THE CHRISTIAN-MARXIAN ALTERNATIVE:

...It may be objected that here the bias of the reviewer toward non-violence is indicated...

...Garaudy quite rightly objects to the dualism that has marked Christianity and its theology, and he sees the young especially as demonstrating their intui-tive wisdom by reacting against this dualism...

...Questions like these Garaudy does not face...

...His contact with the young has convinced him that there is a worldwide crisis in values as well as in the social struc-tures in which people live and love and work and raise their families...

...Like Illich...

...Garaudy has not yet come to question, as Illich does, the whole modern system of transportation...

...One can agree with Garaudy that it is a historical fact that it took Marxism to remind Christians that the future of the earth is their business, but one can ask if it is their only business...

...My second major criticism is that Garaudy's denunciation of contemporary ills is not radical enough...

...But I must fault his book on three counts: one, that his view of Chris-tianity is simplistic...

...The reviewer indeed has to be convinced that her role includes objective evaluation to point out the lacks in a book whose author's commitment to correct social injustice in his native France has been worked out in a career marked by sustained courage...

...hope, because I had previously read Garaudy's article, "Faith and Revolution," (published in the Spring 1973 issue of Cross Currents) and an-ticipated that, in a longer treatment of the issues he had raised, he would go further in clarifying the relation-ship of Christianity and Marxism in a future that would include meaningful work in a world of human meaning...

...For every-body else there was a feeling of pes-simism arising out of an awareness of a deeper malaise...

...But even here his suggestions for re-form reveal that science and technology are not among the institutions he has called in question...

...Like Ellul...

...What struck me most was his conclusion that only the Left was optimistic for they thought the problem was simply capitalism, which, after all, could cer-tainly be done away with...

...In comparison with II-lich's Tools for Conviviality, Garaudy's Alternative Future lacks a radical ex-amination of science and technology as they now affect post-industrial and industrializing nations...

...One worries about the revolution he advocates when he writes: "This does not mean that such a revolution ex-cludes a priori all violence but simply that it need not include violence...

...Garaudy does not say, except to tell us that it will be the result of the "populist alliance" (the translator's phrasing perhaps giving Garaudy's words a different meaning...

...While it would probably be unfair to Garaudy to say that he has not yet realized Ivan Mich's point that for the worker in the auto plant it makes little difference in his day-to-day discontent whether it is Ford or the socialist state that owns the plant, Garaudy would prob-ably see the answer to the worker's plight in the direct democracy which he so ardently espouses...

...THE CHRISTIAN-MARXIAN ALTERNATIVE DOROTHY DOHEN Tfce Alternative Future: A Vision of Christian marxism ROGER GARAUDY, translated by LEONARD MAYHEW Simon & Schuster, $6.95 I approached The Alternative Future with a good deal of interest and hope: interest, because I was teaching the Sociology of Work to a class of sixty, two-thirds of whom were adults who needed neither myself nor any other sociologist to tell them of the reality of worker discontent in an industrial age...

...But bal-ance him with prophets of the deeper malaise...

...Per-haps even raising the question reveals a bias in favor of democratic voting procedures, but I will raise it anyway: How does one know that the revolu-tion is the conscious choice of the majority...

...One can agree that the Christian more than anyone else by virtue of his conscious, willing partici-pation in the mysteries of Crucifixion and Resurrection is called to remake this world, but does he do it with rec-ognition that Christ said his kingdom is not of this world...

...The conclusion has to be that while Garaudy's eloquence is edifying for the Christian social actionist who is more than likely to be dis-couraged these days, he brings to the social actionist insights from Marxism without the illumination of the method of Marx...

...The book has proved to me to be a great disappointment, even though I am left still with a great deal of sym-pathy for the author, both as a person and as a prophet goaded by an inchoate vision...

...As I finished reading The Alternative Future I happened on the December 1974 issue of The New Yorker...

...His is not the synthesis that might hopefully have resulted if he had faced up to questions such as those posed by Jacques Ellul in False Presence of the Kingdom...

...How can one fail to sympathize with a man who writes in the book's Conclusion: "It is an overwhelming experience when a man who has professed himself an atheist for many years discovers that there has always been a Christian inside him...

...It would be an injustice to Garaudy to say that he sees the present crisis as due to capitalism alone, and it would be a misrepresentation of his ma-terial to imply that work is the only institution he sees in need of change...

...Thus, the context of transcendence for him means future-orientation, and activity to improve this world, and, evidently, nothing more...

...True, his criticism of what he calls Stalinist technobureaucracy is no less incisive than his criticism of capitalism...

...It would only have recourse to violence to defend itself against the armed aggression of a minority op-posed to the conscious choice of the majority...

...And again, "The means to be used could not exclude violence under pain of betraying the future . . . this kind of revolution does not need violence to succeed...

...Read Garaudy, of course...

...to help others face a dead end . . . and to suggest a possible future...

...But one wonders if Garaudy's fear of dualism prevents him from see-ing theological dialectic...

...Like Illich.ike Ellul...

...I have to confess that I was very surprised when I checked to discover that The Alternative Future was first published in France in 1972...

...two, that his criti-cism of the ills of the contemporary world is not radical enough...

...Certainly he sees education as an in-stitution whose purposes and proce-dures should be seriously questioned...

...This book was written in agony, hope, and passion . . . without any spirit of polemics...

...It is overwhelming to ac-cept responsibility for such a hope...

...The writer of the column 'The Talk of the Town" was reporting on the one-day national strike that had taken place two months before in France...

...ushered in by the national strike...

...At any rate, Garaudy like sixties campus revo-lutionaries has no faith in representa-tive democracy and urges instead di-rect democracy and what he calls a socialism of self-management...

...After thirty-seven years as a Party militant and twenty years as one of its leaders, after finding the meaning and beauty of life there, it is agonizing to have to doubt the very conception of this Party precisely in order to hold on to the hope that it brought to life...

...three, that his program for revolution-and de-spite his disclaimer he is quite specific about what that program includes-is "old hat...

...Perhaps it is just that it took the French-or, at least, Garaudy- longer to lose their optimism...

...However, the re-viewer has another reason for quoting the above sentences with concern...

...As I read it I kept thinking it belonged to those heady, exhilarating days of the sixties when on university campuses in the United States revolution was being made...

...He had yet to discover at the time he wrote the book that what we called "par-ticipatory democracy" and the con-sensus it was supposed to achieve too often meant the tyranny of the minor-ity, as the representative democracy he rejects is likely to mean the tyranny of the majority...