Peter Weiss and others have decided. They challenge us to follow their example. The example demands to be examined.Peter Weiss and others have decided—in favor of the oppressed, and against the oppressors. Whose side do we take? Three guesses as to the right answer to this powerful question, and how we can reach a clear standpoint with the greatest certainty, can bring us most quickly to a correct position. We need only take as our example Peter Weiss and others, and abandon our passivity, our fatalism, our arrogance, our double standards, our reservations, our hedging, our caution, our doubt. We need only put ourselves at a bit of risk. We need only fight a little, side by side with a “socialist” world against a “capitalist” world. Surely that’s not asking too much. But how, really, does one actually go about doing this? How do we have to act in order to do as Peter Weiss and others do, and what does their morality look like?Peter Weiss hasn’t grown tired of assuring us, for months now, that he’s made his decision, but regarding what follows from it, he insists on leaving us without a clue. To be sure, he announces that class struggle is not an outmoded thing, that even here [in Germany] the starkest class differences persist, and that we all find ourselves in a social struggle. At best, such messages might make the Federation of German Industries sit up and take notice; to whom else, though, will they be news? Who would even dispute them? Today, unlike eighty years ago, even the back lots of our big cities show us nothing new of political importance. What the content and goals of the social struggle led by Peter Weiss and others in West Germany are supposed to be, beyond these humble reminders, just isn’t clear. It is possible, in this connection, that he wants us to contemplate the nationalization of the means of production, of the collectivization of agriculture. Perhaps one political party or another should be banned, or a banned party permitted. Or is this struggle about the abolition of the Bundeswehr? The dictatorship of the proletariat? Or are more modest goals at stake? Should the emergency laws be prevented; should the GDR receive diplomatic recognition? Surely such questions are allowed.Before abandoning our doubts, we’d surely like to know not just about the goals but about the strategy with whose help they are to be reached. Is Peter Weiss thinking of cooperation with the unions, or does he want to stake his efforts on the German Peace Union? Does the campaign for nuclear disarmament have his sympathy? Does he consider campaign speeches a useful means of advancing his politics? Or should press releases, bulletins, and “working points” for authors suffice? Or should a political general strike be called? Is Peter Weiss a reformist? Or is he planning a revolution for the Federal Republic? Question upon question. Peter Weiss leaves them unanswered. Out of fatalism, or passivity? Out of caution, to keep his path of retreat open, to keep from risking himself? I don’t like to imagine that of a man with his determination. Instead, I assume: he himself doesn’t know. He has neither a program to advance nor a strategy. However, a political decision without precise goals remains empty; a political decision without a strategy remains blind.Whenever one thing after another is missing, analysis, too, can play fast and loose, and we no longer need any “exertion of the concept.”1 But doing without that exertion is made all the easier when we’ve thrown our doubts overboard once and for all, with the confidence of a patriot who declares of himself: I gave gold for iron. A critical theory that can do without doubt will be difficult to find. Small wonder, then, that every sentence put to paper by our doubt-free colleague is interrupted by a normative judgment. The difference between what exists and what is necessary is abolished, if only verbally. The abyss between what happens in Kreuzberg and what happens in Calcutta is supposed to be filled by six words: “It is, in principle, the same.” To save the “socialist world,” though, ten are needed: “Here, however, the standpoints ought to lead instead to rapprochement.” Analytic description is superfluous; the terrain of the real world doesn’t even need to be surveyed. Instead, the hedgehog of the normative world sits at the finish line and declares, “I’m already here!” For: “The hope among the property owners of the world to win the Soviet Union over to their side is a function of the gigantic exertion of force through which the spirit of free enterprise seeks to consolidate its positions.” Palmström dixit. Regressions are not contained in his worldview, and thus he decrees in noble simplicity that nothing can exist which is not permitted.2To call this way of thinking by its name is not difficult. The political Palmström is the dictionary definition of an idealist, and to stand Marx’s philosophy on its head is obviously part of his project. This greatly simplifies the class struggle. Each and every one of us, until the whole of humanity has done likewise, need only shed his character flaws and choose the Good Cause, bid our egoism adieu, rise above our base material interests—and then the classless society won’t keep us waiting for too long. In Platonic unison, rich nations will announce: We know not of rich and poor, for we are all brothers. “The ‘idea’ always disgraced itself insofar as it differed from the ‘interest,’” wrote Marx (who hasn’t read Peter Weiss).3The situation is silly, but it is not funny. What is at stake here are not just a few writers and their differences of opinion. That one accuses the other of “distorting reality” and is then accused of blind naivete in turn, may leave everyone who can read unmoved. But here we are discussing bloody questions; many are dying in connection with what we are talking about; that is what this is about, not child’s play, and thus an abyss must be called an abyss, wealth called wealth, interest interest, and a terrible chasm must be named so.More than a year ago, in the winter of 1964–65, Chinese and African students staged a demonstration on Red Square in Moscow. The catalyst was the treatment the demonstrators had enjoyed at the hands of the Soviet administration. But the cause lay deeper. Political and ideological slogans were voiced that referred to the disagreement between Moscow and Peking and the stance of the Soviet Union in the Vietnam War. The demonstrating students sang the “Internationale.” Mounted police broke up the march. They were greeted with the call: Fascists, fascists!One year later the accusations by the Chinese against the Soviet government had grown more severe. Peking’s texts discussed an “antagonistic contradiction.” The Chinese not only declared that the Soviet Union had come to an agreement with the United States behind the backs and on the pocketbooks of the poorer countries; they also charged that the Soviets had conducted a restoration of capitalism within their own country; and, expressis verbis, they no longer recognize the Soviet Union as a socialist state.In February of this year [1966], the Soviet Communist Party released a communiqué to all its sister parties, in which we read: China threatens the Soviet Union with a violent revision of its Asian borders; China desires to bring about an armed conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States, during which conflict Peking might observe and “enjoy as an interested spectator” both world powers’ performance of mutual destruction; accordingly, China conducts a “great power politics, in the sense of extreme nationalism” with ultimate designs “upon world domination.”In the writing of Peter Weiss and others, these events meet with no apparent engagement. Are they less conspicuous than what is going on in Angola? Or is Peter Weiss interested, above all, in an undamaged world picture, in a belief without “if” or “but,” a “comfortable religion”? Some indications of this are given in what he writes. His text relies on declarations of faith rather than arguments; the information he adduces is welcome, even if he fails to include documentation and source citations. But these only support the theses he attacks; they act as a postscript to the publication they seek to counter. Peter Weiss’s arguments have little to do with what he both offers of himself, and demands of us: declarations of faith.With this, we still have not arrived at the core of the matter, but only at the core of the dispute that Peter Weiss has set in motion (thanks to him for doing so): at morality, and at double standards.His voice shakes with rage. Peter Weiss is against murder, against exploitation, against hunger, against oppression. He says it himself, and he says it for everybody else to follow. This is an understandable need. To give in to it harms nobody, and benefits nobody. What is articulated here with the eloquence and conviction of a missionary is self-evident. It is the prerequisite of all meaningful political work. Can it take the place of meaningful political work?Our self-declared leaders are in solidarity with the oppressed. They take a stand. We others, by contrast, sit in our five-room apartments. After all, all we do is write. Maybe sometimes we travel to Cuba or the Soviet Union, but only as tourists; maybe we give a single reading in Leipzig, but then we board the interzone train. That’s nothing more than theory. Those are just bare words. At most, an appearance on television, a couple demonstrations. At most, we pay for our own flights when we go to see socialism. At most, the nationalist press slings a bit of its mud our way. But there’s still something cold to drink in the refrigerator. In stark contrast, Peter Weiss and others! They risk themselves. They fight. They have nothing to do with the society they live in. They have left it. They stand shoulder to shoulder with the Black pit-worker in the copper mines of the Transvaal, with the Asian rice-farmer in the fields of South Vietnam, with the Peruvian indio in the vanadium mines. There they stand, shoulder to shoulder, and they fight. Unlike us, Peter Weiss and others are not accomplices of the rich world. With a few interviews, they show us how easily solidarity can be realized: with a few interviews. So easily is the tablecloth sliced in two pieces, is the soul saved and the epithet of the double standard hung around the neck of those who have a little more difficulty declaring their faith. I ask you, gentlemen, to look in the mirror before opening your mouths! Is it really a Black pit-worker sitting shoulder to shoulder with you at the bar? At least if it were Sartre, he’d tell you, “Heroism is not to be won at the point of a pen.” Who keeps patting himself on the back? Who keeps insisting, in all seriousness, that he is putting himself in danger, and fills his mouth with tales of his own courage? Is class struggle merely playing at being Indians, and solidarity a headdress for intellectuals?Travel some day to Vietnam or Peru and spend twenty years fighting a revolutionary war! You’re imagining that what happens there and what happens here are, “in principle, the same.” I beg to differ. I think that dying in Angola in a mine and reading a statistic about the miners in Angola are in principle two different things. You, gentlemen, study statistics. As do I.Throwing around declarations of faith is not for everybody. Now that Peter Weiss and others are demanding that I take a stand, I respond: the various souls in their breasts and in mine are of no importance to world politics. I have no need for a moral arms race on the left. I am not an idealist. I prefer arguments to declarations. I like doubts better than sentiments. Revolutionary blathering disgusts me. I do not need world pictures devoid of contradiction. When in doubt, reality decides.Translated by Seth Howes