Are we entering a post-Marxist age?
Gannon, Thomas M. & Calvez, Jean-Yves & Avineri, Shlomo & Birnbaum, Norman
T-O' THREE MARXIAN SCHOLARS LOOK FUTURE Are we entering a post-Marxist age? L AST YEAR marked the centenary of Karl Marx's death. When he died in London in March 1883 only eleven people...
...The following discussion is based on edited versions of their conference presentations...
...he did not deliver one in 1983 at a similar symposium on the centenary of Marx's death...
...Economic centralization and cultural fragmentation thus supplement one another...
...For a Marxist, it is an unusually cruel twist of events to see the 1844 Paris Manuscripts quoted as a critique of Eastern European Communism...
...Modern social conflicts result from differences in gender groups, generations, nations and regions, as well as from economic classes...
...His work includes both scientific dcscription and moral prophccy, combining clements that arc analytical and eschatological, empirical and religious...
...The gradual socialization of the means of production has occurred, but its triumphant historical subject is capital itself...
...We dare not overlook the possibility that mass unemployment and brutal, rapid declines in living standards may yet engender large-scale class conflict in some capitalist societies...
...Despite Marx's complex depiction of human interests, the depth of Freud's vision is missing...
...In France that decline is evident not only in intellectual circles but also in the political sphere (even in the Communist party itself...
...The most recent challenge to Marxism comes from the school of historians closest to it: the Annales group in France...
...Even within Marxism itself, it is proclaimed that the future is now, that indefinite postponement of revolutionary delight denies one of Marx's central tenets...
...The Marxist inspiration to which I refer is a simplified interpretation of exploitation (based, at times, on the mere evidence of it), together with the Leninist politics of a revolutionary group legitimizing itself by an allegedly scientific theory rather than by popular vote...
...In short, while the world economy has assumed dimensions anticipated by Marx, the new ideology and sensibility -- and even contemporary culture as a whole -- escape his categories...
...Marx's Eurocentrism is thus an example of the immanent dilemmas of any sort of an historical Grand Design...
...Marx himself never doubted that humanity's highest task was the mastery of nature, but his own critique of technocratic rationality has prompted us to question our previous trust in instrumental reason...
...Its spiritual impulses have found other outlets: movements of psychological and religious renewal, newly conceived systems of spiritual transformation...
...In the end, I believe, Leninism (the monistic organization of state government exclusive of "pluralism") will remain long after much else has changed...
...In Eugene Kamenka's judgment (New York Times Book Review, April, 1984), Marx has become simply a figure in the history of ideas: most of what is valuable in his thought has now been absorbed...
...Much of the present-day East European opposition is distant even from the Czech reformers of 1968...
...Fourth, what about the future of Marxism in countries dominated by Marxist-Communist parties...
...It seeks to destroy bureaucratic power, develop pluralistic culture, and preserve the earth and its species...
...Such a minimalist state obviously could not be expected to intervene and prevent the eventual collapse of capitalism...
...But the welfare state neutralizes explosive economic antagonism by proliferating a wide variety of aesthetic, ethnic, and religious values...
...He seeks a church prepared to revise its Eurocentrism...
...It may even be perfected and further developed...
...Thomas M. Gannon, S.J., is director of the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University...
...It revived in the early 1960s with the publication of Louis Althusser's Pour Marx, a manifesto for a new brand of Marxism adapted to the emergence of strncturalism...
...Again, the legacy of the Enlightenment, as well as of Hegd, is clearly visible...
...But this negative proposition needs to be qualified for two reasons...
...An ironic observer might point out that this has happened before: Christianity, after all, grew out of the prophetic traditions of Judaism, and the initial message of Jesus was aimed at his Jewish coreligionists...
...And newer historical examinations of the relationship between politics and the state reveal how much of what we earlier identified as economic factors are indeed political -- leaving us quite unclear about which is primary...
...Good and evil are no longer defined as what exclusively serves or harms the socialist revolution...
...It was recognized that while class conflict in capitalist societies had not culminated in revolution, and while the global system of capitalist exploitation seemed more pervasive, the development of the welfare state in the West owed much to Marxism...
...Two decades ago, the critical Left everywhere would have answered' 'no...
...Analogous developments are evident across the world: movements like the Islamic revival, the Catholic renaissance in Latin America, political Buddhism in Asia, doctrines like Negritude -- all are the new foci of social consciousness None of this should astonish us...
...But Marxism has now been academicized, has thoroughly penetrated much of what was once called "bourgeois social science," and is taught by bourgeois professors who are not Marxists...
...Man the demiurge is thus at the center of Marx's scheme, but not man as an isolated atom or nomad, but man-inrelationship, species being (Gattungswesen...
...Marx began as a poet, proceeding through philosphy to political economy...
...When he died in London in March 1883 only eleven people attended the funeral...
...5. From laissez-faire economic theory, Marx derived his minimalist concept of the role of the state in economic affairs under capitalism...
...In fact, the East Germans did better for the Luther anniversary in 1983 than they did for Marx...
...NORMAN BIRNBAUM ' Marx after Marxism I Ill II II I i $ IT ACCURATE to term our epoch post-Marxist...
...Capital knows no national loyalty...
...Burckhardt and Nietzsche have triumphed over their contemporaries...
...At the end of the war and through the early 1950s interest in Marx and in Marxism was intense, followed by a period of decline...
...Marxism, of course, needs to be modernized, adapted to any number of phenomena not envisioned by its founders...
...We return, in a sense, to the roots of Marxism itself...
...Even the concept of "totality," advanced by modern Marxists as essential to understanding Marx's thought, may lead, as Lukacs felt, to a critical revision of Marxism...
...One hundred years later, it is obvious that the forces -political as well as cultural -- of nationalism have been not only grossly overlooked and underestimated by the Marxian tradition, but that national solidarity has, in many cases, proven itself stronger and more enduring than class solidarity...
...By renouncing Marx, we may return to his spiritual intentions...
...Marx's socialism, implied in his philosophical anthropology, is drawn directly from the Western philosophical tradition...
...Elsewhere, Friar Leonardo Boff refuses to consider himself a Marxist, saying Marxism is but one among many methods of analysis...
...Yet the dilemma is even greater: Marx was one of the major European thinkers who tried to mold our perception of historiCommonweal: 526 cal development into a meaningful structure, and its meaningfulness was a necessary prerequisite for its being open to conscious human direction and control...
...1 HESE BRIEF and general observations lead me to four specific conclusions...
...Nowhere in his writings is there a premonition that first in Europe, and then in the non-European world, nationalism would become the wave of the future...
...One hundred years later, the combination of the political structures of the nation-state with the defensive mechanisms of Keynesian economics has presented Marxian socialism with a very different neocapitalist state, one highly interventionist in political structure, controlling large sections of the economy, softening, through legislation and welfare policies, some of the harshness of capitalism for many of the weaker strata of society...
...This, according to Marx, was already evident in capitalist society, and would become intensified under socialism...
...Nationalism would become a thing of the past...
...THOMAS M. GANNON, S.J...
...To be sure, a world economic system has emerged (comprising both capitalist and the selLdesignated socialist states) which fulfills some of Marx's major predictions...
...It is my sense, then, that we have entered a post-Marxist epoch...
...The pathologies of both state socialism and international capitalism have enlarged and fragmented the structure of social conflict...
...In his vision of a unified science of man and nature, Marx was a typical nineteenth-century figure...
...In the meantime, authoritarianism and aggression threaten to prolong our wait...
...In any number of new social movements, the theme of cultural autonomy is as pronounced as the theory of class conflict defined in strictly economic terms...
...2. By postulating man as homofaber, Marx correctly identified labor as both the sphere of human bondage, as well as the realm of his emancipatory potential...
...There are also symptoms of continuing political crisis, linked to a decline in Marxist influence, within the East European bloc, in China, and in some parts of the third world...
...These considerations, along with a long-standing involvement in research related to issues of religion and society, prompted the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University to sponsor a symposium in April 1984 on the question: "Are we entering a postMarxist age...
...These ideas, along with psychoanalysis and other psychologies, give us fresh insight into the notion of historical totality...
...1. Marx's vision was a synthesis, a secularized version of the Judeo-Christian quest for salvation and the eighteenth century Enlightenment belief in historical progress and human amelioration...
...Here, certain Marxist philosophical and sociological insights will remain influential (perhaps widely so) -- the concept of alienation, the importance of the economic sector, the critique of ideologies...
...Today, half the world's population is led or governed in Marx's name...
...Shlomo Avineri, professor of political science at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, is a leading figure in Israeli politics, and the author of The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx and Towards a Critical Sociology...
...Marx's original labors of scientific description were charged with spiritual energy...
...In this, as in other aspects of his though t , Marx turned out to be a true son of the nineteenth century, incorporating both its achievements as well as its limitations...
...This admission is not of incidental importance, but is decisive for human reason even if it has not yet borne its full fruit...
...4. Marx postulated an ever-growing universalization of human relations, and the disappearance of regional and national differences...
...yet the alternative, as pursued by Marx, may break down before the complex variety of historical experience indifferent cultures...
...Second, Marxism will most likely continue to inspire the more down-to-earth revolutions which can still be expected in some third-world countries as a reaction to post-independence or to bourgeois-authoritarian or ethnically partisangovernments...
...In part, this recognition derives from reflection on the new situation confronting mankind because of our possession of nuclear weapons...
...At the same time, however, revolutionary -- even mass reformist -- movements in the West are conspicuously absent...
...Yet, today Marx appears to be better known and more widely studied in universities than at any time since he began his intellectual career in the 1840's...
...But compare it with "police socialism" where parties who call themselves Marxist administer a spiritual vacuum, furtively penetrated by an opposition which is in principle judged to be impossible by the system's apologists...
...In India this has already taken place -- in Kerala and West Bengal -- and it may happen again...
...at the same time pluralism is carefully avoided...
...5 October 1984:529...
...The history of nineteenthand early twentieth-century Europe will surely sustain a reading quite different from the standard Marxist interpretation...
...If we are to discern its outlines, it is important to understand what has occurred...
...There is also a Qual der Materie, though perhaps not in the sense implied by Jakob Boehme, that indicates man's relationship to man cannot be so easily divorced from his relationship to nature...
...The situation has now changed...
...Marx's more particular views on economic determinism or class conflict will, I suspect, become less and less attractive because they are too narrowly linked to the very simple social structures of the first industrial age...
...is Visiting Fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown, director of the Centre de Recherche et d'Action Sociales in Paris, and author of La Pensed de Karl Marx and The Church and Social Justice...
...The proletariat was to be the legitimate successor to the "Philosopher King," as wel) ~ as to HegeI's"world historical individual" that would not only change the world, but also understand the process of change wrought by it...
...Nor should one fail to realize that, on the other hand, a mechanical application to nonEuropean societies of Marx's universal scheme of historical development, basically culled from the European experience, could be fatal and horrifying...
...A more likely course is that effective reinterpretations of Marxist doctrine will take place without the admission that they are reinterpretations...
...Rather, the centralization of capitalist societies generates multiple and often mutually antagonistic nodes of differentiation and resistance...
...A global proletariat may be more combative, but organized international capital has succeeded (often unintentionally) in dividing and exploiting it, just as it has divided Western populations...
...In publishI ing, Marx has become an academic industry...
...Production is politically centralized, coercion economically organized, consciousness and culture instrumentalized...
...All such categories, even though not devoid of interest, lack the precision and definition required for understanding the contemporary situation...
...Our heightened cultural awareness of the problems of ecology is not only a challenge to the conventional wisdom of capitalist-industrial thought and practice, but to Marxist social analysis as well...
...In France, for example, I have witnessed a number of these fluctuations since the Second World War...
...Even the ostensible masters of the apparatus are servants to it...
...Second, not only are there early warning signals that Marxist ideology is increasingly wearing out in Communist countries, but even among Marxist ideologists one finds more frequent reference to the idea of commonly shared human values which exist prior to any ideology...
...6. In the Eastern European countries, Marx -- and especially the early Marx -- has been repeatedly used as a critical tool to measure existing Communist regimes, and to find them wanting: in Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and of course Yugoslavia...
...Interestingly, President Franoois Mitterrand took the time to deliver an address on Teilhard de Chardin at the UNESCO meeting honoring the centenary of Teilhard's birth in 1981...
...Third, such revolutions are no longer likely to occur in the more complex and sophisticated Western societies...
...and his concept of "the Asiatic mode of production" postulates a dual structure of historical development and explication: one for Europe -- dynamic, dialectical, and transformative -- and one for Asia -- static, stagnant, and unchanging...
...New proletariats multiply as more workers perform utterly routine jobs or become superfluous...
...Indeed, Marx Year 1983 was a remarkably muted and uninspiring event, the occasion for rather formal, obligatory, and dull celebrations...
...What has happened in some Latin American countries may be repeated in Africa, as well as in some parts of Asia, for instance, the Philippines, and Thailand...
...As the Secretary of the Hungarian Communist party recently observed in an official report, progress is underway in the areas of economic freedom, social freedom, and cultural freedom (although less so in the area of religious freedom...
...The speakers were three internationally recognized Marxian scholars: Jean-Yves Calvez, S.J., Shlomo Avineri, and Norman Birnbaum...
...In the universities this revival culminated in May 1968, and there followed first a slow, then rapid decline...
...The Marxian vision of a classless society was aimed at separating the two -- intensifying man's mastery over nature through a new organization of production so as to free human beings from bondage to each other...
...But it shows that the critical nature of Marx's theory has not been entirely lost...
...In capitalist society, consciousness is fabricated industrially in ways which are strikingly similar to its Commonweal: 528 I I I I I l I I I I . . . . f ..f m manipulation by state socialism...
...its relentless pursuit of profit across frontiers is the only effective internationalism in sight...
...But does Marx live outside the college classroom and the reflections of thirdworld theologians...
...But recent transformations in the history and philosophy of science have led us to question the Marxist and positivist reliance on a single canonical scientific method...
...And today, while state socialist societies hardly represent utopia (socialist appropriation of the means of production by party and state has entailed new forms of exploitation), the multiple forms of alienation and an intensified consciousness of homelessness in capitalist societies suggest that the deformation of the human spirit may be as acute now as it was at the beginning of the capitalist epoch...
...First, there are clear signs that Marxist concepts have become less acceptable in the intellectual world of Western societies as too poorly defined for the thorough scientific inquiry practiced there and generally inapplicable to the analysis of advanced industrialism...
...Yet how can one mold such a structure within any other intellectual and cultural horizon than the one derived from one's own culture, even if one tries to elevate it -- as Marx surely did -- to a universal level...
...It is a fact that on many occasions, sizable parts of the European working class have shown themselves more amenable to conservative, sometimes reactionary ideas...
...And consider the challenge of psychoanalysis to the Marxist theory of human nature...
...Pluralism, it should be remembered, is the Marxist code-word for a multiple party system as opposed to the dominant one-party system...
...When this distrust is joined to a renewed interest in ending giganticism in social structures and to the ecologists' demand for a less arrogant approach to nature, we come to see Marx as a prisoner of the assumptions of early capitalist industrialization...
...But two decades ago, this task was feltto be well under way...
...And there is also the influence of Marxist analysis on Catholic liberation theology...
...The existing world was scrutinized for the sake of a higher (and better) world to come...
...Marx ignored the relative autonomy of the development of character in a given historical milieu...
...Historically, Marx claimed, man's mastery over nature (i.e., labor) has always been transformed into man's mastery over his fellow men -class rule...
...At a recent meeting of Marxist philosophers and Christian theologians called by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest, I heard just this admission made not only by Marxists, but even by Soviet ideologists...
...Visiting the East German peace movement a few months ago, I was struck by how very different is its consciousness...
...Marx sought the transcendence of capitalism so that humanity could be restored to wholeness...
...at the same time, the appeal of Marxism has diminished in the political sphere...
...Our politics has not kept pace with this transformation...
...Marxist praxis has fared better in less advanced societies, but whether or not it has helped these societies is another question altogether, especially when, in addition to Marxist categories of analysis, they have also adopted the controversial and dangerous remedies which Lenin adapted from Marx...
...By this I mean the grip of official Marxist doctrine as taught in the official party schools or other state-run educational institutions, even if this doctrine is currently met by disbelief or indifference...
...He has become the lazy thinker's escape from hard work and uncertainty...
...One cannot really examine any pattern of social stratification without paying attention to the important and often independent influences of ethno-cultural factors...
...This kind of "creative development" of Marx's thought is, of course, not unfamiliar to Western Marxists...
...his predictions have proved half-right and half-wrong, but wrong where it matters most to Marxists...
...Instead, I believe that "covert" changes will slowly be introduced -- even changes or modifications in the content of the ideology, but that there will be scrupulous attention paid to preserving the name and label of Marxist Communism as such...
...W HILE THE record of state socialism is a factor in today's retreat from Marxism, I suspect it contributes less to the genesis of a post-Marxist epoch than to a revival of preMarxist consciousness -- a resignation to the eternal return of oppression...
...nowhere could one find any outburst of enthusiasm or any discussion o f " new discoveries" which one heard in 1967 at the 100th anniversary of the publication of the first volume of Capital...
...Nor has state socialism processed that differently...
...No matter how inauthentic or instrumentalized, the culture of capitalism perpetuates itself...
...It has been assimilated into the Western intellectual tradition -- a tradition of which Marx was more a part than most of his philistine detractors...
...None of these developments would surprise Marx...
...Yet, as the centenary celebrations closed, there was evident a widespread significant sentiment that Marx is no longer an authority for our time: that we stand on the threshold of a new era which is not one envisioned by Marx, and which has found no student or forecaster of Marx's stature...
...Social, political, and even religious movements claiming direct descent from Marxism were widely distributed...
...In short, one hardly dares to analyze society and history today only in terms of categories like the forces of production, social relations, bases/superstructure, etc...
...One hundred years later, our experience tells us that not only mastery over men, but mastery over nature itself has its problems, and that these have not merely material but also philosophical and anthropological dimensions as well...
...This distinction is especially pertinent to any consideration of upcoming Marxist revolutions today, specifically, in Latin America...
...One day, perhaps, humanity will actualize its communal or higher self in a revolutionary furor...
...Jean-Yves Calvez, S.J...
...Soviet society will not soon be shaken, nor will the grip of Marxism there soon be relaxed...
...Capitalism hardly thrives...
...There are already signs that these kinds of change are occurring in the understanding of morals presented in Marxist school textbooks...
...His own life exemplified the trajectory of the nineteenth century -from post-Christian millennialism to post-religious scientism...
...3. While Marx's message is universal, his historical horizon was basically Western and Eurocentric...
...It may be that something similar is happening to the teachings of Marx...
...Commonweal: 524 The question of whether or not we are entering a postMarxist age is being asked because signs point towards a decline in Marxist influence...
...He adumbrated "the laws of motion of capitalism," and wished to dedicate Capital to Darwin...
...Multiple allegiances and split social roles (e.g., those fostered by the separation of work and residence) preclude the kind of class consciousness Marx expected...
...A generation ago, its predecessors in opposition were linked to humanist Marxists, the anti-Stalinists of Hungary and Poland in 1956...
...Overlooking this nationalist dimension has greatly weakened the socialist movement in its historical confrontation with other ideologies, which were able to preempt the appeal to national consciousness...
...He was enormously impressed by the fact that, despite their dependence on "immature social conditions," the works of Homer and the tragedians "still constitute for us a source of aesthetic enjoyment and in certain respects prevail as the standard and model beyond attainment...
...Marx expected to find a key to this wholeness of art, especially in the epic and tragic poetry of the Greeks...
...Welfare capitalism, dependent upon production for a mass consumer market, has engendered needs which it cannot satisfy...
...This is also true of bureaucratic ~apitalism...
...In all this history, the major factors contributing to growth or decline in Marxist influence are political rather than intellectual, and the Marxism generally referred to is MarxismLeninism...
...More important to the emergence of a post-Marxist consciousness has been the intractability of capitalist culture: Marxists' political predictions break upon the rock of its immutable autonomy...
...To overlook one's own cultural experience leads to a barren abstraction...
...A return to human wholeness, a search for irreducible virtue in human nature, a willingness to be instructed by the past (even our own past as children) will certainly give us a view of transcendence very different from the progressive hopes of the age...
...It is a history of ups and downs...
...Eastern Europe will remain a troubled area, where nationalism will play an ever more important role...
...In the Communist Manifesto, as well asin his numerous articles for the New York Daily Tribune, Marx emphasized the civilizing role of capitalist industrial expansion vis-$-vis the non-European world...
...As a matter of fact, such skepticism is not a new phenomenon in the Soviet Union...
...Ironically, it is even more vulnerable to a Marxist critique than capitalist regimes...
...There are also changes slowly taking place in the sphere of economic organization, particularly in Hungary, where liberalization is occurring without any official renunciation of Marxist allegiance...
...They destroy the linear clarity of Marx's theory of an economic base with a cultural and social superstructure...
...the thinker who thought in epochs came to believe that humanity could leap over its own historical shadow...
...I am not referring here to a modern version of "bread and circuses...
...Filtered through the lenses of Hegelian dialectics, this vision tried to identify a concrete historical subject conscious of its own transformative role in the world-historical process...
...JEAN-YVES CALVEZ My answer: 'No, b u t . . .' II T HE QUESTION before us is: are we entering a post-Marxist age...
...The new society is the old society writ large...
...The lines dividing these categories were never rigid...
...The theoretical and historical problems involved in such a dual scheme are numerous and obvious...
...I will focus on a number of issues which seem to me responsible for both the immense appeal of Marxist ideas and the deep dissatisfaction encountered among many who were initially drawn to Marx and to Marxism...
...The post-Marxist epoch, then, will be marked indelibly by Marx himself...
...Its affinities are with movements like the German Greens...
...Today, even the Latin American countries where Marxism is still influential (and I include Nicaragua) do not experience that mood of total newness which was felt during the initial years of the Soviet revolution...
...7. Looking at the map of the world today, it must come as an ironic shock to realize that none of the Western, industrialized countries, to which Marx directed his attention -- England, Germany, France, the United States -- has experienced a socialist transformation, whereas Marxist ideologies rule supreme in countries like Russia, and China, Vietnam and North Korea, to which they certainly were not initially addressed...
...For Marx, it was precisely the crassness and visibility of this domination and exploitation which would contribute to the collapse of capitalism...
...Alternative movements like the Greens explicitly demand reconsideration or redefinition of the idea of progress...
...More recently, however, it is the Marxist-Leninist brand of Marxism that has become dominant...
...Insisting on the primacy of "the long term," they depict structures like the family, community, and habitat as inextricably linked to class configurations...
...On the other hand, social classes -- regardless of whether or not it is still correct to use this term -- tend to diversify in today's society rather than to polarize into two separate contending groups...
...My answer will be neither a simple yes or no, but rather something like, "no, but . . . . " One reason for my caution is that one must be very careful today about forecasting a definitive decline in the influence of Marxism, even while admitting there are signs pointing in such a direction...
...Such claims revert to a more primitive, more poetic Marxism in which the complex structure erected by Marx himself dissolves like the insubstantial world of Prospero's farewell to art in The Tempest...
...New corporativisms and older identities (rooted in family, religion, ethnicity, !anguage, etc...
...One hundred years later, the major problem is not epistemological, but historical: has this identification of the proletariat with Reason in History been vindicated...
...Most people are fully conscious of the greater complexity of contemporary society...
...alternate...
...its language is unable either to describe how impersonal concentrations of economic power dictate the fate of nations, or to effectively interpret the enormous development of science and technology...
...Christianity turned less than successful among the Jews and became triumphantly successful among the Gentiles, even managing to conquer the Roman Empire...
...At times one even finds explicit admission that several values impose themselves on all human beings prior to any ideology (or religious creed...
...In summary, we are not yet entering a really post-Marxist age because there will remain for a long time a fairly stable Communist regime in a large and powerful coUntry, the Soviet Union, and because a simplified form of Marxism will continue to be an ingredient of new third-world revolutions...
...Put differently, the internal divisions of Western capitalism, as well as the visible incompetence of capitalist elites, are balanced by the incoherence and disunity of the global opposition...
...Norman Birnbaum is University Professor at the Georgetown University Law Center, and has had broad political experience on both sides of the Atlantic...
...As an hypothesis, therefore, one can accept that some degree of post-Marxism is already present in several Communist 5 October 1984:525 countries, but that it will take a long time for that fact to be officially acknowledged...
...First, it is very difficult to imagine that Marxism could once again be an occasion for the kind of authentic messianic outburst that first occurred in Russia with the Soviet revolution and, subsequ~ently, had influence throughout Europe until Stalin's death in 1953...
...Generally speaking, then, whatever post-Marxism one can observe today is really a post-Marxism-Leninism...
...Aesthetic and moral values fuse with, and not infrequently define, class interests...
...As a result, the secular version of transcendence embodied in original Marxism has ceded, especially among the opponents of caPitalism, to miniaturized notions of felicity...
...Our assessment must be both theoretical and historical...
...The tendency to separate Marx from Lenin (and even from Engels) was typical of some West European intellectuals before and after World War II, principally, the Frankfurt School in Germany, and later, nonorthodox Marxian thinkers in France like Maximillien Rubel, Dionisious Mascolo, Kostas Axelos, and even Henri Lefebvre...
...SHLOMO AVINERi Appeal & dissatisfaction | A NYONE trying to answer the question posed to us must respond to Marx's thought both as an attempt to interpret and change the world, as well as to the performance and appeal of regimes which call themselves Marxist in the contemporary world...
...But for the moment, these societies use adversity very differently...
...In the late 1970s, the "new philosophers" solemnly burned the idols they had earlier adored (and a few more things at the same time...
...The crimes and tyrannies of our century have liquidated the belief in progress...
...Such a state can hardly be expected to wither away under the impact of socialist transformations...
...One should not be surprised that in this Marx again showed himself to be a son of his time...
...It would have been impossible then to declare that Marxism could neither ap5 October 1984:527 prehend nor reshape our world...
...The century separating us from Marx's death and the more than sixty-five years since the Soviet revolution reveal a pattern neither of steady growth nor of steady decline in Marxist influence...
...but often these will be tlsed without any allegiance to Marxism proper...
...Thus, on the one hand, while there may be reason for concern about the problem of exploitation in modern Western societies, the issue cannot be related simply to the ownership or lack of ownership of the means of production...
Vol. 111 • October 1984 • No. 17
