From Red to Rainbow: The Transformation of the Left--Some Key Intellectual Sources.

AuthorBaumgarth, William P., Sr.
PositionViewpoint essay

"Do you know who James O'Connor is?" I replied that I recognized Dr. O'Connor as a New Left economist, generally known for his book Fiscal Crisis of the State (1973). It was 1988, and I was at a party on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. When I mentioned that I was a college professor, my interlocutor reasonably enough, though mistakenly, inferred that I must be on the political left. "Wait while I get something I want you to see." She returned with a copy of Capitalism, Nature, Socialism: A Journal of Socialist Ecology, edited by O'Connor. "What do you make of this?" A classical socialist herself, dedicated to the liberation of the working class from the market economy, she was baffled by the focus of the journal, which addressed itself to the formation of a Red-Green alliance against capitalism on the ecology front. What seemed forgotten in the new journal were, we both thought, classically important, if not essential, concerns of Marxism. My interlocutor asked, "Do you think O'Connor has gone crazy?"

She had a point.

Thirty years ago, the Left's attention was substantially on economic issues in the context of equality and justice. Presently, though, it is impossible to ignore a revolutionary shift in the interests of both the academic Left and the activists, summed up as "political correctness." As evident not merely in recent issues of Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, the Left now embraces issues of sexuality, gender, ecology and related areas for proposed revolutionary change. My friend ascribed the incipient change to mental illness. Some systems of thought can so blind their proponents to the claims of reality that it's tempting to view them as psychopathological, particularly when they are energized with moral or religious zeal. Yet I see this sort of dismissal as recognizably ad hominem, too readily available to silence dissenting thought, because I value liberal tolerance, the proper practice of which requires a belief in the rationality of the political opponent.

My own reaction back then to O'Connor's and his colleagues' change of concern was that they were simply opportunists. The opportunity they were looking for was an occasion to gain, exercise, and enjoy power. Nothing in my subsequent reflections, set forward in this essay, decisively refutes this suspicion. I believe the quest for power to be characteristic of many modern political movements. Yet a commitment to equality seems genuine among Left: rank-and-file radicals. What motivates an attachment to equality may be more noble than the sheer quest for power along the lines of the Inner Party in 1984 (Orwell [1949] 1981), but it might also be rooted in envy (Schoeck 1969).

I liken the development of the publicly stated ideals of the newest radicals to Friedrich Hayek's (1899-1992) notion of spontaneous order (1960, chap. 4). Popularized systems of political thought evolve like languages: whatever limited and idiosyncratic goals the first practitioners of language might have had, the evolved language now has a life of its own, so much so that the very notion of a founder of a language seems bizarre. Just so, the intellectual seeds sown by the intellectual predecessors of current radicalism were at first appropriated by various popularizing intellectuals and, finally, in that form transmitted to the activists, so that the founding thinkers are all but forgotten. Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979), for instance: even his most influential text, "Repressive Tolerance" (Marcuse 1965), is no longer in print. My young colleagues may at best recognize his name, but their attitude toward toleration fits Marcuse's stipulations perfectly.

My thesis is that the new radicalism is a peculiar blend or meeting of at least two traditions--as it were, languages or idioms--of political thought. One tradition speaks in the classic vocabulary of the Enlightenment, emphasizing science, universality, the secular, and reasoned discourse. I argue that this is not the dominant tradition in the new radicalism, nor is the primary instance of it, classical Marxism, unadulterated pure Enlightenment rationalism: Marxism predicates that all thinking is rooted in the subrational, the means and mode of production (Marks and Engels 1978,4, "Marx on the History of His Opinions"). When it is a matter of strategy, the new radicals are reliant upon at least one classical Marxist: Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937). The other tradition informing the new radicalism speaks in the accents of the Counter-Enlightenment: affects and feelings as opposed to structured thought, diversity and individuality rather than the universal. Both of these political idioms share a common vocabulary, equality, and a common commitment to the political primacy of equality: for Marx, largely economic equality; for the antirationalist tradition, much more inclusive equality. Uncovering the sources for these traditions will help us to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the newest Left. I first examine the new radicalism in the context of what I judge to be the subordinate tradition, Marxism.

The Marxist Left

Let me begin by adapting and applying to classical Marxism the distinction Imre Lakatos (1970) makes in his concept of "scientific research programmes": hardcore conceptual axioms and auxiliary assumptions. Every philosophical or religious system affirms a few essential commitments, the denial of which entails that the denier is not of that philosophical school or that religion. For example, someone calling himself a Hobbesian would not deny the key role of fear in the constitution of the commonwealth if that person understood Thomas Hobbes at all. Persons calling themselves Christian but denying that Jesus Christ ever existed seem not to understand Christianity. Muslims who deny the lordship of Allah or the role of the Prophet would be strange Muslims indeed.

Thus, Marxism, I think, has some hardcore conceptual commitments that distinguish it from other schools of political thinking and that need to be affirmed by an avowed Marxist. A denial of dialectical or indeed any kind of materialism, for instance, would be incompatible with calling oneself a Marxist. Karl Marx (1818-83) indicates what he believes to be the essence of his thinking: that history is the saga of humanity's technological progress; that each stage of technological production produces social consequences, which he calls the mode of production. Each such mode encompasses antagonistic classes: some owning and others not owning the means of production. Revolution (transition from one mode of production to a newer one) results when a revolutionary, new ruling class, the material force for that liberation, shatters the fetters placed upon production by the current mode and its ruling class. The final such liberation will be universal and herald in the classless society (Marx and Engels 1978, 4-5, "Marx on the History of his Opinions"). The rejection of capitalism results from Marx's antipathy to what he thinks to be the disastrous consequences of the "anarchy of production." David Ramsey Steele (1992) judges accurately, I think, this antipathy to the role of the market to be the essence of Marx's criticism of capitalism. The new mode of production, socialism, necessitates a comprehensively planned society in place of market and money.

Given the volume of Marx's writings and sufficient time and determination by a partisan, it would be possible to find some quote linking him with green issues or gender issues or even, I guess, identity issues. But the overall thrust of Marx's theory is to applaud the progressive diminution of the "realm of necessity," including nature, and the consequent expansion of the "realm of freedom": human conscious control and comprehensive planning of nature and, of course, society (Marx and Engels 1978, 439-41, "On the Realm of Necessity and the Realm of Freedom"). The growth of technology and the accelerating mechanization of the means of production are crucial for Marx in preparing the material basis for the new mode of production: socialism. A prominent thinker in the left-wing Hegelian tradition (which includes Marxism), Alexandre Kojeve (1902-68), puts it succinctly: "Work sets man against nature. No one would seriously want to defend the interests of Nature against those of man, and in the case of a conflict between them, everybody will automatically side with man against Nature" (2000, 178).

As for gender liberation, consider Dialogue with Clara Zetkin by Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924). Clara Zetkin had been working with German female Marxists on issues of sex and marriage. Some German comrades were producing a newspaper aimed at revolutionizing prostitutes, as if they were a special revolutionary class. For Lenin, this project represented a "morbid deviation" from what ought to have been Clara Zetkin's genuine task: equipping German proletarian women with authentic proletarian class consciousness. The outreach to prostitutes was totally wrongheaded in Lenin's eyes. He explained, "I want no part of the kind of Marxism which infers all phenomena and all changes in the ideological superstructure directiy and blindly from its economic basis, for things are not as simple as all that" (Lenin 1975,692). The mode of production may have changed, Lenin commented, but that does not entail that all aspects of the superstructure, such as traditional sexual morality, must mechanically change also. "Self-control and self-discipline are not slavery," he opined, "not in matters of love either" (1975, 694). Among Marxists, Lenin would not be the sole dissident on gender issues and sexual morality. As Paul Gottfried wryly reports regarding the French Communist Party, "Moreover the comments about women and family life heard at party meetings would have befitted a gathering of pre-Vatican Two Catholic prelates" (2005, 2).

Marx never doubted the philosophical centrality of reason, of science, and, politically, the role of...

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