[This is Chapter
Four of Murphey’s book Socialist Thought.]
Chapter
4
THE INTELLECTUAL
The alienation of the intellectual has not led simply to the intellectuals' morose withdrawal into their introspective "radical solitudes." Intellectuals do withdraw; but they often then come back into society fighting mad, gaining strength through whatever weapons are at their disposal.
The primary means of struggle for the modern intelligentsia has been for its members to seek an
alliance with any unassimilated or disaffected
members of society. This alliance with the have-nots has often been noted by
social commentators. An especially good discussion of it appears in Eric Hoffer's chapter on "The Intellectual and the
Masses" in his book The Ordeal of Change. Hoffer
says about the "unattached intellectual" that thus far "his most
potent alliance has been with the masses. The coming together of the
intellectual and the masses proved itself a formidable
combination."l Lichtheim quotes Auguste
Comte to the effect that "it is among the working class that the new
philosophers will find their most energetic allies."2
Without
a coalition that invokes a force that is much larger than they themselves
constitute, intellectuals would find themselves
politically, socially impotent for short- and middle-term political action.
Their voices would be ineffectual "cries in the wilderness." Their
recourse would be to the long-term permeating effect of ideas. An alliance, on
the other hand, opens the way to effective power. It brings leadership,
command, status and recognition. It provides the leverage that can change the
existing culture and that can make possible a victorious rivalry with the
acting man of commerce and industry. Lewis Feuer says about the intellectual:
"Weak himself, often lacking in physical power and confidence, he was
strengthened by the knowledge that a powerful physical army of proletarians
would march under his leadership."3
Hoffer ponders the motives that move the intellectual in
this way. He shows good understanding
when he gives the intellectual credit for seeking justification: "He must feel that in satisfying these
hungers he does not cater to a petty self." But Hoffer
recognizes an inherent lack of sincerity:
"Once his ‘private ail’ is righted, the intellectual’s ardour for the underprivileged cools considerably. His cast of mind is essentially
aristocratic…Not only does he doubt that the masses could do anything
worthwhile on their own, but he would resent it if they made the attempt. The masses must obey.”
Hoffer’s a comments are in line
with the views of a little-known Russian thinker who has made an acutely
perceptive observation. A passage in
Leon Trotsky’s autobiography My Life says that "in one of the
northern colonies – I think it was Viluysk—lived an
exile called Makhaisky, whose name soon became
generally known. Makhaisky
began as a critic of Social Democratic opportunism. His first hectographed essay, devoted to an
exposure of opportunism of the German Social Democracy, had a great vogue among
the exiles. His second essay criticized
the economic system of Marx and ended with the amazing conclusion that
Socialism is a social order based on the exploitation of the workers by a professional
intelligentsia."4
Makhaisky saw right through the
matter, perceiving the essence of one of the major dynamics within modern
civilization.
In
its quest for a powerful anti-bourgeois alliance, the intellectual subculture
has cast about, not always settling upon or sustaining any given alliance. And there have been times when the
intelligentsia has had virtually to manufacture the alliance, creating
disaffection among have-not groups where previously none had existed.
It
is worthwhile to place Marx’s life in perspective with these things in
mind. The thrust of Marx’s life was to
impress an alienated class consciousness onto the “proletariat.” The vast influence of Marxism has had the
effect of placing the main focus on an alliance between the “intellectual” and
the “worker,” defined as anyone who does not own the means of production and
who derives his income from a wage relationship. It can be argued that there is no element of
alliance in this, that Marx was speaking about a real class struggle so that
there is no need to consider his own role in that context; but I am not
convinced by such an argument. The
theory of class struggle, the constant urging of a greater class consciousness
and disaffection where often there was little or none -- these things are the
work-products of intellectuals such as Marx and Engels
rather than of the workers themselves.
The very process of an intellectual’s devoting his life, along with his disciples’, to promoting such ideas is itself the reality of
the alliance to which I am referring. To
the extent that it succeeds in attracting worker support, it effects the
combination that is sought.
The
alliance has not always been with strictly the proletariat. In the Laslett-Lipset
book we are told, for example, that C. Wright Mills argued in 1960 in Mills’
“letter to the New Left” that it was outmoded to consider the working class the
medium for revolution; Mills argued that “the new revolutionary classes were
the intellectuals and the students.” Our
attention is drawn to the fact that there has been a “tremendous growth of
students” and that they are “directly influenced by the values of the
intellectual community.”5 The New Left’s reliance on an alienated
youth, molded out of the anti-bourgeois hostility of the intellectual
subculture, is strikingly similar to the youth-orientation of Nazism and
Italian fascism. George Mosse says that National
Socialism emphasized the "difference between generations. The young were
set off against the old... Fascism in all countries made a fetish of
youthfulness."6
Sometimes
there has been a desire to stir the very bottom of society. Michael Harrington
says that Bakunin sought revolution through the
"lumpen-proletariat." Instead of a
"disciplined working-class movement," Bakunin
spoke of "the millions of the uncivilized, the disinherited.,
the miserable and the illiterate."7 Harrington traces this on
through to the American New Left philosopher Herbert Marcuse:
"Marcuse, though he speaks as a Marxist, has the
same Bakuninist hopes for 'the substratum of the
outcasts and outsiders, the exploited and persecuted of other races and other
colors, the unemployed and unemployable.'"
Harrington's
own preference, so far as alliances go, is for a coalition of "the
'old' working class" with the
liberally educated young and a rising class of technicians.
Kenneth and Patricia Dolbeare
mention that the New Left devoted considerable attention "to the search
for what is often labeled the 'historical agency of change.'" There was a
shift as the New Left went along.
At first, the focus was on attracting both whites and blacks; but when the
black-power
movement drew blacks away in 1965, the
"focus shifted to poor whites."8 This reminds me of what
Harrington says about the socialist movements in Asia, Africa and Latin America
-- that they are "in search of a new proletariat" and that the search
has moved, from time to time, from the peasants to the urban poor and even to
"military officers and educated elites."
The reference
to military officers and educated elites shows how the search for an alliance
sometimes reaches upward, with the intellectual hoping for an alliance with the
power-center at the top. Hall Draper and Ann Lipow
talk about "Lassalle's secret negotiations with Bismarck, in which the
would-be ‘worker’ dictator’ (as Marx called him) offered to help the Iron
Chancellor establish a 'social monarchy’ (a presumably anti-capitalist
despotism) using Lassalle's working-class troops as a mass base." They say
that "Bismarck turned down the offer, and naturally headed toward a united
front with the bourgeoisie instead; but this perspective remained the Lassallean trademark."9
Frequently
the alienated intellectual has to create the dissatisfaction that will make an
alliance possible. Lichtheim says that the
"early socialists had to convert the working class." We have come to
accept something that is really quite incongruous if we not struck by the
peculiarity of the young revolutionary intellectual Leon Trotsky's saying that
“we must find workers, not wait for anybody or ask anybody, but just find
workers, and set to it." The Russian intelligentsia during the Populist
period went into the fields to recruit the peasants, only to find that the
peasants were basically unresponsive. This has much to tell us about the
dynamics of socialism.
In
The Socialist Register 1977, David Widgery
complained that "the New Left Review's tradition of Marxism has become something over and above
the working class, an alien thing that needs to be 'implanted' like some
electrode into their ungrateful skulls."10 In the same volume,
Peter Jenkins said about Britain that "at present, a mass basis port for
socialism does not exist in this country: it needs to be created."11 David Caute points
out that this has been a long-standing problem for Marxists: "A class, in
short, must become aware of its conflict with other classes… Lenin argued that
full political class consciousness could be brought to the proletariat only
without."12 Communist strategy in the Third World has reflected
this need to create dissatisfaction; Edward Taborsky
says that "the strategem most widely used in the
Third World to promote communist interest through the labor movement been the
time-honored device of fomenting strikes, exploiting them for their own
purposes, and then converting them into fullscale
anti-capitalist and anti-Western class warfare. That has occurred especially in
Latin America."13
In
Chapter 2 I noted that most of the leading thinkers in socialist history have
been from the middle class or higher. Socialism champions the proletariat, but
the intellectuals who have formulated the socialist position have not been
workers themselves.
Moreover, the
intellectuals, not the workers, have been the prime movers. The alliance has
been sought most energetically by the intellectuals. Often the workers have
been indifferent.
Thomas Kirkup spoke to this point when he wrote that "the
initiative in socialist speculation and action has usually come from men
belonging to the middle and upper classes…”14 George Lichtheim observes that "socialism was bound to the
creation of intellectuals of bourgeois origin." Maurice Cornforth speaks
of the "theory of scientific socialism" and says that "the
synthesis of vast data drawn from experience into a scientific theory could not
emerge as it were spontaneously out of the mass movement itself, since it
required long and exacting work of scientific research. This work could only be
done by scholars, by intellectuals. The men who originally worked on the theory
did not themselves work in factories or mines."15
In
Russia in 1883 the Marxist Georgi Plekhanov
saw it as the task of "our socialist intelligentsia ... (to) become the
leader of the working class ... (and to) explain to it its political and
economic interests."16 And this did eventually happen. Maximilien Rubel reports that "in
theory and practice Lenin and his party were an elite of bourgeois
radical intellectuals artificially grafted onto a stirring social
mass...."17
The
indifference on the part of the have-nots is well attested to in socialist literature.
Certainly Lichtheim confirms that the "depressed
stratum" was not responsive in England in the nineteenth century. And he says that in Russia during the summer
of 1874 thousands of intellectuals went out peasants and tried to stir them to
action, only to meet with failure. With regard to France, he says that in the
mid-nineteenth century "most French peasants had become conservative"
and actually served to crush rebellion in the cities as members of the army. It is not surprising that in 1928 the Sixth
World Congress of the Comintern complained that in the Third World the
membership of the Communist parties consisted mostly of the intelligentsia, not
of workers. Nor is it exceptional that we can find a Mexican radical, Octavio Paz, commenting on the "paradox (which would
have scandalized Marx)" that "the Mexican Communist Party is a
university party."18
This
demonstrates the fundamental error that underlies what is often called
"the stomach theory of communism." The impression that poverty causes
socialist radicalism seems a matter of common sense, but actually it is quite
superficial. What is generally needed for radical action is that both
constituents of the alliance be present: an alienated intelligentsia as the
heat-source and the kindling; and unassimilated elements as the combustible
material. Lichtheim says that "no socialist
force worth mentioning has ever emerged from the lower depths of society."
He denies, quite appropriately, that there is any correlation between poverty
and socialism.
The
"stomach theory" is contradicted, also, by the fact that when workers
have become involved, they have usually been skilled workers rather than those
who are less well off. Michael Harrington says that in England it was the
"labor elite of the artisans" who were first attracted to socialism,
rather than the poor. Lichtheim adds that early
socialists first went after the "labor aristocracy" and that this is
a "crucial circumstance" that has been "obscured by the
prominence of a protest literature which made poverty the central theme of what
was coming to be known as the 'social problem.'" Broadening his comments
to encompass more than the English experience, he points out that in Europe
after World War II it was this labor aristocracy that was the most militant
force behind the activities of the Left.
In
the United States, the radical union the I.W.W. (known as the "Wobblies") mixed intellectuals and skilled workers.
Philip S. Foner says "the leadership consisted
largely of two types: skilled workers
and formerly successful trade-union officials such as Haywood, St. John, Ettor, and Little;
and restless intellectuals…."19
Leon Trotsky
found in Russia that “the highly skilled workers who earned fairly good wages”
were the most responsive. And according
to Lichtheim the Mensheviks consisted of a
combination of the “Jewish intelligentsia, plus a ‘labor aristocracy’” that
enjoyed a higher level of education and skill than the average worker.
To be sure,
the many variants of socialist ideology must be analyzed on their merits; but
it is essential, if we want a complete “sociology of intellectual development”
with regard to the Left, to appreciate how much the specific social programs
and broader ideological positions have been vehicles for the alliance. Socialist thought must to a large degree be
understood as a dynamic adaptation to the needs of the alliance. If we were to make an unflattering
characterization, we would speak of “a pandering to the have-nots.”
Joseph
Schumpeter made this point extremely well.
“Having no genuine authority and feeling always in danger of being
unceremoniously told to mind his own business, he must flatter, promise and
incite, nurse left wings and scowling minorities, sponsor doubtful or submarginal cases, appeal to fringe ends, profess himself
ready to obey – in short, behave toward the masses as his predecessors behaved
first toward their ecclesiastical superiors, later toward princes and other
individual patrons, still later toward the collective master of bourgeois
complexion.”20
I
would not suggest that this is done with a sordid awareness of an ulterior
motive. It is virtually always a functional adaptation, which nevertheless
molds socialist ideology's mediation of social reality. An example appears in Kirkup's History of Socialism (1909) when he said
about the German Social Democrats' insistence upon universal suffrage that
"they regard it rather as an instrument of agitation and education. They
seek to enlighten the masses of the people, to make them of one mind on the
political and economic questions that concern them, to organize and discipline
them for the great task of emancipation."
Because of
this, we can expect to see significant warping in the perceptions and
value-systems embraced by many socialists. Selective perception will have been
at work, and sometimes this will result in a wildly distorted interpretation of
reality. One example is Engels' book on the condition
of the working class in England during the nineteenth century; another is Emile
Zola's Germinal, a novel about the squalid conditions in a French mining
community. Such books have made capitalism seem catastrophic. They have given
no balancing emphasis or even recognition to the fact that, compared with
anything that has gone before, the age of capitalism has been one of
undreamed-of improvement for precisely the "common man."
Another
example can be seen in the continuing intellectual preoccupation with the
"Holocaust" in which Nazi Germany [is said to have] slaughtered
millions of innocents. A heartfelt and fully appropriate sensitivity has
pointed to Jewish suffering. But no comparable awareness has -- even now after
Solzhenitsyn -- come into being about the equally or even more extensive
slaughters by Stalin and Mao. If we wonder why this is so, we are hard-pressed
for an answer until we remember how much the Left has colored the twentieth
century's perception of social reality. The mental effects are so pervasive
that we cannot doubt but that future historians will see our time as having
been profoundly flawed in its ability to grasp reality, just as today a
secularist feels that medieval man lived in something of a dream-world of his
own construction.
All of this
has a bearing on the origins of revolutionary radicalism. The desire violently
to tear down an existing structure with a visionary hope of then erecting a
supposedly ideal society, especially when this desire exists in a world that
should otherwise be so full of hope, shows the psychology of fanaticism. Some
perceptions and values are raised to an all-consuming level, while everything
else is depreciated to the point of meaninglessness. We know this as
"going overboard.” It cannot be surprising that the serious, idealistic,
sensitive man of ideas is most susceptible to such an imbalance. Nor can it be
surprising that the average workaday individual will be far less likely to
catch the fever, especially if there is no "carrier" who will stir
him up and do his organizing and articulating for him.
Schumpeter again had something to say to
this. "Neither the opportunity of attack nor real or fancied grievances
are in themselves sufficient to produce, however strongly they may favor, the
emergence of active hostility against a social order. For such an atmosphere to
develop it is necessary that there be groups to whose interest it is to work up
and organize resentment, to nurse it, to voice it and to lead it."
Lichtheim says about Britain that the labor movement
stayed reformist rather than becoming revolutionary because there was no
radical intelligentsia during its beginning period. Virtually all the
continental European countries did have such an intelligentsia, he says; but
Britain, Canada and the United States did not. The
worldview that finds its most prominent expression in Marxism – i.e.,
the worldview that sees the central human predicament as consisting of entrapment, exploitation and class
struggle -- is the principal ideological consequence of the alienated
intellectuals' yearning for an alliance. Feuer says that Marx was the
"symbol of the intellectual joining his lot with the working class."
David Caute tells us that for Marx the "primary
objective was to root his doctrine in the broadest possible strata of the labour movement." Fried and Sanders observe that Marxism's
appeal during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries arose out of
the "support it attracted from the two classes -- the proletariat and the
intellectuals... Marxism ingeniously joined the interests of both classes in a
single theoretical system…." Maurice
Cornforth adds that "what characterizes and unifies Marxism as a movement
(amidst all diversities and disagreements) is the aim of achieving a socialist
society through the means of class struggle...."
Most
people don't realize that Nazism and fascism likewise championed the have-nots
as against a despised bourgeois society. In Hitler's Social Revolution,
David Schoenbaum speaks of "an undifferentiated
glorification of 'the worker,'" which took the form within Nazi ideology
of a promise of upward movement within society and an "aggressive emphasis
on social egalitarianism." The worker was set off against the bourgeoisie.
There was a "socialist world" that included the workers, farmers and
soldiers, and this was seen as in conflict with the "bourgeois
world."21 Lichtheim speaks of the Italian fascists as a "radical
nationalist movement of the
intelligentsia."
Most
especially since World War II, the alliance has resulted in a world-wide
fanning of the flames of revolution. The consequences have been apparent
throughout the "underdeveloped" continents. The pattern that Russia
followed in the nineteenth century has been repeated many times: native
intellectuals imbibing the alienated intellectual impulses coming out of Europe
for their primary inspiration and rationale. Feuer says that intellectuals in
these areas are especially frustrated, since they are kept on the outside and
see an enormous gap between what is and what, in their opinion, ought to be.
The result is extremism: "Ideas and practices that are found only among
the most extreme sectarian, isolated intellectuals in the West found a fertile
transplantation among governing intellectuals in Africa and Asia." Feuer
recalls that Marx pointed out that youthful Russian intellectuals "always
run after the most extreme that the West can offer."
A different
sort of consequence has been that for over a century the classical liberal
devotee of capitalism has lost his claim to working-class support. The flight
of the intellectual to the left and the on-going appeal that the Left has made
to the working class have out-flanked classical liberalism. The supporters of
capitalism have not appeared to have the best interests of the workers at heart
and have seemed to champion, at least in the public perception that has been
encouraged by the Left, a philosophy of oligarchy and privilege. It is
difficult for us to understand that this has not always been the case. But
during the classical liberal ascendancy of Jefferson and Jackson the average citizen
thought of such a liberalism as consistent with his interests.
"Privilege" was on the other side.
This became reversed, though, in the course of the nineteenth century.
An alienated intelligentsia broke way; the working strata were sought after by
the ideological appeals of the Left; and, just as significantly, classical
liberalism itself became arrested in its development and responsiveness by the
defensive and apologetic posture into which it was forced.
Kirkup says that Ferdinand Lassalle pursued a
similar flanking opportunity in Bismarck's Germany. Lassalle "saw
an opportunity for vindicating a great cause, that of the working men, which
would outflank the Liberalism of the
middle classes…." In fact, the preemption of working class support occurred
everywhere. It is visible in the history of nineteenth century Russia, for
example, where first Populism and then Marxism displaced the reformism of such
classical liberals as Turgenev.
In
Chapter 17 we will discuss the elitism inherent in any movement that stems
mainly from an alienated intelligentsia. In the present context we should
notice how incongruous elitism seems when it underlies a militantly egalitarian
ideology. But this incongruity disappears when we realize that in a rivalry
between an alienated intellectual subculture and a predominant bourgeois
culture it is functionally necessary for the intellectual to raise the have-not
to a position of power by stressing equality and democracy (or, as an
alternative, a revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat). The tactical
necessities of this great rivalry explain how elitism and egalitarianism can
complement one another within a coalition. At one and the same time, the
intellectual can champion compassion and wage war on "exploitation,"
while feeling inherently more rational and sensitive than the average person.
An
implication from all this is that the alliance is ultimately tenuous, the way
any alliance is bound to be, even though it has colored the history of the past
century and a half. The have-nots are usually indifferent; they are often
distrustful; and they frequently would just as soon embrace bourgeois values as
to undertake the stern asceticism of anti-bourgeois radicalism. The coalition
accordingly has a difficult time staying together.
Socialist
literature gives countless indications of this. Dolbeare
and Dolbeare observe that the American New Left in
the1960s confronted an obstacle in trying to recruit the poor: "The poor
were found to share the values of materialism and competitiveness" that
the New Left opposed. In Russia Trotsky had noticed that "the
workers...have many philistine traits." Maurice Cornforth struggles with
the fact that the workers' heads are not simply empty vessels into which
socialist ideas can be poured; they are people who already have many other
ideas. He concludes that "the workers' party must try to lead workers to
change their ideas." Quite recently I have seen reference to the
"generally conservative nature of the values held by the German trade
unions," which is causing trouble for the social democrats there.22
Harrington says that Lenin saw considerable significance in the fact that a
"small minority of privileged workers... sometimes corrupted their entire
class through opportunistic accommodations to capitalism."
The distrust
has sometimes been obvious. Feuer says that workers were "almost always
suspicious of Marxist socialism" for the very reason that they suspected
that it included the possibility of a "new dictatorship, that of the
intellectuals." Even the so-called have-nots are frequently at odds with
each other. William Peterson and Alastair Thomas
point in their book on the Social Democratic Parties in Western Europe
toward a "conflict between the interests of those at work and the
unemployed and other welfare recipients." They say that "the forces
of organized labour, the trade unions, normally
represent most strongly the interests of those at work while the concern felt
by social democratic politicians for the underprivileged often works in the
contrary direction. This dilemma has
been posed very strongly in Britain in 1975-6."23
The
workers have occasionally attempted to shake off the intellectuals. A proposal was debated but ultimately
defeated in 1866 to exclude intellectuals from the International.24
Adolph Sturmthal says that “after Lassalle’s death his followers, in their
struggle against the rival Eisenacher group, boasted that they did not accept
intellectuals as members, and above all not Jews.”25 Selig Perlman reports that both anarchism
and Syndicalism ousted the intelligentsia: “Working-class anarchism, like
French Syndicalism, has been a clever working-class stratagem to get rid of the
hegemony of the intellectual. The
intellectual was eliminated from the trade union movement in the name of the
very revolutionary class-consciousness which he himself had helped evoke in
labor.”26
The
intellectuals, for their part, have often been disappointed with the
workers. G.D.H. Cole found that “the
standard of intellectual interest in the British Labour
Movement, and especially among the Trade Unions, is extraordinarily low.”27 Lassalle spoke of a “cankering inner disgust,
caused by the indifference and apathy of the working class taken as a whole.”28
Dwight Macdonald complained that “we were right, but they wouldn’t listen. Nothing is more frustrating for an
intellectual than to work out a logical solution to a problem and then find
that nobody is interested.”29 The Dolbeares wrote in the early 1970s
that “contemporary Marxists… are confronted by the seeming indifference of the
American working class to socialist ideology.”
Feuer believes that the alienated intellectual has
undergone a crisis of personal faith (which is quite similar, I might add, to
that which tormented John Stuart Mill as a young man). He sees a substantial loss of momentum since
World War II: “The sustaining sense of
the intellectual’s mission all but vanished during the last two decades; the
disruption of the labor-intellectual alliance has left the intellectual, at
least for a time, without the sense of supporting identification that gives
meaning to his efforts … (H)is normlessness is the
fact that his socialist ethic is gone, and the recognition that it’s all
careerism.” This self-realization has
been composed of two parts. The first is
the intellectual’s increased awareness of his “own underlying aims.” The second is that the intellectual has come
to see that whatever movement he has thrown himself into can “become as
evil-ridden as the society he had hoped to help redeem.”
The
alienation of the intellectual against bourgeois culture and the alliance of
the intellectual with the have-nots have been two of the most pronounced and
influential features of civilization since the early nineteenth century. The signs that Feuer pointed to in the
preceding passage have been especially pronounced since the death of the New
Left in the early 1970s. I am not
inclined toward historical prediction, since I fully realize the complexity and
subtlety of these things; but we should at least be aware of how profound the
change will be if the alienation were to dry up or the alliance evaporate. We will have entered a new historical age, as
different from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as those centuries were
from those that preceded them. Mankind
will still have its fundamental immaturity; there will still be subterranean
forces pulling and tugging at each other; and we will still be engaged in our
existential quest. But these things will
assume different shapes and will no longer be tied to the pattern of neuroses
and half-perceptions that for us have defined the human condition. The door will again be open, as Thomas Paine
saw it was two centuries ago, for a new beginning – for wherever that will lead
us.
In the present,
the alliance has borne some bitter fruit for both the intellectual and the
have-nots. Tamara Deutscher recently
wrote that there is a “deeply felt isolation of the intellectual in a society
of the Soviet type,” while at the alliance’s other end “the U.S.S.R. working
class is dormant.” “Any strikes are
crushed by troops” and “even the most courageous of the intellectuals show no
concern for the most vital preoccupations of the workers.”30 It is especially tragic when the alliance
leads to a totalitarian society in which, then, both components of the alliance
are suffocated together.
[Note in
2003: My later writing goes into considerable detail about how the
alienated intellectual community has, since approximately the end of World War
II, sought out yet another alliance: this time with unassimilated racial and
ethnic groups. This offers to be the
most effective alliance the alienation has been able to effect, since it
threatens a demographic swamping of both Europe and America. Here again, there is the prospect that the
groups that are championed will not ultimately accept the lead of the
intelligentsia. The alliance is an
extremely effective weapon against the predominant Euro-American culture, but
can’t be seen as ultimately satisfactory to the intellectuals themselves.
Since the
demise of the Soviet Union, yet another factor has emerged, and this comes from
within the predominant culture itself.
The impulse for a Social Gospel sort of “doing good works” has
reinforced the direction of American foreign policy since 1898 to intervention melioristically throughout the world (an impulse that was
masked by other purposes during the Cold War’s opposition to Communist
expansion). Since the atrocities of
1.
Eric Hoffer, The
Ordeal of Change (New York: Perennial Library, 1963), pp. 39, 40.
2.
George Lichtheim, A
Short History of Socialism (New York: Praeger
Publishers, 1970), pp. 178, 52, 64, 37, 139, 56, 278, 36, 277, 253, 205, 210.
3.
Lewis S. Feuer, Marx and the Intellectuals
(Garden City: Anchor Books, 1969), pp.
52, 30, 64-5, 52, 96-7.
4.
Leon Trotsky, My Life (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1960), pp. 129, 104, 106, 208.
5.
John H. M. Laslett and
Seymour Martin Lipset (ed.s),
Failure of a Dream? Essays in the
History of American Socialism (Garden City: Anchor Press, 1974), p. 60.
6.
George L. Mosse, Nazi
Culture (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1966), p.
xxxii.
7.
Michael Harrington, Socialism (New York:
Saturday Review Press, 1970), pp. 62, 359-367, 217, 44, 147.
8.
Kenneth M. Dolbeare
and Patricia Dolbeare, American Ideologies
(Chicago: Markham Publishing Company, 1971), pp. 173, 174, 177, 204.
9.
Ralph Miliband and John Saville (ed.s), The Socialist Register 1976 (London: The
Merlin Press, 1976), p. 182.
10. Ralph Miliband and John Saville (ed.s), The Socialist Register 1977 (London: The
Merlin Press, 1977), p. 57.
11. Miliband and Saville, Register 1977, p. 21.
12. David Caute, The Left in Europe (Since 1789) (New York:
McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1966), pp. 226, 53.
13. Edward Taborsky, Communist Penetration of the Third World (New
York: Robert Speller & Sons Publishers, Inc., 1973), pp. 109-110, 138.
14. Thomas Kirkup, History of Socialism (New York: Macmillan
Company, 1909), pp. 15, 317, 79.
15. Maurice
Cornforth, The Open Philosophy and The Open Society (New York:
International Publishers, 1968), pp. 174, 93, 175.
16. Albert
Fried and Ronald Sanders (ed.s), Socialist Thought
(Garden City: Anchor Books, 1964),
pp. 454, 276.
17. Erich Fromm (ed.), Socialist Humanism (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1965), p. 218.
18. Article
by Octavio Paz, Dissent, Winter, 1979, p. 50.
19. Laslett-Lipset, Failure
of a Dream?, p. 235.
20. Joseph A.
Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York: Harper and
Brothers Publishers, 1942), 2d edition, pp. 154, 145.
21. David Schoenbaum, Hitler’s Social revolution (Garden City:
Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1966), pp. 62, 69.
22. William
E. Paterson and Alastair H. Thomas (ed.s), Social Democratic Parties in Western Europe
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1977), p. 193.
23. Peterson
and Thomas, Social Democratic, p. 22.
24. Kirkup, Socialism,
pp. 183, 184.
25. Laslett-Lipset, Failure
of a Dream?, p. 633.
26. Laslett-Lipset, Failure
of a Dream?, p. 631.
27. G.D.H.
Cole, Labour in the Commonwealth
(London: Headley Bros. Publishers, Ltd., no year given), p. 63.
28. Kirkup, Socialism,
p. 87.
29. Feuer, Marx
and the Intellectuals, p. 97.
30. Article,
“Voices of Dissent” by Tamara Deutscher, The Socialist Register 1978
(London: The Merlin Press, 1978), pp.
41, 42.