Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for Professor Eugene Genovese, the named subject of the polemic in this post.
Markin comment on this series:
One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.
There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
*******
Markin comment on this article:
With the rise of the Occupy Wall Street movement and its off-shoots this fall (2011) it seems that every academic leftist professor of the past forty years, or those with pretensions to leftism, has come out of the woodwork, or rather the treacherous, if comfortable, groves of academia to give the "kids" advise about how it was back in the day (the 1960s or 1970s, as the case may be). This article kind of puts such "experts" in perspective, especially those who have been laying low, very low, in the weeds all these years. Hell, Professor Genovese and the others mentioned in this article seem like Bolsheviks (even if they would cringe at such a designation) compared to some hoary voices that I have heard spouting forth of late.
***********
From Young Spartacus,September 1978- Voices From The Ivory Tower: Genovese's Anti-Marxist Persepctives
'The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it"
-K. Marx
'An anonymous wit reflecting on the revolutionary upheavals of our age, has parodied that Marxists have hitherto merely changed the world, whereas the point is to interpret it. Fair enough, so far as it goes."
—E. Genovese
*********
"We seek to revitalize Marxist thought"—with this modest ambition a group of university professors in the United States announced to the world the appearance of their new journal, Marxist Perspectives. In an editorial statement penned by Eugene D. Genovese (the editor and the chairman of the Department of History at the University of Rochester), the very first issue (Spring 1978) proclaims that the editors have taken upon their thin shoulders a rather herculean task: no less than the resolution of what they call the "crisis" of Marxism.
No ordinary journal this, its goal is nothing less than to salvage the left from the "deformities in ideology" which, we are told, "no honest Marxist, whatever his political tendency, can any longer defend." Far be it, needless to say, from these fine gentlemen to soil their hands with the living struggles of the working class and the political battles to forge a genuinely revolutionary party; the authors inform us that, "the painful history of those revolutions and parties needs no review here." What follows is an unabashed display of academics reveling in their university sinecures.
The editors of Marxist Perspectives cast an admiring glance at William Appleman Williams, the University of Wisconsin historian, who served as their mentor when they were his graduate students in the 1960's. Since that time, however, many of the journal's contributors were drawn into active political movements around the issues of civil rights and the Vietnam war. For these academic Marxists the demise of the New Left was the signal for a complete retreat into the universities. Having made no substantive political decisions other than furthering their own careers, they of course place the blame upon the left: "Marxism, like all philosophies and world views, is in crisis."
These academics and cast-off from the New Left are no doubt witnessing a crisis—but it is their own, not that of communists. It is not we who are thrown into a tizzy by the sight of Stalinists engaged in a criminal nationalist border war between "Socialist Vietnam" and "Democratic Kampuchea"; not we that equate the rise of petty-bourgeois nationalist regimes in Angola and Mozambique or the jackboot of Stalinist repression in Eastern Europe with the Bolshevik-led Russian proletariat's conquest of Soviet power in 1917; nor we that find the social-democratization of Western European Communist Parties under the catchphrase "Euro-communism" intriguing.
A recent article by an associate of Marxist Perspectives, the renowned British historian E.J. Hobsbawm, expresses precisely this confusion. Titled, appropriately enough, "Should the Poor Organize?" Hobsbawm's dark picture of despair captures well the sentiments currently being bantered about academia's armchairs:
"Once upon a time, say from the middle of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, the movements of the left whether they called themselves socialist, communist, or syndicalist— like everybody else who believed in progress, knew just where they wanted to go and just what, with the help of history, strategy, and effort, they ought or needed to do to get there. Now they no longer do
"Neither capitalism nor its designated graved diggers are any longer what they were in 1914 or even in 1939. The historical forces and mechanisms on which socialists relied to produce an increasingly militant proletariat and increasingly vulnerable ruling class are not working as they were supposed to. The great armies of labor are no longer marching forward, as they once seemed to, growing, increasingly united, and carrying the future with them."
New York Review of Books,
23 March 1978
So, buoyed by such cynicism, Marxist theory is to be revitalized!
Not only are there no "perspectives" to be found here, but the editors reject outright the revolutionary core of Marxism. Genovese's brazen editorial statement asserts, "We are not a partisan political journal. Those who thrive on political polemics will have to publish elsewhere." Lest there be any misunderstanding, Genovese continues, "We shall not entertain ill-mannered polemics; factional attacks; holier-than-thou treatises; or accusations of revisionism, dogmatism, adventurism, tailism, Stalinism, Trotskyism, Bernsteinism, rotten liberalism, or any of those other wonderful devices for avoiding reasoned response to honest arguments."
The irony of this statement is that in this journal entitled Marxist Perspectives Marx himself would not fit the criteria for publication. Would Genovese undertake to edit out the polemical "excesses" of Capital, the Communist Manifesto, the Critique of the Goths Program or Engels' Anti-Duhring! What Marxist Perspectives cannot fathom is that revolutionaries engage in polemics because the substance of the political debate matters. Marx, Lenin and Trotsky spent much of their time writing polemics in the process of trying to forge political organizations capable of changing the world. For those that cannot stomach "ill-mannered polemics," the prospect of making the world "rise on new foundations" must simply be beyond the realm of thought.
In 1915, Lenin wrote that, "Strong ideas are those that shock and scandalize, evoke indignation, anger, and animosity in some and enthusiasm in others." Judged in this light, Marxist Perspectives offers only a series of weak ideas. With the exception of Genovese's editorial and an amusing piece by Gore Vidal on the American Bicentennial, this new journal contains virtually unreadable tracts ranging from Hobsbawm's article on religion and the rise of socialism to an insipid review of Yves Saint Laurent's latest fashions!
The pity is that many of these same scholars have published very valuable and thought-provoking material elsewhere, including: Hobsbawm's Primitive Rebels and (under the pseudonym Francis Newton) The Jazz Scene, Christopher Lasch's insightful New York Review of Books essay "Narcissist America"; and Genovese's perceptive works on slavery, as well as his fine polemics (ill-mannered or not) against the fairy tale history books of Communist Party hack Herbert Aptheker and divers black nationalists. While these works are not to be slighted, collectively these people add up to far less than their individual academic contributions.
This is hardly surprising. Implicit in Marxist Perspectives' magnanimous
recognition of "many Marxisms" is abhorrence for the inescapable programmatic conclusions of Marxism leading to the battle for the dictatorship of the proletariat (the term itself is anathema to most academics). Marxism provides the worldview to interpret and change the existing society: it cannot exist independently of communist politics and communist organization. Lenin neatly summarized this position in the second edition of State and Revolution (December 1918):
"It is often said and written that the main point in Marx's theory is the class struggle. But this is wrong. And this wrong notion very often results in an opportunist distortion of Marxism and its falsification in a spirit acceptable to the bourgeoisie. For the theory of the class struggle was created not by Marx, but by the bourgeoisie before Marx, and generally speaking, it is acceptable to the bourgeoisie. Those who recognize only the class struggle are not yet Marxists; they are to be found still within the bounds of bourgeois thinking and bourgeois politics. To confine Marxism to the theory of the class struggle means curtailing Marxism, distorting it, reducing it to something acceptable to the bourgeoisie. Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is what constitutes the most profound distinction between the Marxist and the ordinary petty (as well as big) bourgeoisie. This is the touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism should be tested!"
Nor was this new to Lenin. Marx made exactly the same point in a well-known 1852 letter to Joseph Weydemeyer: "And now as to myself, no credit is due to me for discovering the existence of classes in modern society or the struggle between them. Long before me bourgeois historians had described the historical development of this class struggle and bourgeois economists, the economic anatomy of the classes. What 1 did was to prove: (1) that the existence of class is only bound up with particular, historical phases in the development of production, (2) that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat, (3) that this dictatorship itself only constitutes the transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society."
To recognize their honesty, the editors grudgingly accept, at least halfheartedly, the gulf that separates them from Marxism. One of the more boldfaced statements in Genovese's introduction to Marxist Perspectives is a comment on Marx's famous dictum in his Theses on Feuerbach dealing with the need to change the world. Genovese in turn tells us, "An anonymous wit reflecting on the revolutionary upheavals of our age, has parodied that Marxists have hitherto merely changed the world, whereas the point is to interpret it. Fair enough, so far as it goes."
Marxist Perspectives is only a prestigious publication aimed at capitalizing on the increased "respectability" of this brand of "Marxism" in bourgeois academia. The journal graciously offers bourgeois opponents a regular column, "From the Other Shore," and even the New York Times has praised both the journal's "intellectual seriousness" and its "sound understanding of the market economy" (i.e., its commercial profitability).
But the rejection of revolutionary Marxism has its own logic—even for these self-styled "interpreters." Not only have the two issues to date prominently featured articles on behalf of Euro-communism, but a Marxist Perspectives-sponsored New York symposium on "The Communist Experience in America" in May of this year proved to be little more than a platform for right-wing social democrats of the Michael Harrington ilk. For these scholars who reject revolution and the Leninist party but who wish to apply aspects of Marxism or to be known as Marxists, the best thing would be simply to stay out of politics. Much better if Genovese, Lasch and Hobsbawm would stick to their own scholarly researches rather than dabble in the cynical anti-Marxism of the Marxist Perspectives editorial statement. Academic Marxism, insofar as it organizes itself as a tendency, can only become part of the periphery of social democracy—the defender of a comfortable status quo.
The fact that much of our critique of Marxist Perspectives can be drawn from
quotes of Marx and Lenin is far from accidental. The attempt of academic
leftists to decry revolutionary struggles in the name of "revitalization" is hardly a new phenomenon. Trotsky best summed this up in a 1923 speech at Sverdlov University on the "Tasks of Communist Education" (reprinted in Problems of Everyday Life). More than half a century later it retains its full applicability to today's academics
Marxists:
"Academicism in the sense of the belief in the self-contained importance of theory is doubly absurd for us a revolutionaries. Theory serves collective humanity; it serves the cause of revolution.
"It is true that in certain periods of our social development, there were attempts to separate Marxism from revolutionary action. This was during the time of the so-called legal Marxism in the 1890's. Russian Marxists were divided into two camps: Legal Marxists from the journalistic salons of Moscow and Petersburg; and the underground fraternity—imprisoned, in penal exile, emigrated, illegal.
"The legalists were as a general rule more educated than our group of young Marxists in those days. It is true that there was among us a group of broadly educated revolutionary Marxists, but they were only a handful. We, the youth, if we are honest with ourselves, were in the overwhelming majority pretty ignorant. We were shocked sometimes by some of Darwin's ideas. Not all of us, however, even had occasion to get so far as to read Darwin. Nevertheless, I can say with certainty that when one of these underground, young, 19- or 20-year-old Marxists happened to meet and collide head-on with a legal Marxist, the feeling invariably sprang up among the young people that, all the same, we were more intelligent. This was not simply puerile arrogance. No, The key to this feeling is that it is impossible to genuinely master Marxism if you do not have the will for revolutionary action. Only if Marxist theory is combined with that will and directed toward overcoming the existing conditions can it be a tool to drill and bore. And if this active revolutionary will is absent, then the Marxism is pseudo-Marxism, a wooden knife which neither stabs nor cuts. And this is what it was under the direction of our legal Marxists. They were gradually transformed into liberals.
"The willingness for revolutionary action is a precondition for mastering the Marxist dialectic. The one cannot live without the other. Marxism cannot be academicism without ceasing to be Marxism, i.e. the theoretical tool of revolutionary action."
Markin comment on this series:
One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.
There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
*******
Markin comment on this article:
With the rise of the Occupy Wall Street movement and its off-shoots this fall (2011) it seems that every academic leftist professor of the past forty years, or those with pretensions to leftism, has come out of the woodwork, or rather the treacherous, if comfortable, groves of academia to give the "kids" advise about how it was back in the day (the 1960s or 1970s, as the case may be). This article kind of puts such "experts" in perspective, especially those who have been laying low, very low, in the weeds all these years. Hell, Professor Genovese and the others mentioned in this article seem like Bolsheviks (even if they would cringe at such a designation) compared to some hoary voices that I have heard spouting forth of late.
***********
From Young Spartacus,September 1978- Voices From The Ivory Tower: Genovese's Anti-Marxist Persepctives
'The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it"
-K. Marx
'An anonymous wit reflecting on the revolutionary upheavals of our age, has parodied that Marxists have hitherto merely changed the world, whereas the point is to interpret it. Fair enough, so far as it goes."
—E. Genovese
*********
"We seek to revitalize Marxist thought"—with this modest ambition a group of university professors in the United States announced to the world the appearance of their new journal, Marxist Perspectives. In an editorial statement penned by Eugene D. Genovese (the editor and the chairman of the Department of History at the University of Rochester), the very first issue (Spring 1978) proclaims that the editors have taken upon their thin shoulders a rather herculean task: no less than the resolution of what they call the "crisis" of Marxism.
No ordinary journal this, its goal is nothing less than to salvage the left from the "deformities in ideology" which, we are told, "no honest Marxist, whatever his political tendency, can any longer defend." Far be it, needless to say, from these fine gentlemen to soil their hands with the living struggles of the working class and the political battles to forge a genuinely revolutionary party; the authors inform us that, "the painful history of those revolutions and parties needs no review here." What follows is an unabashed display of academics reveling in their university sinecures.
The editors of Marxist Perspectives cast an admiring glance at William Appleman Williams, the University of Wisconsin historian, who served as their mentor when they were his graduate students in the 1960's. Since that time, however, many of the journal's contributors were drawn into active political movements around the issues of civil rights and the Vietnam war. For these academic Marxists the demise of the New Left was the signal for a complete retreat into the universities. Having made no substantive political decisions other than furthering their own careers, they of course place the blame upon the left: "Marxism, like all philosophies and world views, is in crisis."
These academics and cast-off from the New Left are no doubt witnessing a crisis—but it is their own, not that of communists. It is not we who are thrown into a tizzy by the sight of Stalinists engaged in a criminal nationalist border war between "Socialist Vietnam" and "Democratic Kampuchea"; not we that equate the rise of petty-bourgeois nationalist regimes in Angola and Mozambique or the jackboot of Stalinist repression in Eastern Europe with the Bolshevik-led Russian proletariat's conquest of Soviet power in 1917; nor we that find the social-democratization of Western European Communist Parties under the catchphrase "Euro-communism" intriguing.
A recent article by an associate of Marxist Perspectives, the renowned British historian E.J. Hobsbawm, expresses precisely this confusion. Titled, appropriately enough, "Should the Poor Organize?" Hobsbawm's dark picture of despair captures well the sentiments currently being bantered about academia's armchairs:
"Once upon a time, say from the middle of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, the movements of the left whether they called themselves socialist, communist, or syndicalist— like everybody else who believed in progress, knew just where they wanted to go and just what, with the help of history, strategy, and effort, they ought or needed to do to get there. Now they no longer do
"Neither capitalism nor its designated graved diggers are any longer what they were in 1914 or even in 1939. The historical forces and mechanisms on which socialists relied to produce an increasingly militant proletariat and increasingly vulnerable ruling class are not working as they were supposed to. The great armies of labor are no longer marching forward, as they once seemed to, growing, increasingly united, and carrying the future with them."
New York Review of Books,
23 March 1978
So, buoyed by such cynicism, Marxist theory is to be revitalized!
Not only are there no "perspectives" to be found here, but the editors reject outright the revolutionary core of Marxism. Genovese's brazen editorial statement asserts, "We are not a partisan political journal. Those who thrive on political polemics will have to publish elsewhere." Lest there be any misunderstanding, Genovese continues, "We shall not entertain ill-mannered polemics; factional attacks; holier-than-thou treatises; or accusations of revisionism, dogmatism, adventurism, tailism, Stalinism, Trotskyism, Bernsteinism, rotten liberalism, or any of those other wonderful devices for avoiding reasoned response to honest arguments."
The irony of this statement is that in this journal entitled Marxist Perspectives Marx himself would not fit the criteria for publication. Would Genovese undertake to edit out the polemical "excesses" of Capital, the Communist Manifesto, the Critique of the Goths Program or Engels' Anti-Duhring! What Marxist Perspectives cannot fathom is that revolutionaries engage in polemics because the substance of the political debate matters. Marx, Lenin and Trotsky spent much of their time writing polemics in the process of trying to forge political organizations capable of changing the world. For those that cannot stomach "ill-mannered polemics," the prospect of making the world "rise on new foundations" must simply be beyond the realm of thought.
In 1915, Lenin wrote that, "Strong ideas are those that shock and scandalize, evoke indignation, anger, and animosity in some and enthusiasm in others." Judged in this light, Marxist Perspectives offers only a series of weak ideas. With the exception of Genovese's editorial and an amusing piece by Gore Vidal on the American Bicentennial, this new journal contains virtually unreadable tracts ranging from Hobsbawm's article on religion and the rise of socialism to an insipid review of Yves Saint Laurent's latest fashions!
The pity is that many of these same scholars have published very valuable and thought-provoking material elsewhere, including: Hobsbawm's Primitive Rebels and (under the pseudonym Francis Newton) The Jazz Scene, Christopher Lasch's insightful New York Review of Books essay "Narcissist America"; and Genovese's perceptive works on slavery, as well as his fine polemics (ill-mannered or not) against the fairy tale history books of Communist Party hack Herbert Aptheker and divers black nationalists. While these works are not to be slighted, collectively these people add up to far less than their individual academic contributions.
This is hardly surprising. Implicit in Marxist Perspectives' magnanimous
recognition of "many Marxisms" is abhorrence for the inescapable programmatic conclusions of Marxism leading to the battle for the dictatorship of the proletariat (the term itself is anathema to most academics). Marxism provides the worldview to interpret and change the existing society: it cannot exist independently of communist politics and communist organization. Lenin neatly summarized this position in the second edition of State and Revolution (December 1918):
"It is often said and written that the main point in Marx's theory is the class struggle. But this is wrong. And this wrong notion very often results in an opportunist distortion of Marxism and its falsification in a spirit acceptable to the bourgeoisie. For the theory of the class struggle was created not by Marx, but by the bourgeoisie before Marx, and generally speaking, it is acceptable to the bourgeoisie. Those who recognize only the class struggle are not yet Marxists; they are to be found still within the bounds of bourgeois thinking and bourgeois politics. To confine Marxism to the theory of the class struggle means curtailing Marxism, distorting it, reducing it to something acceptable to the bourgeoisie. Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is what constitutes the most profound distinction between the Marxist and the ordinary petty (as well as big) bourgeoisie. This is the touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism should be tested!"
Nor was this new to Lenin. Marx made exactly the same point in a well-known 1852 letter to Joseph Weydemeyer: "And now as to myself, no credit is due to me for discovering the existence of classes in modern society or the struggle between them. Long before me bourgeois historians had described the historical development of this class struggle and bourgeois economists, the economic anatomy of the classes. What 1 did was to prove: (1) that the existence of class is only bound up with particular, historical phases in the development of production, (2) that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat, (3) that this dictatorship itself only constitutes the transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society."
To recognize their honesty, the editors grudgingly accept, at least halfheartedly, the gulf that separates them from Marxism. One of the more boldfaced statements in Genovese's introduction to Marxist Perspectives is a comment on Marx's famous dictum in his Theses on Feuerbach dealing with the need to change the world. Genovese in turn tells us, "An anonymous wit reflecting on the revolutionary upheavals of our age, has parodied that Marxists have hitherto merely changed the world, whereas the point is to interpret it. Fair enough, so far as it goes."
Marxist Perspectives is only a prestigious publication aimed at capitalizing on the increased "respectability" of this brand of "Marxism" in bourgeois academia. The journal graciously offers bourgeois opponents a regular column, "From the Other Shore," and even the New York Times has praised both the journal's "intellectual seriousness" and its "sound understanding of the market economy" (i.e., its commercial profitability).
But the rejection of revolutionary Marxism has its own logic—even for these self-styled "interpreters." Not only have the two issues to date prominently featured articles on behalf of Euro-communism, but a Marxist Perspectives-sponsored New York symposium on "The Communist Experience in America" in May of this year proved to be little more than a platform for right-wing social democrats of the Michael Harrington ilk. For these scholars who reject revolution and the Leninist party but who wish to apply aspects of Marxism or to be known as Marxists, the best thing would be simply to stay out of politics. Much better if Genovese, Lasch and Hobsbawm would stick to their own scholarly researches rather than dabble in the cynical anti-Marxism of the Marxist Perspectives editorial statement. Academic Marxism, insofar as it organizes itself as a tendency, can only become part of the periphery of social democracy—the defender of a comfortable status quo.
The fact that much of our critique of Marxist Perspectives can be drawn from
quotes of Marx and Lenin is far from accidental. The attempt of academic
leftists to decry revolutionary struggles in the name of "revitalization" is hardly a new phenomenon. Trotsky best summed this up in a 1923 speech at Sverdlov University on the "Tasks of Communist Education" (reprinted in Problems of Everyday Life). More than half a century later it retains its full applicability to today's academics
Marxists:
"Academicism in the sense of the belief in the self-contained importance of theory is doubly absurd for us a revolutionaries. Theory serves collective humanity; it serves the cause of revolution.
"It is true that in certain periods of our social development, there were attempts to separate Marxism from revolutionary action. This was during the time of the so-called legal Marxism in the 1890's. Russian Marxists were divided into two camps: Legal Marxists from the journalistic salons of Moscow and Petersburg; and the underground fraternity—imprisoned, in penal exile, emigrated, illegal.
"The legalists were as a general rule more educated than our group of young Marxists in those days. It is true that there was among us a group of broadly educated revolutionary Marxists, but they were only a handful. We, the youth, if we are honest with ourselves, were in the overwhelming majority pretty ignorant. We were shocked sometimes by some of Darwin's ideas. Not all of us, however, even had occasion to get so far as to read Darwin. Nevertheless, I can say with certainty that when one of these underground, young, 19- or 20-year-old Marxists happened to meet and collide head-on with a legal Marxist, the feeling invariably sprang up among the young people that, all the same, we were more intelligent. This was not simply puerile arrogance. No, The key to this feeling is that it is impossible to genuinely master Marxism if you do not have the will for revolutionary action. Only if Marxist theory is combined with that will and directed toward overcoming the existing conditions can it be a tool to drill and bore. And if this active revolutionary will is absent, then the Marxism is pseudo-Marxism, a wooden knife which neither stabs nor cuts. And this is what it was under the direction of our legal Marxists. They were gradually transformed into liberals.
"The willingness for revolutionary action is a precondition for mastering the Marxist dialectic. The one cannot live without the other. Marxism cannot be academicism without ceasing to be Marxism, i.e. the theoretical tool of revolutionary action."
