The Marxism of Manuel Sacristán: From Communism to the New Social Movements

319 Pages·2014·0.984 MB·English

by  Manuel Sacristán

The Marxism of Manuel Sacristán
Historical Materialism
Book Series
Editorial Board
Sébastien Budgen (Paris)
Steve Edwards (London)
Marcel van der Linden (Amsterdam)
Peter Thomas (London)

VOLUME 76
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/hm
The Marxism of Manuel Sacristán
From Communism to the New Social Movements
By
Manuel Sacristán
Translated and Edited by
Renzo Llorente
LEIDEN | BOSTON
This work has been published with a subsidy from the Directorate General of
Books, Archives and Libraries of the Spanish Ministry of Culture.
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Contents
Acknowledgements  vii
Introduction  1
A Note on This Edition  23
part 1
On Marx and Engels  
1 Marx’s Scientific Work and His Notion of Science  29
2 Karl Marx as a Sociologist of Science  67
3 Engels’s Task in Anti-Dühring  121
4 Marx on Spain  141
5 What is Dialectic?  154
6 One Hundred Years On: To What ‘Literary Genre’ Does Marx’s Capital
Belong?  163
7 On the Centenary of Karl Marx’s Death  167
8 Which Marx Will Be Read in the Twenty-First Century?  170
part 2
On Political Ecology, Communist Politics, and the New Social
Movements
9 Political Ecological Considerations in Marx  179
10 Paper for the Conference on Politics and Ecology  189
vi contents
11 The Political and Ecological Situation in Spain and the Way to Approach
This Situation Critically from a Position on the Left  196
12 Three Notes on the Clash of Cultures and Genocide  201
13 On the Subject of ‘Eurocommunism’  212
14 On Stalinism  220
15 Marxist Parties and the Peace Movement  230
16 The Marxist Tradition and New Problems  234
part 3
Interviews
17 ‘Gramsci is a classic, he is not a fad’: Interview with the Diario de
Barcelona  255
18 Manuel Sacristán Speaks with Dialéctica  259
19 Interview with Naturaleza  278
20 Interview with Mundo Obrero  285
Further Reading  293
References  295
Index  308
Acknowledgements
Anyone who takes a serious interest in Manuel Sacristán’s work today owes
an enormous debt to Salvador López Arnal, whose prodigious scholarship
has been critical in disseminating Sacristán’s thought and in recovering his
intellectual legacy. Indeed, if Sacristán’s thought continues to attract interest
beyond a relatively small group of disciples and admirers, it is in large part
thanks to Salvador’s tireless efforts. In addition to bringing out new editions
of some of Sacristán’s most important writings and interviews, Salvador has
rescued many of Sacristán’s unpublished pieces (including numerous lectures,
which he has transcribed himself), edited several collections of essays on the
philosopher’s life and thought, and played a key role in the creation of Integral
Sacristán, an exhaustive, 13-hour documentary about Sacristán. Were it not
for Salvador’s endeavours, I myself might never have taken much notice
of Sacristán: it was precisely one of Salvador’s books (the invaluable Acerca
de Manuel Sacristán, co-edited with Pere de la Fuente), which I discovered by
chance in the 1990s, that first convinced me that Sacristán was a Marxist thinker
well worth studying. For all of these reasons, and on account of his readiness to
respond to each and every one of my queries regarding Sacristaniana, my first
and most fundamental debt is to Salvador.
There are a number of other debts that I would also like to record here.
Yaiza Hernández Velázquez encouraged me to undertake this transla-
tion and, even more importantly, took responsibility, on very short notice,
for many of the bureaucratic tasks necessary to secure financial support
for the project. Vera Sacristán, Manuel Sacristán’s daughter, granted per-
mission to reprint most of the material that appears in this anthology and,
along with Marti Huetink at Brill, assisted me with various questions regard-
ing translation rights. Ruth MacKay kindly offered to review her translation,
first published more than two decades ago, of the essay reprinted here as
Chapter 9. I thank all of these people for helping to make this book possible.
In addition to the assistance that I have received from individuals, I have
benefited from institutional support, which I would also like to acknowledge
here. Saint Louis University, Madrid Campus granted me a sabbatical leave
during the Autumn 2012 semester, which enabled me to complete part of the
work on the present volume. I also received a translation grant from Spain’s
Ministry of Culture (which has since become the Ministry of Education,
Culture and Sports). I am grateful to both institutions for their support of this
project.
Finally, I thank family and friends for their forbearance.

Introduction
A Life of Commitment
Manuel Sacristán Luzón1 was born in Madrid, on 5 September 1925,2 the first of
three children in a middle-class family. In November 1936, a few months after
the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, the family moved to Valencia, where it
remained until February 1937. This was followed by a stay of similar duration in
the Italian town of Rivatrigoso, before the family settled in Nice, where it would
remain until August 1939 (the Civil War having ended just a few months earlier,
with the victory of Franco’s quasi-fascist forces). From Nice, the Sacristán fam-
ily returned to Spain and settled in Barcelona, which would remain Manuel
Sacristán’s permanent home for the rest of his life.
After completing his secondary schooling in Barcelona, Sacristán began
studying law at the University of Barcelona in 1944. In his third year at univer-
sity, however, he switched to philosophy, though he would later complete his
law degree as well. While a student at the university, Sacristán left the Spanish
Falange’s youth organisation, which he had joined in 1940.3 (His father had
for a time served as the administrator for the youth organisation). His rupture
with the Falange, an organisation originally established as a fascist move-
ment, was apparently prompted in large part by the Falangists’ proclivity
for violence and, in particular, their brutal treatment of catalanista students
(those students who defended the Catalan cultural identity).4 In 1949, renal
tuberculosis required Sacristán to undergo a nephrectomy, after which he
1 In Spain and other Spanish-speaking countries, one’s full name includes the first surname of
both of one’s parents (each of whom likewise has two last names), with the father’s surname
usually appearing first. However, in most contexts one only uses the first surname, although
both last names are sometimes used when the first surname is unusually common. Hence,
the author of the texts translated in the present volume is generally referred to as Manuel
Sacristán, and this is how I shall be referring to him hereafter.
2 In preparing this biographical sketch – and some parts of the rest of the introduction as
well – I have drawn extensively on Capella 2004, Sempere 1987, Fernández Buey 1995,
Fernández Buey 2003, and Fernández Buey and López Arnal 2004. Unless otherwise indi-
cated, all translations from the Spanish are my own.
3 Sempere and Capella both date Sacristán’s break with Falangism to 1945–6; Sempere 1987,
p. 6; Capella 2004, p. 29, n. 16; yet Fernández Buey contends that it may have occurred as late
as 1947; Fernández Buey 2003, p. 31.
4 Fernández Buey 2003, p. 31.
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2 Introduction
would live with only one kidney.5 That same year Sacristán was instrumental
in the creation of Laye, a cultural journal that attracted some of Barcelona’s
best writers, and one to which Sacristán would himself contribute numerous
articles and book reviews before it ceased publication five years later.
In 1954, Sacristán won a merit-based scholarship to undertake post-
graduate study in formal logic at the Institut für mathematische Logik und
Grundlagenforschung in Münster. The nearly two years that Sacristán spent
in Germany proved decisive for his future intellectual and political develop-
ment. To begin with, Sacristán’s stay in Germany enabled him to master the
German language – from which he would later translate many works into
Spanish – and deepen his familiarity with German culture, for which he felt
a strong affinity.6 In addition, Sacristán’s training in Münster would make
him one of the very few Spanish philosophers competent in symbolic logic,
a branch of philosophy hardly studied in Spain at the time. (The training in
the philosophy of science that he received at the Institut also set him apart
from most other Spanish philosophers in the late 1950s). Finally, and most
importantly, it was during his time in Germany that Sacristán first familiar-
ised himself with the works of Marx and Engels, and came into contact with
German communist workers and, through them, the Spanish Communist
Party, whose leadership kept its headquarters in Paris at that time. In short, it
was in Germany that Sacristán embraced Marxism7 and first established con-
tact with the organised labour movement, to which he would remain commit-
ted for the rest of his life.
Despite being offered a position at the Institut in Münster upon com-
pleting his programme of study, Sacristán chose to return to Spain, where,
in 1956, he immediately began teaching classes in philosophy and logic as a
non-permanent faculty member at the University of Barcelona. By this time
(late 1956) Sacristán was a member of the Spanish Communist Party (PCE).
He also belonged to the Central Committee of the Unified Socialist Party of
Catalonia (PSUC), a national-regional Communist party formed indepen-
dently of the Spanish Communist Party but closely affiliated with it. This rapid
ascent within Spain’s main Communist organisations – both of them illegal
5 Fernández Buey and Capella, Sacristán’s two most prominent disciples, both stress that
this experience would have a profound impact on Sacristán’s attitude toward existence;
Fernández Buey 2003, p. 32; Capella 2004, p. 33.
6 See Sacristán 2004c, pp. 99–100, for Sacristán’s own description of his Germanophilia in
regard to literature, philosophy, music, and culture generally.
7 One of the people Sacristán met in Münster was Ulrike Meinhof, some of whose work he
would translate and analyse two decades later, after Meinhof’s death; see Sacristán 1985b.