The Western Marxists
Baras, Victor
THE WESTERN MARXISTS are bad Marxists or non-Marxists or anti-Marxists. Mr. McInnes is certainly no Marxist, but he takes Marx seriously—more seriously than many Western Marxists. To paraphrase...
...Perhaps so, but it does not follow, as he suggests, that there is a plurality of rational ways of understanding...
...It is a scholarly work, indeed an erudite work, and if it shares the weakness of all projects in intellectual history, it is stronger than most...
...Lacombe, Lucien: An absolute triumph from Louis, Malle...
...Consciousness has come to mean little more than "will" or "wish" or "desire...
...He says, "It is not mere values and inventions that provide the variety of ways of living but social movements...
...In the past, each epoch has fallen victim to its own internal contradictions, giving rise to a new and higher (i.e., more complete) consciousness...
...If he is tempted to deny it, he sells himself short...
...The very attempt to be rational (Marx's attempt included) is dismissed as the product of false consciousness or ideology...
...On the contrary, changes in the material world cause changes in human consciousness...
...For Hegel, the history of the world is the progress of human understanding...
...Hegel may be described as a "dialectical idealist...
...Except for the irrationalists whom Mr...
...McInnes, to his credit, makes these distinctions and makes them well...
...This development finds its fullest exposition in the drug-sex dreams of the New Left of the 1960s...
...Scholars familiar with Sorel, Lukacs, Gramsci, and Marcuse may find these chapters useul...
...If Western liberalism is superior to Marxism, then that superiority can and must be explained...
...May-September romances...
...In the thought of Herbert Marcuse, one finds Freud's "reality principle" blurred with Marx's "capitalist repression...
...It is not a mark of dogmatism but of sanity to attempt to distinguish reason from unreason, truth from error, sense from folly...
...As Mr...
...Now it is 1964, and former SS officials plan to help Nasser destroy Israel, except that Peter Miller (Jon Voight), a German journalist With A Conscience, works to foil them...
...Claustrophobic photography, sophisticated and chilling dialogue, a phenomenally fine work...
...Marx, as every Soviet schoolboy knows, stood Hegel on his head...
...McInnes' account of the varieties of bad theory stands as a reminder of the need for good theory...
...One may take the next step and say that Marx had to be rethought because Marx was an inadequate guide...
...McInnes is commendably fair to the Marxists whose thought he chronicles but does not share...
...He condemns Marx and Hegel equally (and, by implication, most philosophers) because they try to distinguish the real from the illusory, the eternal from the ephemeral, the natural from the artificial...
...McInnes as an adherent of a misguided or dangerous doctrine called Totalism...
...The Widow Couderc: Simone Signoret and Alain Delon in a pallid treatment of the Georges Simenon story of a middle-aged peasant woman sheltering and loving a young city fellow on the lam from the law...
...Gripping throughout, escapist fare for those who would rather worry about a cinema disaster than their own problems...
...just the most exciting rock group in the world doing its best numbers...
...Harold and Maude: This one will last throughout the seventies...
...that is, Marx was wrong...
...This insight does not come from social movements, however, but from thought, in this case from Mr...
...To paraphrase McInnes, Western Marxists praise Marx for his philosophy (or his "humanism"), while dismissing the small matter of his economic theory...
...The remystification of Marx has not resulted in a simple return to Hegel...
...Scenes from a Marriage: Ingmar Bergman's seemingly endless investigation of a modern alliance gone sour, distilled from his 300-minute six-part television series into a massively powerful movie starring Liv Ullmann...
...If there is a "plurality of rational ways of living," then it is possible and necessary to distinguish the rational ways from the irrational ways...
...Therefore Marxism can not be understood or adequately countered without non-Marxist theory...
...Marx calls himself a dialectical materialist...
...McInnes, two developments contributed decisively to the rethinking of Marx by Western Marxists...
...Marxism understands itself as a theoretical critique of the liberal West...
...Each epoch of history corresponds to a particular level of awareness (consciousness...
...According to Mr...
...Preachy, talky, and dull, a terribly disappointing cinematization of Frederick Forsyth's terribly exciting book...
...McInnes' own thought...
...They forget that Marx dismissed philosophy as "ideology," something to be explained away precisely by economic theory...
...The Western MarxistsThe Gambler: James Caan as Axel Freed, who's got everything including the goyische chick of the decade...
...Alas, it moves nowhere and spoils a super story by virtue of bad pacing...
...The material world for Marx is, simply and without qualification, the economic world—the world of material production...
...Liberal eclecticism of theory, not to mention rejection of theory, is insufficient...
...History does not consist of stages of consciousness which produce changes in the material world, as Hegel claims...
...singing, gesturing, perspiring, and turning themselves on...
...It is virtually impossible to write a history that is faithful, on the one hand, to the intricacies of other people's thoughts and, on the other hand, to the thought of the author...
...The story of a young French peasant boy who becomes a collaborator in 1944, finds happiness doing the Nazis' business and more happiness loving a Jewish girl, and then...
...The movement from Marx to the Western Marxists is the story of the progressive "re-mystification of Marx...
...Communism is possible, says Marx, because of the virtually limitless productive capacity created by modern science and technology...
...Signoret somehow convinces us that she could attract Delon and could tolerate his frolics with her nitwit niece...
...Everyone who believes that the world is a rationally comprehensible whole is denounced by Mr...
...This is especially true of Chairman Mao, whose significance for Western Marxists receives surprisingly little mention from Mr...
...In each stage of history the material dialectic consists in the conflict between two aspects of production, the means of production (the level of technology) and the relations of production (the system of ownership...
...Max (Dirk Boga le), now an anonymous night porter, formerly did his thing as an SS sadist in a death camp, his favorite toy being one Lucia, his "little girl" (Charlotte Rampling...
...the film is terrifying, draining, nauseating...
...It is not the nature of things but the economic systemof kinky sex...
...Finally, history culminates in a completely reasonable ordering of the world, in the form of the modern bourgeois state...
...One was the failure of Marxism in the communist world (to achieve harmony and freedom), the other the failure of Marxism in the noncommunist world (to make a revolution or even to create a revolutionary proletariat...
...However, a ghoulish group of ex-Nazis intervene to spoil the s-m fun, but not before the audience is treated to the most explicitly sadistic sex scenes of any commercial film in memory...
...Indeed, the detailed discussion of the roots of Western Marxism (in chapters 2 through 5) is too much for the general reader...
...McInnes does not like such judgments...
...McInnes points out, the ideologists of communist countries have also had to undertake considerable remystification of Marx...
...The study of the material conditions of production has been replaced by renewed concern with "consciousness...
...how to save H.M.S...
...Juggernaut: A technically excellent disaster flick...
...New York shown in all its grimy splendor, tough talk, and paranoia...
...The West has inherited "Marxists" for whom "materialism" is not the foundation of their doctrine but an epithet to be hurled at the bourgeoisie...
...This philosophic project itself, he implies, reveals a dogmatic or authoritarian cast of mind...
...McInnes is a careful and most knowledgeable student of Marxist theory...
...McInnes tells us that "there is a plurality of rational ways of living...
...Heavy and insistent and dreary, but with some superb supporting work from such as Morris Carnovsky and Lauren Hutton...
...Britonic from explosives while denying the shipjacker his $1.5 million...
...Every such effort resembles, to use his favorite example, the Socratic attempt to distinguish physic (nature) from nomos (convention...
...Herein lies one of the major differences between Marx and his latter-day disciples in the West...
...The study of politics, understood as "socialmovements" or anything else, requires a standpoint outside of politics...
...They organize an auxiliary police force to protect their apartment building, get carried away with it all, and end unhappily...
...that prevents the endless gratification of infantile fantasies...
...Hegel was right, Marx says, about the dialectical progression of the stages of history, but he was wrong about what constitutes the dialectic...
...Improvements in politics, religion, art, and science result from this progress of human understanding...
...the general reader will find neither a readily accessible exposition of their doctrines nor any reason to seek to understand them more fully...
...a few deft moments from Karen Black (out of the cockpit and into the beauty salon) and some others, but on balance a dismal flop...
...Liliana Cavani's bizarre film of a sort of Grand Guignol Hotel are hostile to science, technology, prosperity, and even to thought...
...Beautifully directed, acted, and conceived...
...Not advised for those whose marriages are rocky...
...The culmination of history for Marx is full communism, a world without material scarcity and hence without political conflict...
...It refuses to preach, communicating its message subtly and by example, not by moralisms...
...His work is an intellectual history of Western Marxism...
...The Taking of Pelham One Two Three: Subwayjacking in Spraypaint Village, with the mayor (Abe Beame-ish rather than Lindsayesque), the Transit Authority, the cops, and everyone else rushing frantically to meet the one-hour deadline of the baddies, who promise a hostage shot every minute if the ransom money doesn't arrive on time...
...Therefore, the rethinking of Marx has meant, to some extent, the rediscovery of Hegel...
...The Western Marxists have rediscovered Hegel's concern with the primacy of consciousness but not his concern with the primacy of reason...
...Ladies and Gentlemen, the Rolling Stones: Culled from their '72 tour, the entire film is Mick and Co...
...Law and Disorder: Carroll O'Connor and Ernest Borgnine as two grown-up men wishing they were little boys...
...The Night Porter: Tender is the sadomasochistic night...
...Bogarde is, quite simply, magnificent...
...Yes, sure, but this is the May-September romance to beat them all...
...McInnes does not quite say that Marx was wrong...
...Hegel confused cause and effect...
...He also has this thing about gambling...
...No interviews, backstage blather, audience hysteria scenes...
...Even less does he say that Hegel was right...
...The Odessa File: Nazis are always in season...
...One need only imagine a new world, untroubled by the distinction between the possible and the impossible, and that world can be created...
...He frowns on the philosophicattempt to explain the world comprehensively...
...McInnes justly condemns, every student of politics, including Marx, Hegel, and McInnes, describes politics not only by the standard of politics but by the standard of reason...
...Ari and Jackie have nothing on this pair...
...Now it is 1957, and who turns up at the Hotel zur Oper in Vienna but Lucia, and incredibly they take up where they left off...
Vol. 8 • January 1975 • No. 4
