MARXISM: THE PERSISTENT VISION

LEADERS of the 75 Communist parties meeting in Moscow--and those conspicuously absent--often argue bitterly about what their faith, Marxism, means. More interesting is the question of what Marxism does. How strong is its influence today? What accounts for its ability to renew its appeal? Who needs it?

As a theory of society, Marxism's "laws" have been mocked by events, such as the increasing prosperity of the workers and the near disappearance of cyclical economic crisis. As a political movement and myth, it has been far more successful. Regimes calling themselves Marxist (and who has a right to say they are not?) rule a third of mankind. Their future expansion, while not as likely as it seemed 20 years ago, is by no means impossible. But neither failed Marxist theory nor entrenched Marxist power explains why Marxism can today provide slogans for the uproar in U.S. colleges and ghettos, courage for guerrillas in Viet Nam, flickers of hope for anxious intellectuals and bewildered peasants.

Functionally, Marxism is a vision, belonging more to poetics than to science or politics. It began as a sensitive man's response to an early stage of a fundamental transformation in the human condition. The great change that had set in by the middle of the 19th century still rolls on, gathering speed and extending its breadth. Today, as in Marx's time, men feel the change as both a threat and a promise. It evokes fear and hope simultaneously. The Marxist vision is a peculiar, sometimes deadly--but for many men an effective--way of perceiving the moving society and relating themselves to it.

Dr. Marx concocted a "total" theory, a consistent set of symbols, to explain the course of history, and he intended his theory to be swallowed whole. The vision derives much of its poetic force from its unity, although few modern men gulp down the whole brew. Outside the Communist countries, formal conversion to Marxism is now rarer than it was a generation ago. Much Marxist influence is indirect and fragmentary. In some minds, fragments of the Marxist vision coexist--illogically--with Christianity or Freudianism. For most, it provides a rationale for criticizing society as it is, rather than a plan for moving toward society as it ought to be.

Alienation and Anarchism

Nevertheless, Marxist influence is still potent, especially where men find themselves in situations somehow analogous to those that surrounded Marx in the Europe of five generations ago. Leaving aside the uses of Marxism within the Communist-ruled countries, groups especially susceptible to the vision today include the peoples of less advanced countries now experiencing early stages of modernization, and certain unassimilated groups (for example, radical U.S. blacks) in advanced countries. Equally susceptible are intellectuals and youth.

Why and how the Marxist vision attracts many members of this mixed bag may be explained by a quick look back at Marx's Europe of the 1840s, which in today's parlance would be called a "developing area." Its social structure was crumbling under the impact of science and industrialization. Three attitudes toward change were fairly clearly defined: 1) conservative, 2) progressive or, as it was called, "liberal," and 3) revolutionary. Then, as now, thoroughgoing reactionaries were hard to find; nobody seriously tried to restore the pre-industrial Europe. But there were many clingers, people who fought rearguard actions, defending for reasons of interest or sentiment one or another bastion of the pre-industrial past. Against them, the liberals, mainly middle-class and including many intellectuals, carried the fight for science, industrialization, education and the nation-state, promising (recklessly) a tomorrow of peace and enlightenment.

Between those two groups there was no doubt where Marx stood: for science against religion, for industrialism against "the idiocy of rural life," for the new nation-state against the remnants of the old political order. But he regarded the new order, capitalism, as a transient phase that would soon destroy itself and be replaced by a wave that he saw expressed in the third attitude toward the new order, revolution. The liberals, eyes on the future, tended to be insensitive to the suffering, material and psychological, caused by the march of the new order. Marx was not. He believed, incorrectly, as it turned out, that the material condition of the workers must worsen as capitalism developed. But his observations about psychological "alienation" in a changing society have proved much more durable.

Appealing Ambivalence

The revolutionary spirit in Marx's Europe was essentially anarchistic. It was the revolt of men alienated by industrializing change from the land, from their tools, from a sense of their status--however humble--in a society that they understood. Although Marx sympathized with the emotions that called forth this revolt, he recognized anarchism's impotence and fought it bitterly. In his view, nothing could or should stop the march of industrialization and its political and social consequences.

Thus, a key element in the Marxist vision was his effort to channel the anarchistic spirit so that it would be in favor of industrialism but opposed to the capitalists. His intellectual support of the new order fused with his passionate sense of justice to shape a way of being that was simultaneously on the side of progress and in revolt against its present villains who controlled both government and the means of production. This ambivalent way of dealing with the stress of rapid social change retains its appeal for many men today.

This appeal arises from the fact that many countries are now in situations resembling the Europe of the 1840s. Those who wish to lead must notice the resentments of men displaced by progress from the land and from the certainties of traditional society. In developing countries, for example, a leader can put himself on the side of industrialization and modernization while at the same time blaming the capitalists (in practice, this often means the U.S.) for the suffering and alienation. "Yankee go home" descends from the Marxist vision, combining rising nationalism with class hostility.

Many advanced nations, including the U.S., contain "underdeveloped countries," groups experiencing their first intensive contact with industrialism. Formal Marxism has not achieved a substantial following among American Negroes, but Marx would not be surprised at the rise of black militancy in recent years. As Southern Negroes move from the land to the cities, their rising material expectations collide with the frustrations of impersonal urban life. In many ways, the ghetto riots are recurrences of the blind old anarchist reaction that the Marxist vision tries to channel into another kind of political expression. Black Panther slogans have undergone an evolution typical of Marxist influence. The Panthers began with a program of ethnic separation, resisting assimilation by the national state with anarchistic verve. In effect, their leaders express Marxist concepts, calling for a class struggle joining blacks and whites against "exploiters."

Less obvious but no less real is the analogy between 19th century Europe and the situation of modern intellectuals. Today intellectuals are prospering, and their susceptibility to Marxist concepts can hardly be explained on grounds of material "immiserization" (growing poverty). But there are other reasons for alienation among intellectuals. The specialization of the sciences tends to dissociate the academic intellectual from the decisions, almost invariably multidisciplinary in nature, that actually shape the course of society. The intellectual often feels irrelevant. As a scientist, he pursues work that does not include concern for the moral or esthetic content of progress, but as a man he has not forgotten the intellectual's traditional responsibility for the good, the beautiful and the unity between kinds of truth. Many intellectuals draw symbols from the Marxist vision to explain what is wrong and to suggest how their lives might regain a sense of relevance.

Sir Isaiah Berlin, non-Marxist biographer of Marx, in a recent interview made this appraisal of Marxism's influence upon intellectuals: "Marx has entered the texture of thought of all sorts of intellectuals without their being conscious of it. Anyone who ignores Marx is a kind of primitive, a prescientific." Sir Isaiah is quite conscious of Marx's mistakes, but "most important thinkers have violently exaggerated. If they don't, they're not listened to. Plato, Descartes, the writers of the Gospels, Kant, Hegel, Bertrand Russell, exaggerated. Exaggeration breaks the crust of accepted opinion. Freudianism would have been an eclectic mess if Freud hadn't exaggerated."

Marx's exaggeration--or simplification--is often especially appealing to university students in the advanced countries, who are cruelly confronted with the modern problem of "identity." Never was a society so opaque to its young. Unlike the peasant's son, or even the merchant's son, today's young may be unable to grasp precisely what their fathers do. What is it like to be a corporation executive, an advertising copywriter, a designer of computers?

The Opaque Future

The inscrutable face that a complex society presents to its young makes them vulnerable to simplistic explanations of it. To them, as to 19th century anarchists, individual man appears good and society appears corrupt. "I am a human being. Do not bend, fold or mutilate," was the slogan raised on the Berkeley campus in 1964 and repeated many times since. The computer, symbol of advancing technology, has resurrected all the old Luddite animosity toward the machine. The French student rioters of a year ago burned with the old anarchist passion against "society"--the passion that Marxism is designed to harness.

So far, rebellious youth in the advanced countries shows little sign of swallowing Marxism whole, but the Marxist vision does have its strong appeal to the alienated young. An Italian observer, the critic Nicola Chiaramonte, believes that Marxist influence has grown among Italian youth, even though the Communist Party has been losing young members. "Marx isn't very highly regarded as a thinker," Chiaramonte says, "but as a father image he is very much present. The older generation of Marxists remains influenced by Marxist thought, the last philosophy with a consistent system. But youth is moved by Marx's call to action. Castro's Cuba and Che Guevara conjure up a romantic image."

In a rapidly changing world, men apparently need a clear image of the "enemy" responsible for their anxiety and frustration. Hence the recent discovery of something called "the Establishment." A more recent American variant is "the military-industrial complex," familiarly known as MIC. The idea descends from Marx's "ruling class" of capitalists, with their grip on government and the cultural "superstructure." Neither "the Establishment" nor "the MIC" was coined by a Marxist, but the eager way in which these names, twisted from their original meaning, were embraced indicates the desperate psychological need of many Americans for "a class enemy" in a society that has gone a long way toward abolishing class.

Will the Vision Go Away?

Marxism today is more effective as a source of symbols directed against society's defects than as a guide to political action or serious thought. In countries dominated by Marxist parties, the faith is largely cant, the conventional wisdom, though it would be wrong to assume that such a role has no significance.

As a student of society, Marx had a fatal limitation: his central insistence that all history and all human motivation could be reduced to materialist factors. Modern sociology, psychology and history have a more sophisticated view. Indeed, Marx's theory of man-as-economic-animal is regularly disproved by countless eruptions of nationalism, tribalism and just plain human cussedness that can hardly be explained through economic motives. It is a striking irony that the New Left, which often uses Marxist sticks to belabor capitalist society, tries to reach beyond Marx for spiritual values and a kind of community (neo-tribalism) that Marx, the materialist, would have considered sentimental and atavistic.

Despite these limitations, the Marxist vision remains pervasive. It has already drawn into its influence some who started as New Leftists and have gradually become Marxists. In addition, Marxism's most interesting area of opportunity lies among highly educated people in advanced countries, notably the U.S. The slogans of their rebellion against various social evils assert that they wish to change society. But underneath the surface, what is being resisted is often change itself, change that has no obvious meaning and no clearly understood direction. As the U.S. enters the "postindustrial age," the bitter questions about the future, the nostalgia for the past--all the 19th century symptoms seem to be returning. Perhaps tomorrow will see men longing for the rigidities of the industrial century, as previous generations clung to the stabilities of their rural past. Extreme alienation from tomorrow's more complex society may well provoke the anarchist syndrome.

In any age, the anarchist thrust--though it can be destructively powerful--leads nowhere. Some rebels sensing this, will look around for a more constructive vision. When they look, there will be the bearded prophet with his peculiar mix of scientism and moral passion, his peculiar way of linking yesterday-today-tomorrow, his peculiar kind of oversimplification and exaggeration, his peculiar kind of hope.

So the attraction of the Marxist vision may persist until modern society finds a more effective way of explaining itself and its direction. And that could be a long, long time.

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