The New Marxism of the Intellectuals

...This instinct of revolt is enfeebled among civilized peoples, "whether it is that it has been exhausted during their previous development, or whether, finally they were originally less endowed with it than were others...

...According to Bakunin, on the other hand, one should recognize the peasant revolutions in backward countries as the model for the world's future, and say to the "advanced" countries, "De te fabula narratur...

...He grasped far more deeply than the bookworm Marx ever did the nature of the revolutionary "instincts...

...the revolutionary movement accomplishes a tactical parricide...

...The peasants constitute "the main force" of the revolution against the imperialists, he said, continuing: "The contradiction between the revolutionary peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America and the imperialists headed by the United States is the principal contradiction in the contemporary world...

...The virtues of the new revolutionist are also of a different order from the old...

...Their basic principle, "Insurrectional activity is today the number one political activity," is also their principle of self-therapy...

...2. The neo-Marxist believes that the Alienated Intellectuals will be the principal agents in fashioning the new society...

...5. The neo-Marxist tends to regard the colored races of Asia, Africa, and Latin America as the "proletariat" (in a higher sense) engaged in a war of liberation from the "bourgeois" white race of North America and Europe...

...The true proletariat of modern times, Bakunin said, is not the industrial workers of "advanced" countries, but rather "that great mass, those millions of noncivilized, disinherited, wretched and illiterates...

...A century later Lin Piao, Minister of Defense in Mao Tse-tung's Communist China, proclaims the war of the countryside against the cities and summons the peasants of Asia, Africa, and Latin America to lead the world through "people's wars" to Communism...

...The neo-Marxist today, though, is often an intellectual who is consciously regressing to primitivism...

...Bakuninist-Marxism will be a tragic chapter in the history of the intellectual class, the worst of their treasons because it is the most self-destructive...

...Consequently, Regis Debray says that in Latin America "there is a close tie between biology and ideology," and that elderly men cannot fit into the ranks of the mountain guerrillas...

...Guerrilla warfare" is precisely a projective tactic of those haunted by fears concerning their masculinity...

...During his 12 years of imprisonment and Siberian exile, Bakunin could not pursue daily studies and note-taking as Marx did in the reading room of the British Museum...

...Regis Debray is the most recent exponent of neo-primitivist Marxism...

...This is the creed of political primitivism and anti-civilization that permeates the new revolutionary movements...

...The neo-primitivist intellectual drawn to "guerrilla warfare" is moved by an atavistic longing for the freedom of savagery...

...But why are Western intellectuals among those drawn to primitivism, to extolling violence, "creative vandalism...

...The stupid nonsense the Russian students are perpetrating," wrote Marx in 1877, was "merely a symptom, worthless in itself...

...For many years Marx fought an uncompromising battle against his anarchist adversary, Michael Bakunin...

...indeed, what he fears most is the stability and affluence of the capitalist economy, and its capacity for de-revolutionizing the masses with material goods...

...Society, they feel, is not proffering them the places they merit...

...But it is a symptom...

...The quest for manhood and identity through guerrilla warfare is a recurrent theme among them...

...The Alienated Intellectuals, beginning with Blanqui and Bakunin, have tended to be anti-Semitic largely, one suspects, because the persecuted Jews refused to secede from the system but generally cultivated their professional and technical powers and skills until the system recognized them...

...He has become doubtful that some economic law preordains the decay of capitalist civilization...

...8. The neo-Marxist believes that the younger generation, those under 30, or even 25, are uniquely endowed with revolutionary instincts...

...The primitivist impulse not only waxed strong among Bakunin's disciples but was nourished by their study of a forerunner of Che Guevara's and Regis Debray's manuals on the vocation of the guerrilla warrior, the Catechism of the Revolutionist: "The revolutionist is a doomed man...

...9. The neo-Marxist will consequently not wait for the economic decline of capitalism...

...Bakuninist neo-primitivism is the most recent symptom of a collapse of character in many intellectuals...

...In the mountain he recovers his manhood, and he finds the mountain his appropriate symbol...

...We may add: Neo-Bakuninist Marxism is the hallucinogenic of the Alienated Intellectuals...

...Between the two World Wars, for instance, T. E. Lawrence became something of an idol of young English intellectuals as a man of books who had gone among Arab nomads of the desert and proved his manhood in guerrilla warfare: raiding the enemy's communication lines, living life primitively with tent and camel, acknowledging the homosexual community of his comrades-in-arms, and then writing the definitive essay on guerrilla warfare for the Encyclopedia Britannica...

...You are capable of creating cadres who can endure torture and imprisonment in silence," said Che Guevara to Communist Party comrades, "but not of training cadres who can capture a machine-gun nest...

...Curiously, this ideology of anti-civilization had a strong attractive power...

...therefore he advocates the tactic of continuous insurrection and terrorism to disrupt and dislocate the system, to "bring it to a grinding halt...

...all of them officer candidates without an army...

...The revolutionary student intellectual was something new in Marx's lifetime...

...Thus bakunin's neo-primitivist ideology prevails among the new generation of Marxists...

...A hundred years later, however, Bakunin appears to be taking his revenge upon Marx...

...And what are these maternal incubators, these Oedipal ties, that the guerrillero is trying to sever...

...Sixty-five years ago, in 1903, Lenin created the new conception of a Bolshevik party—the party of professional revolutionists engaged in propaganda and agitation, editing newspapers, writing clandestine leaflets, meeting in secret cells to read Marxist classics, waging electoral campaigns for the Duma's seats, teaching the workers that they must one day violently overthrow the bourgeois regime...

...Marx, Bakunin argued, failed to understand the psychology of revolution...

...3. The neo-Marxist, rejecting the impersonal determinism of economic processes and slow cumulative social movements, believes in the personal voluntarism of individual guerrilla action as the force to ignite the system...

...he wishes to recover his manliness, to have his every word transmuted to action...

...Marx ridiculed Bakunin as "one of the most ignorant men in the field of social theory," yet it turns out that his anarchist adversary was far more prescient, far more intuitive in grasping the dynamic of the revolutionary drive...

...He knows only one science, the science of destruction...

...7. The neo-Marxist, because he is an Alienated Intellectual, holds to an ideology of anti-intellectualism...

...Everything in him is absorbed by one exclusive interest, one thought, one passion—the revolution...

...not in the immanent development of the system, but the confrontation of the system by the individual...

...MICHAEL BAKUNIN In 1870 Engels, Marx's collaborator, could muster no enthusiasm for the prospect of an alliance between student nihilists and a backward people...

...Mao's strategy, he explained, was "the establishment of rural revolutionary base areas and the encirclement of cities...

...Three years later, he said that the outcome of the world struggle would be determined by the fact that the backward countries had "the overwhelming majority of the population of the globe...

...Where else could such an encounter, such an alliance, take place...

...Day by day they "destroy the idea of the unassailabil-ity" of the existing order, "that age-old accummulation of fear and humility vis-a-vis the patron, the policeman, the guardia rural . . ." The enemy's strength is shown to be bluster...

...What Lawrence of Arabia was for the English middle-class alienated youth in the 1920s-'30s, Che Guevara of Cuba and Bolivia is for the estranged youth of the mid-'60s...

...Thus the future prime ministers of Kenya and Ghana, both Alienated Intellectuals, struggled for a reidentification with tribal culture...

...instead, Marxism has become the ideology of Alienated Intellectuals...

...All guns, all bullets, and all resources to the Sierra...

...Debray endorses Fidel Castro's exhortation of 1957: "The most fitting slogan of the day ought to be...

...He saw the peasantry as a retarding force, sunk in the "idiocy of rural life...

...Thus, too, Mao Tse-tung and his disciples cherish the days of the Long March and the memory of their Communist enclave in Yenan...

...6. The neo-Marxist is anti-urban, and sees the countryside in the present epoch waging an implacable war against the degenerate, exploiting cities...

...The object is but one—the quickest possible destruction of that ignoble system...

...the new vanguard builds itself without the benefit of a party apparatus...

...Lenin, we now see, was the intermediary who imparted this neo-barbarian ingredient to Marxism...

...What drives them is the "instinctive passion of the masses for equality...

...A frequent contributor to these pages, his new book, The Conflict of Generations, is to be published by Basic Books in February, 1969, tellectuals exempt from the workings of economic causation, are now hailed as the activators of an otherwise immobile historical dialectic...

...he wishes not so much to raise the cultural level of the masses as to lower himself to theirs...

...Kwame Nkrumah made mandatory a tribal blood ritual in The Circle, a revolutionary African student group he helped to found...

...The civilization of the cities—egoistic, competitive, industrial, intellectual—is an emasculating force, says the Alienated Intellectual...

...If Marx's spectre stood over the world during the years of the Depression, it is clear that Bakunin's spectre animates the revolutionary movements today...

...Like C. Wright Mills, he regards such a "labor metaphysic"' as a "legacy from Victorian Marxism that is now quite unrealistic...

...Maintaining a mechanical law of stages of social evolution, Marx looked to the workers of the "most advanced countries," where "modern capitalist production has reached its highest degree of development," to initiate and guide the revolution...

...Ten and 15 years ago, when African nations were achieving their independence, there also emerged a strange mixture of tribalism and Marxism...

...Houses, running water, a roof, electricity, stores...

...Here, in short, is an exemplar of the Alienated Intellectual, with all the credentials for formulating the precepts of the new ideological stage, Bakuninist-Marxism...

...They are the restless chieftains of the new intellectual tribes, the new sects and movements, who see themselves as the philosopher-kings of the new society...

...To be sure, Bakunin lacked Marx's erudition and dialectical skill...

...He must de-civilize, de-cultivate himself...

...American and European workers are regarded by the neo-Marxists as having succumbed to capitalist affluence...

...There were Roman intellectuals who welcomed the triumph of the Huns and Vandals when their Empire was invaded, claiming that it brought a higher primitivism to replace their guilt-ridden civilization...

...Seventy per cent of the world's population, said Lenin in 1920, lived in backward Asian countries, and the Soviet form of society could be directly adapted to these precapitalist systems...

...Gone is the concern for political coalitions and alliances...

...Having fallen under the spell of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, Debray expounds, in his Revolution in the Revolution?, the new primacy of the student turned guerrilla fighter: "The irony of history has willed, by virtue of the social situation of many Latin American countries, the assignment of precisely this vanguard role to students and revolutionary intellectuals, who have had to unleash, or rather initiate, the highest forms of class struggle...

...He utterly rejected terrorist violence or attempts by bands of intellectuals to seize power...

...Today Fidel Castro, Regis Debray, and admirers of the late Che Guevara assert that the guerrilla action of armed intellectuals is necessary for opening their road to power...

...But there is a deeper malady, too, whose operations can only be obscurely sensed...

...Chaim Weizmannn, who insisted on doing his seven hours a day of chemistry and refused to be an ideologist, was much more representative of the Jews than the handful of professional revolutionists...

...The so-called "inferior races," who have either rejected or remained unaffected by bourgeois civilization, will be the makers of the revolution Bakunin declared...

...They fused primitivism with Marxism largely because the peoples they were undertaking REGIS DEBRAY to lead politically lived at a primitive social and material level...

...Taking the entire globe, if North America and Western Europe can be called the cities of the world, then Asia, Africa and Latin America constitute the rural areas of the world...

...The guerrilla fighters meanwhile, according to Debray, remold the passive psychology of the peasantry...

...This instinct is a fact which is completely primordial and animal...

...The new elite strives for power, longing to replace the succession of businessmen, lawyers, engineers, and soldiers who have hitherto provided the governing elites...

...The guerrilla movement, says Debray, has ended "the divorce of several decades' duration between Marxist theory and revolutionary practice...

...In a sense, the contemporary world revolution also presents a picture of the encirclement of cities by the rural areas...

...Father Marx and Old Man Lenin are superseded by Fidel and Che...

...What Marx could never have possibly discerned was that the intellectuals would remake Marxism into a frankly neo-barbarian ideology—that is, anti-intellectual, anti-urban, anti-working class, anti-Western...

...guerrilla activity enables them to overcome the anxieties of bourgeois infantilism, their special illness...

...Maturation and growth in the advanced countries were not trustworthy roads to Communism...

...Raymond Aron once said Marxism was the opiate of the intellectuals...

...4. The neo-Marxist regards the peasantry of backward countries as offering far more revolutionary potential than the proletariat of advanced societies...

...His neo-primitivism is a rebellion against what he believes his intellect has done to emasculate him...

...he synthesized Trotskyism with tribalism...

...A century ago, Marx hailed the workers' trade unions and political parties as instruments for educating the workers to a cultural and poltical level that would bring them to rule...

...The Alienated Intellectuals also have men of unusual abilities...

...In this respect, he reverts to the position of Louis Auguste Blanqui, the indefatigable organizer in Paris for 40 years of secret clubs of declasses, recruited mostly from Left Bank students and nonstu-dents, who planned for the seizure of power by their elite and the proclamation of a dictatorship in the name of the proletariat...

...He is what we might call a neo-primitivist...

...this "rabble," "very nearly unpolluted by all bourgeois civilization" will inaugurate the social revolution...

...At the same time the neo-Marxist, as a generational rebel, aims to undermine the leadership of the older generation in Marxism...

...He was troubled by it but never fully understood it: Student unrest seemed to him epiphenomenal to some deeper movement, and could therefore be disregarded...

...The cult of violence is a reversion to the primitive rites of passage from adolescence...

...rather, it is a conscious protest against the values of Western civilization, an assertion, often by Westerners themselves, of a neo-barbarian standpoint...

...We have yet to cope honestly and directly with this problem...

...We can list them, bearing in mind that they are found in varying proportions in different movements and sub-movements: 1. The neo-Marxist intellectual rejects the notion that the labor movement is a progressive force in contemporary history...

...All sections of Russian society are in full decomposition economically, morally, and intellectually...

...What has been taking place in much of our society is not the "secession of the proletariat" that Toynbee feared, but the "secession of the intellectuals...

...And, the students, those youthful inLewis S. Feuer is currently a Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto...

...To Marx intellectuals sometimes seemed self-destructive in their idealism...

...It is perhaps characteristic of neo-primitivism that myth has become a privileged ideological category for so many intellectuals...

...But Bakunin, having escaped and returned to his revolutionist's calling, mixed naturally with workingmen's and students' circles...

...Part of the malaise springs from the multiplication of a vast corps of literary and esthetic intellectuals lacking high competence or talents, often semi-educated, who nonetheless consider themselves (in Shelley's phrase) as most properly qualified to be the legislators of mankind...

...The Alienated Intellectual, with his surplus free-floating energies, lives in a world of myth and fantasy, far from the science that Marx extolled...

...He combines the concept of generational struggle with that of class struggle, and above all, with elitism and primitivist in-stinctivism, adopting in underlying tone the view of the Russian student revolutionist P. N. Tkachev, who declared that all people over 25 years of age should forthwith be executed...

...For every Trotsky there were a hundred doctors, dentists, druggists, teachers, engineers...

...Jomo Kenyatta, a Marxist alienated from the primitive customs of his own people, tried desperately to find a cultural mooring among them...

...His neo-primitivism does not arise from tribal conditions of life...

...They seemed to him a menacing amalgam threatening to disintegrate Western progess: "How awful for the world . . . that there are 40,000 revolutionary students in Russia...

...If Karl Marx were alive today, he would be astounded by the latest stage of Marxism...

...When he wrote (with Friedrich Engels) the Communist Manifesto in 1848, and when he published Das Kapital in 1867, he thought he was providing the workers' movement with a science...

...As they share their burdens, lightening each others' knapsacks, the guerrillas, according to Debray, feel themselves shedding class egoism and living communism in a historic leap from the bourgeois constraints...

...It was during the late 1860s that Bakunin, challenging Marx's hegemony in the International Workingmen's Association, wrote a series of pamphlets which history has demonstrated to have been the most prophetic criticisms of Marxism...

...He drove the Russian and his followers from the International, and believed he had put their ideas to rout...

...Che Guevara could not attune himself to the Socialist bureaucratic society of Cuba, and had to seek out the Bolivian mountains in a death-quest...

...A hundred years later his doctrine is largely ignored by industrial workers...

...The potent social mixture of modern times, between the neo-primitivist intellectual and the culturally primitive peasant, was fashioned in Bakunin's social alchemy: "I believe exclusively in the peasant community and in the dedicated community of irreconcilable youths...

...The social revolution of our time, said Bakunin, is primarily an uprising of the "uncivilized," the so-called "inferior races...

...the guerrilla's ambush and terrorism prove "that a soldier and a policeman are no more bullet-proof than anyone else...

...If there is anything which might ruin the Western European movement, then it would be this import of 40,000 more or less educated, ambitious, hungry Russian nihilists...

...If classical thinkers such as Marx and Freud wanted to supplant the unconscious with the conscious, the id with ego, the neo-primitivist wants to replace reason with the id, consciousness with the rule of unconscious drives...

...The guerrilla fighter supplants the party militant...

...Lin Piao gave frank expression to this Bakuninist idea in 1965...

...he revives in this sense the classical Populist doctrine of an antagonism between the soil-dwellers and decadent urban civilization...

...In the virgin forest, he can undertake "to erase the marks left on his body by the incubator—his weakness...

...The intellectual too often suffers from a Hamlet-complex...

...Now there is a neo-Bakuninist-Marx-ist conception of the party: "The guerrilla force is the party in embryo...

...During his own politically active days, Marx looked to the initiative of the International Workingmen's Association as the historical agent of the world's socialism...

...He demands a new generational style, a new tactic, that will stamp the obsolescence of the old...

...Nothing like getting out to realize to what extent these lukewarm incubators make one infantile and bourgeois...

...The child of wealthy parents, a graduate of the Ecole Normale, 27 years old, a creature of ideas with no stabilizing ballast of experience, he perceives social realities through a transcendental political a priori, and since he never had to earn his own living he has never had real obstacles on which to expend his plentiful aggressive energies...

...The guerrillero's experience brings a new sense of comradeship to replace bourgeois psychology: "The first law of guerrilla life is that no one survives it alone . . . Petty bourgeois psychology melts like snow under the summer sun, undermining the ideology of the same stratum...

...at other times they seemed eager to gain positions of power, and to use the workers' movement to achieve their ambitions...

...Lawrence could never adjust himself to ordinary, prosaic society and had to live by a cult of death...

...The stage of industrial evolution is not the primary determinant, insisted Bakunin, but rather "the intensity of the instinct of revolt...

...What are the tenets of this new Bakuninist-Marxism...

...He held up England as a model of the world's future evolution, saying, "De te fabula narratur...

...a "rejuvenation" (in Debray's word) of the party takes place...

...In language, gait, dress, morals, and manners, he tries to identify himself with the behavior of the masses as he sees them, and to rid himself of the trappings of bourgeois culture...

...While Bakunin's anarchism, of course, plays little part, his definitions of the roles of intellectuals, peasants, violence, and the revolutionary instinct have carried the day...

...the resentment of the backward was the reliable mainspring of the world's revolution...

...One thing, however, is clear: The neo-primitivist who like Bakunin uses political action to project his private maladies on a social scale, finally becomes the progenitor of a society in which his maladies are magnified and transmitted a thousandfold...

...Bakunin, broken by Marx's vilifications, did in fact retire to die...

...Day and night he must have one thought, one aim—inexorable destruction...

...To its ideologists it has the attractions of a psychological restorative—a quick access to "reality," self-assertion, and community...

...A phalanx 40,000 strong, these youths, whether they know it or not, belong to the revolution...

...To stalk the system, to strike at it suddenly from ambush, to feel the exhilaration of maiming and decapitating authority, all this excites the unmanned Alienated Intellectual...

...he often feels that his intellect has disabled him, unmanned him, feminized him, deprived him of the capacities for will and action...

...The revolutionaries today, the intellectuals and student activists, are Marxist in form but Bakuninist in content...

...Revolutionary students were ready to revolt against their fathers' civilization...

...The neo-primitivist intellectual, glorifying violence, wishes scientific reason to abdicate in favor of the revolutionary instincts...