opens that minute of the lecture on YouTube.
Shore on Marx
A guaranteed outcome seems to make action pointless.
Shore poses a Calvinist-style puzzle for classical Marxism: if the proletariat is predestined to win anyway, why act at all? That is the problem Lenin will take up.
Put simply Shore's puzzle for classic Marxism: if the workers are destined to win anyway, why act at all? It echoes Calvinism: if God has already decided who is saved, why go to church? Lenin will take this up.
Lenin, Luxemburg, Lukács
Lenin gives intellectuals a role: do not wait, hurry history along. Luxemburg distrusts any elite and trusts the workers; Lukács has the Party know the workers' true consciousness.
Classical Marxism invites the Calvinist's question: if the outcome is fixed anyway, why act? Lenin's answer gives intellectuals a role: not to wait, but to hurry history along.
Put simply Marxism raises a question Calvinists, who believe salvation is decided in advance, also face: if the outcome is fixed anyway, why act? Lenin's answer gives intellectuals a role: not to wait, but to hurry history along.
Against Lenin, Luxemburg holds that any elite eventually turns conservative; genuine revolutionary energy lives in the proletariat, which must be trusted to reach consciousness by itself.
The Party understands the workers' true class consciousness, perhaps before they do; what proletarians empirically happen to think is another matter, and confusing the two is "opportunism."
Put simply Lukács: the Party knows the workers' true understanding of their place as a class, perhaps before they do. What workers actually happen to think is another matter, and confusing the two is "opportunism."
Beauvoir, Kołakowski, Kosík, Shore
Beauvoir seeks room for agency and Kołakowski recasts commitment as a moral choice, while Kosík calls the clash with iron laws unresolved. Shore says how much room those laws left decided, for the revisionists, how guilty they were, and that the terror demanded vigilance while promising a fixed future.
Beauvoir takes Marx seriously but refuses his determinism: she wants room for human agency inside a Marxist story about where history is heading.
Put simply Beauvoir takes Marx seriously but rejects the idea that history is fixed in advance. She wants room for people to act freely within Marx's story of where history is going.
"We are communist," Kołakowski writes, not from having recognized communism as historically necessary but from having sided with the oppressed, the poor, the persecuted.
If iron laws drive history inexorably toward a goal, how can that be squared with human striving, or with human activity meaning anything? Kosík holds this antinomy still unresolved.
Put simply Kosík: if fixed laws drive history unstoppably toward a goal, how can human effort matter or mean anything? He thinks no one has yet resolved this contradiction.
The revisionists' every question, Shore argues, varies one theme: how much room did history's iron laws really leave for agency? The answer fixes their guilt for cheering the purges.
Put simply Shore: every question the revisionists asked came down to one. How much freedom to choose did history's "iron laws" really leave people? The answer decided how guilty they were for cheering the purges.
Shore's own illustration of aporia is the Stalinist terror: everyone had to watch ceaselessly for enemies lurking anywhere, even as history's iron laws supposedly guaranteed the communist future.
Put simply Shore's own example of a self-contradiction ("aporia") is Stalin's terror. People had to watch constantly for hidden enemies everywhere, yet history's laws supposedly guaranteed communism's victory anyway.
Havel, Patočka
For Havel, everyone both suffers and sustains the system, so everyone answers for it; for Patočka, responsibility comes with being in the world at all.
The line dividing victims from oppressors runs through every individual: each person, in a fashion of their own, is at once the system's victim and its supporter.
Put simply Havel: the line between victims and oppressors runs through each person. Everyone, in their own way, both suffers under the system and helps hold it up.
Havel's greengrocer is not powerless, which makes him answerable and so guilty: it is people like him whose compliance keeps the game going.
Put simply Havel: the greengrocer, an ordinary shopkeeper who displays a communist slogan he does not believe, is not powerless. That makes him responsible, and so guilty, because people like him keep the system going.
In the text In "The Power of the Powerless" (1978), section VI, Havel writes that "Position in the power hierarchy determines the degree of responsibility and guilt", and that rulers and ruled are both unfree.
Addressing the US Congress in 1990, Havel inverted Marx: "consciousness precedes being," meaning that individual responsibility comes first and transcends any socioeconomic conditions.
Put simply Havel to the US Congress in 1990, reversing Marx: "consciousness precedes being." Individual responsibility comes first, he meant, and stands above any economic or social conditions.
To be in the world from the outset is to be responsible for it from the outset; that responsibility goes everywhere with Dasein, an ontological trait, not a contingent tie.
Put simply Patočka: because we find ourselves in the world from the start, we are responsible for it from the start. That responsibility goes everywhere with us; it is part of what a human being is, not a chance tie.
Our summary of where the lectures leave the question.
Near its end the route inverts where it began, from history deciding for us to Havel's "consciousness precedes being," and closes on Patočka's responsibility that comes with being in the world.
Those with a reading page of their own.