Passage Beyond Marxism

...Then lastly were the representatives of the Hoover Institution itself, the friendly and courteous Milorad Drachkovitch, and Stefan T. Possony...

...At Stanford, a century later, a conference convened to evaluate the work which these "obscure men of 1864" (in Sir Isaiah Berlin's words) began...

...Martin's Hall of September 28, 1864...

...Max Nomad, the ancient anarchist, asked himself lugubriously what an "83year old Galician Jew" was doing in this company, and with a syndicalist's conscience, spoke of the Conference's honoraria as the "wages of sin...

...Such writers as Rostow and Deutscher, he said, are fashioning a view of the Western world for the benefit of Russians...

...His revisionist synthesis of Communism with goulash was a hopeful augur...

...To this extent, there is a latent contradiction in the notion of Marxism as a "secular religion...

...MEETING AT STANFORD Passage Beyond Marxism By Lewis S. Feuer A hundred years ago a handful of French, English and Italian workers met in London to organize what became the International Working Men's Association...

...For all we know, Mao's annoyance as a cultured scholar with the uncouth Khrushchev may have shaped Maoism far more than the "objective" needs of industrialization...

...Wolfe, a friend of Bukharin, could recall Moscow in 1928 when he was American delegate to the Sixth Congress of the Communist International, and Shachtman, literary executor of Leon Trotsky, remembered the impassioned polemics at the Hotel Metropole 40 years ago...

...He did observe, though, that Father Wetter (the other great authority on "diamat") had not been called to Rome to help with the preparation of a paper on Communism probably out of consideration for the Russian Church...

...A whole group of men may share the ideological tenets of Marxism, but the emotional vectors which they bring to bear on their common doctrine diffract it into a variety of psychoideologies...

...They were born to the "end of ideology" immaculately, and required none of the arduous labor of Raymond Aron or Daniel Bell to get there...

...Sidney Hook, whose Toward the Understanding of Karl Marx 30 years ago opened a new era of Marxian thought in America, was there to discuss 30 years of misunderstanding of Marx...

...Are there all sorts of possibilities, real to the actors in history, which are ruled out by the social scientist with his bias for simple, objective laws, to which the actors are subsumed...

...Father Bochenski and his coworkers will, we trust, continue their scholarly studies of Soviet thought...

...Theodore Draper, foreign editor of the New Masses during the '30s, and now the authoritative historian of American Communism, was making intelligible the strange world of Latin American contemporaneity...

...To Carl Landauer fell the task of defending the Social Democratic heritage, which he did in the most eloquent words the Conference heard...

...The ancient world did not know ex-Christians—persons who had gone through the Christian experience and found it wanting...

...Thus Bertram Wolfe, in his luminous talk on Leninism, said "by way of confession" that after a lifetime's study he had come to the conclusion that "we have to study the character of the man who set his imprint upon the doctrine.' What seems to emerge as central for political history is not so much ideology as what we might call "psycho-ideology...

...not the Marxist ideology in Mao's case, for instance, as much as the emotional vector of revenge upon the Western world which gives to Marxist words a new overtone...

...Any intellectual awakening, Wolfe maintained, would have to come from the novelists and artists, not the desiccated ideologists...

...There was a genuine note of optimism in the addresses of the speakers from Continental Europe, Aron and Lowenthal, which was not shared by the "right wing" of the Conference...

...The Dead Sea Scrolls of Marxism are replacing its Scriptures as far as the younger generation is concerned...

...But there was no agreement in the final evaluation of Marxism and the Socialist Internationals...

...the motorcycle detachment prepared to lead the way like a tank squad...

...For Trotsky, far more than Stalin, insisted (just as Mao) on a bolder international policy and a more drastic domestic industrialization...

...In his opinion, the controlling variable in the history of Communism was the "objective situation" at the given time, the "constraining factors...

...The "Administration" became a shadowy, fearsome fathersymbol for the "System" which threatened their liberties...

...What ideology moved the students...

...For if it is secular, it can be refuted by temporal events, and tested by historical reality...

...Raymond Aron remarked that he was gratified that the end of the end of ideology would pose a new opponent before him...

...Intellectually, as Raymond Aron observed in his lecture, there is a sense in which almost all of us have become Marxists...

...As he presented his solid historical evidence, I could not help thinking however of the revival of psychoideology taking place a few miles away at Berkeley...

...He depicted the utter incongruity between the power of Trotsky's criticism and the impotence of the sect which rallied around him...

...On this point there was general agreement at the Conference...

...The origin of the break, he said, was in the conflict between a highly industrialized country and an under-industrialized one...

...The Marx whom their student leaders admired was the young idealist of the Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts, not the dialectical sociologist of Capital...

...Trotsky was incredulous as he watched Stalin plagiarize his programs for collectivization and industrialization, for Trotsky had been insisting that Stalin's regime was laying the basis for a restoration of capitalism...

...The Chinese, he felt, needed an atmosphere of ruthless struggle in order to maintain themselves in power, and industrialize their country, hence, the Maoist ideology...

...The factions had run their course into historical memory, and old enemies were reunited not as comrades, but as human beings...

...Lewis S. Feuer is Professor of Philosophy and Social Science at the University of California...

...They kept their tired vigil of days and nights in a kind of exhilaration, the boys and girls on blankets, with their guitars, singing folk songs, in a profusion of coffee containers, sandwich boxes and textbooks, seeking to overcome totally all alienation—of race, sex, and generation...

...Not the ideological component but the distinct emotional directive, we might say, is what makes these doctrines important...

...One got a poignant sense of the inadequacy of sociological categories as one listened to Max Shachtman tell the history of Trotskyism...

...Indeed, he finds much similarity in standpoint between Pravda and Osservatore Romano...

...Evidently the stage of industrialization does not determine the ideological superstructure...

...He is the first to admit a certain kinship between the thoughtprocesses of scholasticism and those of dialectical materialism...

...The Second International failed because it was not strong enough to prevent war, not because of a corruption in its philosophy...

...Daniel Bell likewise saw an erosion of ideology in the Soviet Union under the accumulated pressure of scientific advances...

...An agreement was negotiated at the last minute by President Clark Kerr...

...Yet Trotsky failed...

...The audience roared with laughter...

...One man in power chooses one way rather than another to remain in power because his character thus determines him...

...This Conference of 1964, organized by the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University, was probably the first and last meeting of the PostCommunist International...

...Perhaps in a curious way the "end of theology" is proportional to the "end of ideology...

...If socialism succeeds, embourgeoisement is inevitable...

...If Lowenthal's "law" were true, we might ask, why hadn't Trotsky won out against Stalin in the first years of Soviet industrialization...

...If ideas were dangerous, still mankind's only hope was the Promethean path of risk...

...Five hundred policemen massed to disperse the students...

...Adam Ulam protested against this new stress on "personality theory," which he remarked would not have been heard at such a conference 25 years ago...

...Bertram Wolfe walked the Stanford campus with Max Shachtman...

...The Internationals had all failed...

...a functioning government in which Martov and Chernov would have joined Lenin was, he felt, simply rendered impossible by objective circumstances...

...There is a common Marxian language, except that where the Soviet idiom still emphasizes class struggle, the Western variant underlines economic development...

...There was one important difference, however...

...The three Internationals had foundered largely on the shoals of nationalism and national differences...

...prosperity is the greatest threat to the revolutionary élan...

...Though all the Internationals had failed, it was beyond dispute that Karl Marx's Inaugural Address in 1864 had articulated an underlying aspiration of our time...

...It fulfilled functional needs in the early stage of industrialization...

...Once again this issue arose as we listened to Richard Lowenthal's acute analysis of the SinoSoviet rift...

...Only five days previously I had seen averted by the narrowest margin what would have been the most tragic incident in the history of American education...

...The academics are judicious, welldocumented, and detached...

...If there were any central themes in the Conference, I would sum them up in two aphorisms: first, Heraclitus' saying, Man's character is his fate, and second, in the words of the novelist Heinrich Mann, Most deeds are committed head downwards, and blindness is their essence...

...As one watched the thousand undergraduate faces puzzling over the fate of the dream of the workers' self-emancipation, one wondered if the post-ideological scholars could fashion a nobler philosophy of the self-emancipation of all humanity...

...it existed among the Proudhonist Belgians and the empiricist British as much as among the German Marxists...

...Five hundred demonstrators on the University Plaza had besieged for two days a police car which housed an arrested man...

...Does this historical determinism, I wondered, issue itself from a psycho-ideological decision rather than from the scientific weight of evidence...

...Khrushchev, though less fascinating than Stalin to intellectuals, said Aron, perhaps because less cruel, was nevertheless a man of good fortune for the Western world...

...Robert Daniels of Vermont, the historian of Trotskyism, told the Conference that unlike other members, he could speak neither as an observer-participant nor with an "international accent...

...Bertram Wolfe, on the other hand, felt that the close study of Soviet philosophy was only a little less boring to read than its subject, because Soviet official philosophy was an ossified set of formulae...

...Was Stalin's character, apart from the "objective requirements" of holding power or developing the economy, a primary source of his basic decisions, even as it was of his later catastrophic decision to sign the pact with Hitler...

...Father Joseph M. Bochenski, the learned Jesuit director of the Osteuropa-Institut at Fribourg, pleaded that dialectical materialism still provided in the Soviet Union a worldview with great spiritual power, and that its study was therefore important...

...The academics, children of the new age of foundation-financed scholarship, are a world removed from the postCommunists, even when their findings and conclusions sound alike...

...I tried to question him about the politics of the Ecumenical Council, but he told me that he was no "Vaticanologist" (this despite his old personal friendship with Pope Paul VI...

...its First International was a hesitant groping toward a Great International...

...Abba Lerner pondered the new meaning of Marxism, and said it reminded him of his old grandmother who whenever she met a kind person said he had a Jewish heart...

...Lowenthal too saw an irreversible dialectic in the polycentric breakup of the Communist International...

...The most distinguished of the academic group, Professor Merle Fainsod, lectured with Harvard urbanity and balance on Khrushchevism, and had the pleasure of being introduced by his former student, Zbigniew Brzezinski...

...Stanford undergraduates in the Memorial Auditorium were in a strange way in intellectual communion with the workingmen in St...

...Yet despite the depths of later perversion, the Association of 1864 had bequeathed a noble dream...

...Trotsky himself thought that Stalin triumphed because a law of psychological exhaustion was making itself felt among the masses...

...Side by side with the post-Marxists at this Conference were the academics, especially the large younger generation of professors for whom Soviet studies are a "field...

...One was told that Possony, now concerned with the grand design, in his view, of Communist military strategy, is serving as an advisor to Barry Goldwater...

...the post-Communists are original, imaginative, and still involved...

...Indeed, how horrendous beyond calculation was the culminating failure of the Third International, which with power in Stalin's hands signed the pact with Hitler that let loose all the bloodshed and degeneration of World War II...

...I could not help feeling uncomfortable with this readily fashioned sociological determinism...

...The Stanford Conference was ample testimony that the big fact in the history of Western Marxism is the passage beyond it...

...Certainly ideology in its classical sense fared poorly at the Conference, which was characterized by the "end of ideology" mentality...

...Six thousand students, sympathizers and spectators, were wedged closely around them...

...The various young professors from Bryn Mawr to the Bay Area had obviously never felt or kindled an "ideological passion...

...Engels once wrote that there was a similarity in spirit between the sections of the International and the early Christian communities...

...It is the emotion which interprets and directs the words, and makes for the unbridgeable separations between Leninists, Kautskyans, Khrushchevists, and Maoists, despite their common language...

...The alienation of the workers in the 19th century had been a fact, he said, long before it was a theory...

...Sidney Hook, too, directed some powerful criticisms against neoideologists, especially those who have sought to make central for Marx the concept of alienation...

...Gerhart Niemeyer, for example, attacked the Social Democracy and its International for having kept the workers alienated from society, for having kept hanging over society the fear of proletarian revolt, and for having pretended, though it lacked any real power, to be a Proletarian Parliament...

...Leonard Schapiro, the distinguished British historian of Communism, wondered whether the Conference was not being misled by a proliferation of "isms"—Khrushchevism, Stalinism, Titoism, Maoism—into imputing too much importance to ephemeral theoretical doctrines when what was important was a group's determination to maintain itself in power...