In the thirties we had plenty of young radicals around who professed to be Marxists. To give them their due, they had actually read the works of their mentors, from Papa Marx and his collaborator Engels, on down through Karl Kautsky, Eduard Bernstein, Rosa Luxemburg, Nicolai Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and the rest. They knew about "revisionism," they could argue about the relevance of Trotsky’s "law of uneven and combined development." True enough, they were ignoramuses when it came to the subject of economics; they believed the discredited hokum about the inevitable impoverishment of the working classes under capitalism, they spouted nonstatistical nonsense about the "falling rate of profit" as constituting the "law of motion of the capitalist system," and they accepted the notion of "surplus value" which has no scientific justification whatsoever. But despite their failings, the radicals of the thirties had done their homework when it came to mastering their own literature. It was a pleasure to argue with them, for they knew how to listen and they did not expect immediate capitulation to their point of view.
The contemporary breed of young Marxists, however, is quite a different animal. Despite their complaints about the "generation gap" and the "lack of communication," the modern Marxists insist that their slogans must be accepted without argument (to the accompaniment of witless cries of "right on, right on"). The idea of debate, of a comparison of alternatives, is frowned upon. In the thirties the socialist Norman Thomas and the Communist Earl Browder would submit to questions; today the very idea of conducting a rational discussion with the likes of Jerry Rubin or Abbie Hoffman or Mark Rudd is laughable.
What has happened in the last generation to debase the intellectual climate? How is it that our reviving "neo-Marxism" has succumbed to such irrationality and amorality? Lewis Feuer, who was himself a Marxist of sorts when he was a young professor, thinks the source of our contemporary confusion can be cleared up if only we can come to grips with the career of the concept of "alienation."
The Concept of "Alienation"
In his thought-provoking Marx and the Intellectuals: a Set of Post-Ideological Essays (Doubleday and Co., Anchor Books, $1.45), Professor Feuer traces the shambles on our campuses to leftist intellectual failure to make a study of Marxism as a whole. The young have become "hung up," to adapt their own phrase, on a specific phase in the life of Karl Marx which Marx himself came to reject as he grew older. By limiting their reading of radical literature to the juvenalia of Karl Marx, the "neo-Marxists" have taken "alienation" as a "slogan-word" out of its context in the totality of a life. The "slogan-word" has become a "generation fetish," and the fetish has resulted in a "largely directionless rejection of American society." Professing themselves to be Marxists, the young have actually become disciples of the anarchist Bakunin, whom Karl Marx held in special abomination.
"Alienation" and the Human Condition
As a dedicated student of the entire library of Marxist thought, Professor Feuer is quite aware that Marx and Engels had to discard the concept of "alienation" from their thinking simply because it led nowhere in terms of what they were after. "Alienation" is a psychoanalytic concept which raises more questions about human nature than can be answered by references to the class struggle. It leads one out of "historical materialism" into the subjective world of Sigmund Freud.
As Professor Feuer points out, there are several modes of "alienation" that are quite independent of each other. A worker on an assembly line can be just as "alienated" in a socialist factory in eastern Europe as he might be in a General Motors plant in Flint, Michigan. One can feel "alienated" because of race, or because of mother or father rejection, or because of caste restrictions in a pre-capitalist, pre-industrial part of the world. Professor Feuer found "alienation" in the Israeli kibbutz societies, where certain individuals reacted to the "interminable vacuity" of "communality." These individuals would "flee to their tents" to escape from a "closed circle, a squirrel cage from which there is no release."
In short, "alienation" is part of the human condition anywhere. It is something the individual must come to grips with in relation to his own psychological problems. To project one’s personal troubles on "society" or on the "system" when they may very possibly derive from one’s family circumstances or from individual character shortcomings is unintelligent. So Professor Feuer reaches an inevitable conclusion: our "intellectuals," so-called, give evidence of having defective brains when they permit themselves to be "hung up" on "alienation" as something worth talking about.
"The socialist movement," says Professor Feuer, "proposed to eliminate economic exploitation and to abolish the class system. These were relatively definable goals. A movement cannot, however, very well propose to alienate the alienators as it did to expropriate the expropriators, for the alienated mood is so multiform in its expression, so unlocated in any specific social form, that it does not delineate the clear goals and foci for action that a political movement requires."
The New Barbarism
The modern Marxist may still make pietistic references to the idea of "scientific socialism," but actually he has reverted to something that Professor Feuer calls "neoprimitivism." The new Marxism is "Marxist in form but Bakuninist in content." Instead of holding any real belief in what nineteenth century Marxists called the "three arms of the labor movement — the union, the cooperative, and the party," the modern Marxist thinks that a "labor metaphysic" is an "unrealistic legacy from Victorian Marxism" (the quote is from C. Wright Mills). The new Marxists believe in the primacy of the individual will; they are "neobarbarian, anti-intellectual, antiurban, anti-working class, anti-Western." Their theory is that the "peasant countries" of Asia and Africa and Latin America will eventually surround the "West." And they look to see the college intellectuals, not the labor ‘leaders, forcing the eventual capitulation of capitalist society to the Maoists, the Castroites, and the idolators of that consummate guerilla failure, the late Che Guevara.
Professor Feuer is very much aware of contradictions in socialist thought that Marx and his successors in the Soviet Union have never been able to solve. Communism was supposed to lead to a genuine intellectual liberalization. But the Soviets don’t even dare to discuss the origins of Stalinism. If they explain it along "historical materialist" lines, they have to admit that the system devised by Lenin was itself at fault in permitting the emergence of a cruel tyrant. If, on the other hand, they try to blame Stalinism on the "paranoid tendencies" of an individual, then psychoanalytic factors must be accepted as part of "social causation." No matter how they squirm, the Soviet intellectuals are caught by the "dead hand of official Marxist ideology." They cannot think for themselves when they are limited to "historical materialism."
An Honest Doubt
Though he began as a socialist, and presumably still thinks of himself as one, Professor Feuer has come to reject socialism as a "dialectic system." Our future development, he says, is shrouded in mystery because of "three basic aspects of indeterminacy." The "fall in the rate of profit" is not necessarily fated "unless extra-economic rigidities are added to the laws of economic theory." "There is no foretelling in the capitalist economy whether innovation will be predominantly of a capital-saving or labor-saving form." And, "most important, there is no way of foreseeing whether a given era will be marked by the dearth or the emergence of new great industries." The only advantage that socialism has over capitalism, in Professor Feuer’s estimation, is that it "is an attempt to reduce the impact of economic indeterminacy on men’s lives." As against the "advantage," however, there "remains the great question as to the extent to which an over-determined, over-planned and over-socialized economy can frustrate other components in men’s psyches."
This is fair enough. If our student radicals were willing to debate the subject on Professor Feuer’s terms, we might get somewhere. But I’d like to know how many college bookstores have stacked Marx and the Intellectuals in any depth on their shelves.