American Academia and the Survival of Marxist Ideas

American Academia and the Survival of Marxist Ideas

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American Academia and the Survival of Marxist Ideas Dario Fernandez-Morera

PMGER

Westport, Connecticut London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-PublicationData FernPndez-Morera, Dario. American academia and the suwival of Marxist ideas / Darfo Fernhdez-Morera. cm. p. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-275-95264-9 (alk. paper) 1. Education, Higher-United States-Philosophy. 2. Communism and education-United States. 3. Socialism and education-United States. I.Title. LA226.F47 1996 378’.0973”dc20 96534 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright 0 1996 by Dario FernPndez-Morera

A l l rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 96-534 ISBN: 0-275-95264-9 First published in 1996 Praeger Publishers, 88 Post Road West, Westport, C T 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. Printed in the United States of America

The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (239.48-1984). l 0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Copyright Acknowledgments The author and publisher gratefully acknowledge the following sources for their permission to quote excerpts from Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, copyright 1949 by Harcourt Brace & Company and renewed 1977 by Sonia Brownell Orwell, reprinted by permission of the publisher; Leon Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1968); Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto (New York: International Publishers, 1968); Giovanni Gentile, Genesis and Structure of Society (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1960); ThomasA. Spragens, Jr., “The Limitations of Libertarianism, Part 11,” The Responsive Community 2, no. 2 (Spring 1992). Every reasonable effort has been made to trace the owners of copyright materials in this book, but in some instances this has proven impossible. The author and publisher will be glad to receive information leading to more complete acknowledgments in subsequent printings of the book and in the meantime extend their apologies for any omissions.

To my fellow professors, without whom this book would not have been possible.

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Contents Introduction

1

1. The Marxist Approach in Academia I

9

2. The Marxist Approach in Academia I1

37

3. The Pursuit of Power

55

4.

67

The Marxist Approach to Ethics I

5. The Marxist Approach to Ethics I1

89

6. The Marxist Defenses I: From “Denial” to “Apocalyptic Visions and Elastic Displacement of the Objects of Oppression and the Sources of Liberation”

101

7. The Marxist Defenses 11: From “Misery As an Ideal” to the “Desperation Defense”

119

8.

Problems of the Marxist Approach: Practice

135

9.

Problems of the Marxist Approach:

151

Theory

Conclusion: The Strange World of the Academic Intellectuals

169

Suggested Further Readings

191

Index

193

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Introduction It is not a matter of reducing the poem IT.S. Eliot’s Waste Land] to the state of contemporary capitalism; but neitheris it a matter of introducing so many judicious complications that anything as crude as capitalism may to all intent and purposes be forgotten. “British professor Terry Eagleton. Marxism and Literary Criticism For many academicians in the humanities and the social sciences during the Age of Late Marxism,’ Karl Marx’s ideas remain preferred explanations of how the world works. This preference deserves a critical analysis, because it seems to run against both theoretical and f a c t d evidence. As a theory of economics, history, and society, Marxist (“materialist”) discoursehas been problematized by earlier critics like Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk, later thinkers like Karl Popper, Raymond Aron, Ludwig von Mises, F. A. Hayek, and Thomas Sowell, and even by economists from the socialist countries like the Pole Stefan Kurowski and the Russian Yuri Maltsev. As a practice of pedagogy and government, the discourse has been at least equally problematized by the results of numerous Marxist social experiments carried out throughout the world since 1917 by learned and intelligent people. In France, for example, the retreat of the intellectuals from Marxism as a philosophical option and the related decline of Professor Louis Althusser’s version of materialist discourse began with Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s landmark appearances on French television in the 1970s.’ These appearances dramatically exposed the Marxist experiment long defended or excused by influential professors like Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In some socialist countries, the retreat has been no less significant. In Prague, visitors have reported both cabbages and Marxist books on sale by the pound in

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shops near Charles University: “A pound of cabbage costs more than a pound of mar^."^ Famous professors have found themselves without students in universities where materialist discourse is no longer required, where students discuss issues eons “away from Marxism,” andwhere “scientific knowledge, patriotismand humanism” are allegedly replacing materialist approaches.* In the former East Germany, some academicians claim to have been “defrauded for 40 year^."^ Many intellectuals now read subversive writers like John Locke, Thomas Paine, the American Founding Fathers, Karl Popper, Ludwig von Mises, F. A.Hayek, Murray Rothbard, Rose Wilder Lane, Isabel Paterson, James Buchanan, Gary Becker, Albert J. Nock, David Friedman,Robert Nozick, Hans-HermannHoppe, Ayn Rand,andTiborMachan.6 In many instances the Communist Partyhas prudently changed its name and now advocates a market economy more or less modified by the adjective “social.”’ These countries now look to the “Capitalist West” for both business investments and economic aid-once dubbed tools of Capitalist “imperialism” and “exploitation.” These changes culminate a long process of historical development from which highly regarded socialist economists like Kurowski concluded that it was necessary to throw out such fundamentals of Marx’s texts as “the labor theory of value, the ideal of directly socialized labor, and the principle of the primacy of politics over economics.”’ Cynicism regardingMarx’s teachings had longexisted even among the Marxist Nomenklatura. Some members of the intelligentsia were the exception who still hoped, in a better and (always) future socialism, to salvage the (always) potentially benefic ideas of the founding father. But by the late 1980s, Marx and his discourse had largely become the subject of scatological folkloric humor. Thus in both theory and practice materialist discourse may have become what William James called a “dead option.”’ But while in the former socialist countries, schools weaken the grip of historical, cultural, and other materialisms with alternative discourses often animated by the values of a formerly despised “bourgeois humanism,” and while in the former socialist universities academicians widen their horizons or face professional obsolescence,inthegreatuniversitiesofthe United Statespractitionersofmaterialist discourse continue to be held in professional esteem and chosen for positions of authority in academic departments, university presses, journals, societies, and moneydispensing government agencies and private foundations. Some remain among the most highly paid members of the profession.’O Their courses attract large enrollments; and graduate students eagerly assimilate and apply their leading conceptsand terminology, moving on to become themselves successful practitioners of materialist discourse. Leading university presses compete for their scholarship in the areas of literary criticism, history, philosophy, sociology, politics,and even law and economics. Perhaps more significant, professors with hardly any Marxist affiliation or interest often apply many of these ideas to their scholarly research and their everyday teaching. Statistical data lend support to these common-sense generalizations: The increasing Marxist presence in the professional articles published by a single but very

Introduction

3

important languages and literatures journal from 1930 to 1990-Publications ofthe been quantified.” These data have been unknowingly confirmed by a materialist academicianwho, in 1993, praised the “thoroughly Marxist” frame of reference of the enormously influential Modern Language Association.” Professorial meetings further support these assessments: In 1992 an academic conference openly sympathetic to the principles of Marxismdrew 1,500 registrants, mostly academicians,and an overflow had to be turned away.I3 Prestigious universities continue to subsidize avowedly Marxist journals whose editorial boards refer to themselves as “editorial collectives”-once a de rigueur label in the former socialist countries.’* “The Marxian prescription,” a professor observes accurately, “or at least its economic ingredient, may be in disrepute, but Marx continues to control the social agenda from his grave in Highgate.”15 Even without taking into account theusually unidentified traces of theirthought in much of postmodern academic writing, a recent issue of the Arts &HumanitiesIndex lists Marx and Lenin as the two most frequently cited sources in arts and humanities journals over a seven-year period: This means that in their professional work, arts and humanities academicians routinely refer to Mam andLenin more often than to Aristotle, Plato, Shakespeare, or even to God Himself (the Bible ranked only sixth on the list).IG One reason for this curioussurvival is that fundamentalmaterialist epistemological and ethical assumptions remain central to a koine which is now de rigueur among substantial numbers of university professors, and which provides the frame of reference for apparently dissimilar academicdiscourses-from the “sociologyof knowledge” to “macropsychology,” and from Marxoid deconstruction to “critical” legal studies to “new” historicism to “material studies” to “multiculturalism” and “women’s studies.” Sometimes these assumptions are openly displayed. More often, they are merely operational.

Modern Language Association (PMLA)-has

T o be sure, numerous Marxist premises and axioms now widespread in academic postmodernism did notoriginate with Marx.” Bits and pieces and even whole areas of the materialist approach are common to various currents ofWestern thought; and they have been nourished by a collectivism known and cherished in the West long before Ph.D. Marx and his academic followers.” The founder of materialist discourse has reminded us that, since as far back as 1829, Americans had their own “social democratic ~chool’’;’~ though probably he had not read Nathaniel Hawthorne’sunflattering examination of the various American collectivist experiments in The Blithedale Romanceand in shortstories like“The Shaker Bridal” and “The Canterbury Pilgrims.” Later, materialist premises and axioms resound in the collectivist teachings of early twentieth-century American Progressivists and Environmentalists-frombrilliant minds like JohnDeweyand Clarence Darrow to curious cases like Margaret Mead.” Premises and axioms redolent of those of materialist discourse have also been exposed in the Sociology of Knowledge and in Behaviorism by J.G. Merquior and Antony Flew.” In the late twentieth-century, they have found anespecially propitious environment in the anti-

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American “adversarial culture” studied by Paul Hollander, David Horowitz, Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell, Lionel Trilling, and Lewis S. Feuer and illustrated by Sartre’s mauvaisefoi statement to the communistnewspaper Libhation: “The contempt and horror that you [Americans] inspire we refuse to turn into hatred.”’* Many of these premises and axioms now inform the anti-individualistic (“communitarian”) arguments presently being resuscitated by yet another wave of collectivist American intellectuals. as in the case of a famous Sometimes the connection has been one of reciprocity, Harvard educatorlike Dewey. Former Soviet academicians Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr M. Nekrich remind us that the Russian communists drew heavily upon Dewey’s progressive idea^.'^ Conversely, Dewey found in the marvelous Soviet “social experiment” the fulfillment of his educational hopes: After visiting what was then the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics, Professor Dewey lamented that he lacked “the necessary literary skill” to convey to American readers the “achievements” of communist schools and communist policies.’* John Taylor Gatto, 1991 New York State Teacher of the Year, confirms that many of Dewey’s ideas had long been in harmony with the communists’collectivist assumptions and goals: In 1896 John Dewey said that independent,self-reliant people would be a counterproductive anachronism in the collective society of the future. In modern society, said Dewey, people to which they belonged-not by their would be defined by their associations-the groups own individual accomplishments....Dewey said that the great mistake of traditional pedagogy had been to make reading and writing constitute the bulk of early schoolwork. He advocated that the phonics method of teaching reading be abandoned and replaced by the whole-word method, not because the latter was more efficient (he admitted it was less efficient), but because reading hard books produces independent thinkers, thinkers whocannot be socialized very easily. By socialized Dewey meant conditioned to a program of social objectives administered by the best social thinkers in government.That was a giant step on the road to state socialism, and it was a vision radically disconnected from America’s past, its historic hopes and dreams.z5 Not accidentally, Dewey’s affinity for the communists’ educational approach was accompanied by a distaste for the innovative pedagogical ideas of Maria Montessori, which the enormous influence of his teachings has effectively kept out (except for the adoption of non-threatening technical innovations like child-sized furniture or wood block implements) of the educational mainstream of the United States. It was hard, Dewey wrote in 1928 (with Trotskyalready expelled from the Party by Stalin), not to feel envious ofthe conditionsof socialist intellectuals: While those in other countries spent their lives criticizing society, here in the land of socialism intellectuals “have a task that is total and constructive. They are organic members of an organic going movement.”26 Dewey’s observation was accurate. With the more reactionary among them either exiled, killed, cowed, or inhabiting reeducation camps spread across the vast expanses ofSiberia, the majority of Russianintellectuals, professorial or otherwise, were by this time not only cooperating with the communitarian effort that Dewey found so appealing in the restructuring of society and the

Introduction

5

creation of better peopleand a better world through meaningful social change-but in fact were enthusiastically justifying and spreading the politically correct axioms behind said restructuring and said social change. In his reports about socialist Russia, Dewey failed to mention theinefficiency, the mediocrity, the misery, the deaths from hunger,mass jailing, and mass killings, and the pervasive bureaucratization created by the colossal Marxist “experiment”; just as he failed to consider at least the possibility that those ideas that he shared with the Marxist reformers might be somehow connected with such results. Instead, with his admiration for the “experiment,” Professor Dewey became one of the first in a long line of intelligent and learned Western educators whose ability to dissociate ideas from their consequences has been nothing short of remarkable, and whose related function as apologists for communism has been historicized by Lewis S. Feuer, Paul Hollander, and Franeois Furet.” The service that these Western intellectuals have rendered to Marxism has been as effective as that rendered during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s by German and Italian academicians to National Socialist and Fascist discourses. Nonetheless, as Dewey acknowledged, many of the progressive ideas that he so enthusiastically espoused were brought to fruition most effectively and influentially through materialist discourse by means of their systematic application by some of the best minds in the socialist countries since 1917. During the twentieth century, epistemological and ethical collectivism, utopian or otherwise, together with European and American progressivism, have been most effectively articulated and most thoroughly applied through the teachings of Marx. They have therefore been theoretically defined by materialist discourse. More forcefully, unambiguously, coherently, and systematically than anyothertwentieth-centurydiscourse,materialist discourse hasembodied progressive collectivist thought. With the possible exception of the National Socialist and Fascist versions of collectivism during the 1930s and 1940s (versions whose affinitieswith Marxism many critics have pointed out),since 1917 the very idea of collectivism has been virtually monopolized by materialist discourse. Therefore one of my objectives has been to expose the links between the discourse and its historical effects-links that the protective rationalizing maneuver of the academic practitioner of materialist discoursehas attempted to camouflage.’’

To expose these links, I have emphasized crucial points at which even seemingly opposing positions reveal common conceptual dilemmas and contradictions. But readers should be aware that one Marxistclaim makes thisprojecttheoretically impossible: Materialist discourse is so heterogeneous and complex as to be beyond critical scrutiny-unlike the bourgeoisie, Capitalism, “society,” “the classes,” “the West,” and “the patriarchy,” which are so monolithic and simple as to be routinely bandied about. With this insistence on its unique status, the discourse marks itself as a distinct species, sometimes boldly professing, sometimes thinly disguising, its contempt for the Others. This aristocratic awareness of itsworth appears as hegemonic to some observers. But liberal bourgeois humanists usually follow to the letter their

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own maxims of toleration and pluralism, thus protecting a mode of thought that remains their implacable enemy. It is true that the more sagacious practitioners of materialist discourse see the dangers of assimilation lurking behind the openness sometimes naively, but more often maliciously, taunted by their enemies. Therefore, in righteous self-defense, they denounce andreject bourgeois tolerationand pluralism as false and hypocritical-a trap, a surreptitious hegemonic technique used by the more nefarious elements of the oppressing groups to neutralize their unwary opposition.

NOTES

1. As a worker in the field of cultural practices, I date the beginning of the Age of Early Marxism around 1848 with the publication of The Communist Manifesto. I borrow the title of worker “in the field of cultural practices” from famous materialist professor Terry Eagleton of Oxford University in his Literary Theory (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983), 214. The Age of Early Marxism ends in 1917 with the beginnings of the Advanced Marxist Age, during which societies deliberately built after Marx’s ideas proliferated around the globe. The age of Advanced Marxism ends in the 1980s. The annum mirubilis is 1989, when the inviability of these societies, though rather obvious before, now became inescapably clear. 2. The retreat was practically complete by1980. See Vincent Descombes,Modern French Philosophy, trans. L. Scott-Fox and J. M. Harding (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1980), 1415, 118-35, 172. The Frenchintellectuals’retreatfromMarxismandthedeclineinthe influence of Professor Althusser have been more recently chronicled by Tony Judt, Past Impefect (Berkeley: U of CaliforniaP, 1993). Althusser’s strangulation of his wife and his being declared mentally incompetent to stand trial took place long after he had become intellectually irrelevant. 3. AP, Chicago Tribune, 29 July 1990. of the 4. Cf. the case of formerly eminent Czech professor Zdenek Safar, deputy director Marxist-Leninist Institute in the philosophy college of Prague Universityas reported by R. C. Longworth, “Communist again alters his stripes,” Chicago Tribune, 6 December 1989. Professor Safar is now reading Milton Friedman, whose ideas he finds very “interesting.” 5. Ray Mosely, “East Germany catches glimpse of West German goods,” Chicago Tribune, 2 July 1990. 6. Cf. Llewellyn Rockwell, ed., The Free Market Reader (Burlingame, Calif.:The Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1988), 231-57. 7. The name change usually centers around one variation or other of “Democratic Socialism,” or the party of “Economic Democracy”-an improved label adopted earlier, with much foresight, by some American socialists, such as former Students for a Democratic Society member and now California lawmaker Tom Hayden, whose progressive platform he calls “Campaign for Economic Democracy”(CED). Derek Shearer, former Fellow of the socialist think tank Institute for Policy Studies, astutely suggested that American socialists adopt the term “economic democracy” rather than the discredited “S” word-socialism. See Rae1 Jean Isaac and Erich Isaac,The Coercive Utopians (Chicago: Regnery Gateway,1985), 167; S. Steve Powell, Covert Cadre: Inside the Institutefor Policy Studies (Ottawa, 111.: Green Hill, 1987), 191.

8. Alexander Tsypko, “Revitalization of Socialism or Restoration of Capitalism,”The Cat0 journal2, no. 2 (Fall 1991): 286.

Introduction

7

9. William James,Pragmatism and Four Essays on the Meaning of Truth (New York: New AmericanLibrary, 1974), 20.According to ArthurSeldon and BrianCrozier, it hasalso become part of what Max, a more picturesque writer than James, once called the “dustbin of history.” See their Socialism: The Grand Delusion (London: Universe Books, 1986). “In the end,” economist Jeffrey Sachs has observed,“the fundamental reason for the collapse. .. was the loss of conviction, which came from the failure of the model. [Socialist society] was actually based on an idea, and by 1985 the idea was clearly seen to have failed.” Cited in Glenn Kaye, “A Conversation with ...The Revolutionary Jeffrey Sachs,”HarvardMagazine, November-December 1992, 50. 10. Such as Duke University’s famous Fredric Jameson. This lionized professor, perhaps the most often-cited literary critic today, still admires Mao and his Cultural Revolution. See Paul Hollander, Anti-Americanism: Critiques at Home and Abroad, 1365-1990 (New York: OxfordUP,1992),467.ForJameson’senormousinfluence,see John M. Ellis,“Fredric Jameson’s Marxist Criticism,” Academic Questions 7, no. 2 (Spring 1994): 30-43. 11. Will Morrisey, “Ideology and Literary Studies: PMLA 1930-1990,” Academic Questions 6, no. l (Winter 1992-93): 54-66. 12. Professor Mike Brown, cited in Andrt Ryerson, “Wither Marxism,”Academic Questions 6, no. 2 (Spring 1993): 74. 13. “Marxism in the New World Order,” reported by Andrt Ryerson, “Wither Marxism,” 71. 14. The word “board’ is too businesslike for these invariably subsidized publications. Compare, among others, Socialist Review, “edited by Collectives in San Francisco Bay Area and bounday2, which Boston” and distributed by Duke University Press. This press also publishes boasts also an “editorial collective.” This word, “collective,” attached to scholarlypublications, was de rigzteur in the former socialist countries and isnowwidespreadinmanyWestern scholarly works: see for instance The Sexual Subject: Screen Reader in Sexualig, [by the] Screen or thejournal EditorialCollective.EditedbyMandyMerck(London:Routledge,1992), Gender and Histoy, published by the University of Essex and the University of South Florida, and edited “With the support of an international Editorial Collective” (BasilBlackwell Catalog, 1992). 15. Richard Cornuelle, “The Power and Poverty of LibertarianThought,” Critical Review 6, no. 1 (Winter 1992): 4. 16. Ron Grossman, “Strong words,” Chicago Tribune, 4 January 1993. The Index is published by the Institute for Scientific Information. The present book contributes to the phenomenon and thereby shows that the frequency of the citations does not always mean that their academic authors necessarily subscribe to the views of Marxand Lenin. Nonetheless, a perusal of the articles mentioned in the index confirms that the academic citations of these two geniuses are by and large sympathetic. 17. A recent survey ofa neglected area of Marx’s debtto previous thinkers is Ralph Raico, “Classical Liberal Roots of the Marxist Theory of Classes,” in Yuri Maltsev, ed.,Requiemfor Marx (Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig von Mises Institute, Auburn University, 1993), 189-220. 18. Auguste Come is one of the great sources of materialist discourse. See Raymond Aron, Main Currents in Sociological Thought, vol. 1 (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1968), 93, 99, 102, 121. 19. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideolou, Parts I and 111, ed. R. Pascal (New York: International Publishers, 1939), 123. Marx got his information mostly from the work of Thomas Hamilton, the son of a professor. See Lewis S. Feuer, Marx and the Intellectuals: A Set of Post-Ideological Essays (New York: Anchor, 1969), 202.

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20. For Mead as an “academic fraud” see Antony Flew, Thinking About Social Thinking: The Philosophy o f the Social Sciences (London:BasilBlackwell, 1985), 7-8, 153, 156; D. Freeman, “‘0Rose thou art sick!’,” American Anthropologist 86 (June 1984): 400405; H. Caton, “Margaret Mead and Samoa,” Quadrant (Sidney), March 1984: 28-31; A. Wendt, PaciJc IslandF Monthly (April “Three FacesofSamoa:Mead’s,Freeman’sandWendt’s,” 1983):10-13,69. 21. J.G. Merquior, “For the Sake of the Whole,” Critical Review (Summer 1990): 30125. Flew, Thinking About Social Thinking 25,36-37, 3 9 4 2 , 106, and passim.Thisis a formidable book. 22. Raymond Aron, MPmoires (Paris: Julliard, 1983), 309 (my translation). 23. Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr M. Nekrich, Utopia in Power: The History of the Soviet Unionfiom 1917 to the Present (New York: Summit Books, 1982), 171. 24. Feuer, M a m and the Intellectuals, 103-4. 25. John TaylorGatto, “Our PrussianSchoolSystem,” Cat0 Policy Report 15,no.2 (March/April 1993): 14. Dewey’s well-known differences with Marxists like Trotsky amounted to a quarrel about means and ways of reasoning. Ethically and politically their determinedly egalitarian and collectivist goals were the same. 26. Feuer, M a m and the Intellectuals, 103-4. 27. Ibid.; Paul Hollander, Political Pilpims (New York: Oxford UP, 1981); idem, AntiAmericanism: Critiques at Home and Abroad, 1965-1990; FranGois Furet, Le passt! d t n e illusion. Essdi sur l’idke communiste au x 2 si2cle (Paris: editions Robert Laffont, S.A., 1995).What Hollander points out regarding pilgrimages of American intellectuals to Nicaragua can be applied to such trips in practically every country where Marxists have ruled since the communists took power in Russia in 1917. 28. In pursuing this and other objectives, my use of “Marxism” and “materialist discourse” as syntactical subjects is only a shorthand substitute for what many a professor thinks, talks, and writes: I disagree with the freewheeling hypostatizing evident in the use of notions like “class,” “society,” “the bourgeoisie,” “the patriarchy,” and “capitalism.”

Chapter One

The Marxist Approach in Academia I

Anything could be true. The so-called laws of nature were nonsense. The law of gravity was nonsense. “If I wished,” O’Brien had said, ‘‘I could float off this floor likea soap bubble.” Winston worked itout. “If he thinks he floats off the floor, and if I simultaneously think I see him do it, then the thing happens.” Suddenly,like a lump of submerged wreckage breaking the surface of water, the thought burst into his mind: “It does not really happen. We imagine it. It is hallucination.” He pushed the thought under instantly. The fallacy was obvious. It presupposed that somewhere or other, outside oneself, there was a “real” world where “real” things happened. But how could there be such a world? What knowledge have we of anything, save our own minds?. ...Whatever happens in all minds, truly happens. He had no difficulty in disposing of the fallacy, and he was in no danger of succumbing to it. “George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four An elite-determined relativism is to be found everywhere, not onlyin philosophy, but also in legal theory. Thus an eminent constitutional lawyer, Sanford Levinson, in his Constitutional Faith, reaches, under the influence of the philosopher Richard Rorty, the “rather gloomy” conclusion of Sartre that “the establishment of fascism would establish fascism a s the truth of man.” -William Warren Bartley 111, Unfathomed mowledge, Unmeasured Wealth

THE MALLEABILITY OF TRUTH Bourgeois critics surprised at the largely academic existence of what they consider an obsolete intellectual paradigm overlook that materialist discourse has built-in

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provisions allowing any sophisticated academicianto dissolve all “non-antagonistic’’ (“non-irreconcilable,” or notreally real) contradictions between theory and empirical data. Among these provisionsis the axiom establishing that “historical” (social, cultural, etc.) factors “construct” (fashion, configure, shape,etc.) epistemological activity. Since materialist discourse also postulates that “politics”-in the Marxist sense of collective struggles forhegemony-shapes history, it follows that the collective in power constructs epistemological activity politicallyand therefore “ideologically”in the Marxist sense of a surreptitious shaping of one’s mind. Truth cannot be objective because it is always fashionedby collective (class, sex, race, etc.), and therefore, political rules. What is true or not canchange because it depends on the collective and its “concrete” (“practical”) circumstances. In short, truth depends on “practice.” Or, as V. I. Lenin taught: “One of the basic principles of dialectics is that there is no such thing as abstract truth, truth is always concrete.”’ This opposition between what is “abstract” (or “absolute,” or “objective”) and what is “concrete” (or “practical,” or“historica1,” or “political,”or determined by “action”), in which the second dominates the first, characterizes the materialist approach to knowledge and truth. At an American university, a materialist professor of economics approvingly explains this foundational teaching: “Western philosophers conceive of truth as objective and unalterable. Marxists, though, assume there is no such thing as objectivity, inasmuch as even the greatest minds are prisoners to the society they live in ...truth has one meaning in a bourgeois society, quite another in a socialist state.”’ In Russian philosopher Alexandr Zinoviev’s satirical novel The Radiant Future, a poem by university students in the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics mockingly describes this academically sanctioned approach, in which truth axiomatically depends on practice at a given historical junctures3 This remarkable flexibility of truth can explain, too, what some observers have regarded as the mostcolossal institutionalized lying the world has ever seen-in such placesas Marxist-Leninist Russia, China,Germany, Romania,Poland,Bulgaria, Czechoslovalua, Hungary, Vietnam, Cuba, and so forth.* Hostilecommentators have even suggested an Orwellian connection between this vast lying and the enormous dimensions of crime in these countries-beginning with Lenin’s ghastly legacy as the founder of really existing socialism: “For every crime is at its root alie, a betrayal of t r ~ t h . ”But ~ the theoretical justification for this lying remains imperfectlyunderstood by those unfamiliar with the subtleties of materialist discourse. Bourgeoiscritics fail to see that truth inevitablychanges with changesinthe historical (social, cultural, political, etc.) context. Truth is fluid because it depends on concrete practice (social rules, culture, group hegemony, etc.).Truth is “contextual.” As a consequence of this contextuality (concreteness, practicality, historicity), and therefore of truth’s dependence on the rules of the collective (the community, the society, the culture, etc.), what may be socially (always socially) constructed as the truth ina particular situation may not be socially constructed as the truth in the next. What unsophisticated or malicious bourgeois observers have traditionally considered ‘‘lying’’ is therefore not lying,but merely a differentsocially fashioned truth.‘

Academia Marxist Approach The in

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This viewpoint is axiomatic for practitioners of materialist discourse, who wittily signal their position by setting the word “truth” in quotations. The viewpoint has also had some interesting effects, illustrated by George Orwell in Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, on the way truth has been conceived in the socialist countries and is still conceived by many professors in the West. In American academia, this vision of truth has been promoted with remarkable effectiveness by a circleof eminent professors from the city of Frankfurt (hence their nickname “Frankfurters”),’ who call their work “Critical Theory.”’ These professors’ booksareregularlytranslated and published by prestigiousAmericanuniversity presses and favorably reviewed by American academicians. An admiring American educator, author of several books written along the same lines and also published by prestigious university presses, explains one of these German professors’ teachings on the nature of truth: “Horkheimer develops a very strong theory of ‘truth’ [notice the characteristic quotation marks] that frees it from any nostalgia forunearthing or preserving deep ‘meanings.’ Horkheimer repositions ‘truth’ as a factual weapon in political struggles.”’ The unarguable usefulness of such a relativization oftruth (euphemistically called by the American professor a “repositioning”) in the political struggles was proved during public prosecutor Nikolai V. Krylenko’s memorable redefinitions at the trials of the 1930s in the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics: Truth, the law, and such related concepts as innocence and guilt Krylenko regarded as quite flexible because they are determined by historical, and hence constantly changing, social conditions, and therefore dependent on practical considerations of what is necessary to further human solidarity and social progress at a particular historical juncture. Alexandr Solzhenitsyn explained the intellectual grounds for this original approach to legal theory and practice: The reason that fine points of jurisprudence are unnecessary, is that thereno is need to clarify whether the defendant is guiltyor not guilty: the conceptofguilt is an old bourgeois concept which has now been uprooted. Andso we heard from Comrade Krylenko thata tribunal was not that kind of court! O n another occasion we would hear from him that a tribunal was not a court at all: “A tribunal is an organ of the class struggle of the workers directed against their enemies” and must act “from the point of view of the interests of the revolution. ..having in mind the most desirable results for the masses of workers and peasants.” People are not people but “carriers of specific ideas.” “No matter what the individual qualities [of the defendant], only one method of evaluating him is to be applied: evaluation from the point of view of class expediency.”” A connoisseur of materialist discourse, Krylenko knew that truth and justice are socially constructed (configured, fashioned, etc.) by culture, class hegemony, and other such historical variables, and therefore fluid: “No matter how much is said here,” he explained during one of hissuccessful prosecutions of the numerous enemies of socialism, “about the eternal law of truth, justice, etc., we know. ..how dearly these have cost us.’”’

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The theory behind the views of Krylenko and so many Western academicians relies on two sets of propositions: (1) when progressives in power (hegemonic) make the law (or works of art, or criticism, or classroom teaching, and so on) serve their political interests, they merely do what all ruling (hegemonic) classes have always done: make thelaw (orworks of art,or criticism, or teaching) serve the rulingclasses by reflecting their values and therefore legitimating their political interests at a particular historical juncture;” (2) the difference between the bourgeois humanists and the progressives is that, first of all, the progressives honestly acknowledge their collective bias, whereas the bourgeois humanists do not; andsecond, the collective biases of theprogressives are the right ones because they are biases in favor ofthe oppressed groups, whereas the biases of the bourgeois thinkers are the wrong ones, because they are biases in favor of the Capitalists (or the white males, or the Europeans, or the West, and so forth, as in recent versions of these old proposition^).'^ “So-called impartial justice, citizen, is a bourgeois prejudice.”’* The approach is taught at the HarvardLaw School by its “Critical Legal Theory” group, whose selfapplied label is a not-too-subtle take-off on the Frankfurters’ “Critical Theory.” It is also taught by many other influential professors in the United States, such as famous reader-response critic Stanley Fish, holder of joint appointments in both English and Law (although he does not have a law degree) at Duke Univer~ity.’~ The variations played by professors upon these themes now constitute a scholarly consensus: “[Nlothing could be more urgent than ...[pressuring] the unarticulated assumptions behind juridical practices [emphasis added]-that is, those practicesthat promote and legitimate what is accepted as social justice at this historical moment [emphasis added]. The persistent question that looms ...is whether there is or can ever be any such thing as ‘universal’ and ‘objective’ justice.’’16Used before and after Krylenko, these principles were developed early by the founders of Marxism. They are made quite explicit in The Communist Manifesto”: ideas are but the outgrowth of the conditions of your bourgeois production and bourgeois property, just as your jurisprudence is but the will of your class made into a law for all. ...The selfish misconception that induces youto transform into eternal laws of nature and of reason, the social forms springing from your present mode of production and form of rise anddisappearintheprogressofproduction-this property-historicalrelationsthat misconception you share with every ruling class that has preceded you. (26)

Your very

These propositions soon became axiomatic. Take, for example, Trotsky‘s 1920 critique o f Karl Kautsky’s trust, characteristic of Kautsky’s inconsistent Marxism,in the universal desirabilityof personal freedom, democracy,and other such puerilities: “The principles of democracy,” sneers Trotsky, ““the sovereignty of the people, universal and equal suffrage, personal liberties-appear to him [Kautsky] in a halo of moral duty. They are turned from their historical meaning and presented as unalterable and sacred things-in-themselves.”” English professor and Labour leader Harold Laski used a similar line ofthought in 1944 to attack Parliament and defend socialist Russia as a country of “really existing socialism.””

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Accepting as an unquestionable fact this presumed historical “constructing” of meanings and values allows skilled practitioners of materialist discourseto carry out helpfulredefinitions of freedom,justice, and individuality. In the course of the redefinitions, the hegemony of Marxist thought over mere bourgeois ideology becomes inseparable from the domination of the undesirable bourgeois past by the superior socialist present. Hence Trotsky‘s shrewd insistencethat socialism couldnot triumph in one country until it had triumphed all: in only then would the stubborn masses lack any disturbing examples, contrasts, and ideas-and especially their lingering records. This theoretically required domination of the past by the present has important practical consequences, also emphasized by Orwell in his fiction, in the way history has been treated in the socialist countries. As the founders of materialist discourse (and O’Brien in Nineteen Eigbty-Four) explained: In bourgeois society, therefore, the past dominates the present; in Communist society,the present dominatesthe past. In bourgeois society capital is independentand has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality. of things is called bythe bourgeois, abolition of individuality And the abolition of this state and freedom! And rightly so. The abolition of bourgeois individuality, bourgeois independence, and bourgeois freedom is undoubtedly aimed at. By freedom is meant, underthe present bourgeois conditions of production, free trade, free selling and buying. But if sellingand buying disappears, free selling and buying disappears also. This talk about free selling and buying, and all the other “brave words” ofour bourgeoisie about freedom in general have a meaning, if any, only in contrast with restricted selling and buying, with the fettered traders of the Middle Ages, but have no meaning when opposed to the Communist abolition of buying and selling, ofthe bourgeois conditions of production, and of the bourgeoisie itself. You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing for nine-tenths of the population; its society, private property is already done away with existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths. You reproach us, therefore, with intending to do away with a form of property, the necessary condition for whose existence isthe non-existence of any property for the immense majority of society. ...You must, therefore, confess that by “individual” you mean no other person than the bourgeois, than the middle-class owner of property. This person must, indeed be swept out of the way, and made impossible. (The Communist Man$sto, 24-25) In materialist discourse, the victory of the oppressed collectives-led by the best because most progressive minds, of course-will create an entirely new society with different ideas, views, and conceptions. This change again is predicated on accepting polylogism, which the Manifesto insists upon with characteristic sarcasm: “Does it require deep intuition to comprehend that man’s ideas, views, and conceptions, in one word, man’s consciousness, changes with every change in the conditions of his material existence, in his socid relations and in his social life? ...The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class” (29).

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In other words, not only man is “infinitely malleable” (to use O’Brien’s words) because his very self-his consciousness-is inevitably shaped by his environment (social being): “truth” also is infinitely malleable, and for the same reason. Formulated with more charm, the approach now informs the thinking of professors who could not otherwise be considered practitioners of materialist discourse: [I]f you have found way a of distinguishing truth from falsehood more fancy thanlooking at standdrds [emphasis added] of the arguments and assessing how good they are, with whatever argument we can think of in the conversation as it stands [emphasis added], please tell me, urgently, by express mail. ...We must stop people like [Richard] Posner and Plato from making off with the word “truth,” relabeling it Truth, handing it to experts, and leavingout most of the arguments that serious people use. According to another professor, the electronic media “show us how to use communicative skills self-consciously in an environment in which we do not seek to possess truth but to create it collectively.”20 In other words, truth is, as Lenin taught, a matter of concrete practice (standards, rules, etc.). Since the collective establishes and enforces the “standards,” they change with alterations in the collective and in the identity of the collective’s establishers and enforcers. Truth therefore can be X when the conversation (called “argument” only by the unsophisticated) stands in such and such a way, bound by such and such “rules.” But then the same “truth” can turn out tobe Y, when the conversation stands in a different way, bound by different rules, practices, culture, history, and so forth.

THE MATERIALIST APPROACH TO THE UNDERSTANDING OF SCIENCE The academic preference for this approach explains thefavor granted to Professor Thomas Kuhn’s theory of scientific developments and the relative silence that objections to his ideas have encountered among humanities and social science professors. Kuhn argues that a ruling scientific group backs up some scientific paradigm which thereby becomes hegemonic. This ruling scientific collective trains initiates into the procedures and assumptions of the ruling paradigm favored by the ruling scientific collective. Things do not change until another paradigm happens to be adopted by a scientificgroup sufficiently strong to make the new paradigm accepted by the bigger scientific collective and eventually by society at large.2‘When Kuhn’s model shows that individuals who disrupt a scientific paradigm are a rarity and so are scientific revolutions, he remains within the parameters of individualistic approaches to thehistory of science. But hebreaks away from them when he emphasizes the collective nature of scientific revolutions and claims not only that they disrupt more than they enlighten, but that they ought to be more often than not crushed for the sake of the overall collective scientific enterprise.As William Warren Bartley I11 observes, Kuhn’s is a relativistic viewpoint in which the main determinant of scientific truth is not the possible objective veracity of a scientific theory but rather

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the imposition of the theory upon the community by the scientific collective in power.” Professor Kuhn’s view of science resembles the Marxist approach. Marxism posits that collectives vie for hegemony and that the dominantcollective imposes its ideas, values, and so forth. This is a fact oflife. Therefore one ought tomake sure that the ideas, values, and so forth, of the correct collective (the proletariat, in the classic version; women, non-Europeans, etc., in today’s versions) become hegemonic (are “empowered”)-led of course by the best minds: the Party (in the classic version), the progressive professors (in today’s version), and so forth. Kuhn posits that scientific groups vie for hegemony. This is a fact of life. Therefore scientific collectives are not wrong (for wrong and right are anyway relative to whoever holds power) in vying for hegemony and excluding disturbing ideas because they are innovative. Bartley points out that in Kuhn’s paradigm of scientific development, “the history of science is not the story of a battle for truth amongst competingframeworks in a market setting, for competing frameworks are excluded by reigning hegemonies. Rather, the history of science is the story ofsuccessive ideological hegemoniesseizing the whip hand of power in the halls of learning. It is Kuhn who has written, as already mentioned: ‘It is precisely the abandonment of critical discourse that marks the transition to science.’ ’u3 Significantly, only afew academicians in the humanities and the social sciences have paid attention to the problems in Kuhn’s explanations (among the exceptions are Antony Flew, Nobelist in Economics George J. Stigler, Ian C. Jarvie and Bartley himself).24 Kuhn’s book is now over twenty years old, yet continues to be widely cited by humanities and social science professors. It is true that Kuhn’s model for the understanding of scientific developments describes and explains well the reception given to his own ideas: A substantial number of members of the collectiveof humanities andsocial science professors has accepted and continued to repeat Kuhn’s ideas while routinely overlooking those of his opponents. His paradigm is quite hegemonic in this particular academic realm. But Kuhn’s paradigm does not fare so well when placed in thehistorical context of actual controversies in present-dayand really existing science-such as the discovery of the AIDS virus or the death of thousands of victims in world epidemics (see chapter 8: Problems of the Marxist Approach: Practice).

“THE PERSONAL IS THE POLITICAL” (OR “THE PRIVATE IS REALLY PUBLIC”) The axiomatic primacy of politics in the materialist sense of relations of group domination is now so hegemonic that it configures even the congressionally sponsored National Standards for United States History developed by a collective of academic historians: “In the new history there are no facts independent of ideology and power, no history that is not political. The ‘old’ history is but a story-‘narrative,’ in the jargon-told by the ruling classes to consolidate their power. So now we shall have a new history. Its purpose is to empower students against these elites by teaching them their own counternarrative, heavy on McCarthy, light on Edi-

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Together with the axiomatic flexibility of truth, law, ethics, and so forth, this Marxist principle is also part of the often unstated theoretical justification for political correctness (PC); and both principles overdetermine PC philosophically to what some critics who share its underlying assumptions and goals naively lament as its “excesses.” The assumed primacy of “politics” rests upon the polylogism of Marx’s fundamental axiom: that men’s consciousness is the result of their social being, that is to say, of their existence in a particular society, rather than the other way around.’‘ Since social being constructs one’s consciousness (the “I,” the subject), it follows that one’s ideas, feelings, preferences, and values aresociallyconstructed and therefore subject to modification by the various elements (cultural, political, etc.) constituting this all powerful Social Being. This Being constructs practically everything. Thus, for example,national literatures: “Anationalliterature is neveran empirical fact. It is an ideological construction ... (in Frederic [sic]Jameson’s sense) by a social subject which transfers to that construction its own interests and masks in that construction its own contradiction^."^' Social being constructs even sexeuphemistically called “gender” by prudish academicians, who pointedly ignore (except in issues relevant to homosexuality) the likely genetic origin of sexual orientations. Thus, instead of examining materialist discourse from the viewpoint of, say, aesthetics, or religion, or psychology, or literature, or the sexual practices of Marxas philosophy, or religion, or psychology, or sexology might want-one is supposed to examine them from the viewpoint ofmaterialist discourse. Naturally,one usually ends up subordinating aesthetics, religion, psychology, literature, and sex to endless discussions about social power, ideology, hegemony, authority, class, gender, race, group oppression, and so on. Accepting these collectivist assumptions has unexpected consequences. It justifies, for example, choosing juries according to their backgrounds (“social being”) rather than randomly, so that they “represent cross-sections of the population.” U.S. courts have insisted since 1975 that juries must be “representative” of their particular (usually sexual or racial) collective. The assumption is that jurors simply cannot be impartial and objective: therefore we need a balance of collective biases. But how can one reason otherwise juridicallyif one accepts that social being shapes consciousness and that there is no objective criterion of truth? The “empirical” justification for the materialist claims is that theyfit the worldus it really is. Or, in thewords of a famous Western professorliterature: of “The socialist or class struggle because these critic does not see literature in terms of ideology happen to be his or her political interests, arbitrarily projected onto literary works. He or she would hold that such matters are thevery stuff of history, and that inso far as literature is an historicalphenomenon theyare the very stuff of literature too.”28 The same truism was just as confidently taught once upon a time by his colleagues in the socialist countries: “When Marxism regards the history of antagonistic-class societies and thehistory of contending classes, it is not in order toindulge its ‘biased’ dialectical concept of development, but because such is the actual course of hist ~ t y . ”Unlike ~ ~ the ideas of the “Others,” Marxist ideas are not historically relative, but really true.

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The axiomatic subordination of consciousness to social being-embarrassingly undialectical, because it posits a unidirectional relation of cause and effect-was thoroughly institutionalized in the educational systems of the socialist countries?’ Since materialist discourse declares everything ultimately “social,” and since society must be obviously politically organized one way or another, itfollows that everything is ultimately political. Therefore in countries built upon Marxist ideas, all human action, even during one’s moments of privacy, has been seen as necessarily politicized, because it has beenseen as necessarily social (public). Thus the communist newspaper Pravda once noted that in the USSR the use of an individual’s free time,even during his so-called privacy, must involve not just that individual, but also such public entities as the party, the government, the Komsomol organizations, and so forth.” Any reader of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four will immediately recognize this idea. Thus, what startedas a presumably realistic description of the way things aresoon acquired a normative function:the teaching accordingto which practicallyall human activity is ultimatelypolitical(inthematerialistsense, not to beconfused with Aristotle’s view of man as a political being because he lives in apolis, a city-state of which he is a free citizen who freely participates in the political process-among other things) was effectively translated into the most politicized form of life the world has ever known. The practice of a theory that saw the world as a political arena validatedthe theory. The belief in theprophecy helped itsfulfillment-so that even the “freedom of science” from political biases was declared impossible by definition: Party teachings underlined that even the natural and mathematical sciences were and must be just as political as the hi~torical.~’ TheSoviet situation in fact nicely justified the Marxist formula: The way things are in the world is X, despite hypocritical bourgeois claims to the contrary; therefore let us use X for the creation of better people and a better world. The politicization of society necessitated huge forces of ideologuesto ensure the hegemony of the theory and therefore its truth. In the former Union of Socialist Soviet Republics, for example, the number of ideological workers-lecturers, educators, and organizers of cultural and artistic activities, all relentlessly advocating a theory on which their own livelihood depended-was greater than the total number of soldiers in the army, navy, and air force.33 Politicization inevitably led to what former Soviet historians Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr Nekrich have called “the infantilization of the population”:

Just like the stern father of a lazy and disobedient child, ideology teaches Soviet citizens how to understand eventsin the world around them, howto behave, howto relate to their families, neighbors, and so on. At the 1979 ideological conference ,..Suslov presented his army of ideologues witha new missionas a result of the economic crisis:“to work out an arrangement for meeting people’s real needs.”34

The expression “real needs”gives a clueto one of the most effective means employed to infantilize the population: Government insistently pointed out that people have “real needs,” which changed and renewed themselves constantly, being defined and

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redefined by the benevolent authorities; and then proceeded to make people depend on the government for the satisfaction of said endless “needs.” Observers of contemporary American life have noticed a similar infantilization: “The ethicof our age,” lamentscolumnist Stephen Chapman, “means treating adults like children.”35 Infantilization accordswith F. A. Hayeks appraisal of the socioeconomic consequences of statism:

As soon as the state takes upon itself the task of planning ...economic life, the problem of the due station of the different individuals and groups must indeed inevitably become the central political problem. As the coercive power ofthe state will alone decide who isto have what [what is euphemistically called “wealth redistribution” in the West], the only power worth having will be a share in the exercise of this directing power. There will be no economic or social questions that would not be political questions in the sense that their solution will depend exclusivelyon who wields the coercive power,on whose arethe views that will prevail on all occasions.36 After examining the cases of many “Third World” countries politicized through Western subsidies, economist Peter Bauer reached a similar conclusion: Politicization,heargued,rechannelshumaneffortfromproductivetopolitical a~tivity.~’ Zinoviev described a similar phenomenon in the former Union of Socialist Soviet Republics: The politicization of society fostered the class emergence, by an almost Darwinian process, of a human type whose superiority residednot in its productive or creative talent but rather in its unquestionable political ability, which enabled it to maneuver successfully within a thoroughly politicized It is true that during the Age of Late Marxism some formerly socialist countries have begun to react against the materialist teachings. T o improve living conditions by freeing the human mind (for they believe that the human mind can, contrary to Marxist theory, be free), some reformers have insisted that politicians be excluded from economic decisions, education, and theworkplace. For these reformers, politics neither informs nor should inform everything3’ But in theUnited States, large segments ofthe intelligentsia move inthe direction of an earlier age-are reactionary, so to speak. They advocate not only the political readings of literary texts but also the politicization of ever more areas of human activity. Eminent academicians agree with the materialist teachings that “[classical] liberalism is a lie”; and that practically all is “ p ~ l i t i c a l . ”Therefore ~~ they see being deliberately political in orderto improve such an obviously rotten society as a virtue, not a vice. The flexibility of the materialist approach takes care of anypossible contradictions in the progressive educational agenda, such as, for example, the notorious inconsistency in the PC treatment of real or perceived evils in the past and present history of the Capitalist West and the treatment,or lack of it, of similar or worse problems in the past and present historyof non-Western countries and races. Moreover, since progressive professors declare that theirinterests and those of the oppressed coincide, they also can dialectically claim exemptionfrom the charge that they, too, might be

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acting merely in their ownselfish interests: Unlike the Others,progressive professors are not motivated by a bad (bourgeois, etc.) ideology, but by a good one thatfurthers the well-being of humanity. Like the bolshevik~,~~ many American professors use the educational system as a tool to change the political inclinations of the students in the direction of the professors’ideas-of courseforthegood of society. “The professor’s task now,” a leading academician writes, “becomes helping students spot, confront, and work against the political horrors of one’s time.”*’ Even computers, some professors argue, must be taken “out of the commercial realm and into the political arena.”*j Practiced and advocated by Marxists from Lenin to Antonio Gramsci, this politicization of cultural expressionhas met with remarkable success in the United States. Facing the combined system of academiaand publishing houses staffedwith editors trained in the politicized graduate programsof American universities, novelist Larry Woiwode has lamented a degreeof cultural control in theUnited States unsuspected by the population at large: And just as bador worse (it’s difficultto judge with the dark growing darker) is the academy’s refusalto carry on discourse with ideologies or views aliento its entrenched Marxist-humanism (no oxymoron that), and the reluctance of the literary-publishing complex to take note of, much less put into print or support, the work of anyone whose views are not quite correct. If anyoneis unsure of what I’m saying,I’ll say it more openly, because the attitudethat needs to be identified has made its way from the literary arena to grant-giving foundations to the media, and from the best universities and colleges into every branch of public educati01-1.~~ Robert Brustein, critic and artistic director of The American Repertory Theater, describes a characteristic feature of this control: “Funding blackmail is, in fact, the means by which political correctness, masquerading as multiculturalism, has proceeded to harass the world of serious art. ...Today it is a rare foundation indeed that doesn’t reserve thelion’sshare of itsrevenueforincrementalmulticultural projects. Artistic support, in short, is posited not on quality (most funders admit that excellence is an obsolete standard), but on evidence of affirmative action.”45 Intellectuals whose values and ways of reasoning are indistinguishable from thoseof practitioners of materialist discourse now direct major humanistic foundations in the United States.46 In fact, some members of the American cultural intelligentsia openly proclaim their agreement with the artistic criteria of Marxism-Leninism: determining the worth of a work of art on the basis of how much it furthers social improvementas understood of course by Marxism-Leninism. “[Cuba],” rhapsodizes the Dean of Faculty and Vice President of Academic Affairs of the School of the Art Instituteof Chicago, provided its art world diplomats with great exhilaration [during the time of the Fifth Havana Art Bienale]. ...There was little thought of New York, Berlin, or Paris, little interest in the nihilism that shrouds so much of Postmodernism. The Havana Bienale mounted art work

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about issues; artists were chosen due to their success&lresponse to investigations of race, ecoloa, gender, immigration, and health [emphasis added]....I doubt if there is anyone who attended

the Bienale (except for those few journalists hoping to witness Cuba’s demise) who was not pained by the reports of the most recent massive emigration [sic]. If this is a tragedy, it is our tragedy, because we will never know what the experiment [sic] of Cuba might have been had it been left alone to find its own way out of underdevelopment without impediment.”*’ Eerily, these 1994 comments repeat the kindof praise which sympathetic Western intellectuals used to bestow upon the then similarly labeled “experiments” of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics in the 1930s and thePeople’s Republic ofChina in the 1960s.** The comments also reiterate equally old explanations for the stubbornly recurring economic misery under really existing socialism.*’ But even more instructive is the fact that the artistic criterion favored by this well-placed academician is indistinguishable from that of old“socialist realism”: social relevance as defined by the progressives. Such commonality of values explains the recurring examples of American sympathy toward the policies of socialist regimes in the former Union of Socialist Soviet Republics, the People’s Republic of China, or Cuba, in spite of the equally recurring evidence of artistic misery-from the incarcerations and defections of their more spiritedartists to the necessary and rather obvious ideological bondage of those who stay behind. Accepting the theoretical axiom according to which practically everything is pomodusvivendi. In litical has a logical bearing on one’schoiceofsocioeconomic unified Germany, for example, some progressives have called, so far unsuccessfully, for adopting the system of universal “child care” which existedin former East Germany and which the progressives tout as one the “most important social achievements” of really existing socialism: the “personal” (having children and caring for them) was, in such a system, indeed indistinguishable from “the political” (the State, the public sector, the government). These Germanprogressives may be overlooking a possible correlation between this sort of“most important social achievement” and the socioeconomic problems that contributed to thecollapse of the German “Democratic Republic” along with other socialist regimes.50

MARXISM, FASCISM,AND NATIONAL SOCIALISM VERSUS CLASSICAL LIBERALISM Materialist discourse teaches that the real reason we choose one explanation over another is always political: so-called non-political explanations merely serve some more or less hidden collective (group, class, gender, race, etc.) hegemonic interest of which one may not even be aware. This bias (somehow irresistibly unselfconscious “ b a d ideology” (also exceptforpractitionersofmaterialistdiscourse)constitutes called “false consciousness”). Thus, giving up or notgiving up, say, Ptolemy’s views, is largely a political, not an epistemological, decision. It has little to do with the truth-value of theviews (exceptions to this rule are Marx’sviews, including this rule, which are really and objectively true).

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Politics is hegemonic over and prior to everything else. It cannot be otherwise, since social being axiomaticallyprecedes consciousness, and social being is necessarily political being. But American academicianswho agree with the slogan “the personal is the political’’ and apply it cheerfully to their research seem unaware of a potential drawback The slogan involves not only a materialist principle (which they do not find objectionable), but also a Fascist one (which they probably would rather not find out). Like Marxism, both Fascism and National Socialism gave priority to collective positions of dominance and to the political power struggle over mere “truth” and “ideas.” This priority is one of the pillars of Fascist and National Socialist thought: “[For Hitler] it was not evidence that made an idea persuasive but handiness, not truth but the idea’s aptness as aweapon. ‘Every idea, even the best,’ he noted, ‘becomes a danger if it parades as a purpose in itself, being in reality only a means to one.’ Elsewhere he emphasized that in the political struggle force always needs the support of an idea-significantly he did not put it the other way r o ~ n d . ” This ~’ is the same vision of truth taught by the mild-mannered professors of the Frankfurt school, for whom, as for Hitler, truth is merely “a weapon in political struggles.” As in materialist discourse, education was acknowledged to be inevitably political in National Socialism-like everything else. Therefore the National Socialists proceeded to politicize education accordingto good politics-National Socialist politics. Their main instruments of indoctrination were the Napolas (Nationalpolitische Erziehungsaufstalten: the National Political Institutes of Education). In the Napolas, education was configured by the political teachingsof National Socialism. Through these teachings German students learned the basic tenets of National Socialist doctrine, from the communitarian and selfless ethos of Gemeinschap (Community) to the benefits of racial purity in the preservation of a people’s culture.52 These similarities between National Socialism and Marxism are consistent with National Socialism’s general indebtedness to materialist discourse. As Joachim Fest has pointed out, “Hitler learned his most lasting lessons from Marxism.”53 Italian Fascism learned much as well. Mussolini started his political career as a Marxist. But the intellectual edifice of Fascism owes even more to materialist discourse than the political edifice. It is worth quoting infull context from thewritings of Professor Giovanni Gentile, the official and brilliant philosopher of Italian Fascism. Gentile attackedboth classical liberalism and its defining concernwith limiting government power (the public sector) and defending individual freedom and the private sector from government intrusion. He insisted on the ethical and epistemological primacyof the collective and on theevils of the “social atomism” presumably advocated by classical liberalism. Like today’s American “communitarians,” he argued that those who insist in divorcing politics from thought should not be surprised at the decline of the public ethos, because this decline follows from the very divorce they advocate. One may notice, too, the importance which Gentile, like practitioners of materialist discourse, gives to the opposition between what is “abstract” (or “absolute,” “objective,” etc.) and what is “concrete” (or “practical,” or changeable according to historical conditions, and so on):

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There is no one possessed of an active conscience who would not rebel against a politicaland social atomism of this kind [classical liberalism], which smashesand destroys the substantial unity of human community, making it no more than an accident and depriving it of value as an end in itself-the only kind of value that matters. ...There is much talk nowadays of authoritarian governments and liberal governments, which is all based on the abstract opposition of authority and liberty,the government and the individuals governed.The individuals are conceived as atoms, each one standing on his own and possessing in himself allthe rights and duties that have any meaning for him; and the government is thought of as a purely limiting power which coordinates the free activities of the individuals. People are unwilling to recognize that the choice of suitable machinery for the tempering of the two opposed principles is not a problem to be solved by reference to eterna/princz$/es, but in accordance with historical criteria founded on considerations of expedience appropriate to different historical situations. ...Anyone who is acquainted with the history of liberalism will be aware that it had its origin in a particular historical situation at the end ofthe seventeenth century, and that itsdevelopmenthasrunparallelwiththatofthebourgeoisindustrialsocietyof Europe. In other words, it is not really a philosophical doctrine in the true sense-for philosophy always deals with man sub specie aeterni-but the solution of a particular historical problem. ...Mazzini desired liberty, as every man does who is aware of his own nature; but he knewthat it does not belong to an individual inthe abstract, butto the People, the concrete substanceofeveryindividual[Gentile’sargumenthere,asisoftenthecase,isredolentof National Socialist teaching: “There is no concept of ‘freedom’ as such,” wrote Joseph Goebbels: “Therefore the limits of the individual’s concept of freedom lie within the limitsof the People’s concept of freedom.”]. ...The distinction between ethics and politics is one on which recent Italian philosophy has harped most insistently [this is a reference to Croce’s classical liberal philosophy]. ...The State [“Society” in modern parlance; “The People” in the language of National Socialism: all inimical to the individualistic viewpoints of classical liberalism] is the universal aspect ofthe individual. ...Whenever we distinguish and oppose the two terms “State” and “individual” the distinction is simply empirical....It follows that this State [the “Ethical State”; compare today’s calls for a “Work-Ethic State”] has an immanent ethical character. ...There is no more effective proof ofthe State’s ethical character than the moralism, whether genuine or hypocritical, naive or rhetorical, with which the adversaries of this doctrine try so industriously to discover and to heal the moralsores of ordinary political life. Having logically despoiled the State andthe world of politics in whichit actually exists of every moral attribute, they are horrified atthe picture of humanity which they have concocted in their own minds. ...The logic of this avoidance of politics [by classical liberals] is founded on the familiar but fallacious distinction between the “public” and the “private” life of an i n d i ~ i d u a l . ~ ~ Professor Gentile’s words prefigure today’s arguments in favor of self-sacrifice to the collective and against the “social atomism” created by the classical liberal emphasis on individualism and the marketplace. The similarity lends credenceto Leonard Peikoffs analysis of the “ominous parallels” between Fascism and present-day socioeconomic and political trends in the United States.55American conservatives usually associate the trends with American “liberalism.” Butclassical liberals rightly point out that sometimes American conservative policies are no less interventionist (statist) and therefore no less alien to the original spirit of liberalism than those of the “liberals.” PhilosopherGeorgeSantayana’s 1915 descriptionof the ideals of

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liberalism illustrates how much the word has lost its initial meaning in the political discourse of the United States: [the liberty of liberalism] consists in limiting the prescriptionsof the law to a few points, for the most part negative, leaving itto the initiative and conscience of individualsto order their life and conversation as they like, provided only they do not interfere with the same freedom in others. In practice liberal countries have never reached this ideal of peaceful anarchy, but have continued to enforce state education, monogamy, the vested rights of property, and sometimes military service. But within whatever limits, liberty is understood to lie in the individual being left alone,so that he may express his personal impulses as he pleases in word and action.56 The ideals which Santayana described (and which he, as a conservative, disliked) are no longer associatedwith liberalism in the UnitedStates. Europeans more properly call today’s American “liberalism” Social Democracy, Labour, even or Socialism. The original meaning of the word is now carried in the United States by such composites as “classical liberalism” or by the term ‘‘libertarian.’’ A return to the original meaning has taken place in the former Unionof Socialist Soviet Republics: In the new Russia the “liberals” are liberal in the sense explained by Santayana; whereas the “conservatives” include the Marxists, the Fascists, and the assorted Nationalists. Like Fascism, National Socialism echoesthe Marxist attacks against suchclassical liberal ideals as individualism and thefree market. Its anti-free market stance greatly helped National Socialism in a country where difficult economic conditions were widely blamed on Capitali~m.~’ National Socialists associated Liberalismus with Individualismus (and individualism with the Jews: but then Jews, like “Capitalism” and “thebourgeoisie,” can boast of being associated by their enemies with practically anything important in the history of the world). The reason for their animosity against individualismis that placing the individual aheadof Gemeinschaft(the “Community,” also known as “Society,” “The People,” “the Collective,” etc.) creates an obstaclefordeveloping the people’scommunitarianism (Gemeinschafjrsinn) and therefore their willingness to follow a leader according to the leadership principle (dm Fiihrerprinzip): For how canone be willing to follow a leaderif one places one’s individuality and needs ahead of those of the community which the leader leads? National Socialist thinker Joseph Goebbels clarifies these issues for us: “Whereas [classical] liberalism arose from the ‘individual’ and each person [Einzelmenschen] stood as the center ofall things, we [Nationalsocialists] have replaced[ersetzt haben] the individual through the People and each person through the Community [Gemeinscha$] .”58 During his period of allegianceto NationalSocialism, ProfessorMartin Heidegger gave his own version of these collectivist teachings in his exhortations for selfless National Public Service by German youth: There is only one single German “estate” [“Lebensstand’l. That is the estate of labor [Arbeitsstand] whichisrooted in and borne by the Volkandwhichhasfreely submitted to the

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historical will of the State. The character of this estate is being pre-formed in the National Socialist Workers’ Party movement. A call to the Labor Service is being sounded. Those who are lame, comfortable, and effete will “go” into the Labor Service because it will perhaps jeopardize their degree and employment prospects to stay away. Those who are strong and unbroken are proud that extreme demands are being made of them: for that is the moment when they rise up to the hardest tasks, those for which there is neither pay nor praise, but only the “reward” of sacrifice and service in the area of the innermost necessities of German Being[deutschen Seins].57 Alfred Rosenberg, one of the main NationalSocialist theoreticians, similarly insisted on the need to overcome selfish bourgeois individualism: Individualism is recognized as being just as “relative” as undifferentiated universalism. Both strive continuously to attain an understandable logic and, because of these efforts, both are shattered. When this happens, the organic, Volkish Weltanschauung comes into its own, as it has always led the way whenever mechanical individualism and schematic universalism have sought to put the world in chains. ...Today, in the midst of a collapsing atomistic epoch, this true, organic Welranschauung demands its right, its fundamental right, to an ever greater degree. ...The individualistic dogma whereby each individual existsforit@ ...this dogma today has been finally excluded from serious consideration.“ Since Rosenberg regarded selflessness as a virtue, he naturally rejected individualism because of its necessarily selfish component. He also concluded that it is necessary to redefine freedomas something tobe thought of only in thecontext of one’s collective existence: “Freedom, as seen from the viewpointof National Socialist thought, is not to be understood as uncheckedindividualism, but as acreative achievement of the individual being, as a representation of his inner strength, and also as a representation of that blood and character which provide the preconditions for this personality. Therefore, we do not conceive of the individual as an isolated phenomenon, but, above all, as the healthy essence of Volsktum.”“ Change the motif of race to that of class, and one ends up with Marx’s vision of a new and superior kind of individualism and freedom to be found and enjoyed by submerging oneself in the collective life. Another NationalSocialist intellectual elaborateson the relation benveen collectivism and the leadership principle: “The leadership principle of the German Leadership State rests on a collective foundation. It is rooted in the state authority of the people’s state, that is, in a Communitarian Ethics. The idea of Community, the idea of the We as the whole of the people, structures the political art of the Leadership State.’”*Put anotherway: Without acollective with a common agenda (a “We,” a “community” of purpose), a leader does not have much to go on-a group of eitherself-sufficient or freely cooperating individualswho trade their services and goods according to a multiplicity of interests rather than a common “public agenda” does not offer a fertile ground for a leader to exercise his “leadership.” Professor Gentile’s comprehensive assault on classical liberalism by means of the concept of the “Ethical State” further illustrates theFascist teachings on the relation

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between the individual and his government and between the private and the public realms. Gentile insists on the ultimate lack of distinction between the public and the private spheres. Blurringthedistinction is a necessary condition for the eventual subordination of the private sphere to the public one and therefore to the State: indeed, on this blurring rests the justification of the totalitarian state. Gentile is also exemplary in his defense of the moral obligations of the individual toward a “community” which axiomatically gives him everythinghe has and makes him every-

thing he is:

The language that every man uses is that of his fathers, the language of his tribe or of his clan, of his city or his nation. It is his and yet not his; and he cannot use it to say “This is my view” unless at the same time he can say “This is our view.” For at the root of the“I” there is a “We.” The community to which an individual belongs is the basis of his spiritual existence; it speaks through his mouth, feels with his heart, and thinks with his brain. Membership of this community is the law of existence for every man in every aspect of his actual spiritual life. ...The individual can only be free in a free State. Or, more precisely, the free individual is the free State, since the State is not really a relationship between individuals; it lies within the individual, in that unity of particular and universal which constitutes his individuality.It follows from this that the State hasan immanent ethical character. W h o would want to deny it unless he had some reason for opposing the State? People in opposition, for whom the State is a target of attack, naturally begin by treating it as a res, a thing withoutvalue and unworthy of any kind of respect. But those who deny the ethical character of the State make haste to restore to it with the left hand what they have taken away with the right. For it is only the State created by other men that they refuse to recognize as ethical, and they want to replace it by another one, which, when rightly understood and rightly organized, can once more be credited with the value that a moral and religious conception of life confers on it, by making it an instrument of higher ends....The logic of this avoidance of politics is foundedon the familiar but fallacious distinction between the “public” andthe “private” life of an individual. ...Thus the relation of friend to friend, of husband and wife, of father and son will be “private” since such relationships belong to the individualas a separate person. But these same relations begin to have a “public” import when the person concerned is regarded as a citizen, amemberoftheState. The education that a father giveshis childrenprovidesatypical example, inasmuch as we agree that the State cannot simply ignore The it. moral to be drawn from this example is that an action is either “public” or “private” depending on whether we think of it concretelyor in the abstract. And thetruth is that within the Stateeverything that is abstractly “private” becomes “public” in a concrete situation.... That the Stutei competence is limited has been one of the classic tenets of the individualistic philosophy that liberal theory always tends to fall back on. ...There is nothing really private then; and there are no limits to State action. ...The regime corresponding to such a doctrine is called “totalitarian” and “authoritarian” and is set off against “democracy,” the system of liberty. But one might say just the opposite, for in this conception the State is the will of the individual himself in its universal and absolute aspect, and thus the individual swallows the State, and since legitimate authority cannot extend beyond the actual will of the individual, authority is resolved completely in liberty.63 The community, then, incarnate in the Ethical State and its authority, becomes both the new essence and the new definition of individual freedom. This Fascist

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principle echoes the materialist belief that under real socialism and especially under eventual communism the individual finds a new and superior form of individual freedom in his ethical integration to his community (compare, too, one of Ingsoc’s dialectical teachings in Nineteen Eighty-Four: Freedom is slavery). Gentile’s Fascist model of course differs from Marxism in,among otherthings, itsideal of community as something that transcends the class polarization inseparable from the Marxist world view. But one maynotice in the brilliant Italian academicianeven the standard Marxist opposition between what is “abstract” (“absolute,” “objective,” etc.) and what is “concrete” (“practical”). The collectivist critique of individualismcommon toFascism, National Socialism, and Marxism is now part of the American academic mainstream. Compare Professor Gentile’s words, written in the 194Os, with the words of another professor writing more than forty years later in the United States: What bias, then, is now misleading us? I am suggesting that it is an unbridled, exaggerated individualism. ...Liberal political theory, from Hobbes onward, called on each citizen to view himself as primarily a distinct, autonomous atom, unlinked to his fellow atoms unless he contractsto join them: now the sources of this project indeed, are far older; it started with the Greeks. Their efforts to encourage individual thought and responsibility gave rise to all that is most destructive in our civilization. Christianity, with its emphasis on the separate, irreplaceable value of eachhuman soul, also played a key part in the drama, which came into full flower in the Enlightenment. The careful separation of each soul from its social background has of course been responsible for an immense amount thatis distinctive and valuable it nearly so far. No wonder in the achievementsof our civilization. No other culture has carried that to many people it never looked, until lately, as if we could ever have too much of that left with good thing, individualism.What has happened now, however, is that we seem to be little conceptual groundto stand and we wantto make the opposite kind ofpoint anddeclare that the world is, after all, in sorne ways actually one, and that human beings exist only as parts of it.64 One may also recall here the holistic teachings of Soviet materialist professors satirized by Zinoviev in The Radiant Future.65 The NationalSocialist version of holism is almost as 1apidary:“One who overvalues the individual,” Goebbels wrote, “places the freedom of the people at risk, indeed seriously endangers it.”66 According to Goebbels, “There is no notion of liberty in itself’ (or “in the abstract,” as Gentile and Lenin would say; notice in Goebbels, too, an echo of Trotsky’s rejection of Kautsky‘s view of human freedom as a sacred communitarian ideas, couched thing “in itself’).67 Trotsky hadearlier defended these in the characteristic terminology of Marxism: “The worker does not merely bargain with the Soviet State; no, he is subordinated to the Soviet State, under its orders in every direction-for it is his [original emphasis] State.”“ Trotsky‘s arguments infavor of compulsory National Labor Service were similarly grounded. He realized the necessary connection between compulsion and the national socioeconomic planning which defined socialism (his reasoning agrees with also the classical liberal insistence that socialism necessarily involves c~ercion).~’ He

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knew that, for classical liberalism, freedom is inseparable from the marketplace:“For the Liberal, freedom in the long run means the market. Can or cannot thecapitalist buy labor-power at a moderate price-that is for him thesole measure of the freedom of labor.”’’ But the market, Marxism teaches, neitheris nor can real&be free, as the “Liberal” believes or pretends to believe: “That measure is false,” Trotsky continued, “not only inrelation to the future butalso in connection with thepast.” Therefore, Trotsky argued, to claim that compulsory National Labor Service (“militarized labor”)curtailsfreedom is hypocritical. Compulsory labor is no morecompulsory than the so-called free labor of the market. In fact, compulsory National Labor Service has the advantageof being willed by the community-inclined citizens through the prescience of the best minds in charge. By their willingness to freely contribute voluntary labor to the communityleast at once a weekand more, individuals indicate their willingness to further contribute their unpaid labor for the good of the whole: The militarization of labor by the will of the workers themselves is the Socialist dictatorship. That compulsory labor service and the militarization of labor do not force the will of the workers, as “free” labour used to do, is best shown by the flourishing, unprecedented in the history of humanity, of labor voluntarism in the formof “Subbotniks” (Communist Saturdays). Such a phenomenon there never was before, anywhere or at any time. By their own voluntary labor, freely given-once a week and oftener-the workers clearly demonstrate not only their readiness to bear the yoke of “compulsory” labor but their eagerness to give the State besides that a certain quantity of additional labor. The “Subbotniks” are not only a splendid demonstration of Communist solidarity,but also the best possible guarantee for the successful introduction of general labor service. Such truly Communist tendencies must be shown up in their true light, extended, and developed with the help of pr~paganda.~‘ This idea ofworking withoutpay for the public good is as central to thematerialist ethics as to that of Fascism and National Socialism (compare Professor Heidegger’s exhortations to German youth). The idea was part of the institutionalized selfless morality of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics: “The malicious enemies of communism ...allege that the faith of the Soviet people in communism is on the ebb. What a vile slander!!! If they could only see with what love, with what enthusiasm, the workers of our region have built this magnificent Slogan!!! Completely of thenew, communist approach to without payment!!! Is not thisanexample labo~r!!!?”’~ “Gemeinschafi [CommuIn the American academic reformulations, words like nity],” “das Volk [thePeople],” and “The State”arereplaced by “community,” Gemeinscba3 and some “society,” and “country.” But the ultimate ideal remains form or other of National Labor Service. An American professor explains:

To participate in any red-world civil association that has a history to incur is moral obligation. Even if the society in question is seriously flawed, each participant in its ongoing common life is in debt to all sorts of fellow citizens whom he or she has never met and cannot even name. The institutions, the infrastructure, the very existence of a political order that is part of what creates and sustains us-all are received as a patrimonythat we did not purchase and

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that we cannot in any coherent sense be saidto deserve. As a member of the Duke University faculty ...I can recreate in State parks that were financed by taxpayers of years long past. I have legal rights-the right to a jury trial and the right to vote-that were fashioned by British As a citizen lawyers centuries agoand established by American statesmen long since departed. of the United States,I enjoy all sorts of rightsand privileges-both political and economicthat were created through the labors of innumerable Americans and protected with great personal sacrifices and suffering. I can say, as libertarians insist, that I am a free person with rights that the State must respect. But Iiftake that status to mean that I do not owe something to my country, then I am a fool and an ingrate. It is entirely appropriate, therefore, for my fellow countrymen to ask of me some kind of service to the common cause. To make this request is to do no more than what parents say they want when their children inquire what they can do to repay them: Just do the same for our grandchildren. The record of my own generation in this regard, it must be said, is altogether less than admirable. Cheered on by Reaganite libertarian regimes, we have clearly taken more than we have given. ...The narrow purview of the libertarian outlook also obscures a potentially significant by-product aofwelldesigned national service program. For in addition to the direct social benefits produced by such a program, there would be its contribution to a sense of common cause and civic friendship among the participant^.'^ The use of the fathedchildren image in theprofessor’s argument (compare Gentile’s similar fathedson imagery in his description of the indebtedness of the “I” to the “We”) is not accidental: H e is in favor of paternalism. This standard argument against “excessive” individualism(what is “excessive” usually to be determined by the best minds in charge) and in favor of statism (“national labor service,” etc.) must meet the equally standard argument of the classical liberals: that by working industriously, by not stealing, by not coercing others, by providing for one’s self and family, by paying for shared services like sewage and street works, police, the judiciary, and national defense, and by producing good quality services and goods which other people canfreely trade for their ownservices and goods, a free citizen in a free republic already makes a superior moral as well as material “contribution” to thesociety in which helives. This sortof person not only maintains what he “inherits” from previous productive (and therefore, in this sense, good) people but in fact adds to it with his own efforts. H e thus preserves and furthers the order that makes him happy. Contrary to the collectivist argument, he does not have a moral obligation to “contribute” to anybody: unless he borrows money or asks for a favor, he does not “owe” anything toanyone-as would be the case if he acceptedhandouts from other people in whatever form they may come, from private charity to tax-funded “safety nets,” to subsidies. H e is not “taking more” than he is “given.” He is in the black. He earns all that he gets. H e cannot but do so, since the ethics and practice of this model run against freeloading: he either pays for what he gets or is clearly ethically or materially indebted to those who give him, out of compassion or in the course of a commercial transaction or in some other way, the services and goods that he is not paying for. In this classical liberal political model the productive, and therefore good, person doesnot owe free labor to anyone and should resist being compulsorily

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put into a situation of effective slavery: Whether he helps someone or not is solely up to him and his love or regard for that someone. If, with classical liberalism, one does not accept the premise that everything one does is always and ultimately “socially” done and therefore “socially” owned, there is little basis for the socialist/ Fascist argument in favor of some kind or other of compulsory labor and wealth redistribution. O n the other hand, if one accepts the collectivist premise, then the belief that the personal is indeed the political (the public, the social, etc.) and that the collective’s good is prior to the individual’s good can hardly be denied. As Gentile and Trotsky demonstrated, the publicgood can be redefined to equal the individual’s good in order to further justify sacrificing an individual or a group to the public good. In the nineteenth century, Lord Acton (“Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely”)pointed out the connection between this “good of the nation” and the collectivist ethos, and he made it the basis for his attack on both: “Nationality is founded on the perpetual supremacy of the collective will, of which the unity of the nation is the necessary condition, to which every other influence must defer, and against which no obligation enjoys authority, and all resistance is t y r a n n i ~ a l . ”This ~ ~ connection between collectivism and nationalism was turned by Fascism and NationalSocialism into anethical linchpin of their political program. National Socialists reiterated “harmless sounding andwidely acceptable platitudes that could ultimately be made the basis of a totalitarian state-as, for example, the maxim that the common good takes precedence over the good of the indi~idual.”’~ Hitler knew how people crave to belong to something greater than their own selves (the holistic urge) and how much they want not to be selfish (the altruistic urge). H e also knew that to fulfill such needs they may be willing to do things-such as sacrificing their individual interests alongwith those of their fellow citizens-which they would refuse to do for other reasons. “[One] of Hitler’s fundamental insights, acquired in the loneliness of his youth, was that people wanted to be10ng.”~‘These needs helped Germans accept the government’s relentless messages urging them to “sacrifice” and “serve” something greater than their own puny selves-such as the “public good.” “[The] demand forselfless service frequently had a far greater appeal than the [bourgeois] intellectuals’ demand of freedom for the i n d i ~ i d u a l . ” ~ ~ O n such altruistic axioms, entreaties, and injunctions was built a machinery of governmental activism which, second only to thatof really existing socialism, penetrated every aspect of the life of the German citizen: “It would be a mistake,” Fest writes, “to see nothing but coercion in the multitudinous organizations of the party, the politicized professional associations, the chambers, bureaus and leagues that proliferated throughout the country.Rather, the practice of talungevery individual into the fold according to his age, his function, and even his preferences in leisure or entertainment, of leaving peoplenothing butsleep as their private domain, as Robert Ley remarked on occasion-this practice sprangfrom awidespread craving forsocial participation. Hitler was not exaggerating when he asserted ...that he had asked his followers for nothing but sacrifices. In fact he had rediscovered the old truism that most people have a need for fitting into an organized whole, that there is joy in fulfilling a f ~ n c t i o n . ” ’ ~

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As in the socialist countries and Italian Fascism, under National Socialism the primacy of the political principle became axiomatic. Thus, for a National Socialist professor, “[Tlhe political will [emphasis in the original] of the nationalsocialist revolution has permeated all, and any resistance against it is sen~eless.”~’ The similarity among Fascist, National Socialist, and Marxist professorsin vocabulary and argument is not accidental. It has a common basis not mentioned by F. A. Hayek in his pioneering linkage of their socioeconomic projects (The Road to Sefdom, 1944): a shared approach to knowledge. This common basis justifies studies that treat both Marx and Hitler, along with Pol Pot and de Sade, as representatives of a generalized “leftism.”80 Theory of knowledge is also the overlooked foundation of other similarities often pointed out among Marxism, Fascism, and National Socialism.*’ Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, connoisseur of both sides of this collectivist coin (he started as a Fascist and ended up as a communist)8z pointed in this direction when, in 1945, he suggested a “methodological” connection between Marxism and Fascism: “One can say that fascism has been an attempt by elements from all social classes to escape an approaching Marxist destiny, by incorporating a part ...of the Marxist impulse and method.”83 Commenting on Drieu, Bernard-Henry Ltvy underlines an aspect of Fascist thought that further points to its connection with the Marxist approach to knowledge: “Fascism,” writes Lkvy, “is not just political, but solely p ~ l i t i c a l . ”If~Levy ~ is right, Fascism would turn out tobe the quintessence of that often professorially repeated Marxist axiom according to which practicallyevery human act is necessarily political.

NOTES 1. V. I. Lenin, One Step Forward, Two Steps Buckward (1904; Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1978), 207. 2. University of Massachusetts at Amherst materialist professor of economics Stephen Resnick, cited by Ron Grossman, “The Marxist brothers: Derided and discarded in Europe, communism is still a tie that binds teachers on someU.S. college campuses,”Chicago Tribune, 18 March 1991. 3. Alexandr Zinoviev, The Radiant Future (New York: Random House, 1980), 20. 4. Among the many studies of this lying, one the of most comprehensive is former Soviet Utopia in Power: The Histo y of the Soviet professors Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr Nekrich’s Unionfiom 1917 to thePresent (New York: Summit Books, 1986). The Soviet government itself acknowledged in the late 1980s that for more than seventy years history textbooks had lied to Soviet students. Even maps lied, intentionally showing man-made as wellas naturally occurring landmarks in the wrong places,or not at all. In the official Soviet map of Moscow, the KGB building did not exist. Hungarian psychiatrist Ferenc Grezsa bas observed that in Hungary “Ayouth whois 20”and even his parents-grew up during the communist regime, learning - about criminals who were really heroes and heroes who were criminals.” [Cited in Linnet Myers, “Extreme nationalists stirup concern in Hungary,” Cbicugo Tribune, 12 March 19931. 5. Paul Greenberg, “Yearning for the bad old days of Stalinist Russia,” Chicago Tribune, 12 March 1993. Lenin’s colossal crimes, earlier exposed by Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, Mikhail

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Heller, Aleksandr Nekrich and many others, have been recently illuminated even more devastatingly by a Russian general with access to formerly unavailable KGB files: Dmitri Volkogonov, Lenin (New York: The Free Press, 1994). Volkogonov shows that Lenin was directly responsible for the death of hundreds of thousands. 6. The periodic revisions of official truth in the socialist countries responded, too, to changes in the ruling collectives,and therefore also jibed with this Marxist hegemonic theory of truth. 7. Coined by a disrespectful Ernest Gellner,Postmodernism, Reason and Religion (London: Routledge, 1992), 33-35. 8. The principal figures are Theodor Adorno, Juergen Habermas, and Max Horkheimer. Their self-chosen label monopolizes the word “critical”: right off the bat, the label excludes as non-critical any theoretical workdone by non-Marxists. This trick is reminiscent of Lenin’s choiceof the label“Bolsheviks”(“majoritarians”)forhisownfactionand“Mensheviks” (minoritarians) for the other socialists. But, as is usually the case with materialist discourse, the rhetorical trick started with Marx, who called August von Willich’s socialist faction“the minority,” although von Willich’s followers had a numerical advantage both in the London section of theCommunist League and the Workers’ Educational Association. See David Felix, M a m as Politician (Carbondale: Southern IllinoisUP, 1983), 98. 9. Paul Bod, Intellectuals in Power: A Genealogy of Critical Humanism (New York: Columbia UP, 1986), 239. 10. Typicalwas the caseat the beginning of 19 18, when the death penalty was still officially nonexistent (having been “abolished” by the Bolsheviks). Alexandr Solzhenitsyn explains: “At the beginning of 1918, Trotsky ordered that Aleksei Shchastny, a newly appointed admiral, be brought to trial because he had refused to scuttle the Baltic Fleet. Karklin, the chairman of the Verkhtrib, quickly sentenced him in broken Russian: ‘To be shot within twenty-four hours.’ There was a stir in the hall: But it had been abolished! Prosecutor Krylenko explained: ‘What are you worrying about? Executions have been abolished. But Shchastny is not being executed; he is being shot.’ And they did shoot him.” [The Gulag Archipelago, vol. 1 (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), 434-351. The foundations for such procedure were the relativist ethical and epistemological axioms of materialist discourse. Again Solzhenitsyn throws light on the matter by quoting Krylenko: “‘A tribunal is not the kind of court in which fine points of jurisprudence and clever stratagems areto be restored. ...We are creating a new law and new ethical norms.’ ” (The Gulag Archipelago, vol. 1, 308). 11.Solzhenitsyn, The GulagArchipelago, vol. 1, 398. 12. This axiom is encapsulated in The Communist Manifesto’s teaching accordingto which the ruling ideas of each age have always been those of the ruling class. See my chapter 9 for the weaknesses in this teaching. 13. These propositions seem applicable to practically the entire range of human activity: cf. Marxist professorTerry Eagleton, “Conclusion: Political Criticism,” in hisLiterary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis: The U of Minnesota P, 1983). 14. As the Bolshevik magistrate, patterned after Krylenko, says in Ayn Rand’s We the Living (New York: Random House, Inc., 1936), 169. 15. Stanley Fish, There? No Such Thing as Free Speech. ..and It? a Good Thing, Too (New York: Oxford UP, 1994); idem,Doing Whatcomes Natura& Change, Rhetoric, and thePractice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies (Durham: Duke UP, 1989). 16. Professor Donald Morton, editor of Queer Theory: A Lesbian and Gay Culturalstudies Reader, cited in the January 1995 State University of New York Press brochure advertising Jerry D. Leonard, ed.,Legal Studies as Culturalstudies (Albany: StateU ofNew York P, 1994).

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This anthology features articles that rely upon the Marxist vision truth, of among them: Marie Ashe, “Mind’s Opportunity: Birthing a Poststructuralist Feminist Jurisprudence”; Jerry Leonard, “Foucault and (the Ideology 00 Genealogical Legal Theory”; Drucilla Cornell, “Time, Deconstruction, and the Challenge to Legal Positivism:The Call for Judicial Responsibility.” 17. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto (New York: International Publishers, 1948). All page references are to this “authorized” (by Engels) edition. 18. Leon Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism (Ann Arbor: The U of Michigan P, 1963), 37. Marxists havebeenmistaken.At arecentuniversityconferenceonEasternEuropean developments, nearly every foreign participant stressed that, having lived in what they call a “moral vacuum” (as a consequence of the sort of relativism defended by Trotsky), they now wanted to have those “bourgeois liberties” that are taken for granted in the West and based on presumably natural principles. See Ray Moseley, “Once-Secret Party favored in E. Germany,” Chicago Tribune, 1 March 1990. Cf. Marx inThe CornrnunistManifesto,26. Alexandr Solzhenitsyn has some interesting pages on the practical consequences of adopting these axioms (The Gulag Arch$ehgo, vol. 1, 306-9). 19. Harold Laski, Faith, Reason and Civilisation (New York: Viking, 1944). Orwell agreed withLaski that Soviet Russia was the real thing (Orwell termed Russia “a state definitely describable as Socialist”) but thought that Laski’s book was “pernicious tripe.” Orwell’s unfavorable review of Laski’s book was rejected by the editor of the Manchester Evening News, the evening paper of the Manchester Guardian. See Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, eds., The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters o f George Orwell, vol. 3 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1968), 141 n.2. 20. Donald McCloskey, “The Essential Rhetoric of Law, Literature and Liberty,” Critical Review 5, no. 2 (Spring 1991): 221-22; approvingly, Professor Richard Lanham, cited in James J. O’Donnell, “The New Liberal Arts,”Ideas 3, no. 2 (1995):45. 21. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed., enl. (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1970). 22. William Warren Bartley 111, Unfathomed Knowledge, Unmeasured Wealth (LaSalle, Ill.: Open Court, 1990), 105. 23.Ibid. 24. Antony Flew, Thinking About Social Thinking: The Philosophy o f the Social Sciences (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), 174-79; George J. Stigler, The Economist m Preacher and Other Essays (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982), 112-14; Ian C. Jarvie, “Popper on the Difference between the Natural and the Social Sciences,” in Paul Levinson, ed., In Pursuit of Truth: Essays in Honour of Karl Popper? 80th Birthday (New York: HumanitiesPress, 1982), 83-107 and idem, “Explanation, Reduction and the Sociological Turn in the Philosophy of Science-or Kuhn as Ideologue for Merton’s Theory of Science,” in Gerard Radnitzky, ed., The Unity of the Sciences, vol.2(NewYork:ParagonHouse, 1989); Bartley, Unfathomed Knowledge, 105. 25. Charles Krauthammer, “When history lessons ignore white males-hear them roar,” Chicago Tribune, 4 November 1994. 26. Karl Marx, “Preface” toA Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), in Lee Baxandall and Stefan Morawski, eds., Marx and Engels on Literature and Art (St. Louis1 Milwaukee: Telos Press,1973), 85. See also, above, p. 13, the quotation from page 29 of The Communist Manifesto. 27. ProfessorBeatrizGonzilezStephan,“Poderyculturanacional,” Estudios 1, no. 1 (January-June 1992): 48 (my translation). 28. Eagleton, LiteraryTheory, 209.

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29. Kh. Momjan, Landmarks in History (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1980), 44. 30. Cf. the widely used manual by professors Z. Berbeshkina, L. Yakovleva,D.and Zerkin, What is Historical Materialism? (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1987), 48. 31. Heller and Nekrich, Utopia in Power, 656. 32. The 1920s and 1930s Soviet journalMarxism and the Natural Sciences, cited in Heller and Nekrich, Utopia in Power, 265. 33. Ibid., 656. In the Republic of Kazakhstan alone, the ideological workers participating in the harvest of 1979 equalled ten full-strength army divisions. 34.Ibid., 657. 35. Stephen Chapman, “The ethic ofour age means treating adults like children,” Chicago Tribune, 18 March 1993, Section 1, p. 31. 36. F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1944), 197. 37.PeterBauer,“WesternSubsidiesandEasternReform,” The Cat0 Journal 2, no.2 (Winter 1992): 345. 38. Zinoviev, The Radiant Future, passim. 39. In Hungary, for instance, legislation now forbids political activity in the working place, thus dealing a blow to the old communists, for which such activity has always been a “key weapon of communist indoctrination” (Chicago Tribune, 20 October 1989). In former Yugoslavia, some reformers have insistedthat politicians getout of economic decisions(Chicago Tribune, 9 February1989).Similar changes have taken place in schools and universities which, in accordance with materialist axioms, had been thoroughly politicized-with rather adverse results for innovation and learning (Chicago Tribune, 6 December 1989; 3 July 1990). Even in Western countries like Italy, whose educational system had long been penetrated by materialist ideas, and where the “Chinese system” (pioneered in Mao’s China: in it a studentis selected by the class-the community-to take the exam for everyone else: from his ability to the needs of the whole, etc.) had been adopted in many humanities exams, some students are rebelling against the politicization of the system. Like many American professors, materialist Italian teachers are shocked by what they “the call egocentricity and narcissism” of their charges. “They don’t seem to give a damn about the community as a whole,” complains a teacher who has since quit in disgust. Students respond that they “don’t want to listen to their teachers’ political interpretations but want the facts.” Nor is class oppression accepted as an excuseforpoorwork. “I am notscandalizedthatthosewhodon’tstudyfailtheir examinations,” says student leader Gaia Molho, “And I would never fight to defend them” (Chicago Tribune, 5 December 1989). 40. Professor Frank Lentricchia, Criticism andSocial Change, with a Postscript by Kenneth Burke(Chicago: The UofChicago P, 1983), 2; ProfessorLouis Rent Beresapprovingly quoted by Washington Post columnist William Raspberry, Chicago Tribune, 24 August 1990. 41. Heller and Nekrich, Utopia in Power, 172. 42. Frank Lentricchia, professor of English literature at Duke University, cited by David Lehman, “Reign of Intolerance,”Partisan Review 60, no. 4 (1993): 633. 43. “Unnerving look into the computer future,” Chicago Tribune, 6 December 1988. 44. Larry Woiwode, “Politics in American Letters: Remembering Dos Passos,” Chronicles (August 1992):4445”originally a speech accepting the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature on September 20, 1991, at Longwood College, Farmville, Virginia. The case ofThe American Spectatorand Reason at my university illustrates what can happen to politically incorrect writing in academia: For years both magazines were confined to the rare books room at the library. After discovering this situation, I eventually managed to get the magazines movedto the regular reading room of the library, where they could share space

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with more acceptable publications, such as The Nation. In literary and cultural criticism, the questioning of Marxist ideas is particularly unwelcome: TwoIvy League presses happened to lose the prospectus ofthe present book after keeping it for several months, only to turn down a second copy because itdid not fit “our present catalog of publications.” Six other university presses rejected the prospectus for the same reason. Another university press turned it down because the press already had “too many literature titles.” But in fact none of the editors at these presses had actually read the prospectus: They had decided against publication immediately after realizing what the book was about by readingthe cover letter. I know, because I had routinely changed the order of some ofthe pages, and these pages came back every time exactly in the same altered order in which I had sent them.The editor of another Ivy League press did read the prospectus thoroughly and “with great pleasure,” but turned it down because his press wasno longer “publishing this sort of material.” During a follow-up callI made that to request advice on how to make the prospectus more attractive to another press, this same editor told me, confidentially,that there was “nothing wrong with the prospectus,” but that given the present configuration of his editorial board it would be practically impossible to get approval for “this type of manuscript.” In fact, he said, he had recently had his “knuckles rapped’ for trying to sponsor a couple of politically incorrect manuscripts. My university turned down my request of a small grantto pay a research assistant to help me complete the manuscript of the present book. Then it gave me the grant only after my complaint letter to the Graduate School Dean.In my department, and in anot particularly radicalized university, practitioners of materialist discourse frequently end up the as top candidates for job openings; and since I joinedthe department (at a more innocent time, when my political consciousness had not yet been awakened and made manifest) no anti-socialist has been hired. 45. Robert Brustein in his Dumbocracy in America,cited by Richard Christiansen, “If art is not enough, what is it worth?” Chicago Tribune, 1 1 December 1994. 46. Thus, the president of the Guggenheim Foundation, Mr. Joel Conarroe, defending political correctness by denying its existence: “The enemies of PC ...score their points by recycling a handful of supposedly shocking anecdotes about alleged close-mindedness on a few purportedly radicalized campuses.” Uoel Conarroe, “How I’m PC,”New York Times, 12 July 1991, Op-ed]. Foundations like the Guggenheim, Ford, Carnegie, and MacArthur regularly fund Marxist-based humanistic research, while regularly shunning clearly conservative or classical liberal humanities projects. 47. Carol Becker, letter to New Art Examiner, December 1944, p. 8. 48. Heller and Nekrich, Utopia in Power, 255-58, 282. 49. Including the idea of a “blockade” by the enemies of socialism. Of course, Cuba can and does do commerce with every country exceptthe United States. Unlike Haiti,Cuba has not been blockaded by the United States. In fact, unlike, say, South Africa or Iraq, Cuba has never been economically boycotted by theUN. But one may wonder whyCuba should want so desperately to do business with and get investments from a country that presumably exploited Cuba precisely through both forso many years;and one may also wonder why should the United States want to do business with and invest in a regime that in1960s the confiscated the Cuban properties of American businesses and shareholders. 50. “Women’s Earnings in the Germanys” (excerpted from The Week in Germany,a newsletter of the German Information Center, New York),Chicago Tribune, 20 May 1990. 5 1. Joachim Fest,Hitler, trans. Richard Winston and Clara Winston (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), 124. 52. Fredric Reider, The Order of the SS: How Did It Happen (Tucson: Aztex, n.d.), 157 [Translation of Fredric Reider, L’Ordre S.S. (Paris: Editions de laPensCe Moderne, 1975)].

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53. Fest, Hitler, 125. Genesis and Structure of Society, trans. H. S. Harris(Urbana54.GiovanniGentile, Champaign: U of Illinois P, 1960), 80, 130, 131, 133, 177. 55. Leonard Peikoff, The Ominom Paralleh (New York: Stein & Day, 1982). 56. George Santayana, “Liberalism and Culture” (1915), in Norman Henfrey, ed.,Selected Writings o f George Santayana, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1968), 19. 57. Mark Mazower, interviewed by Wayne Pond, “War and Democracy, an interview with Mark Mazower,” Ideas From the National Humanities Center 3, no. 1 (Summer 1994): 33. Der Nationalsozial58. Joseph Goebbels’ speech, November 1933, in Walther Hofer, ed., ismus: Dokumente 1933-1945 (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1957), 89. I have translated all quotations from this work. 59.MartinHeidegger,“TheCall to theLaborService,” Freiburger Studentzeitung, 23 January 1934, in Richard Wolin, The Heidegger Controversy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993), 54-55. 60. Alfred Rosenberg,Race and Race Historyand Other Essays (New York: Harper& Row, 1977), 92. 61. Ibid.,162. 62. Otto Koellreuter, in Hofer, ed., Der Nationalsozialismus, 82. 63. Gentile, Genesis and Structure o f Society, 82, 177, 179. 64. Mary Migdley, Evolution as a Religion: Strange Hopes and Stranger Fears (London: Methuen, 1985), 14042. 65. Zinoviev, The Radiant Future, 20. 66. Joseph Goebbels, in Hofer, ed., Der Nationalsozialismus, 89. Fascist thought echoes such statements. Sometimes the echo is practically verbatim and irresistibly attractive, as in Gentile’s unobjectionable assertion that “The individual can only be free in a free State.” 67. Hofer, ed., Der Nationalsozialismus, 89. 68. Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism, 168. 69. Ibid., 144: The word“consequently”showsthenecessaryconnection.Comparehis acknowledgment of the link between compulsion and national economic planning on p. 141: “We, on the other hand, oppose capitalist slavery by socially-regulated labor on the basis of an economic plan, obligatory for the whole people and consequently compulsory for each worker in the country.” 70. Ibid.,140. 71. Ibid.,147. 72. Zinoviev, The Radiant Future, 9-10. 73. Thomas A. Spragens, Jr., “The Limitations of Libertarianism, Part 11,” The Responsive Community: Rights and Responsibilities, 2, no. 2 (Spring 1992): 46-47. 74. J. Rufus Fears, ed.,Selected Writings ofLordActon, vol. I: Essays in the History ofFreedom (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1986), xxi, 424. 75.Fest, Hitler, 123. 76. Ibid.,428. 77. Ibid.,429. 78. Ibid. The private lives ofHitler and Mussolini jibed with the proclaimed ideals oftheir political parties: Not only did they live with relative austerity (especially Hitler), but also displayed an overwhelming dedication to public affairs. They had indeed turned the “personal” into “the political” and subordinated their private to their public lives. 79. Walter Frank, president of the “National Institute for the History of the New Germany, 1936,” in Hofer, ed., Der Nationalsozialismus, 100.

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80. Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Le$ismRevisited: From de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Pol Pot (NewYork:RegneryGateway, 1990); Eric Hoffer, The True Believer (New York: Harper, 1951). 81. To the usual ones (totalitarian tendencies, religious-like characteristics, and so forth) one may also add the personality cults: Marx, Mao, Stalin, Fidel, Ho, and so on, as well as the preference for the uniform (a trait associated with the military model that in one form or another is part and parcel of all socialisms). 82. “Germany has killed Europe,” he wrote, “now the hope is Russia”-thus inverting a frequent process which Hitler once recalled asgood a reason for recruiting ex-communists for the cause of National Socialism. “The petit bourgeois Social-Democrat and the trade-union boss,” Hitler observed, “will never make a National Socialist, but the Communist always will.” [Hermann Rauschning, Hitler Speaks (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1940), 1341. Mussolini of course started as a Marxist. 83. Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, /ournu1 1739-1745, ed., Julien Hervier (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 18 February 1945. 84. Bernard-Henry L+, “Drieu: vivere e morire all’ombra di Vichy,” Corriere della sera, 30 April 1992, 7.

Chapter Two

The Marxist Approach in Academia I1

“You also believe that the nature of reality is self-evident. When you see something, you assume that everyone else sees the same thing as you. But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Notin the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes; only in the mind of the Party, which is collective [emphasis added] and immortal.” “George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

A psychic at Orange Coast College teaches a course that includes a segment on how to use psychokinesis to turn traffic signals green. ...Instructor Dianne Morrissey taught the red-be-gone techniques to a group of about 30 studentsrecently,and 15 reportedsuccess. One student claimed a streak of 14 straight greens. -The Orange County Register’ Students study cultural change and the construction of knowledge, the emergency and functioning of power relationships. ...The range of courses includes ...“Constructing Sexuality.” -The Claremont Graduate School new “Cultural Studies” M.A./Ph.D. Program

THE HEGEMONY OF THE COLLECTIVE AND SOCIOLOGY Scholarly efforts by practitioners of materialist discourse hinge upon accepting the primacy of the collective (“society,” “culture,” etc.) and its attendant themes. The primacy also configures the materialist approachto ethics: Collective rights supercede

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individual rights. After all, according to Karl Marx, men’s consciousness is determined by their social being,and not the other way around.’ This axiom also underlies his other influential collectivist postulate according to which the ruling ideas of a time are always the ideas of its ruling class.3 Materialist professorsin the socialist countries have long taught the correctness of such notions, which explain theresults of practically every human act. These results include works of art and other cultural “products.”* As two Western professors inform us, we must take seriouslyMarx’s views regarding “the dependency of art on socioeconomic processes, the class context of the artist’s origins and functions, or the dialectically founded discrepancy between the cultural and material levels of human de~elopment.”~ One must do so because “Marx, the student of history, has established more firmly than anyone that historical and sociological studies provide decisive insights into the permanent attributes andchanges of art.”‘ And as another Western professor admiringly repeats, “‘Like any artist,’ they [Marx and Engels] write in The German Ideology ‘Raphael was conditioned by the technical advances made in art before his time, by the organisation of society, by the division of labor By postulating such “conditioning” (“conin the locality in which he lived.’ structing,” etc.), materialism can even claim that science, like the human minditself, can never be really free: both are subject to social forces, self-serving collective ideology, and so forth. As Frederick Engels observed when praising Ferdinand Lassalle’s Sickingen, even when writing plays one should aim for political correctness by highlighting what is “historical” and therefore collective rather than what is merely individual: The Individuum should neverbegiven the sort of discursive primacy ascribed to it by Liberalismus.8 Today’s Western professors continue this long Marxist tradition of approaching art and literature in a politically correct manner. Notice the generous but conditioned acceptance ofYeats by a famous professor ofliterature: “To claim, then, that (say) Yeats’ anti-rationalistic reverence for concrete qualities of experience is a value to be integrated into the post-revolutionary future [when Capitalism will be gone ...] is in essence to derive one’s poetry from the past [which is bad]. Yet Yeats, nevertheless, has his value ...the value is a function of a specific relation to a concrete ideological formation.”’ This notion of “concrete ideological formation” has of course also been standard academic teaching in thesocialist countries.” Psychological problems and anti-social behavior arealso determined by one’s collective (social being). Therefore, as another famous professor teaches, even neurosis must doubtless be related to living in a “bourgeois” society (a socioeconomic and therefore “ideological” formation). It follows then that one should and couldmake society better by remedying the excesses of Capitalism, andso forth. This change in social being will eventually eliminate psychological problems and anti-social behavior, since they are and should be explained not biologically, but socially. For this change to happen it will help to implement all ten points of the Communist Manifesto: “The founders of scientific communism [Marx and Engels],”as Soviet materialist professors used to explain to their students,

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foresaw that the first phase [socialism] of the new socioeconomic formation [communism] the entire history of would see the appearance of the socialist personality, conditioned, like mankind, by labour and the obtaining system of social (material and intellectual) production. The new socialist man appeared, as they had predicted, as a result of the victorious Great October Socialist Revolution of 1917 in Russia, the dedicated labour and struggle of the Soviet people, andthe establishment of the socialist world system. The behaviour and personal traits of the people of the new, socialist, type are essentially conditioned by the qualitatively new system of social relations and the new social environment. The content of the social changes that occurred in the USSR shows that Soviet society step by step eliminated the exploitation of man by man; all material and intellectual wealth serves the worker, labour having becomenot only a means of livelihood butalso a means of serving society; relationships amongpeoplearemarkedbythedevelopment of. ..harmony, collectivism and fraternal cooperation.‘* N o wonder that many Western academicians recommend, too, that“To more fully grasp the Marxian world view one should read the philosophical works of Marx and Engels,” as well as “those of their most authentic interpreters,e.g., Lenin, Gramsci, L ~ k i c s . ” ’To ~ further illustrate the importance of learning these things one may quote V. I. Lenin’s still unsurpassed words: “The Marxist doctrine is omnipotent because it is true.”’* Like the basis of today’s fashionable groupethics, the usually unstatedbasis of PC in American academia isalso the collectivist Marxist approach. As in materialist discourse, so in PC the search for truth is displaced from an interest in the logic of assertions and the accuracy of facts to an interest in the hidden and self-serving motivations of the speakers and their determiningsocial circumstances; and therefore to an interest in the collective within which the speaker speaks and from which he presumably derives what and how he speaks. Thus, epistemology, like ethics, ends up effectively dominated by sociology and politics-but a sociology and politics understood strictly according to materialist premises. Robert Hughes describes what he calls “a cardinal rule of the PC attitude to oppression studies”: “Whatever a white European male historian or witness has to say must be suspect; the utterance of anoppressed person or group deserves instant credence, even if they’re the merest a~sertion.”’~ But how canit be otherwise, if one accepts that the arguments and facts of the ruling (hegemonic) class (once the bourgeoisie, but now more often the whites, or the males,or the Westerners, and so on) are mere disguises and tools that the hegemonic collective entity uses to perpetuate its domination, oppression, and so on? These beliefs define the materialist concept of (bad) “ideology” and inform not only academic PC and “multiculturalism” but also other postmodern academic approaches like non-individualist (socialist) feminism and “New” historicism. American university presses regularly turn out books that thrive in the academically “hot” field of the “sociology of knowledge.”Antony Flew and J. Q. Merquior, among others, have examinedthe epistemological problems ofthis presumably bourgeois discipline.“ At best, sociology of knowledgecalls attention to social factors of

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varying epistemological relevance. At worse, it surreptitiously slides into casual macroexplanations fundamentally indistinguishable from those of Marxism.” Seeminglyworkingwithinthisrespectablebourgeoisdiscipline,apractitionerof materialist discourse canassert (making reference to Emile Durkheim rather than to Marx) that so-called true knowledge is in fact “socially” constructed. Even to speak of the subordination of truth to politics poses the question wrongly from the point of view of materialist discourse: for itis not that truth mustbe changed to serve the right politics (one that will of course create better people and a better world), but that truth in fact depends on politics (hegemonic struggles, practices, etc.) from the very beginning. Truth is politics, because fashioned by the collective-which is, by necessity, politically and therefore hegemonically organized: this is what one might less charitably call the Tribal Theory of Knowledge.

THE PRIVATE IS REALLY THE PUBLIC Privileging the collective factor while downplaying the individual one is justified by the Marxist-Leninist emphasis on what is “concrete” (practical). As a Western professor explains, “Liberalhumanism is a suburbanmoral ideology, limited in practice to largely interpersonal matters. ...What it means to be a ‘better person’ then must be concrete and practical-that is to say, concerned with people’s political situations as a whole-rather than narrowly abstract, concerned only with the immediate interpersonal relationswhich can be abstractedfrom this concrete whole.”18 Notice the same emphasis on what is “concrete” and “practical” over what is “abstract” in the following statements by another professor of an apparently very differentpoliticalpersuasion:“[Alnaction is either‘public’ or ‘private,’ ” wrote academician Giovanni Gentile, “depending on whetherwe think of it concretely or in the abstract. And the truth is that within the State everything that is abstractly or ‘historical’] situation.”” ‘private’ becomes ‘public’ in a concrete [or ‘practical,’ Professor Gentile thereby erased the distinction between the public and privatesectors in favor of the public one (the “Ethical State” of Italian Fascism). As we sawin theearlier chapter, this blurring of the distinction between the public (the collective) and theprivate (the individual)is one of the areas of common ground among Marxists, Fascists, American “liberals,” and even many “conservatives.” Blurring the distinction opens the way to a takeover of the private sphere by the public one and therefore by the all-knowing governmental apparatuses that presumably work in the name of and for the benefit of the “public” sector: this is one of the theoretical justifications for the totalitarian state, in which nothing is lek to the private realm. The blurring can be found in the views of a “liberal” feminist op-ed writer for the New York Times and Pulitzer Prize winner: For Ann Quindlen, the “public” sphere is supposed to respect the “private” sphere only in the case of the individual’s “right to abortion.” In everything else, the “public” should dominate over the “private.” Quindlen’s blurringof the distinction has notpassed unnoticed: “In her solipsistic world,” observes Terry Eastland, “the two terms are interchangeable.”” Some of the ideas of another well-known “liberal” author, Mickey &us,

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are similarly indistinguishable from those implemented by Italian Fascism and National Socialism in the 1930s and 1940s; yet the reviews of his book have failed to notice the connections.”

SCIENCE AS A POLITICAL CONSTRUCTION Academicians who have lived under socialism for generations spiritedly defend theWesterntrustinscientific research as an activity that can be relatively free from ideological, self-serving, cultural, racial, sexual, and other pressures, and that should therefore be protected from them. According to Chinese dissident scientist Fang Li-Zhi, Physics and all sciences, as fields of knowledge, are independent of political power and ideology. ...Science is a universal enterprise international in scope. ...Infringements of scientific freedom hinder not only the pursuit of scientific inquiry but also the progress and potential of human society.The scientific community therefore has an important role to play of scientific freedom.The concern of people engaged in defending people who suffer violations in free research has helpedand is still helping othersto pursue their work in freedom, without political and ideological harassment.”22 But some American professors are not so sure that there is or can even be such a thing as “scientific freedom”-as Li-Zhi naively believes. Therefore, why try to defend something that cannot exist in the first place? Based on these assumptions, an American academician arguesin a book published by a prestigious university press that both the “scientific practitioner” and the “scientific article” are “social construct~.’’’~ The wordpractitioner immediately reduces the scientistmerely to someone who happens to “practice” a certain kind of discourse that has no greater claim to respect thanother discourses. Like them, it is subject to HISTORY, “concrete” practice, and so forth. The “scientific” approach is therefore no more valid than other approaches for yielding knowledge about so-called reality. The professor’sviews also adhere to the materialist teaching according to which even science is ruled by politics and therefore by ideology. Indeed, for the professor, these emerging “social constructs” appear as a result of “conflict.” By relating “conflict” to the creation of “science” the professor is not-too-surreptitiously applying the old materialist prinas in “class struggle,” or “contradiction”) as a ciple of “conflict” (or “struggle,” generating force. From the professor’s viewpoint, things cannot work otherwise, since materialism postulates that “science” is something whose resources and expectations areand must be-as the professor asserts in dutifully collectivist fashion-“communally” developed. The emphasis on communal development is necessary because granting epistemological primacy to the individual rather than to the collective of individuals making up “society” has always been anathema to Party Line. Faithful to this Line, the professor insists that individual scientists are the “products” of the HISTORICAL circumstances of their time. In other words, what scientists discover

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is bound to be discovered anyway if not by scientist A then by scientist B. The presumed “merit” of theindividual scientist is therefore a delusion, sinceHISTORY is really at work, not the historically conditioned individual scientist. Now being extended to scientific research, this approach has already become institutionalized in the humanities and the social sciences. As aleadingAmerican philosophy professor gently informsus, humanistic research is inevitably a political activity: We humanistic intellectuals findourselves in a position analogous to that of the “social-gospel” or “liberation theology” clergy, the priests and ministers who thinkof themselves as working to build the kingdomof God on earth. ...We are accusedof being paid to contribute to and

communicate knowledge, while instead “politicizing the humanities.” Yet we cannot take the idea of unpoliticized humanities any more seriously than our opposite numbers in the clergy can take seriously the idea of a depoliticized But long before American professors, academicians in thesocialist countries had imparted these ideas to generations of students. Socialist professors pointed out that even Marx came into this world merely because of socioeconomic and political configurations that made an individual like Marx historically inevitable-indeed providential. And he andEngels created not just “science” (for there is no such thing as science tout court: what is called science varies for each particular collective), but a science for the oppressed proletarians: “Historical materialism (and Marxism as a whole)appeared inthe 1840s. Itsemergence wasby no meansaccidental. The working class, which had begun an independent revolutionary struggle, needed an understanding of the laws and prospects of social development, a genuine science of society. Marx and Engels created such a science for the working class and working people of the whole ~ o r l d . ” ’ ~ Knowing these ideas and their academic exponents from bitter experience, Li-Zhi has noted thenecessary conditions forfree research and science: “Scientific education and free research are totally inconsistent with ideological controls.” But Li-Zhi may not realize that free research and scientific education are incompatible with ideological controls not merely becausefree research and free scientific education endanger the authorityof the progressive people in charge, but also because the “epistemology” practiced by the power-holders in fact claims that free research, and therefore free science, are impossible in the first place. Therefore, research and science are closely monitored to make sure that they remain unfree and thus consistent with ideological controls-as they are supposed to be anyway. Condemned by scientists living under socialism, the politicization of science is sometimes defended by scientists living under Capitalism. A biographer of Leo Szilard informs us that Szilard “helped debunk the myth of scientific ‘objectivity’ and the notion that scientists should shun politics.”26 It is true that, in the same breath, the biographer quotes Szilard’s claim to pursue truth: “‘Truthfulness’ was, and alI was striving Presumably Szilard could dialectically ways remained, what solve the problem of not believing in objectively ascertainable truth yet believing

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that truth can be all the same scientifically pursued. Scientific truth for Szilard was perhaps situational, dependent o n concrete historical (social, political, etc.) conditions-as Fascist professor Gentile, Lenin, and others have insisted. It is also true that thebiographer who communicates thesefacts to us is described by a sympathetic reviewer as full of “fairness” to his subject matter-Leo Szilard.’* One may wonder, again, how the biographer can be “fair” to his subject if objectivity is supposed to be impossible.

MARXISM AND NON-INDMDUALIST ACADEMIC FEMINISM AND ‘WOMEN STUDIES” Marxism and non-individualist academic feminism stand in an isomorphic relation. The words of a leading feminist philosopher of science illustrate the Marxist configuration of this academically dominant form of “women studies”: [Despite] the deeply ingrained Western cu!tural belief in science’s intrinsic progressiveness, science today serves primarily regressive social tendencies. Its ways of constructing [notice how, asin Marxism, science is said to “construct” meaning: science does not discover “truth,” it merely concocts its own] and conferring [same maneuver here: science is declared to engage in a power act that grants rather than “discovers” meanings] meanings are not only sexist but also racist, classicist, and culturally coercive. ...It is movements for social liberation that have most increased the objectivity of science, not the norms [again the same maneuver: norms, “rules,” which are culturally or socially developed, determine so-called “scientific” truth] of science as they have been practiced [again, the importance of “practice” in the determination of so-called “truth” is as philosophers have rationally constructed them.z9

So the question is not whether scienceis shackled by politics (as Marxism teaches, it is shackled by politics as a matter of course), but, in Marxism, the question is how to shackle science withthe correct politics. And again, as in Marxism, to make science really good, andtherefore really true, one must change the politically (hegemonically) determined social norms within which science operates. Likewise, the idea expressed by the “leading feminist philosopher of science” (according to which most Western science has been traditionally “coercive”) has been the Communist Party Line in the socialist countries for generations.As Li-Zhi notes, “Almost all of the great physicists from Newton to Einstein have been characterized by Communist dictators as members of the bourgeoisie whose contributions are ‘bourgeois spiritualpollutants’ ” [original emphasis].30 Non-individualist feminism and Marxism are structurally similar. As used by many feminists, the word “male” (“patriarchal”) functions as a code word for old materialist war-horses: “the ‘‘bourgeois,’’the “bourgeoisie,” and “Capitalism.”Seemingly unaware that what they say has already been said many times, and possibly said better, by socialist professors in Europe and elsewhere, American feminist professors continue to reiterate materialist teachings dating back to Marx and taught for generations in the socialist countries. Under the guise of a “Gender” philosophy and

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history of science, they are presentedas something new when in fact they constitute strikingly comprehensive replications of Marxist theories. The feminist mimicking is ultimately predicated on a transfer of the Marxist historicizing teaching accordingto which the scientific method is merely theproduct of the hegemony of a particular class and therefore questionable as a procedure for ascertaining truth valid for all historical conditions. Feminist “theory” merely replaces the notion of class with that of sex (or “gender,” as puritan feminists prefer, in order to devaluethebiologicalimplicationsof the word “sex” in favor of theword “gender,” which can more easily be made to depend on“social practice” rather than on the dreaded genes). So where Marxism spoke of a “proletarian science” with its own peculiar methods and priorities, feminism unoriginally speaks of a “feminist science.” Therefore, some feminists attack the sciences for “overvaluing systematic knowledge, such as the information obtained in l a b ~ r a t o r i e s , ”while ~ ~ othersdemand a “female-friendly ~cience.”~’ These writings sometimes mimic quite accurately the materialist positions of Lysenko and Stalin on the politically conditioned nature of science: Many biologists do not see the connection between the Victorian, capitalistic, industrial British society in which Darwin lived and his description of the natural world as competitive and hierarchical.[Exasperated,scientistPaul Gross comments at this point: “As if the natural world is not competitive and hierarchical and everyone or almost everyone except biologists knows it!”] [Rlecognizing the influence of the androcentric perspective ...is doubly difficult for the scientists. Fee ...Harraway. ..Hein ...and Keller ...have described the specific ways in which the very objectivity said to be characteristic of scientific knowledge and the whole dichotomy between subject and object are, in fact, male ways of relating to the world, which specifically exclude women.33 With their contemporary makeup removed, the fundamentals of the nonindividualist version of feminism and “women studies” turn out to be those developed by bearded, middle-class,white paterfamilias in nineteenth-century Germany.34

EVERYTHING IS ULTIMATELY A FICTION, A LIE The materialist goal of promoting the idea that scientific truth (like all truth) is subordinatedto(and“shaped,”“constructed,”“configured,”“generated,”“fashioned,”etc., by) collective (“social,” “community,” “cultural,”etc.) rules (“practice,” “standards,” etc.), andtherefore by power configurations, is being increasingly helped by the strategy of promoting the idea that science is constructed by rhetoric. Why? Because certain features of rhetoric are those employed by materialism to define truth as ultimately arbitrary and therefore subject to collective (social, community, cultural, etc.) “practice,”“rules,”and so on.Forexample,rhetoric is a “rule”-bound and“practice”-oriented discipline;and itdoes not particularly concern itself with truth but rather with persuasion-that is, with imposing (here come into

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play such characteristically authoritarian Marxist concepts as hegemony, power, etc.) a particular view upon the listener or reader. The next logical step in the belittling of science has beento proclaim that science is really literature and therefore (goes the reasoning) nothing but fiction-that is, a lie. Linking science with rhetoric and literature (and thus with practice and other such factors that help relativize truth) is the latest fashion among professors in the humanities. It serves as an effective way to undermine (“demythologize”) science and the scientific approach andtherefore neutralize one of materialism’s most feared enemies: the scientific method, whose empirical component the Marxist historical record simply cannot withstand. A new journal on the subject describes its Marxist conception of science: Multiple discursive communities affectthe way that scientific knowledge is disseminatedand shape the practices and languageof literature, science, technology, and medicine. Science and technology are in turn cultural, social, and embodied practices. The title Conjgurutions suggests the importance of this ongoing “configuring’or shaping. While configuring is typically theoretical, mathematical, literary, rhetorical, and tropological, Configurutionswill affirmthat configuring can also be visual, graphic, geometrical, instrumental, material, and emb~died.’~ In fact, separating science from literature (rhetoric) is now recognized among the more sophisticated professors as a naive mistake: White, like most people arguing this way. ..,separates literature from science. That’s the mistake. ...They ...fail to see the rhetoric of science itself.The result is that they fail to see the unity of the culture. ...[It is not true that] there is a separate thing called Science, with its well-known Scientific Method, involving numbers and lab-coats andso forth.36 For materialist discourse, even getting words right when presenting a presumably scientific discovery is not supposed to be a matter of individual “genius” but rather HISTORICALLY (socially, culturally, politically, etc.) conditioned. Again, it cannot be otherwise, since materialist discourse teaches that every self is but a collectively socialized self. One surreptitious effect of all these practices is to do away with the idea of “author” and therefore, in agreement with materialist goals, with the implications of the idea of “author” for such basic Capitalist concepts as private property rights. The idea of author is then replaced with collective, non-individual, public, suprapersonal and even impersonal entities. The trick of relativizing things by means of a “historicizing” maneuver based on to every realm of knowledge. Take Readerthe collectivist vision can be applied Response criticism in literary studies. Sharing with materialist discourse a belief in the existence of an “interpretive community” with assumptions and conventions that “guide”(or“construct,”“shape,”“fashion,”etc.)interpretations,ReaderResponse’s now most popular variant falls squarely withinthe realm of the materialist approach to kn~wledge.~’ From an initially individualistic approach,much o f h e r -

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ican academic Reader-Response criticism has reverted to the standard oldcollectivist approaches of Marxism-thereby simplifying Reader-Response into merely society’s response. Materialist discourse often absorbs and hegemonizes effortlessly an alien discourse. Perhaps unknowingly, American professors have thus modified a form of Reception-Aesthetics precisely along the lines suggested by German Marxist academicians in former East Germany. Marxist relativization works equally well in the study of civilizations-or rather “cultures,” as materialist discourse prefers: A l l cultures should be considered equally “valid.” (The word “good” is avoided, for it introduces such undesirable, because “. Judgmental” and therefore-in self-exception-bud, categories as “bad,” “good,” “better,” and“worse”). It is undesirable, for example,to regard the life of the Congo Pygmies or of the Plains Indiansas less desirable than, say, that of their contemporary Europeans. But whetherthis relativization shouldalso hold that the cultures of Soviet Marxism or of German National Socialism make a Gulag guard or an SS guard merely a representative of his respective culture at a given point in time and place (HISTORY), and therefore deserving of universal appreciation, has not been yet clarified. Nor has been clarified the case of cultures which, like Islam in its sacred book the Koran, postulate women as love slaves in theafterlife (the huries);or which, like some African cultures, teachthe necessity of cliterectomies, yet are fully entitled to the respect that we must reserve for all cultures-since they are all equally valid. One possible answer to this interesting, but for some reason seldom discussed, dilemma might be that the flexibility of materialist discourse allows for selective exceptions to the teaching that “all cultures are equally valid.”This flexibility could explain why, for example, the martial civilization of the Aztecs, with its ceremonial wars to capture slaves and prisoners for its colossal hecatombes, or the warrior cultures of the Plains Indians, with their mutual and endemic pillaging, enslaving, and ritualistic killings and torture, can be regarded as culturally valid and worthy of respect-while the superior (because eventuallytriumphant) war-making capabilities of the Europeansettlers and the conquistudores, or the Spanish Inquisition’s burning of heretics for the presumably ethical purpose of saving their souls, can remain historically unacceptable. A less kind explanation for this characteristic exceptionalism has been given by novelist and screenwriter Fred Halliday in his account of the horriblepractices that in fact pervaded the New Worlds so-called paradise before the advent of the Europeans:

One of the reasons the truth is so hard to get at these days is that we have just crossed over into the era of censorship in American schools. Truth is being systematically scrubbed from the textbooks and wheeled and dealed. Schools are being controlled by politicians and by those who speak to politicians. At the same time, teachers who are well-read and who have not been successfully bribed with concerns for their own tenureand retirement are becoming a rare and almost extinct species.38

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THE GREAT BOOKS AS POLITICAL “CONSTRUCTS” Adopting the representative argument of a famous Reader-Response professor, one can say that the Great Books’ standards of worth are not standards for all time and everywhere.39 Standards vary with changes in political power (or in M a c k as National Socialist professors wrotein thecourse of makingthe same political powerMoreover, the Great Books’ stanbased argument during the 1930s and 1940~).~O dards are set by the Great Books themselves. No wonder that the Great Books are supposed to be “Great”! In other words, Great Books are great because Great Books say they are, not because their qualities are great for all time and everywhere. As socialist and Fascist professors also agreed, so-called Greatness is inseparable from political factors: Allstandards are politically conditioned-likeeverything else. In fact, the Great Books are great only because they have been declared so by the defenders of the Great Books; and these defenders, up to now, have controlled (hegemonized, etc.) themainorgansofculturalvalidation:the universities. Butwhen power changes-when groups of professors “democratically” seize control of power within academia, then other standards are developed and different Great Books come into being. N o wonder older teachers are upset. They arelike the organizers of the coup against Gorbachev: They want to preserve the old order that is crumbling around them.4’ Therefore, the new great books may now range from Superman comics to a great, but up to now unhailed, writer who, say, defends blacks, homosexuals, women, animals, the earth, and so on, against imperialist, Capitalist, white, male, and other oppressions. The above argument is structurally Marxist.It is identical to the reasoning mechanism in Trotsky‘s sneering dismissal ofKautsky‘s passionate defense of democratic standards and practice^.^' These standards and practices, Trotsky cackled, are HISTORICALLY conditioned (notice that using the word “practices” grants Trotsky an immediate advantage, because it suggests the historical relativity of the referent he is trying to undermine). Like all standards, they are not somewhere “out there” independently of HISTORICAL (political, social, cultural, economic, and therefore ideological) factors. Standards vary with these factors. Therefore, there is no justification for setting these factors. Therefore, there is no justification for setting these standards and practices above some alternative ones. Democracy (at least as understood by a watered-downsocialist like Kautsky, whose oncepolitically correct views had been corrupted by classical, liberal bourgeois ideas) has no more reason (independent of HISTORICAL factors) to be respected than non-democracy or, even better, than true democracy (that is, democracy as defined by Trotsky and his fellow Marxists: cf. the Humpty Dumpty defense): The dictatorship [of the proletariat] is necessary because it is a case ...of the very existence of the bourgeoisie. No agreement is possible on this ground. Only force can be the deciding factor. ...The principles of democracy-the sovereignty of the people, universal and equal suffrage, personal liberties-appear, as presented to him [Kautsky], in a halo of moral duty.

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as unalterable and sacred thingsThey are turned from their historical meaning and presented in-themselves. ...That real democracy [that espoused by the German Communists] with which the German people is now making practical acquaintance Kautsky confronts with a kind of ideal democracy, as he would confront a common phenomenon with the thing-initself. ...The doctrine of formal democracy is not scientific Socialism, but the theory of socallednaturallaw. The essence of the latterconsistsin the recognitionofeternal and unchanging standards of law, which among different peoplesand at different periods find a different, more or less limited and distorted expression. ...The theoretical apostasy of Kautsky lies just in this point: having recognized the principle of democracy as absolute and eternal, he has stepped back from materialist dialectics to natural law. That which was exposed by Marxism as the passing mechanism of the bourgeoisie, and was subjected only to temporary utilization [by the Communists] with the object of preparing the proletarian revolution, has been newly sanctified by Kautsky as the supreme principle standing above classes, and unconditionally subordinating to itself the methods of the proletarian struggle.43 In order to neutralize the dangerous belief in bourgeois democracyas a universally desirable goal (for this ideal, every intelligent Marxist has realized, is the worst enemy-as HISTORICAL events since 1989 have confirmed), Trotsky puts it in its place by asserting the hirtoricity of the belief, and therefore its relativity,with respect to “concrete” historical (political, social, cultural,etc.) conditions. In doingso, Trotsky applies a principle articulated repeatedlyby practitioners of materialist discourse everywhere-curiously and anti-materialistically independent of their own “culture” and historical position in time and place. In other words, the “historically” relativizing principle surreptitiously and tacitly becomes auniversal axiom seeminglyindependent of the very HISTORY relentlessly invoked by the axiom itself. But then Marxist principles, unlike thoseof the Others, are usually and for some unexplainedreason universally true, notsubject to historical conditions. That Marxist principles can be miraculously applied in widely different historical conditions can be seen even more easily by comparing assertions of intelligent and learned practitioners of materialist discourse widely separated by time and space. Thus, a famousliterature and law professor,writingin 1980 America, dutifully insists, like Trotsky in the 1920s in Russia, on the need for a “sociopolitically effective inquiry into the historicity of literature, culture, and society.”**The professor’s words, like thoseof Trotsky in a muchearlier and quitedifferent historical juncture, dutifully repeat one of the CommunistParty Lines of defense against “triumphalist” Capitalism in the late 1980s: One must reject, as the professor puts it, “bourgeois ideological dogmatism that proclaims capitalism as the final goal of human society, civilization and progress.” Trotsky’s“contextualistic” or “historicizing’argumentagainstthedemocratic ideal of watered-down socialist Kautsky is no different from the“sneering argument” used by some progressive American academicians against the so-called “standards” Books of the Great Books. For the sneering argument amounts to putting the Great in their place by stating that alleged standards of literary greatness are merely the

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historically conditioned standardsof whatever political group is in power at a particular historical moment. This common belief in practice (history, power, domination, hegemony and so on) as the ultimate arbiter of what is good or bad or true or false (“Only force can be the deciding factor,” as Trotsky said) coheres perfectly with the common authoritarianism that allies materialist discoursewith bothFascism and some oftoday’s more fashionable academic discourses. In a very real way, a contextualist epistemology (cf. the equating of science to rhetoric-with its disengagement from absolute standards of truth and its emphasis on merely imposing on the reader or listener a particular line) leads not only historically but also logically to coercion, authoritarianism, and the totalitarian state. This approach to knowledge coheres, too,with the authoritarian remarks attributed (but later denied by the academician) to an eminent professorat Duke University who represents as well as anyotherthe“sneering argument” against the Great Books. His denied remarks, nonetheless, jibe with the professor’s avowed epistemological views, which do not differ from those of academicians in Fascist and socialist countries-as shown not so much by his membership in the socialist-dominated Santa Monica City Council, as by his emphasis on the decisive epistemological role played by the Marxist-Leninist notions ofpractice and

ideology:

[Elach chapter finally reduces to the argument in which the troubles and benefits of interpretive theory are made to disappear in the solvent of an enriched notion of practice. ...One cannot understand an utterance without at the same time hearing or reading it as the utterance of someone with more or less specific concerns, interests, and desires, someone with an intenti~n.*~ Here this practitioner of “Reader-Response criticism” is not so much following J. L. Austin’s ideas on “speech acts”as he is restating the axioms of Marxist criticism: There are no absolutes (except, of course, for this very assertion and other similarly progressive ones); “truth” is determined by practice, social or cultural rules, and so forth (and therefore by HISTORY); and whatever a bourgeois (male, white, humanist, etc.) thinker “argues” must be analyzed not so much for the validity of the arguments or their fidelityto thefacts, but for the benefits the purported “argument” brings to the bourgeois(his interests). This procedure“unmasks”thehegemonic “intentions” of the oppressive classes and furthers human liberation by means of a Marxist-inspired and academically fashionable hermeneutics of suspicion. This “epistemology” cannot but dismiss such a naive idea as the “freedom of the mind” which, George Orwell wrote, “can only happen if the concept of right and wrong is restored to p o l i t i ~ s . ”Therefore, ~~ it cannot but dismiss, too, the idea of universal moral values, since any utterance about values, like any other utterance, must be studied not for the validity of its arguments or the truth of its assertions but rather as a disguised tool of the interests of the speaker or writer. Of course this materialist belief has had consequences. As an otherwise sympa-

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thetic critic of M a n has reminded us, “The concept of ‘universal moralvalues’ has only belatedly entered the vocabularies of some formerly communist societies, now in the throes of redefining their ethos. Rejection of individual moral absolutes on the ground that such virtues were bourgeois and a sham was one the more treacherous legacies of Marx’s philo~ophy.”~’ But the polylogistic epistemologythat provides the foundation ofthis philosophy is today practiced in the Western university by mild-mannered as well as wild-eyed academicians. This anti-objectivist philosophical basis of both Fascism and Marxism has permeated the thought of even brilliant thinkers like the later Ludwig Wittgenstein, who argued that “any attempt to understand reason, mathematics, language, law, etc. solely in terms of articulated, universal rules must break down as soon as application of rules to particular Like one raises the question of the Fascist professor Gentile, Bolshevik leader Lenin,and the teachers of materialismin the former socialist countries, Professor Wittgenstein argued that so-called reason and its so-called discoveriesare ultimately a question not of universal principlesbut of particular rules in “concrete” situations and therefore changeable. Wittgenstein taught that “justification or proof, or in general a reliance on evidence and reasons, is funded by the actions of believers and that there is no further funding.”*’ That is, he believed that people’s practice, and therefore people’s action, is the ultimate epistemological foundation of any presumed reasoning or argumentation. Understanding anything is thus reduced to understanding particular (“concrete”) situations, particular (“concrete”) “speech communities,” particular (“concrete”) cultures, and so on. Meaning must be sought in practice, action, and so on. This “historical” approach must be distinguished from the historical approach of classical historicism, with its careful attention to context in order to understand a historical event. The classical approach involved abelief in the possibility of a greater of the honest scholar or lesser degree of value-free judgment (Wer@eibeit)on the part who tries to understand even when he does not approve. But for Marxism and Fascism, Wereeibeit is not only impossible but itself an “interested” or self-serving notion.

“TOUT EST REXATIF” (AUGUSTE COMTE) Soviet professors once made clear the politically correct use of terms like “historicity,” “politics,” “domination,” and “practice”-as words calling attention to the historical conditionality of reason and, therefore, of such products of reason as economics, science,and theidea ofjustice. Thus, aformerly eminent Soviet academician wrote: [Tlhe political ideology of a class seeks to prove the necessity of the social system of which that class is the bearer. Thus, bourgeois ideology seeks to prove the necessityof the capitalist for the mode of production, maintaining that capitalist production relations are rational, bourgeoisie has a vital role in them. Accordingly, the working class upholds the necessity of the communist modeof prod~ction.~’

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Again, truth is “concrete,” a matter of “practice”-as Lenin pointed out. It is therefore flexible because “practice” and its “rules” are in turn dependent on domination (hegemony, power, authority, etc.): each dominant (hegemonic, etc.) class (group, gender, etc.) pretends that its standards of “truth” or of “excellence” or of whatever arethe right ones. In fact, all standards reflect merely dominant (hegemonic, etc.) “ideology” (“false” or “self-interested consciousness”). Such is the case with the Great Books. Therefore, the standards associated with them are subject to change and will be changed, no matter the resistance of reactionary professors. For history is on the side of progressive academic reformers-as Marx teaches that it is on the side of progressive people everywhere. It might, of course, be argued in favor of the objective greatness of the Great Books that even Marx wondered why, if values are relative to historical factors, the Great Books of the Greeks still appeal to us, although historical conditions have drastically changed sincethe timeof the Greeks. Butas a modern Western materialist professor cleverly retorts, “How dowe know that [Greek Art] will remain ‘eternally’ charming, since history has not yet ended?”51 The professor’s answer draws upon one of the standard discursive defenses of Marxism, Hope that Springs Eternal: Since not every country has tried Marxism at every time until the end of history, how do we know that it will not work out some time or other? The professor continues: Suppose thatwe find out eventually that what Greek Artreally meant for the Greeks is extremely remote from our concerns. W e may then conceivably cease to enjoy Greek Art upon realizing thatwe like it only because we read our own interests into it. In other words, one must wait for the f i t w e judgment of HISTORY whenever the present judgment of HISTORY belies the assertions of materialist discourse. This last “argument” is a direct application of the fundamental Denial defense.

NOTES I.“Here’s how it works: About 100 yards out, picture yourself walking up to the trafficsignal pole, putting your arms around it and pushing the button for a walk signal. ...Out loud, say, ‘I walk up to the pole. I put my arms around the pole. And I push the button in.’ Also, Morrissey said, it doesn’t matter which walk button your mind reaches for. ‘Don’t get so analytical:Am I at the front right pole or the back right pole? You can just imagine yourself Chicago at all four of them.’ ” Rickey Young,“With this technique, motorists won’t see red,” Tribune (reproduced from the Orange County Register),7 March 1993, Section 17, p. N. 2. K a r l Marx, Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859). 3. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Manifesto o f t h e Communist Party (1848). 4. Cf. The collectively written work Marxist-Leninist Aesthetics and the Arts (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1980). 5.StefanMorawskiinLeeBaxandallandStefanMorawski,eds., Marx alzd Engels on Literature and Art (St. Louis/Milwaukee: Telos Press,1973), 6. 6. Baxandall and Morawski, eds., Marx and Engels on Literature andArt, 6. 7. Terry Eagleton, Marxism and Literary Criticism (London: Methuen, 1976), 74. 8. Engels’ letter to Lassalle, 18 May 1859, in Baxandall and Morawski, eds., Marx and Engels on Literature andArt, 108-10.

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9. Terry Eagleton, Criticism andIdeology (London: Verso, 1978), 184-85. 10. Usually called “socioeconomic formation,” since society (and economics) “construct” (shape, etc.) class ideology. See, for example, F. V. Konstantinov et al., The Fundamentals of Marxist-Leninist Philosophy (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1982). 239-41. 11. Fredric Jameson, The Prison-House ofLanguage: A CriticalAccount ofStructuralism and Russian Formalism (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1972), 182. 12. Z.Berbeshkina, L. Yakovleva, andD. Zerkin, What is HistoricalMaterialism?(Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1987), 195. 13. Baxandall and Morawski, Marx and Engels on Literature and Art, 1. 14. V. I. Lenin, “The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism,”Collected Works, vol. 19 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), 23. 15. Robert Hughes, “The Fraying of America,” Time, 3 February 1992, p. 47. 16. Antony Flew, Thinking About Social Thinking (London: Blackwell, 1985);J. G. Merquior, “For the Sake of the Whole,” Criticul Review (Summer 1990): 301-25. 17. This often hidden connection between the sociology of knowledge and Marxism has also been pointed out by J. G. Merquior, “For the Sakeof the Whole,” 301-25. 18. Terry Eagleton, Literary Theovy (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983), 207-8. 19. Giovanni Gentile, Genesis and Structure of Society, trans. H. S. Harris (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1960), 177. 20. Terry Eastland, “Booby Prize,” The American Spectator (June 1992): 43. 21. Mickey Kaus, The End ofEquality (New York: Basic Books, 1992). See my chapter 4. 22. Fang Li-Zhi,“The Sidney Hook Memorial Award Address: Breaking Down Ideological Barriers Through Free Research,”Academic Questions (Summer 1992): 73. 23. Charles Bazerman, Shaping Written Knowledge: The Genre and Activity of theExperimentalArticle in Science (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1988), 149. 24. Richard Rorry, in a speech to the American Council of Learned Societies, cited by Stephen Cox, “Assumptions o f Power,’’ Renson (March 1993): 36. 25. Berbeshkina et al., What is HistoricalMateriulism?, 15-16. 26. According to Andrew Szanton, “Man behind the bomb: Leo Szilard: Physicist, biologist and politicalgadfly,” Chicago Tribune, 21 February1993,Section14, reviewofWilliam Lanouette, with Bela Szilard, Genius in the Shadows: A Biography of Leo Szilard (New York: Scribner’s, 1993). 27. Szanton, “Man behind the bomb.” 28.Ibid. 29. Sandra Harding, The Science Question in Feminism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell UP, 1986), 9, cited in Paul R. Gross, “On the ‘Gendering’ of Science,” Academic Questions 5, no. 2 (Spring 1992): 10-11. 30. Fang Li-Zhi, “The Sidney Hook Memorial Award Address,” 73. ZlliberalEducation 31. Harvard biology professor Ruth Hubbard, cited in Dinesh D’Souza, (New York: The Free Press, 1991), 207. 32. Sue V. Rosser, who among other recommendations includes formulating hypotheses of qualitative and quantitative methods in data focusing on gender; using a combination gatherings; encouraging the development of hypotheses that are relational, interdependent, and multicausalrather than hierarchical,reductionist, and dualistic;decreasinglaboratory exercises in which students kill animals or use harsh treatment; doingfewer experiments that directly benefit the American military; doing more experiments to explore problems of “social concern” (social concern as defined by the collectivist feminists, of course); and encouraging the study of biases. See “CETL Forum Report: Female-Friendly Science,” Teaching at UIC

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2, no. 1 (1993): 4. Some of these approaches are of course used by scientists anyway. Others, however, are peculiarto the feminist approach. 33. Sue V. Rosser, Teaching Science and Health from a Feminist Perspective (New York: Pergamon Press, Inc., 1986), 5, cited in Paul Gross, “On the ‘Gendering’ of Science,” 11. 34. For a different kind of feminism (Libertarian or Individualist) see Wendy McElroy, ed., Freedom, Feminism, and the State (Washington, D.C.: CATO, 1982). Individualist femRechiming the Mainstream: Individualist Feminism variously informs Joan Kennedy Taylor, inism Rediscovered (Buffalo:Prometheus,1992);ChristinaHoffSommers, Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994); Katie Roiphe, The Morning Ajier: Sex, Fear and Feminism on Campus (New York: Little, Brown & Co., 1993); Camille Paglia, Sex, Art, andAmerican Culture (New York: Vintage, 1992). 35. A 1992 brochure advertisingConfigurations:A Journal of Literature, Science and Technology, the official organ of the Society of Literature and Science. 36. Donald McCloskey, “The Essential Rhetoric of Law, Literature and Liberty,” Critical Review 5, no. 2 (Spring 1991): 219. 37. Cf. for example the ideas of Stanley Fish. See J. Ellis,AgainstDeconst~ction(Princeton: Princeton UP, 1989), 121, n.6. 38. Fred Halliday, “Columbus: An American Savior,” Penthouse (October 1992): 83-85. 39. Professor Stanley Fish during the “Firing Line” rerun program, 10 September 1991, WTTW, Chicago. 40. For the National Socialist writingson culture being a matter of domination (racialfor them) and political power (Mach), see Walther Hofer, ed., Der Nationalsozialismus: Dokumente 1733-1745 (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1957). 41. This analogy wasactuallyusedbyProfessorStanleyFishduringthe“FiringLine” rerun program, 10 September 1991, W T T W , Chicago. 42. Leon Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism (Ann Arbor: The U of Michigan P, 1963), 19, 37. 43. Ibid., 20, 21, 37, 38, 44. Dominick LaCapra, Soundings in Critical Theory (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell UP, 1989), 92. 45. Stanley Fish,Doing What Comes Natural&: Change, Rhetoric,and the Practice o f Theory in LiterayandLegalStudies (Durham, N.C.: Duke UP,1989), ix, 100. 46. Review of F. A. Hayek‘s The Road to &$doom, published in Observer, 9 April 1944, and collected in George Orwell, As I Please: 1943-1945,ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968), 119. 47. Professor Frank E. Manuel, “A Requiem for Karl Man,” Daedalus (Spring 1992): 17. 48. McCloskey, “The Essential Rhetoric of Law, Literature, and Liberty,” 210. 49. R. W. Newell, Objectivity, Empiricism and Truth (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986), 78. 50. Berbeshkina et al., What is Historical Materialism?, 151. 51. Eagleton, LiteraryTheory, 12.

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ChapterThree

The Pursuit of Power [As] with any other social element, the elements making up the liberal discourse never appear as crystallized, andmay be the field of hegemonic struggle. It is not in the abandonment of the democratic terrain but, on the contrary, in the extension of the field of democratic struggles to the whole ofcivil societyandthe state, thatthe possibility resides for a hegemonic strategy of the Left. “Professors Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony C Socialist Strategy

“The first thing you must realize is thatpower is collective. The individual only has power in so far a s he ceases to be an individual.” “O’Brien to Winston in George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

THE NOTION OF “HEGEMONY” Contemporary academicians’ obsessionwith the question of “power”-hegemony, domination, authority, and so forth-illustrates the fact that whoever looks for too long at things from a Marxist viewpoint sooneror later ends up asking the question: Who holds the power? (Thus, reputedly, Stalin, who knew his Marx well, said: “How many divisions does the Pope have?”) Marxism’s power-based view of the world appears sooner or later in practically every materialist text-even in those describing physical phenomena. Take, for instance,atextfrom the man behind the MarxistRevolution in China, the very intelligent and well-read poet Mao-now considered responsible for the death of more than 40 million Chinese and once upon a time highly esteemed by many

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Western academicians and journalists:’ “At the moment when the new aspect has won the dominantposition over the old aspect, the quality of the old thing changes into the quality of the new thing. Thus the quality of a thing is mainly determined by the principal aspect of the contradiction that has won the dominant position.”’ This representative piece of materialist thought repeats a formula reiterated from Marx and Engels down to academic Marxists in the twentieth century. Translated into normal language, it means simply that the nature of anything is but the result of what dominates what (Mao’s meaning is obscured in part by the persistence in Marxism of the Hegelian practice of usingthe word “contradiction” in the sense of “opposition” and of loosely speaking of “contradictions” not only in language but also in the non-verbal world).3 The principle of power (authority, hegemony, etc.) as the key to understanding social phenomena is old in the Western intellectual tradition. But it remained marginalized (cf. the fate of Thrasymachus at the hands of Socrates in Plato’s Republic) until Nietzsche and Marxist and Fascist discourses rescued it from the fringes of Western thought, thereby investing it with a renewed credibility. It implies a philosophical position to which some mild-mannered academicians would not consciously subscribe,but which others would find difficult to reject even if aware of the implications: By asserting the supreme fact of domination and the universal existence of political power-seeking, materialist discourse serves the cause to political of anygroup (including its own) claiming to demonstrateby force its right hegemony-no matter howwell that right triesto conceal itself behind social-benefit or humanistic allegations. This was, in fact,the position taken by the winningfaction among the revolutionary intellectual elites in Russia: The Bolsheviks claimed that History was on their sidebecause they had won. Later, Trotsky would remain faithful to this materialist teachingeven when complaining aboutbeing a victimof repression in the conflict with Stalin.* Victory in the struggle for political power(Mach, in National Socialist language) is enough. A factual consequence of this materialist principle of political power grabbing (adopted thoroughly by Fascist and National Socialist thinkers-cf. the National Socialists’ Machterpezjikng) has been that materialist discourse, like Fascist and National Socialist discourses, really needs no logical or ethical excuse for its discursive imperialism: If the hegemonic struggle is one of the things that inform the march of history, then the hegemonic orientation of the discourse requires no apology. Thus, again, what begins as a presumably realistic description of the way things really are, surreptitiously turns into a prescription for the way things should be. George Orwell laid bare the materialist reasoning in the fictional world of Ingsoc (“Inglish Socialism”): “The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake,” the intellectual O’Brien tells Winston in a scene redolent of a talk between a knowledgeable professor and a naive student: “We are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness; only power, pure power. ...Power is not a means; ~ his talk about the “Party,” it is an end. ...The object of power is p ~ w e r . ”In O’Brien is not misrepresenting materialist teachings. Marxism does teachthat strug-

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gling to achieve hegemony is the ultimate motivation for anyone trying to do anything. It is a universal social principle. The Marxist teaching of the “class struggle” rests on it. Thus, it must be understood and applied if a materialist-oriented academician is to get to the bottom of whatever he examines. Under the humanistic cloak of a disinterested search for knowledge, Marxism carries on a surreptitious love affair with hegemony. Practitioners of materialist discourse are into domination: Fondly recalling his heady days of 1968, when, as a student, he helped shut down Columbia University, a history professor nostalgically muses that “The moment we had there, the power we felt ...has to be recovered.” This academician can hardly wait to experience again that heady feeling of power.6 Explaining the work of a colleague, another professor chooses a revealing image: “The readers have now overthrown the bosses and installed themselves in power.”’ Restating these standard longings in a book published by a prestigious university press, two other mild-manneredAmerican academicians give the longings an equally standard philosophical formulation by declaring that epistemology itself is but a matter of power, and exploitation something that everyone practices.’ For Dante, “Love moves the sun and the other stars” (Paradiso XXXIII, 145). For materialist professors, Power does the moving. This authoritarian perspective sneaks out in the most mild-mannered professors, for whom even logical standards of validity and truth depend on hegemony-on who dominates whom.For example, ProfessorHerbert Marcuse’s opinion, standard among practitioners of materialist discourse, is that “The general concept that discursive logic developed has its foundations on the reality of domination.”’ (Yet A Freudian elsewhere Professor Marcuse criticizes theauthoritarianpersonality: would say that this criticism reveals in Marcuse the Dr. Goodvibes of the “Kudzu” cartoons.)”

THE ELITISM OF THE MATERIALIST PROFESSORS That Professor Marcuse’s “humanistic” stance hides a fundamental elitism has been noticed byone of hispeers in former socialistRussia, eminent Marxist professor Yuri Barabash, who calls attention to the fact that the index of Marcuse’s famous like book One-Dimensional Man shows that his favorite authors are exquisite writers Paul Valkry, Stefan George, Charles Baudelaire,and Rainer Maria Rilke, rather than more down-to-earth authors like Zola, Heine, or Thomas Mann.” For Professor Marcuse, “socialism” is obviously something that “ought [original emphasis] to be.”” Unfortunately, Marcuse laments that, somehow contrary to what Marx taught, Capitalism “delivers the goods to ever anlarger part of the population.” As a result, the masses do not want, nor are interested in, the socialist revolution. Therefore, “those minorities [enlightened by Marxism] which strive for change in the whole ...will be left harmless and helpless in the face of the overwhelming majority, which militates against qualitative social change. The majority is firmly grounded in the increasing satisfaction of needs.”Thus, Marcuse offers a politically

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correct solution to this problem: Establishing “the dictatorship of an elite [of which eminent Professor Marcuse will undoubtedly be part] over the people.” This elitist principle has been part of Marxism fromthe very beginning. Compare the Communist Manifesto’s defense of the leading elite-the Communists-who are over the and must be a “vanguard” because they enjoy an epistemological advantage proletariat. The principle is never far from the consciousness of materialist professors. A British academician plays a common variation upon it: Radical workers and intelligentsia should not be afraid to regard themselves as a vanguard, and should not lack the courage to insist on a vision of society-a positive conception of a truly human life-which does not correspond to the only one prevailing in our intellectually and emotionally drugged capitalist mass culture. And if the situation ever becomes ripe for this vanguard to translate such a vision of society into a social reality, they must not hold back from such a translation because they fear imparting or inculcating, through structural means, a setof values that some plain, but manipulated men, wouldnot in their ideologically drugged state choose. ...This may sound-brought up as we have been in a liberal ethos [anathema to Marxists]-like an invitation to tyranny, but if it is done with integrity and with a full commitment to socialist and indeed egalitarian values, this must not and indeed will not be Flew laments that this professor “never gives a moment’s thought to constitutional checks and balances, the institutional separation of powers, accountability to an ele~torate.”’~ But then Flew realizes his own lack of sophistication: “All such worldly wise and Whiggish concerns are, no doubt, expressions of an ‘ideologically drugged state-product of masterful manipulations by the unspeakable bourgeois.” Practical revolutionaries express this materialist elitism no less forcefully than do mild-mannered academicians. Eminent leader Che Guevara, speaking of the vanguards constitutedby the communists,was equally eloquent on the need for the best minds to lead the populace to the Radiant Future: [Such vanguards] are qualitatively different from the masses who see only by halves and must be subjected to incentives and pressures of some intensity [Trotsky‘s ‘‘compulsion’’]: it is the dictatorship of the proletariat being exercisednot only upon the defeated class but also individually upon the victorious class....[Institutions are needed] to permit the natural selection of those who are destined to march in the vanguard and who dispense rewards and punishments to those who fulfill their duty or act against the society under constr~ction.’~

As Flew notices, “In the Newspeak of established Leninism, the technical expression for these arrangements is ‘democratic socialism.’ ” l 6 But co-opting the word “democracy” is a relatively recent phenomenon in materialist discourse. During the early years of the Age of High Marxism, even Trotsky despised the term. Now, however, even central planning is called “democratic centralism.”” Another idea similarly grounded inMarxist teachings buttresses materialist elitism: The masses have been thoroughly stupefied by their oppressors, and therefore only academic practitionersof materialist discourse (who,because they are for some unex-

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plained reason superior, are relatively immune to the oppressors’tricks and can therefore learn materialist discourse despitethe oppressors’ effortsto stop them) can show the masses how wretched they really are. This idea is part of the progressive professors’ discursive arsenal. Marcuse, for example, realized that the masses are not interested in the socialist revolution because “the subjective need is repressed ... firstly by virtueof the actual satisfactionof needs, and secondly by massive a scientific manipulation and administration of needs.’”’ This sort of reasoning justified, too, the non-ironic recommendation made to the East German Communist Party by the notorious Stalinist and darling of many Western drama professors, Bertolt Brecht: “In June 1954, when the workers of East Berlin went on strike and poured into the streets to protest low wages and high prices, the East German communist party announced that the people had not justified the confidence placed in them by the to dissolve the people and party. Bertolt Brecht wrote a poem advising the party elect a new The low materialist evaluation of the masses’ acumen also surfaces in eminent materialist academician GeorgLukAcs, a Stalinist professor much esteemed in Western academia.Lukics has actually questioned the capacity of the proletariat to absorb socialist ideology.’’ Dialectically speaking, Professor Lukics teaches us, there exists a “historical gap” between the objective conditions of Capitalist crisis and the subjective conditions of class consciousness in the proletariat.21 Therefore, at least for the time being (that is, “provisionally”), without correct guidance from the most progressive intellectuals, the proletariat cannot quite realize that Capitalism is in fact in the midst of a final and irreversible crisis. This idea that Capitalism is always in its final throes began with Marx in the nineteenth century. But perhaps in historical terms a crisis is a rather slow process: As a cynical commentator observes, Lukics’ notion of the “historical gap” is but a theme “on which manyvariations later come to be played as the renewable death sentence imposed upon Western capitalism fails to be carried out by its appointed executioner.”” Professor LukAcs’ attitude toward the massesis not uncommon among practitioners of materialist discourse, perhaps because it is built into the discourse from its inception: When Marx and Engels wrote in the Communist Manfesto that communists “have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march,” in one single sentence they established forever the hegemonic (though of course benevolent) rights of the progressive intellectuals over the masses. Doubts regarding the political ability of the class sponsored by the materialist intellectuals were also harbored by K a r l Kautsky and the socialists of the Second International, who thought that class consciousness would not develop among proletarians as part of the flow of historical events without the necessary gentle push from those more capable of grasping the true knowledge directly-the progressive intelligent~ia.’~ Such an attitude cuts across the Marxist ideological spectrum, from the “moderates” to the “radicals”: Kautsky‘s view of the masses was later appropriated by the Bolshevik Lenin.z4 In his famous tract What is to be Done? Lenin taught us: “The history of all

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countries shows that the working class, exclusively by itsownefforts, is able to develop only trade-union consciousness....Modern socialist consciousness can arise only on the basis of profound scientific knowledge. . ..Socialist consciousness is something introduced into the proletarian class struggle from without. ..and not something that arose spontaneously within it.’’25 Trotsky‘s views were consistent with this convenient advocacy of the need for an intellectual leadership that will show what is truly good to the non-intellectualmasses: “The revolutionary supremacy of the proletariat pre-supposes within the proletariat itself the political supremacy of a party, with a clear programme of action and a faultless internal discipline.”26 Trotsky went on to argue for the leadership’s systematic distrust of everyone (an attitude which, though “Trotskyst,” has, thanks to Trotsky‘s anti-Stalinist writings, become known as “Stalinist”).*’ In consonance with his skepticism regardingthe merits of mass participation were Trotsky‘s ideas on the innate laziness of the proletariat-a notion that helped him justify compulsive national labor service.” But Trotsky’s insight was not original. He followed Marx and Engels, who had earlier affirmed the innate laziness of humanity: “as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists,” wrote Marx, “labor is shunned like the plague.”29By advocating compulsory national labor service, Trotsky was also in agreement with Lenin, who had earlier praised “German imperialism” and the Prussian State for having “displayed its economically advanced position by the fact that it went over, earlier than any of the warring powers, to a system of compulsory labor ~ervice.”~’ Both Lenin and Trotsky were also faithfully applying the humanistic teachings of Marxism in point number eight of The Communist Manifesto, which advised the compulsory militarization of workers through the establishment of industrial and agricultural armies. In a related recommendation in point number nine, Marx advised progressive leaders to abolish the “distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the population over the country.” This idea contains great potential for social engineering. By moving the population around, one not only Marxistically lessens the alienation of city peoplefrom the countryside (an alienation traditionally lamented by city-dwelling intellectuals), but also alleviates people’s unequal or excessive concentration in towns and in certain areas of a country, helping to lessen unemployment by shipping people to where there is work. This recommendation to the progressive leadership was an ecological conception ahead of its time. Eventually, however, it was implemented, with local variations of course, wherever intellectuals with a goodgrasp of Marxismgainedsufficientpoliticalpower. It was implemented by such leaders as Lenin and Trotsky, with their armies of workers enthusiastically travelling from region to region, and withtheir thoughtful regulation and redistribution of people’s movements within the country. It was implemented by a sensitive poet and philosopher like Mao, who adopted it with characteristic forcefulness (necessary, to be sure, because many Chinese city folk stubbornly resisted being taken to the countryside to increase their awareness of nature and peasant life, while conversely many country folk desperately wanted to give up their closeness to the soil and to nature in order tomove to the cities-against their best interests and

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those ofthe whole). It was implemented by charismatic Doctor of Law, Fidel Castro, who organized Cuban civilians into “voluntary brigades” (augmented by some truly volunteer foreigners, mostly youngsters from the United States) to cut cane in the fields and carry out the Marxist goals of building armies of workers, more equally redistributing the population, and gradually lessening the distinction between those who work in the towns and those who work in the countryside. And it was implemented by the ex-Parisian student Pol Pot, a progressive leader quite successful in his efforts to get city people (often against their selfish wishes) to work in the fields, thus tasting what it meant to be a farmer-thereby, again, reducing the alienation of modern “civilized” man from nature and the soil. Students of history can probably find other, and perhaps more subtle, implementations of points eight and nine by political leaders. Carrying on the Marxist tradition, which argues the need for leadership by the intellectual cadres, some progressive East European academicians have argued that the very cultural achievements of socialism depend upon the guidance and quality of the white-collar workers, rather than the p ~ o l e t a r i a t .Many ~ ~ Western materialist academicians agree: After lamenting thefact that almost every Marxist revolutionary leader or theoretician of any consequence has come from the “possessing’ classes, progressive British professor Perry Anderson finds no better explanation than seeing in this pattern a confirmation of the “immaturity” (perhaps also merely “provisional,” until the tireless, and up-to-now still unrewarded, efforts of the more progressive intellectuals finally turnthe proletarians into certifiedMarxists) of the international working class.32 That these infants suffer from “immaturity” (as Professor Anderson delicately puts it), or from retarded mental development (as someone else might say), seems to be a fact in materialist discourse. Foras Stalinist academicianLukics wisely has pointed out, sometimes the Party is “forced to adopt astance opposed to that of the masses; it must show them the way by rejecting their immediate wishes.” Only “after many bitter experiences will the masses,” continues academician Lukics, “understand the correctness of the Party’s view.”33Infants do notalways know whatis good forthem. Orwell was aware of this fundamental conviction among the moreprogressive (and therefore the leading) intelligentsia: Proletarians are “helpless animals,” says the intellectual O’Brien to the recalcitrant intellectual Winston in Nineteen Eighty-Four, “only the party At the bottom of it all may be the fact that the dialectical method itself is so sophisticated that it necessarily sets an academic practitioner of materialist discourse apart from the average man-whose usually naive approach to life tends to be based more on common sense than on dialectics. Materialist academicians are well aware of this social cleavage, and in order to dissolve it dialectically they typically adopt a hegemonic maneuver: to dismiss “common sense” from the epistemological realm as a simply pitiful approach.An eminent British professoris eloquent on this subject: “The fact that structuralism offends common sense has always been a point in its favor. Common sense holds that ...the world is pretty much as we perceive it. ... We know that the sun goes around the earth because we can see that it does.”35

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With a few strokes of his pen, this sophisticated professor has labelled, to his own satisfaction, a different approach to knowledge as inferior; and thereby he has discreetly distanced himself fromthe common herd, who trustcommon sense. The naive trust in commonsense would have long disappeared were it notfor thevulgar masses, who unless instructed otherwise, can never see beyond the obvious surfaceof things. Such enemies of dialectics are the commonpeople. One mightimagine thisprofessor patiently explaining to some stupid peasant that, when planting his crops, he should trust dialectics insteadof common sense (in which view of the peasant’s acumen the materialist professor would be in agreement with Marx, who pointedly regretted the “idiocy of rural life”).36 Realizing the limited valueof the Western masses as agents of True Progress may also be related to the increasing idolization of the Third World and the Primal Peoples of the earth by the progressive intelligentsia. Western factory workers, of course, have already been given up on as sources of revolution. If not corrupted, they are at least in a veritable stupor caused by all the services and goods, mostly worthless, which the Capitalists (or the bourgeoisie, etc.) constantly and deviously heap upon them. Since this proletariat has proven unwilling, or perhaps unable, to understand thematerialist intellectuals’ teachings (which would improve the workers’ spiritual lives, if not their material ones), progressive academicians have found a more promising pupil. Thus, they have transferred their progressivist message from a recalcitrant and hopelessly spoiled child to what appears to be a more willing student with a far brighter future. Just as despising the European bourgeoisie was fashionable in intellectualcircles at a time when Marxist discursive practices included a virtuous proletariat, so now hating the entire Western tradition is de rigueur at a time when hopes are pinned on the oppressed, poor, and secretly better people of the Third World.37 But that the Western masses cannot quite be trusted to do the right thing by themselves is a familiar materialist position implicit in the very project of socialist construction. Harvard professor John Kenneth Galbraithhas articulated iteffectively in connection with the beguiling power of Madison Avenue, to the extent that this opinion is now part of the system of beliefs of many Americans who have no idea of its origins. Antony Flew has deflated this standard materialist shibboleth: “First, commercial advertisers-those monster bogypersons of the New Left-are not in fact secret and irresistible manipulators. They operate in the open, sometimes effectively and sometimes ineffectively, attempting to inform and to persuade. In this they are entirely at one with the author of the Afluent Society; who, as has often been remarked, would have been equally successful on Madison Avenue.”38 Defenders of Capitalism have pointed out various further weaknesses in Galbraith’s materialist position;and they have also argued the importanceof advertising in improving the standard of living of the American p~pulation.~’ Michael Novak and others have stressed the connection between advertising, freedom of choice,and decentralized knowledge in democratic Capitalist societies.*’ These defenders of Capitalism could have given empirical proof of the relative capacity of the masses to choose, make up their minds, and, therefore, freely act in accepting or rejecting a

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product in spite of the most powerful advertising campaigns: Cases like the Ford Edsel, the NewCoke, or the Jane Fonda Fitness Studios wouldbe obvious examples. Of course, since for materialist discourse, empiricism itself is an “ideology” (a materialist British professor has in fact written an article with the title “Is Empiricism An Ideology?” in which he conclusively proves that itis),41 offeringadverse empirical examples has no effect on consistently defended materialist beliefs.

POWER AS A JUSTIFICATION FOR POWER Practitioners of materialist discourse are justified in their leadership efforts by the Marxist axiom assertingthat hegemony is an incontestable factor insocial life. Since this is the case, one has every right to achieve domination, no matter what the means, in order to create better people and a better world. In other words, when faced with a cunning opposition that seeks to dissuade potential converts to socialism with all sorts of “materialistic lures” (the designation given by Marxism to what the less sophisticated religious moralists used to decry as “the sinful enjoyment ofthe world”), in his noble quest for a more humane society the progressive can, with a clean conscience, resortto various formsof governmental coercionin order to achieve his goals of progressive social change. As Trotsky andhis followers acknowledged even while complaining of their treatment by the Stalinists, historyshows that those who win are historically right.42 The Stalinists certainly proved the validity of the Marxist epistemological and ethical axiom defended by Trotsky with their ownunarguable success over Trotsky and his followers. Success is the one factually irresistible justification for power. With historical forces backing them up, here the National Socialist and the hardcore Marxist socialist shake hands discursively, as they once did politically. Marxist and Fascist discourses merge because in a domination-oriented Weltanschauungthere is no other moral or philosophical justification: What is in authority simply is in authority because it has sufficiently greater power, for one reason or other, than anything else; and a ruling elite presumably representing the people can therefore justify itself merely by its own success. As convinced as the next professor that the principle of hegemony is one of the keys to history, Adolf Hitler grasped this essential affinity between the National Socialist and the hard-core

NOTES 1. As a student at Stanford University in the late 1960s and early 1970s I used to see Mao’s famous Red Book on sale at the Stanford bookstore, in both English and Spanish. It sold very well. Harrison Salisbury, the influential New York Times correspondent, called Mao’s China “the miracle of the modern world.” Harvard professor John King Fairbank, famous sinologist, said that the Marxistrevolutionwas“thebestthing that hashappened to the Chinese people in centuries.” The same admiration, of course, has been bestowed upon Lenin, Stalin, Castro, Ho Chi Mihn, and so on, in a well-known Western pattern. See my chapter 6 on the Marxist Defenses.

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2. Mao Tse Tung, On Contradiction, cited in Antony Flew, Thinking Straight (Buffalo: Prometheus, 1977), 19. 3. Flew, Thinking Straight, 19. 4. Mikhail Hellerand Aleksandr Nekrich,Utopia in Power: The History o f the Soviet Union ?om 1917 to the Present (New York: Summit Books, 1986), 216. 5. George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (New York: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1949), 217. 6. Historian Mark Naison at a weekend reunion with his revolutionary classmates (AP, “1968 radicals unbowed about Columbia protest,” Chicago Tribune, 24 April 1988). 7. Terry Eagleton, LiteraryTheory: A n Introduction (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983), 85. 8. Stephen A. Resnick and Richard D. Wolff, Knowledge and Class:A Marxian Critique of Political Economy (Chicago: U of ChicagoP, 1987). 9. Herbert Marcuse, One-DimensionalMan (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964), chap. 5. 10. Equally interesting are the euphemisms (“inducing,” “cooperation,” “persuasion”) in these statements by another mild-mannered materialist professor, for whomlanguageisa “symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols. ... There is no chance of our keeping apart the meanings of persuasion ...and communication” Kenneth Burke, ARhetoric ofMotives (Berkeley: U of California P, 1969), 43 and 46. That do what we want (“persuasion”) language could be usedfor means other than making people does not occur to Burke. 11. Yuri Barabash, Aesthetics and Poetics (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), 17. 12. Cited in D. Cooper, ed., The Dialectics ofLiberation (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), 175. 13. Sociology professor K. Nielsen, in H. Hawton, ed., Question Seven (London: Pemberton, 1974), 62-63. 14. Antony Flew, The Politics o f Procrustes: Contradictions of Enforced Equality (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1981), 132-33. 15. In A. Lothstein, ed., All We Are Saying. . .the Philosophy of the New Left (New York: Putnarn, 1971), 365. 16. Flew, The Politics of Procrustes, 64. 17. Laura D’Andrea Tyson, professor of economics at the University of California at Berkeley and headof the Councilof Economic Advisorsto President BillClinton, cited inLlewellyn H. Rockwell, “The Age of Clinton,” The Free Market (February 1993):2-3. 18. Cited in Cooper, The Dialectics ofliberation, 182. 19. Heller and Nekrich, Utopia in Power, 134. 20. Frank Parkin, Marxism and C h s The0y: A Bourgeois Critique (New York: Columbia UP, 1979), 152. 21. Georg Lukics, History and Class Consciowness (London: Merlin Press, 1971), 305-10. 22. Parkin, Marxism and ClassThe0 y, 152. 23.Ibid.,151. 24.Ibid. 25. V. I. Lenin, What is to be Done? (New York: International Publishers, 1929; countless reprints ever since), 27, 32-33, 40. 26. Leon Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism (Ann Arbor: The U of Michigan P, 1963), 108.

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27. Parkin, Marxism and C h s Theory, 154, citing Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1954), 76. 28. Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism, 133. 29. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844,ed. D. Struik (NewYork: International Publishers, 1982), 11 1. 30. Heller and Nekrich, Utopia in Power, 60, from Lenin, “Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government,” published in Kommunist, no. 14 (1962): 13. 31. Like Czech professor R. Richta, cited in Parkin, Marxism and Class Theory, 20. 32. Perry Anderson, Considerationson WesternMarxism (Thatford: Thatford Press Limited, 1979), 100. 33. LuUcs, History and ClassConsciousness, 329. 34. Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, 222. 35. Eagleton, LiteraryTheory, 108. 36. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto (New York: International Publishers, 1948), 13. 37. Pascal Bruckner has brutally demythologized this adoration of the Third World and exposed its mauvaisefoi in The Tears of the White Man: Compassion as Contempt (New York: The Free Press, 1986). 38. Flew, The Politics of Procrustes, 131. 39. Douglas J. Den Uyl, “The Ethics ofadvertising,” in Tibor R. Machan, ed., Commerce andMorality (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1986), 42-76. 40. Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism (New York: Touchstone, 1982), 107. 41. K. Nielsen, in Metaphilosophy 3, no. 4 (1982). 42. Heller and Nekrich, Utopia in Power, 216. 43. Hermann Rauschning, Hitler Speaks (New York: G. P.Putnam’s Sons, 1940), 13. Eric Hoffer (The True Believer [New York: Harper & Row, 19511, 25) also stressed this interchangeability of the National Socialistand the hard-core Marxist.

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Chapter Four

The Marxist Approach to Ethics I

Under capitalism, the concept of legal equality, progressive in its time, conceals the existence of a growing economic and social inequality. ... As capitalismadvances, it is becoming increasingly clearthat formal equality before the law is not enough to establish men’s genuine equality and genuinely human relations, and that man cannot be really free if the right to property is recognised as his intrinsic (natural) right,a s was done by bourgeois humanists, and if man’s individual, egoistic interests are regarded as fundamental ones. ”Dictionary of Scientific Communism (Moscow: ProgressPublishers, 1984) We are going to take allof the money that we think is unnecessarily being spent and take it from the “haves” and give it to the “have nots” that need it so much. -President Lyndon B. Johnson Los Angeles Times, 3 March 1965 See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them and gives to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime. ...If such a law-which may be an isolated case-isnot abolished immediately, it will spread, multiply, and develop into a system. “Frederic Bastiat, TheLaw This chapter and the next do not address the fact that egalitarian-minded intellectuals, from Ph.D. in Philosophy Karl Marx to Soviet, European, American, and

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otheracademicpractitioners of materialistdiscourse, have seldom wanted to be treated like Joe Blow or have considered him their equal.’ Nor do these chapters deal with the related fact, noticed byAntony Flew and other critics of Marxism,that universalist egalitarians appear routinely unconcerned with the contradiction between the universal equality that, according to them, mustbe imposed upon society for the good of its members and the necessarily unequal power that must be vested upon those who would do the imposing. Rather, the chapters explore other issues: The theoretical foundations and problems and the practical consequences of institutionalized egalitarianism-a widespread ethical approach most cogently articulated in the twentieth century by materialist discourse.

THE GOAL OF EQUALITY Long before today’s most progressive American academicians, professors in the Marxistcountries had beeninvolvedin thepursuit ofsocioeconomicequality through carefully planned educational means. Their efforts were part of one of the most thorough institutionalizations of egalitarianism and altruism ever achieved: the socialist societies of the twentieth century. This commonality of ethical purpose between progressives in the West andprogressives in the socialist countries has been one of the principal reasons for the otherwise puzzling historical reluctance of the Western progressives to condemn socialist societies in toto in spite of all the accumulated evidence against them: wholesale rejection would mean for the Western progressive a rejection of some of his own dearest ethicaldesires. In addition to relentlessly teaching the need and the virtue of serving, sharing with and caring for others, and subordinating (sacrificing) one’s self to the needs of the collective (thecommunity, society,theothers,etc.), one effective, practical method used by socialist pedagogues consisted of implementing affirmative action policies within the educational system. That affirmative action has been thoroughly tried in the socialist countries may lend additional interest to the various critiques of affirmative action policies in the United States. In order to further theirvision of social justice, socialist educators mandated that applicants to college declare the socioeconomic status of theirfamilies. The objective was to give preferential treatment to working-class youth-who had long been discriminated against by the dominant (“hegemonic”)middle (“bourgeois”) class. The pedagogues wanted to move society ever closer to the ideal of universal equality in the never-to-be-lost-sight-of Radiant Future of communism. Their views relied on Karl Marx’s pronouncements on the need for triumphant socialism to discriminate educationally in order to favor the formerly oppressed groups.2 Once his socioeconomicorigin was found out, authoritiesbarredabourgeois youth from entering college. The policy prevented the student, already academically superior presumably because of his “privileged class,’’ from achieving further superiority through a college education. The idea was not just to punish the privileged, but to give a collective advantage to those who were less academically prepared or gifted. For merely helping the best among the proletarian children through socialist

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policies like wealth redistribution or a selective lowering of academic standards would only perpetuate social inequality. After all, there would always be fewer “best” or even merely“qualified”students among thoseproletarianchildren-presumably because of their years of class oppression, the consequent weakness of their family structure and parental learning, and so forth. Materialist teachings justifiedthe government policy with such standard notionsas “hegemony,” “class,” “ideology,” and the social relativism of justice and legality. A citizen from former EastGermany explains how this policy of affirmative action affected his life and that of his child: “My son wanted to study to be a teacher, but under the communists only the children of workers were allowed to go to college. Romi and I were not workers; we had jobs in an office. So my son went to work for the r a i l r ~ a d . ” ~ From the pointof view of materialist discourse, however, this systematic, government-sponsored discrimination of some people in favor of others by theCommunist Party’s affirmative action program was perfectly ethical, since Marxism postulates also treated otherpeople unequally: the onlydtfference was that that the bourgeoisie had

now, under socialism, unequal treatment wus being used to correct this injustice and &rther social and economicequality. The Marxist formula runslike this: It has always been X, despite hypocritical claims to the contrary; therefore let us accept the fact of X, but now use it for the good of the world. For similarly egalitarian reasons,

academic life under really existing socialism was monitored by “society” (through society’s “public servants,” who are in fact in a position of authority over those they supposedly “serve”) in order to discourage politically incorrect ideas, research, and results. It is true that the least socially conscious scientists sometimes became uncomfortable under this communitarian monitoring andregulation of their workand wanted to leave, thus becoming part of the “brain-drain” problem characteristic of socialist ~ocieties.~ This “brain drain” was further exacerbated by the selfish, and therefore unwelcome, desire of the best researchers to profit from theactivity of their superior brains. Strict control over who could leave then became socially necessary and was therefore implemented.

HOLDING THE SUPERIOR IN CHECK An important step on the Marxist road to socioeconomic equality has been to undermine the idea that superiority or excellence exist at all as objective facts of human life. The road is cleared by the materialist collectivist approach to knowledge: The approach makes it possible to claim that such notions as superiority and excellence are socially and therefore politically (ideologically, etc.) “constructed” (shaped, conditioned, etc.). They do not exist independently of the class, and therefore “political,” dominance (hegemony, authority, etc.) by the groups in “power,” which set the terms of what constitutes superiority or excellence. Excellence and superiority, liketruth, liberty, and oppression, then becomeflexible concepts to be redefined as demanded by changing historical conditions and by the practical or concrete need for expediency in carrying out the progressive moral and

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social agenda. Such flexibilityallows any practitioner of materialist discourseto dismiss as politically determined the standards of superiority and excellence that exist in his particular non-Marxist society. The standards are not necessarily valid for collectives (groups) long oppressed or discriminated against by the dominant ones. This reasoning allows those fighting the good fight to redefine at will superiority and excellence, to reject existing criteria of superiority and excellence, and then to develop means to ensure that those who up to now have been regarded (because of existing politicaland social structures that are unjustand musttherefore be changed) as superior or excellent cease to be so regarded. Like their peers from the socialist countries, many progressive Western professors understand this ethically justified need to keep superior, excellent, or more competent people in check in order to promote social equality. Of course, keeping them in check requires some form of coercion-though only for as long as coercion is needed to change society and its more recalcitrant members: afterward, as Marx taught, we will all do whatis moral without being mandated to doso by an intrusive State. But meanwhile, without force being used against them, many individuals in a free market society, as Marx and Lenin realized, would always and inevitably rise to the top. It is a sad fact that superior people tend to excel unless stopped through some kind of compulsion or other. The monopoly of force necessarily inherent in government must therefore be used for a good purpose:to keep down these superior people (who are in any case at the same time not really superior, because excellence is relative to hegemony, etc.) so that universal equality is eventually achieved upon this earth. An altruistic but lucid British professor explains how this materialist reasoning and its egalitarian moral agenda necessarily require government-sanctioned (legal) progressive, such a morally compulsion. It must be emphasized again that, for a justified use of force is required only for the time being (“provisionally,” as the Bolsheviks were fond of saying), that is, only prior to the Radiant Future of strictly voluntary selflessness and social service: By resorting to this idea that the openly coercive policies recommended by Marx in such fundamental works as The Communist Manifesto and the Critique of the Gotha Program will be only temporary and certainly nonexistent in the truly good communist future (when everyone will voluntarily do as he should), the more tenacious materialist academicians can continue to believe and repeat that Marxwas really a lover of liberty.5This is how the altruistic but lucid British professor explains the practical (concrete) need for applying varying degrees of compulsion to at least part of the citizenry: Egalitarianism seems to require a political system in which the state is able to hold in check those social and occupational groups which, by virtueof their skills or education or personal attributes, might otherwise attempt to stake claims to a disproportionate [the professor does not explainby whose standards such “disproportion” can be declared to exist] share ofsociety’s rewards [forit is always “society”that somehow “rewards”].The most effective way ofholding such groups in check is by denying them therighttoorganizepolitically, or in otherwaysto undermine social equality [emphasis added]. This is ...the reasoning underlying the MarxistLeninist case for a political order based on the dictatorship of the proletariat.‘

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Early observers of Marxism in Russia noticed that the Bolsheviks certainly organized public education in such a way as to make it difficult for anyone to exceed the limits of theofficially authorized level of knowledgeand education.’ The reason was ethical: to further universal equality by keeping the superior in check. Eugene Kennedy has called attention to the existence of this egalitarian agenda within the contemporaryAmerican educational system: The agenda aims atholding superior students in check in orderto prevent them from upsetting the highly moral goal of equality in all possible areas-including intellectual effort and its material rewards. Kennedy quotes an influential educator from Harvard University, who admits that in the last decades American schools have helped average students improve somewhat by “getting the bottom of the distribution up. The price paid is that we have brought the top down.”’ This result is only logical, since thegoal of equality,as the British professor lucidly explained, necessitates keeping the potentially superior down. Such reasoning, as Robert Frost pointed out, also underlay the American New Deal: “To the poet the New Deal was a calculating, sentimental, hypocritical,and egalitarian regime, aiming to create ‘a homogenizedsociety,’ a regimented collective ofpeople ‘all pigging together’ in an undifferentiated mass, in which the cream of human nature would not be allowed to rise to the In the UnitedStates, SAT scores show that since 1972 there has been a35 percent decline in the number of students able to exceed 600 on an examination whose highest score is 800: “[SAT] results suggest that a number of American educators are quite deliberately attempting to average out the country’s intellectual class, to fashion a lumpen intelligentsia so that the country will finally look like its schools in which everybody passes with a C grade.”” This homogenization of America’s students, Kennedyobserves, “may be one of the last vestiges of Marxism to be found in a world in which it has failed spectacularly everywhere else.” But he overlooks that these are not by any means the “last vestiges” of Marxism.

THE

HIDDEN ACCEPTANCE OF SUPERIORITY

Behind the Marxist effortsto ensure equality by discriminating against some people in favor of some others (that is, by treating people unequalb) is Marx’s idea that mere equality of distribution (preached by watered-down socialists), not to mention the hopelessly bourgeois concept of mere equality of opportuniq, are not enough. The reason is that Marx realized that some people are, after all, superior through virtues that are either acquired, inborn, or both. As he pointed out, “[Olne man is superior to another physically or mentally, and so supplies more labor in the same time, or can labor for longertime.”” Therefore, according to Marx’s ethics, in order to be real&equal, treatment of people underreal socialism must be unequal in order or acquired inequalities. to correct people? natural “Equal right,” says Marx, is merely a “bourgeois right.” Every such “equal right” is an application of thesame measure to people who infact are dzfferent and therefore not equal to one another. Such “justice” is therefore actually unjust (or “War is

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Peace, Freedom is Slavery,” etc.). Unlike weak socialists, Marx is very lucid on this issue: This equal right is an unequal right for unequal labor.It recognizes no class differences because everyoneis only aworkerlikeeveryone else, but ittacitlyrecognizesunequalindividual endowment and thus productive capacity as natural privileges. It ir, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content, like every right. Right by its very nature can consist only in the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals (and they would not be ...individuals if they were not unequal) [sic] are measurable only by an equal standard in so far as they are brought under an equal point of view.” The excerpt is revealing. It reveals the truereasons for many Marxist practical policies and theoretical corollaries, such as the rejection of individuality and individual approaches in favor of collectivism and collectivist methodologies, the dialectical war on the notionof individual excellence, and theconsequent need,politically necessary, to redefine individualism so as not to lose the support of many potential followers: all this and more is contained in Marx’s open acknowledgment of the unfortunate fact that “individuals would not be individuals if they were not unequal.” The need for government intervention (legal force) to eliminate justice (Right) is now also clear: Justice entails the acceptance of not only the inequality of talents, but also of the inequality of results. As F. A. Hayek observed, “It is of the essence of the demand for equality before the law [justice] that people should be treated alike in spite of the fact that they are different.”I3 For this reason Marx sees the destruction ofjustice(as defined bythe “bourgeois” anyway) as necessary for socialism: Both because individuals remain individuals only if they remain unequal (as Marx points out), and because “Right,” Marx notices with chilling accuracy, “by itsvery nature can consist only in the application of an equal standard” given which, unequal individuals, will-alas!-necessarily produce unequal outcomes. In other words, Justice (Right) necessitates equality of treatment while entailing the acceptance of inequality of results. Justice (Right) must therefore be destroyed or (as in the teachings of Ingsoc-modeled by Orwell after those of materialist discourse) at least redefined as “bourgeois” justice (Right), so that they can more easily be eliminated. With instructive results, such destruction and redefinition was thoroughly andsuccessfully institutionalized in the former Union of Socialist Soviet Republics and other socialist countries. It is also instructive to notice that the more clear-headed defenders of the freemarket (Capitalist) ethics share with Marx and his more lucid followers the recognition that men’s gifts are, of course, unequally distributed.Thus, Mises states: “The fact that men are born unequal in regard to physical and mental capacities cannot be argued away. ...Some surpass their fellow men in health and vigor, in brain and aptitudes, in energy and resolution and are therefore better fitted for the pursuit of earthly affairs than the rest of mankind.”’* And like Marx, Mises also realized that justice requires men’s equal treatmentby the law: For justice to exist at all, one must apply equal treatment under the law and one must accept the consequent, inevitable,

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and desirable inequality of results. O n the other hand,whenever equality of results is sought and implementedby the (legal) force of the state, individuals must necessarily be treated unequally (and therefore unjustly) by the law. Consequently, such agovernment is by definition unjust. Like Marx, Mises saw that wanting equality of results and wanting the rule of impartial law, and therefore of justice, are incompatible inview of the many differences between human beings.I5 In contrast, he argued, the truly just socioeconomic system (Capitalism), to be such, must accept inequality of results and take into account the inherent as well as the acquired means of superior or inferior human productivity and performance (means that are ultimately reducible to virtues like purposefulness, self-discipline, foresight, energy, persistence, problem-solving skills, trustworthiness, and so on). Most important, for justice to exist, the system must allow these same inborn and acquired virtues to be rewarded or not (here is the element of justice at work in Capitalism as an ethical system) as they are judged by one’s fellow men, who show their greater or lesser appreciation for them by paying more or less for (rewarding) the services and goods produced-from the results of clearly superior athleticism or medical skills or entrepreneurial ability to the often nebulous realm of what may be merely fashionable artistic prowess.’‘ Were every individual like every other (a notion that, as Marx pointed out, contradicts the very concept of individuality), there would beno division of labor or capital formationwhich are essential conditions for Capitalism.” Thus under Capitalism, justice not only requires individual differences (and therefore individuals) as well as the equal treatment of individuals by the law (what is called impartiality), but mustalso openly accept inequality of results: For these reasons both justice and individualism are essential to the Capitalist view of the world. Like Marx and Mises, but unlike weaker socialists of the Menshevik,Social Democratic, or American “liberal” variety, Lenin realized that men are indeed unequal. Thus, while approving the unequal treatment of men by socialism and therefore its attack against justice, Lenin admitted the existence of both inborn and acquired inequalities: “People are not alike; one is strong, another is weak; one is married, another is not; one has more children, another has less, and so on.’’18Or, one man is more capable than another in the act of producing services or goods that other people are willing to pay for, thereby allowing the more productive man to live better: In other words, inequality in such virtues as intelligence, self-discipline, energy, perseverance,determination,foresight,focus,and so on usually creates socioeconomic inequalityunless checked by force. Hence theneed for an all-powerful state (only temporarily and always under the rule of the “best” minds suited for this task, of course) to decide who should provide and how and who should deserve. Therefore, to follow Marxistgoals, a really progressive government must usewhatever means are needed to treat people unequally (and thus unjustly) in order to bring about real social justice and real equality. Thus, some animals,as happened inAnimal Farm, become then more equal than others. Understanding this principle (encapsulated in the formula “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need’) is essential to understand not only the

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past history of Marxism but also present-day political and social developments in the United States within and without the educational system. This principle of unequal (and therefore unjust) treatment (“some animals ...etc.”) is the basis of what many Americanprofessors and otherbest minds of the countryeuphemistically call “affirmative action.” It is also behind the conceptof the graduated (“progressive”)income tax-which Marx enthusiastically endorsed in recommendation number two of The Communist Manifesto: By taxing people at unequal ratesthat directly penalize success with what is, as James L. Payne has observed, aprosperityfine, and therefore by treating them unequally, a progressive government endeavors dialectically to promote economic equality. The policy is, of course, further justified by the collectivist postulate that all wealth is “socially”-collectively-created and therefore owned, so that no one individual deserves much for “his” presumed creation of wealth. Equalization of wealth actually promotes the way things really are, but are not, and must therefore be made to be: Thus, for Marxism “Fairness” consists (as Marx recommended in point two) in forcefully taking more wealth away from those who “make” more wealth. This viewpoint is what many politicians and intellectuals in the United States more picturesquely call “soaking the rich” (or“making therich pay their fair share”). “Soaking the rich” is enthusiastically backed not only by many public servants and media personalities (who usually are very rich, and therefore may have so much to spare that they can afford to be “soaked’ without major discomfort), but also by professors of economics (including six Nobel laureates in 1992 alone) who agree with the concept of a “progressive”as opposed to a flat (equal) tax.” This viewpoint overlooks that a just tax can only be a “flat” tax-if only because it subjects every producer to the same percentage of takingsby the authorities and therefore to equal treatment under the law, while still taking necessarily more from those who make more. The progressive approach also equates successful people to “bandits.” Harvard professor Robert Reich, advisor to Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis, and Secretary of Labor under Democratic President Clinton, illustrates this view of “the rich”: “[Iln theeighties,” the professor observes, rich people “made out like bandits.”” That is, one who prospers (enriches himself) by providing services and goods better than other people or by investingmore wisely acts like a thief.The viewpoint necessitates overlooking objections like David Kelley’s: The hallmark of this approach is an obsession with statistics on the distribution of income and wealth: the share goingto the top 1% (or 5% or 20%) as against the share going to lower with brackets. ...In the globaleconomy, likewise, one often hears complaints that the US., only 7% of the world’s population consumes 23% (or whatever)of the worlds resources. Or as Roger Donway once said by way of parody: it’s It’s outrageous that the French, with only 1% of the worlds population, have 12% of the worlds fun. Despite the use of numbers, this entire discussion is dominated by an image, the image of a pie that has appeared somehow on the table and must now be divided up. It is a false image, a mirage. Wealth, unlike fun,

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canbetalliednumerically, but like fun it is not a collective phenomenon. Wealth is the product of. ..thought, ability, and effort. Wealth is not found, but created, and the identity of the creators is a matter of public record. They are the inventors, entrepreneurs, doctors, teachers, and producers in every other line of work, who earn what they receive in voluntary exchange with others.2’ Kelley’s views on what “social justice” means are, of course, eons away from the Marxist approach. According to Marxist ethics, it is not enough even to have people perform an equal amount of “social” labor and then to receive an equal amount of compensation (a weak socialist approach, but one which, like the hard-nosed approach, presupposes an all-knowing and at least sufficiently powerful State to treat people this way): “With an equal output and hence an equal share in the social consumption fund,” Marx and Engels wrote, “one will in fact [still] receive more than another, one will be richer than another and so on. To avoid all these defects, right, instead of being equal, wouldhave to be unequal.”” If even the weak socialist formula of equal output/equal share is ultimately undesirable (albeit temporarily expedient in the process of creating a better-and therefore communist-world in which the formula “from each ...etc.” will rule) for a really just (communist) society, then itis clear that theclassical liberal bourgeoisconcept of mere “equal rights” thoroughly violates the radically progressive communist principle of real equality and is therefore an injustice. Marx explained this truly dialectical ethics in his Critique of the Gotha Program (1875). His reasoning justified his recommendation to force bourgeois children to receive less education in order to allow the children of workersand peasants to catch up with them.Bourgeois children, up to nowprivileged, should be held backso that the children of the less privileged could rise up to their level. Unless this unequal treatment is implemented, bourgeois children will alwaysbe ahead of the other children, no matter how the others strive to catch up: the “social being” advantage is just too great. Mere equality of treatment in education is therefore not enough. Criticizing German weak socialist Ferdinand de Lassalle’s demand for equal education, Marx explained: Equal elementary education? What idea lies behind these words?Is it believed that in presentday society (and it is only with thisone has to deal) education can beequal for all classes?Or

is it demanded that the upper classes also shall be compulsorily reduced to the modicum of education-the elementary school-that alone is compatible with the economic conditions not only of the wage workersbut of the peasants as well?23

THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS OF THEMARXIST ETHICS In the Marxistapproach to justice it may looklike the government is doing nothing but looting the producers and redistributing the loot (some of it back to some of the victims in the form of “subsidies,” “free” this or “free” that, “social services,” etc.) after keeping someof it for itself. But such an undialectical (bourgeois

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humanist) interpretation would be based on a non-materialist (and therefore superficial) reading of the situation. The reason is that, since this governmental appropriation of part of the product of people’s labor is carried out not by the Capitalists (who under socialism are as a matter of course expropriated-looted-anyway) but by “society” (the government, the “public” sector, etc.) and not for the good of the Capitalists but for the good of the community (“society,” etc.)-and therefore for the good ofthe individual who has seen part of the productof his labor takenawaythis appropriation is different from the Capitalists’ appropriation of some of the product of the worker’s labor. Appropriation by some private entity (say, a thiet) is incorrect: but appropriation by the “public” (“social,” “communitarian,” “government,” “state,” etc.) sector is not. Another axiomatic reason is that wealth is presumably given by “society” to the individual rather than actually “earned” by him-because Marxist theory postulates that all wealth, like most everything, is ultimately “social.” Thus what “society” giveth, “society” taketh away. That Capitalists expropriated the workers(badappropriation) was, of course, postulated by Marx in his theory of “surplus value.” This “exploitationtheory” was soon afteritsappearance undermined theoretically by many economists, among themEugen von Bohm-Bawerk. More recently ithas been debunked by Ludwig von Mises, Thomas Sowell, and others. In practice, too, it has proven to be false. Yet despite the theoretical and practical refutations, it continues to charm the imagination of many professors. With his characteristicforcefulness,Lenin has commented enthusiastically on these peculiarly materialist teachingson the natureof justice:“In smashing [“smashing” is a much-favored word among the more earnest practitioners of materialist discourse] Lassalle’s petty-bourgeois, confused phrases about ‘equality’ and ‘justice’ in general, Marx shows the course of development of communist A similarly dialectical point against mere “bourgeois” justice was made by Trotsky when criticizing weak socialist (Menshevik) Abramovich’s comparison of Bolshevik compulsion (slave labor) with that of the Pharaohs. “Wherein, then, does your Socialism,” asked Abramovich naively, “differ from Egyptian slavery?” T o which Trotsky replied: “It was not the Egyptian peasants who decided through their Soviets to build the pyramids ...and the workers were obliged to toil by a class that was hostile to them. Our compulsion is applied by a workers’ and peasants’ government, in the name of the interest of the laboring masses. ...(Liberal analogies ...do not reckon with the class nature of the State).”25 Engels, too, clarified against naive anarchists Marx’s views on the need for authority, and therefore coercion (of the correct kind-or good authority and coercion).2G The underlying assumption behindall these presumably ethical assertions is always that things like liberty, coercion, and so on are, like mosthuman ideals and concepts, historically relative and socially (‘‘practically,’’“culturally,” “community,” etc.) determined. How canitbeotherwisewhen one’s consciousness itself-as Marx taught-is relative to one’s historical conditions (one’s “social” being)? Therefore, what constitutes freedom and Right (justice) at one point does not necessarily constitute freedom and Right (justice) at another. It may in fact constitute the opposite

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(War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, and so on, as Ingsoc teaches in Nineteen Eigbty-

Four),depending on thevalues and needs of the ruling class (for as Marx also taught, the ruling ideas of each time have always been the ideas of the ruling class). Not by chance, Fascism shared the historicizing, and therefore relativizing, assumptions of materialist epistemology. Such sharing atfundamental a level may have prompted former Marxist philosopher Bernard-Henry LCvy to speak of the “profound confabulation of the two totalitarian systems.”*’ A case in point is their common position regarding liberty and authority. Eminent Fascist professor Giovanni Gentile explained, with arguments identical to those of Marxism, the relativity of liberty and authority.According to Gentile(along with Marx, Trotsky, andso forth), bourgeois classical liberal thinkers naively believe these concepts to be absolute and eternal when they are in fact the result of concrete historical situations (“rules,” “practice,” “actions,” “culture,” etc.).28 Progressive American educators share the Marxist belief in the beneficial social consequences (especially evident in the known variety of lifestyles, innovativeness, creativity, productivity, competitiveness, quality of goods and services, and general well-being of socialist countries) that arise from the dialectically understood practice of treating people unequally in order to treat them really equally. These Western educators are so advanced that they leap from Capitalism to communism-from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs-without the intermediate phase of socialism-from each according to his ability, to each according to his work.

“AFFIRMATlVE ACTION” Transferred to the U.S. situation, the Marxist formula posits that unequal treatment had existed long before affirmative action, and therefore it is now justified: After all, the social groups in power (“white males” in the American professors’ adaptation of the materialist approach; “the bourgeoisie” in Marx’s recommendations) have always treated themselves and the “others” unequally. So what is wrong with continuing the practice, but now only in order to make people really equal? Notice the formula: It has always been X, despite hypocritical claimsto thecontrary; therefore let us accept the existence of X, but now use it for the good of the world. Such reasoning directly correspondsto the CommunistParty’s justification both for discriminating educationally against the children of the middle class and for the all ruling classes have Party’s notorious educational indoctrination of the population: indoctrinated-but at least the communists do it create to better peopleand abetter world. O n the same wavelength, some Americanprofessors argue that “black” people in the United States, independently of their socioeconomic status,and whether rich or poor, should be compensated not only with preferential treatment but also with material goods for having beenenslaved once upon a time-just as Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, independentlyof their economic or social status, and rich or not, have been materially compensated by present-day Germany for having been killed

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by Germans once upon a time. As a progressive Harvard professor points out, “Affirmativeaction” isas American as “applepie,”sinceit is appliedto“farmers, veterans, businesses ...regions (e.g., Tennessee River Valley),” black-lung victims, “contracts and jobs allocated bycities, counties andstates controlled by white ethnicbloc political machine^."'^ In other words, this dialectical argument asserts that affirmative action can and must be used, since it has always been used, and frequently for bad purposes (or, socialism exists in many cases in the United States, therefore it should be extended to every case). Since this practice has existed and continues to exist in other areas, it must be also accepted in this one (somethinglike “people have always robbed other people, therefore what is bad about us robbing people”). Again, thedialectical point is that a bad practice hitherto used for evil can be used for good. After all, epistemologically and ethically, all things are historically relative. The formula again is: It has always been X, despite claims to the contrary; therefore let us cheerfully accept X, and now use it for the good of the world. This materialist reasoning has in fact been adopted by the U.S. Supreme Court. Hence its rulings on preferential-treatment quotas. “The main reason the Supreme court upheld a 1977 minority set-aside law (another [Michigan egalitarian Congressman John] Conyers special),” writes Terry Eastland, “was that Congress had made a finding of past discrimination, whichserved as an adequate remedial ‘predicate,’ as the lawyers called it.”3” Avowed Marxists in the United States clearly understandthe connection between affirmative actionon the one hand and Marxist epistemological and ethical principles and the Marxist agendaon the other.A recent book publishedby the openlyMarxist International Publishers, for example, points out the need for still more affirmative action as “the best path to more democracy now, on a path to ~ocialism.”~’ A progressive American government helps and complements the American educators’ struggle for equality by steadily developing and implementing ever new progressive affirmative action devices intended dialectically to treat people unequally in order to make them more equal in the long run. For example, on the New York City Police Department tests, the examiners treat students differently by granting anadvantagetosomedepending on their race: The sergeant’s examination pass and 65 percentfor marksare 75 percentforwhites, 69 percentforHispanics, blacks.32 This is called “race norming.” In cities throughout the United States, a fixed percentage of government business is now by law (legal compulsion) allocated among black, Hispanic, and “women” businesses, effectively stopping white maleowned businesses from competing equally against the “minority” and “women” businesses. The government of the United States hasalso established hiring and 20 percent for minorities and nearly 7percent for women apprentice quotas of nearly at the federal level. Some local governments have implemented even higher quotas, sometimes of up to 35 percent.33 Such an equalization agenda through unequal treatment has also been the objective of what critics have called the federal government’s “Testscam” under the conservative Republican Bush administration:

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In 1981, the U.S. Employment Service, a branch of the Department of Labor, had given state-run employment servicesa new system for converting actual scoreson GATB to percentile rankings. Bureaucrats and approving social scientists [professors] called it “within-group scoring.” In truth, it was a system of scoring based upon race. No longer would job seekers be graded purely on their individual merit againstall other candidates. Instead they would be measured strictly against members of their own race.34 Following publicity on “Testscam,” the U.S. government threw out standardized testing of applicants altogether: “ O n July 10, the public outcry that followed disclosure of the conversion tables forced then Secretary of Labor Elizabeth Dole to suspend GATB use for a two-year period of study,after which she said she hopes to ‘reestablish GATB as a state-of-the art measurement tool by making it more comprehensive and job-related and by minimizing disparities in scores among various groups.’ ” Nonetheless, statements by Secretary of Labor Elizabeth Dole indicated that another effort would be made by the U.S. government, conservative or not, to make sure that unequal treatment of applicants to ensure equality ofresults continued to be used:“Dole seemed to anticipate the invention some of new subterfugeto equalize tests results. Dole’s decision to suspend use of the test altogether reeks of political expedience. During its 42 years of use, testing experts have repeatedly found the GATB a valid gauge of job aptitude.The problem, Dole acknowledged, was in the ‘experimental feature’ or within-group scoring. So out went the baby with the bath water.”35 Lower admission standards for some ethnic groups (blacks, Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, etc.-but not Asians) are now widely accepted throughout the U.S. university system. But whynot, if materialist discourse teachesthat all standards are arbitrary and set by the dominant classes anyway? Less apparent is that, as Carol Jouzaitis reports, already many colleges “award their limited pools of scholarship money basedon students’ economic status rather than on academic merit.” Among thecolleges that have implemented this policy are some of the most prestigious and influential. For years, MIT, Princeton, Yale, Cornell, Brown, Dartmouth, Columbia, and the University of Pennsylvania had anagreement among themselves “to stop givingmerit-basedscholarships.” The agreement involved a yearly discussion of how much financial aid (tuition and other expenses paid with money taken from both tuition charged to the paying students and from MIT claims charitable contributions) they would award and to whom. For example, to admit studentssolely on achievement, regardless of family income;but then,after such “blind” screening, the college proceeds to give aid to all “needy” students, rather than to those who are the best, regardless of “need.” In a rare action, the U.S. government has charged that through such procedures “the brightest students . .. were deprived of the right to vie for campus scholarships, while tuition dollars of wealthy students were used to subsidize the cost of educating poor ones.” (“From each .. .to each ...etc.”) So determined to pursue the policy are some of these colleges, that MIT has gone to court rather than sign a 1991 agreement forbidding

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the“1vy League” institutions “to ban merit scholarship awards and to consult with one another in financial aid determination^."^^ What the government objects to, however, is not so much the colleges’ policy of taking from some studentsto give to others, or of depriving someof the best students of the opportunity to compete for the financial rewards of excellence. The government’s concern is rather the “price-fixing” involved in“exchanging information and fixing their discounted tuition price.” Consequently, the colleges’ defense argument is an “ethical” one: the assertion that price-fixing existed merely “to help needy students, not to generate profits.” The very choice of such an argument reveals that the conviction that “profits” are immoral (whereas the colleges’ “talungs” are not) has already become institutionalized. As a professor of economics from the University of Chicago points out for thedefense, “Profit-maximizing firms wouldnever engage in this type of collective price setting which would leave profitsunaffected.”MIT’sboardchairman and former president (Professor Paul E. Gray) complains that if colleges are prevented from conferring with one another inthis scheme of wealth redistribution, “theywill begin to competefor the most desirable students”by bidding up scholarships. True, a few individual students (presumably the best) would benefit through larger scholarships, “but we [the colleges] would have to fund those by reducing aid to other students. The socio-economic diversity of the student bodywould be reduced.” For this professor it is clear that, unlike business “profits” (making money by selling a service or product to the population),an institution’s “socio-economic equalization” (taking away and redistributing wealth) clearly justifies price-fixing.

THE AMERICAN “STAT0 CORPORATIVO” The Marxist pursuit of socioeconomic equality by means of government coercion is finding an increasingly receptive audience in the United States, where the generalized desire people have for superior and less expensive technological goods and services frequently proportionally rewards one’s excellence in professional, technical, and ancillary managerial work.The discomfort of the less favored in the face of this inequality of results hasprompted a series of highly altruisticand egalitarian studies that propose to change, by means of greater government control the of social reward mechanisms, the level of rewards available to the more productive citizens. That is to say: Since without the aid of government force and left to their own devices, most citizens would chooseto pay the professional, technological,and managerial workers more than other workers in exchange for what the professional, technological, and managerial workers offer to the citizens, a just government must intervene to shortcircuit this relatively free, but not-at-all egalitarian, reward mechanism. Otherwise, the superior producers will continue toenjoy, alas, a superior lifestyle. This cannotbe. With such an ethicalgoal and grudge in mind, the “new” egalitarian studies recycle old Marxist/Fascist agendas by giving them ingenious new spins in which words like “community” and “communitarianism” play the operational role of old words like “socialism” and “Fa~cism.”~’

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A recent and generally well-received book exemplifies the trend.38Written by wellknown American“Neoliberal”intellectualMickey Kaus, thebook advocatesa “Work Ethic State.” Not by chance, the expression is redolent of both the Fascist “Ethical State” and the Marxist-Leninist “Workers State.” For what Kaus naively or otherwise wants for the United States is yet another version of the Fascist Stuto Corporatiuo. In its defense of the collective’s rights against those of the individual, Kaus’ book employs a tactic dearto Fascism: Claiming thatit may be fair that some people make more money and thus enjoy some things that others cannot enjoy (Kaus generously would allow people to enjoy such things as a yacht or an exotic vacation or retiring at forty); but it is not fair that they enjoy more and better of just everything with that money they are now graciously allowed to make. Of some things, to be determined as usual by the best minds in power (among which, of course, one should count Kaus), they must not enjoy more and better. Therefore, since in the new technological society the productive,because more knowledgeable, citizens areprobably going to earn greater wealth than the less productive, because less knowledgeable,ones,in the interestofequality and social justiceagovernment must do something to change the situation, even if this something involves using coercion against some citizens, in order to make sure that they do not enjoy the better fruits of their higher productivity: less affluent but equally hardworking [Tlhat well-offAmericans should liveon safe streets while Americans are afraid to go out after dark; should afford crownsfor their teeth or nursing care for their parentsor stimulating schools for their kids while a lot of equally hardworking people can’t: this doesnot sit right. In short, a democracy can allow rich and poor,but not first class citizens and second-class citizens. ...[It is good] having institutions where rich and poor stand in line together, go to meetings together, sit and root together in the bleachers or the grandstand^.^^

In arguments of this sort itis seldom explainedwhat would be the pointof making more money if even with more money one cannot choose to send one’s children to better schools or live in better neighborhoods or have better health and dental care than somebody else who makes less money. Nor is it clear why, in any case, people like the book‘s author or public servants or professors (all of them presumably part of “the best minds”) have any right at all to passlaws dictating a free citizen’s behavior so that he cannot enjoy his earned wealth in whatever way and spend it in whatever amounts he wantsas long as he hasnot stolen it from his fellow free citizens. A more practical problemwith thenew Fascism/socialismis that talung away from the citizens’ tangible incentives, in whatever amount they would be earned in a relatively free socioeconomic system as the reward for greater productivity and selfimprovement, has been one of the reasons for the recurrent problems of universal mediocrity and lower living standards in really existing socialist regimes. Moreover, historical examples show that, once government has “reorganized society” in such a “fair” manner, there are no significant differences in wealth left:

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That is, noticeable political control over the distribution of services and goods leads to a reduction of differences in wealth, among other reasons because wealth is no longer what determines a greater or lesser ability to obtain scarce services and goods. Instead, political means,and therefore individualand especially group-based political skills to maneuver within the new system, become the determinants (see chapter 1). In this regard, Kaus’ positively presented image of “both rich and poor standing in line” is unselfconsciously revealing. It describes not only the sort of society that the author envisages, but also what, under really existing socialism,happened to the formerly rich and the continuing poor: They all have stood in ever-present lines to receive the scarce and inferiorgoods and services available to the population at large-with the well-known exception of those politically connected, at the top of which always stand the various public managers, planners, helpers, educators, and assorted public servantsor bureaucrats-from the nomenklatura of the former Soviet Union to the mayimbes of still-socialist Cuba. Now, conceivably it might not be because of the repeatedly evil leaderships that such has been the common fate of countries where political action has thoroughly replaced moneymaking through the sale of services and goods as a means for the population’s enjoyment of saidservices and goods. This repeated fate mayhave been the result of the very ethics taught by materialist discourse. Western practitioners of materialist discourse have adamantly refused to accept this unpleasant possibility because it runs against everything that they hold dear. Those who have managed to do so have ipso facto ceased to be practitioners of materialist discourse. M a x Eastman is a classic case. After twenty years of thorough dedication to the ethics of altruism and equality, Eastman finally witnessed its thorough implementation in socialist Russia; the spectacle eventually made him reexamine his ethics:

I had believed, or hoped [as Marx had taught], that when people could no longer compete for private property [private wealth], they would compete for honorific treatments [the betterment of society]. Merit instead of money would be the object of endeavor and the basis of invidious distinction.It did not occur to me that the new goal might be power-still less that the new rulers by getting power would manage to get most of the money as well. I had to learn also that power directly exercised can be more hostile to freedom, more ruthless, more evil in its effect upon the character of the wielder, than power wielded indirectly through a preponderance of wealth.*”

It is rather sobering to recall that, during approximately the same time that a devout Marxist like Eastmanwas reconsidering his premises and assumptions, public servants in the United States were placing their hopes on the very principles upon which the Soviet Union was being built-principles on account of which millions were dying of hunger or from mass executions, on account of which millions of others were suffering untold privations and endless imprisonment, and principles a x Eastman was soon to renounce. Thus, American government official which M Stuart Chase diligently wrote in his1932 book A New Deal:

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Best of all, the new regime [envisaged for the United States by him and other similarly best for.was The sixteen methods minds] would have the clearest idea of what an economic system of becoming wealthy would be proscribed-by firing squad if necessary-ceasing to plague and disrupt the orderly processes of production and distribution. Money would no longer be an end, but wouldbe thrust back whereit belongs as a labor-saving means. The whole vicious pecuniary complex would collapse as it has in Russia. Money making as a career would no more occur to a respectable young man than burglary, forgery, or embezzlement. Then the publicservantproceeded toquoteeminent professor JohnMaynard Keynes, whose ethical vision was, like that of Eastman, derived from Marx:“Everyone will work for the community and, if he does his duty, the community will uphold him. Money making and money accumulating cannot enter into the life calculations of a rational man in Russia. A society of which this is even partially true is a tremendous innovation.”*l In the United States of the late twentieth century, pedagogues continue to defend these ideas. Notice theBolshevik threats explicit in thefollowing professorial critique: Narveson may not want to help someoneelse thrive by supplying her witha prosthetic limb, or by paying a National Health Service to supply one. But for the very same reason that he must refrain from stealing from her if he wants her,turn, in to allow him his negative liberty, he’ll also have to fork over payments for at least the minimal goods that will keep her aliveno matter whose fault it is that she lacks a limb-if he is to avoid her vengeance. Narveson may be willing to forego welfare rights and live “on his own,” but why should anyone else be willing to let him?*’ In other words, to stop some people from takingaway some or all of one’s wealth, one should give them some of it voluntarily. This institutionalization of blackmail is advocated by an otherwise mild-mannered academician.No wonder that seasoned veterans of Russian communism despair of what they hear today in American academia: bitten, twice shy syndrome. Those of us who have lived under socialism exhibit the once Perhaps Western socialism is in fact different and will produce different results. But we observe with growing apprehension the ominously familiar personality types, misconceptions, and attempts to institute this system of thought. The truth of the matter is that the variousideas that seem fresh and innovative to Western specialists have already been tested in the USSR. And if some of those experiments were eventually repudiated, it was not because socialism has been perverted in the USSR, as Western commentators claim, but because these innovations proved to be utterly unfit forreal life.43 Another example, this one relatively recent, of the paradoxical results of institutionalized altruism and egalitarianism is today’s People’s Republic of Vietnam. During the nineteen sixties and seventies, both American progressives and Vietnamese socialists wanted to change the socioeconomic organizationof South Vietnam,where there existed inequalities in wealth: T h e progressives could not be satisfied “with a

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societywherethere is an enormous gapbetweenrich and So thestruggle against Capitalism was carried on until the equality and social justice enjoyed by North Vietnam was finally extended to South Vietnam. Unfortunately, as Peter Collier observes, the gap between rich and poor “is now gone; everyone is Perhaps more significant is that the economy of former South Vietnam, still benefitting from the embryonic Capitalism of French imperialist and American days, is more dynamic andenjoys a better standard of livingthan that of dreary Hanoi and the longer-socialized north.46 Ambitious businesspeople who continue to strive to function under an egalitarian-minded government may be the reason: “The South has a few tycoons like Ba Thi, a woman who turnedrice a distribution network into a thriving conglomerate, raising money from Japanese investors to expand operations into areas such as oil exploration. Yet the heavy hand of the North stunts thespirit of entrepreneurship that might make doi moi [“renovation”] a reality, no doubt because of fears that economic liberties might infect the political arena.”*’ With the egalitarian blueprint as its guide, Kaus’ book on the “Work EthicState” recommends that the government “use the public sphere” to “incubate and spread” an egalitarian culture of “common” interests, sentiments, and experiences. Again, a more basic question is of course never considered in such proposals: why any individual should be forced to have common sentiments, experiences, and interests with otherindividuals.Curiously,this desire for “commonality,” and therefore social cohesiveness, is often held by the same people who advocate “variety” and “multiculturalism.” How “commonality” of interests and ways of life is to be reconciled with “diversity” of interests and ways of life is not clear. But with such “commonality” in mind, it is easy to find ways to reiterate, under various disguises, measures repeatedly tried in the past. The recommendations in Kaus’ “Work State” proposal range from “National Public Service” to forced equalization of the enjoyment of the products of one’s efforts. In Kaus’ socialisdFascist model for social change, the non-threatening piecemeal chipping away at socioeconomic inequality includes “eliminating tax deductions for skybox seats and season tickets,” and “regulating television coverage of sporting events to keep it universal, rather than letting cable networks profitably restrict it.” These legalways of forcing people to “mix” at music and sporting events are redolent of the neo-Fascist Argentina of Juan Doming0 Perbn: With the same egalitarian goals and with similarly legal means, General Perbn’s government would buy entire seat sections at operas and classical music concerts and then distribute the seats among factory workers (Perbn’s descumisudos or “shirtless ones”), who once at the operas and concerts would mix with and scandalize the neatly dressed upperclass Argentineans-to the amusement of populist leader Perbn and his followers. T o allay the fears of the nationalist-oriented, Kaus’ book recommends that one can try “putting a little soul into celebrating public holidays.” This emphasis on heavily nationalistic festivals (parades, speeches, rallies, music, etc.) is another wellknown characteristic of the Marxist-Leninist and Fascist approach to public policy. Other recommendationsare equally redolent ofnot only Marxist but also Fascist and National Socialist convictions, such as the need for subordinating one’s self to

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the community’s needs-for sacrificing the “I” to the “We,” in short, for universalized seFessness (altruism). “True courage,” wrote Joseph Stalin, “consists in being strong enough to master and overcome one’s self and subordinate one’s will to the will of the c ~ l l e c t i v e . ”“[One] ~~ cannot say,” wrote Fascist professor Giovanni Gentile, “‘This is my view’ unless at the same time he can say ‘This is our view.’ For at the root of the ‘I’ there is a ‘We’. ...My right to exist is the duty of others to secure my exi~tence.”~’ “To be a socialist,” declared National Socialist thinker Joseph Goebbels, “is to submit the I to the thou; socialism is sacrificing the individual to the whole.”50 “It is thus necessary,” wrote Adolf Hitler, “that the individual should finally come to realize that his own ego is of no importance in comparison with the existence of his nation ...that the higher interests involved in the life of the whole must here set the limits and lay down the duties of the interests of theindi~idual.”~’ b u s ’ call for a “National Public Service” argues that government must reinstate “conscription” in bothwar and peace. This measure draws on a well-known socialist/ Fascist model for civic life: the army, with its compulsory egalitarian, selfless, and holistic apparatus (cf. Trotsky‘s Communism and Terrorism). Thus “voluntary” National Public Service turns out to be not voluntary at all. Compulsion is part and parcel of the idea. A professor whose work has become a point of reference for the “national service movement” has similarly argued “the merits of obligatory and unpaid [emphasis added],but temporary, labor todo thenecessary work of society that is dangerous, grueling, or dirty.”5Z Here this professor is describing both the Bolsheviks’ Compulsory National Labor Service and the National Socialist National Labor Service (Reicharbeitdienst). According to Kaus’ view of civic life, individuals who decline to “serve” in the army should be forced to work (“serve”) in a system of Compulsory Labor Service Also, to further theegalitarian (in the United States called simply “national service”). agenda,government must “encourage”(byvariousmeansof both coercion and subsidization-the stick-and-carrot method) communal “day-care centers.” In the centers, social classes will necessarily “mix.” This “communal”compulsory approach is superior to giving people a choiceby means of things like“government” vouchers (already philosophically a socialist/Fascistdevice because of its collectivistapproach to providingforchildren)which,unfortunately, permitcontinuedand dreaded “stratification.” Government should start “social experiments” in the form of “modest suburban rezoning schemes” thatwill gradually and “unthreatingly” [sic] reduce the separation of classes in neighborhoods and schools. This agenda is echoed in new books and foundation reports causally connecting the so-called underclass to the migration of whites from the cities: These writings call for government “action” (a frequent euphemism for government force) to keep the middle-class white citizens where they are, thus effectively directing the people’s mobility within a presumably free nation (cf. also the government-sanctioned practice of “busing” children).53 The tactical reason given for “gradualism” and acting “unthreateningly” is that Americans must not realize that their country is being turned into yet another example of the always-ongoing and never-quite-vanquished “socialist experiment.” The

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social agenda in Kaus’ book includes not only little things like those mentioned above, but also what he calls “very big things”-like “national health insurance.” Other “big things” are government programs offering a “government job at subminimum wages” (something forbidden to the profit-seeking, and therefore less moral and moredeserving of worse treatment, private sector, which must pay least at minimum wage). Among the recommended “big things” is the system of “day-care” centers. With these little and big things implemented, the United States will then become a “work-ethic

NOTES

1. Their exceptionalism was registered in Wilfredo Pareto’s comment-his own application of what would later become the postmodern hermeneutics of suspicion-on the egalitarian agenda of many intellectuals: “[the so-called sentiment of equality] is not, in fact, a sentiment of equality and is not related to any abstraction, as a few naive ‘intellectuals’ still believe; but it is related to the direct interests of individuals who are benton escaping certain inequalities not in their favor, and setting up new inequalities that will be in their favor, this latter being their chief concern.” Wilfredo Pareto, Trattato di sociologiagenerale 11, section 1227, my translation. Other critics have made the same point. See Samuel Francis, Equality as a Political Weapon (Auburn, Ala.: The Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1991); Antony Flew, The Politics of Procrustes: Contradictions of Enforced Equality (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1981). 2. Karl Mam, Critique of the Gotha Program (1 875), inLewis S. Feuer, Marx and Engels: Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy (New York: Anchor, 1959). 3. Lars-ErikNelson,“EastGerman:I’dhavepreferredU.S.camp,”[PaloAlto] Times Tribune, 12 August 1990. 4. Vincent J. Schodolsky, “Soviet Union’s Brain Drain,” Chicago Tribune, 5 May 1990. 5. The following statement is representative: “Marx’s goal. ..was the achievement of a freely willed moral order, not a rationalistically planned social structure. ...It was not the defeat of the existing Communism in 1989, but rather the ascension of communism as a theory in the nineteenth century, which confirmed the triumph of the libertarian idea. ... Similarly, Mam argues in The German Ideology that treating each other justly requires social relationships that are voluntary rather than coercive.”Uerry Friedman, editor of Critical Review, cited in Antony Flew, “Dissent from ‘The New Consensus,’ ” Critical Review 6, no. 1 (Winter 1992): 851. Friedman naively repeats, probably unknowingly, the same statements about Mam taught for generations by professors in the socialist countries. 6. Frank Parkin, cited in AntonyFlew, The Politics ofProcrustes, 63-64. Parkin has abanMarxism and Class Theory:A Bourgeois Critique (New York: doned such views. See his scathing Columbia UP, 1979). 7. Cf. German scholar Rene Fulop Miller, cited in Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr Nekrich, Utopia in Power: The History o f the Soviet Unionfrom 1317 to the Present(Vew York: Summit Books, 1986), 218. 8. Professor Richard Herrnstein, quotedby Eugene Kennedy,“Dumbing down American students,” Chicago Tribune, 1 February 1993. 9. Peter J. Stanlis, “Robert Frost: Social and Political Conservative,”Chronicles:A Magazine ofAmerican Culture (August 1992): 23. 10. Eugene Kennedy, “Dumbing down American students.”

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11. Lewis S. Feuer, ed., Marx and Engels: Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy (New York: Anchor, 1959), 118. 12. Ibid.,118-19. 13. LeeLoevinger,“Skepticism and ScienceinMentalTesting,” Skeptical Inquirer 17 (Summer 1993): 417. 14. Ludwig von Mises, “On Equality and Inequality” (1961) in his Money, Method, and the Market Process (Norwell, Mass.: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1990), 190-201. 15. Ludwig von Mises, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics (1949; Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1966), 840-42. 16. Ludwig von Mises, “Epistemological Relativism in the Sciences of Human Action,” in his Money, Method, and the Market Process (Norwell, Mass.: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1990), 42. 17. Mises, Human Action, 157-66. 18. See Henry M. Christman, ed., Essential Works of Lenin (New York: Bantam Books, 1966), 341. 19. Chicago Tribune Wires, “3 more Nobel laureates back Clinton’s economics,” Chicago Tribune, 4 July 1992. 20. Professor Robert Reich, economic “advisor”to both Michael Dukakis and Bill Clinton, during an interview on Channel 7, 4 July 1992. Why is it wrong to make more money by providing services or goods to the population or by better investments is never explained. Why should Reich or anyone else for that matter decide when one is to be declared rich or how much of one’s money should be taken away after one is declared rich is never explained either. 21. David Kelley, “Food for Thought,” IOS Journal 2, no. 1 (Summer 1992): 7. 22. Feuer, Mam and Engels: Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy, 119. 23. Marx, Critique o f the Gotha Program (1875), 129. 24. Christman, Essential Works o f Lenin. 25. Leon Trotsky, Communism and Terrorism (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1963), 171. 26. M u m and Engels: Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy, 481-85. 27. Bernard-Henry Lkvy, “Drieu: vivere e morire all’ombra di Vichy,” Corriere della sera, 30 April 1992, 7. 28. Giovanni Gentile, Genesis and Structure of Society, trans. M. S. Harris (Urbana: U o f Illinois P, 1960), 124-25. 29. Harvard professor Martin Kilson, cited in Tom Wicker, “Affirmative-action foes cry ‘justice’; backers call it ‘hypocrisy.’ ” Chicago Tribune, 16 July 1991. 30. Terry Eastland, “The Set-Aside Set,” The American Spectator, March 1993, 49. 3 1. Gerald Horne, Reversing Discrimination: The Case f i r Aj’irmative Action (New York: International Publishers, 1992). 32. Reported in economist Walter Williams’ column in the Washington Times according to AntonyFlew, “Dissent from the ‘New Consensus,’”CriticalReview 6, no 1 (Winter 1992): 93, n. 1. 33. Stevenson Swanson, “Apprentice quota set by water board,”Chicago Tribune, 22 February 1993, Section 2, p. 3. 34. Robert G. Holland, “Testscam,” Reason, January 1991, 47. 35. Ibid.,48. 36. Carol Jouzaitis, “Student aid deals: Greed or charity?” Chicago Tribune, 6 July 1992. 37. Cf. Leonard Peikoff, The Ominous Parallels (New York: Stein and Day, 1982), which warns of the growth of fascist ideas in the United States.

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38. Mickey Kaus,The End ofEquality (New York: Basic Books,1992), reviewed by George Scialabba, “Mickey Kaus calls for an endto welfare and a fair deal for all who work,” Chicago Tribune, 23 August 1992. 39. Mickey b u s , The End o f Equaliy, cited in George Scialabba, “Mickey Kaus calls for an end to welfareand a fair deal for all who work.” 40. Max Eastman, Love and Revolution (New York: Random House, 1964), 633. 41. Stuart Chase, A New Deal (New York: Macmillan, 1932), 163. 42. Jerry Friedman, “After Libertarianism,” Critical Review 6 , no. 1 (Winter 1992): 136. 43. VladimirBukovsky, To Choose Freedom (Stanford:HooverInstitutionPress, 1987), 127. 44. Peter Collier, review of Neil Sheehan,Hanoi and Saigon (New York: Random House, 1992), Chicago Tribune, 13 September 1992. 45. Ibid. 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid. 48. CitedinArthur M. Schlesinger, The Vital Center (NewYork: HoughtonMifflin, 1962), 56. 49. Gentile, Genesis and Structureof Society, 82, 194. 50. Cited in Schlesinger, The Vital Center, 54. 5 1. Cited in Ayn Rand, The Fascist New Frontier (New York: Nathaniel Branden Institute, 1963), 4. A Call to Civic Service, quoted by Thomas DiLorenzo, “National 52. Charles Moskos in his Service,” The Free Market, February 1993, p. 8. 53. Cf. Clarence Page, “Kerner and the new urban realities,” Chicago Tribune, 7 March 1993. Compare Marx’s ideas on forcefully moving the population around for the good of society (The Communist Manifesto). 54. Kaus, The End o f Equality, cited in George Scialabba, “Mickey Kaus calls for an end to welfare and a fair deal for all who work.”

Chapter Five

The Marxist Approach to Ethics I1

TheBolsheviks have organized public education in such a way that no one can exceed the limits of the officially authorized level of knowledge and education. “German historian Rene Fulop Miller, after visiting Russia in the 1920s, cited in Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr Nekrich, Utopia in Power [The so-called sentimentof equality] is not, in fact, a sentimentof equality and is not related to any abstraction, a s a few naive “intellectuals” still believe; but it is related to the direct interestsof individuals who are bent on escaping certain inequalities not in their favor, and setting upnew inequalities thatwiil be in their favor, this latterbeing their chief concern. “Wilfredo Pareto, Trattato di sociologia generale

THE EDUCATIONAL GOAL OF UNIVERSAL MEDIOCRITY The relentless pursuit of equality by an activist government and a determinedly progressive educational system produced an ever-expanding mediocrity in the socialist countries. This is one of the main themes in Alexandr Zinoviev’s novel The Radiant Future: “A massive mediocrity,” observed Edik, “the kind that is sponsored by the State.”’ Such a radiant futureis already present in American education. Professor Herbert York University system, has London, Dean of the Gallatin Division of the New identified the correlation between the rising tide of educational mediocrity and the institutionalization of the same egalitarian ethics once so effectively applied by educators in the socialist countries:

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Barbara Lerner, for example, in a celebrated piece published in Commentary magazine, seems to delight in reporting that those at the bottom of the testing scale have made strides in entering the mid-level range. ..it is, however, more than offset by the reduction of those scoring the highest levels. In fact, what SAT scores in the nation now suggest is a compression at the mean, aform of numerical homogenization [emphasis added]. Moreover, this condition applies with similar veracity to teachers’ exams ...and to the performance of applicants on civil service tests. The sameness of results is like the classless society, neither rich norpoor, just. .. impoverished [emphasis added] ...like so many areas of life where the egalitarian spirit prevails, those whodo very well are made to feel guiltyfor their success....Whether it’s schooling or teaching or civil service activity, mediocrity is the norm in practice and as a goal.’ Chester E. Finn, Jr. describes some of the problems in grade school alone (high school educationshows a similar growth in mediocrity): “Barely three-fifths ofAmerican eighth-graders are functioning at the level we associate with fifth-grade math: multiplication and division, problems with more than onestep, etc. And only about one in seven is having success with problems involving fractions, decimals, percentages, and simple algebra, the sorts of things introduced by seventh grade.”3 Professors John E. Chubb and TerryM. Moe have proposed a number of Capitalist-oriented economic approaches to stop thedecline of American schools.*Their logic is that if the principles of socialism lead to mediocrity, then those of its opposite can reverse the trend. But “equality” and “mutual caring,” rather than producing students who are academically superior to other students m e now the goals of the most progressive professors. They may well succeed, because placing egalitarianism, “cooperation,” and “caring for others” above mere selfish excellence has already become axiomatic in the training of teachers at the most influential schools of education throughout the United States.

SELFLESSNESS, VOLUNTARISM,AND THE PUBLIC GOOD

All discussions on how to improve the quality of American education must face the fact that academic excellence is no longer the principal goal of the system as conceived by its directing minds. To put it otherwise: The philosophy that at the present time informs education in theUnited States doesnot even accept the concept of excellence. A far loftier educational agenda has instead replacedThe it. head of the prestigious Stanford University School of Education exemplifies the phenomenon. Thisprofessor teaches future teachers that there is a better way because “cooperative way as opposed to a competitive way.” Problems must be discussed, the professor articulately points out, as “a cooperative kind of thing.”5 The most important “kind of thing” for the educator is to teach caring. She questions the benefits of grading, because, “at some point, what good does grading do? After all, education is not a contest to see who’s best.” Unfortunately, the professor laments, in the United States many see it that way, and “they perpetuate a process that stands in the way of teaching students to be caring.”

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“I think,” the professor observes, “it’s a question of ideology. We are so immersed in this individualist ideology, the notion that we have to be best, not that we have to do our best. Those who are striving to be number one, seldom have the time or inclination to think about who is number two or number three, unless it is to compete with them.” Therefore, individualism and the search for excellence (for to excel means literally to be superior, better than others) are some of the culturally ingrained prejudices that must be combatted to create better people and a better world in the United States. Promoting voluntary rather than for-profit work is an important part of this agenda. Therefore, the Stanford educator wants students to be required to do voluntary communitywork. The oxymoron explicit in this ideais routinely overlooked in all discussions of so-called voluntarism in the United States. Also routinely overlooked is that “required voluntary work‘’ has been called in the socialist countries, less euphemistically, Compulsory Labor Service. The professor also wants this “voluntary” work placed on the same level as academic disciplines like mathematics. Placing compulsory labor service at the same level as other academic activities and making student grades depend partly on this “service” to society was once also standard practice in the socialist countries. It was a formof political activism regarded as particularly conducive to improving thelives of everyone. “What’s needed for the lesson to work,” the Stanford educatoragrees, “is for the entire school environment to reflect the caring.” The Stanford University School of Education is not an isolated case. In Ed School Follies: The Miseducation ofAmerica > Teachers,6Rita Kramer describes what she calls the descent of teachers’ training into “a new kind of academic dark age.” Trying to find out what it is that future American teachers are learning, Kramer discovered that schools of education are not only devoidof any proper principles of education, but that the professors themselves deride education as such. They look down upon educational and rational principles like defining terms, giving examples, correcting mistakes right away, praising students that do well, and using drills and practice: As a prominent American educator insists, “Teaching this way is unethical and immoral.” The teaching of knowledge and the way to acquire it have given way to of academic excellence in favor other goals. Schools of education repudiate standards of various criteria that further egalitarianism and warm feelings. “The aim is not to produce individuals capable of effort and mastery,” Kramer writes, “but to make sure everyone gets a passing grade. The school is to be remade into a republic of feelings-as distinct from a republic of learning-where everyone can feel he deserves an A.” The search for equality of outcome is central to this educational philosophy. A professor at Texas Southern University, for example, calls for teachers to “promote equity in student achievement.” At Eastern Michigan University, another professor teaches that working hard and being rewarded for personal merit are oppressive concepts. “In order to create a more just society,” Kramer observes, the prevalent educational philosophy calls for teachers to “devote most of their attention and efforts to remediation for the slow, the weak, the apathetic, the hostile ...without

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suggesting that they may not be performing at the same levelas the more able students.” The idea is “to have everyone come out equal in the end.” What of the non-slow, non-weak, non-apathetic, non-hostile student? “What happens to those more capable or motivated students is hardly anyone’s concern.” A high school principal in the Chicago school system illustrates how these progressive ideas have now filtered down throughout the educational apparatus. “I’d like to throw out testing,” the principal admits, “and replace it with an Index of Decent HumanBeings.” Echoing the teachings of the best U.S. schools of education, the educator explains that standardized tests merely reflect socioeconomic inequality and therefore only teach us that the students who do poorly are socioeconomically lowdeprived. They “tell us nothing thatwe don’t know already, that children from income families tend to score lower.” The principal is very consistent in the application of progressive thinking: H e is reluctant to suspend students, since it is not e here another their fault that they flunk, but the fault of ~ o c i e t y . ~ O nrecognizes illustration of the Marxist axiom asserting that one’s social being determines one’s consciousness. These progressive viewpoints are now mainstream: A year ago our high school principal invited me to join an advisory group convened to help develop a special course of international studies. A rigorous syllabus, including languages, economics, and political science was envisioned for accomplished sophomores who had demonstrated they could handle demanding classes. Sadly,one member of the group-a teacherbemoaned making achievementthe benchmark for enrollment. She knew of “underachievers” who had never worked to their potential, yet might be motivated by such a course.So she felt it should be available to anyone. And about three years ago in ColumbusI heard a passionate plea for lower standards. Ambitious goals and high expectations frustrate too many young people, warned the emotional speaker, whose gripping oratory included a tragic story about one teen’s suicide. The most frightening conclusion one draws from these episodes is that neither pupil nor teacher grasps how their standards have been watered down.8 The egalitarian anti-elitism of the educational system does notregard “smart people” as socially desirable. A parent reports: A columnist in a recent issue of our community’s high-school newspaper, the Lakewood, Ohio, Times, assailed a new grading policy that went into effectwhenclassesbegan. The writer felt it wasn’t fairthat students taking advanced placement classes will earn5 points for Honors, 4.5 for As, and 3.5 for Bs-or a half-point higher than what students with identical grades in regular courses will earn. Echoing parental advice, the columnist argued that “It shouldn’t matter what the grade in the course is, it should matter how much we learn. This should apply for all classes, advanced placement or not advanced placement.” Adorned with a sketch entitled “Steroids of Academics,” the column also made a reference about “smart people” that smacked of enmity.’ These ideas are also promoted by some of themost prestigious foundations inthe United States. Take, for example,an educational report by the Carnegie Foundation. Subtitled “Turning Points: Preparing American Youth for the 21st Century,” this

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report has been prepared by academicians working for the “Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development.”’o Among other things, these educators want to achieve equality in the racial, the social, and the so-called educational areas. They assume the materialist axioms statingthat such equalityis not merely possible, but necessary, to create better people and a better world, and that education must play a key role because it most effectively helps reformers sweep old notions away from the consciousness of the population atlarge. To achieve their goals, the professors cheerfully recommend the materialist principle of keepingso-called superior people in check. The professors very logically want superior students not to be considered superior, not to learn at a pace quicker than their so-called inferior peers and, by eliminatingstandardizedtesting, not to be categorized as superior. Stopping the better students from learning at a faster pace by keeping them in the same classes with the slower learners furthers the egalitarian agenda. So does discrediting the idea of competition, which, if made part of the system, sooner or laterreveals who is better and who is worse (cf. the elimination of the word “competition” from the vocabulary of the socialist countries, and its replacement by the word “emulation”); and so does discrediting testing itself, because testing unfortunately tends to reveal academic superiority and inferiority. Though implemented in every socialist country, this egalitarian approach was most thoroughly and successfully applied in Cambodia by the Red Khmer by means of a systematic “checking’ of the superior. The Cambodian Reds’ aim was “to eradicate any traces of the educated, the middle class and any link with the past. Everything from songs to emotions tofamilial ties were to be excised. The past was to be wiped clean-and wiped out.”” This approach “was not madness, but logic. ...C-minus students who had mixed slogans of cafe communism andmail-order Maoism.” Logic indeed: The Paris-educated student-leaders of the Red Khmer, like the Bolshevik intellectuals long before them, knew their M a n well. The Carnegie report recommends that superior students ought to be forced to stay with the average ones and that they should not be encouraged to learn at their own individual rate but at the rate of the collective-in this case the average class group. As is standard in materialist discourse, the report emphasizes “cooperative learning”-in this case, children teaching children, which obviously trains them to care, give, help, and share with those who know less or are less gifted. In consonance with these goals of social improvement, the president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancementof Teaching, Professor Ernest Boyer, believes that schools should no longer be seen merely as centers of knowledge and good reasoning. Instead, theyshould be turned into “social service centers.” The professor recommends that school-based health clinics (which have existed for quite a while, at least since the Great Society “social advances” of the 1960s and are part of the “social service” politicalagendaalreadyinstitutionalizedinAmericaneducation) should be combined withchildday-carefacilities (to further this role) and thatschools should assume the responsibility for feeding students, since children should be in school from 7 A.M. to 6:30 P.M.” Inspired by the Carnegie report and its ethical assumptions and policy recom-

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mendations, a primary school administrator in Oak Park, Illinois, argues that superior students (so-called “gifted’ ones) should be grouped with non-achievers, not to teach the non-achievers, but i n order to learnfiom them; and should therefore be placed with the non-achievers on the playground, because the non-achievers are usually leaders on the playground (obviously because physical skill and force rather than brains prevail, though the professor does not point this out): In other words, the so-called “superior” student should, after all, learn from the so-called “inferior,” thereby learning, too, that the “inferior” student is not really inferior, and since the latter can never teach qua student but only qua bully, the playground is the logical teaching place for this dialectical epistemological and social equalization of the student~.’~ Other influential foundations sponsor similar goals. Thus, the Rockefeller Foundation’s chairman, millionaire David Rockefeller, writing as an expert on education: I, for one, believe that among the characteristics of the twenty-first century will be a forced [sic] deemphasis on material consumption. ...If I am right, of all the world’s people it will beAmericanswhowillhave to adjustthemost,simplybecauseweare-percapita-the world’s biggest consumers. Along with more thoughtful development of the nation’s material ...I do not mean resources must come a greater exploration of its citizens’ “inner resources”. to suggest an egoistical self-absorption. ...I mean the human impulse towards altruism and cooperation, which brings a harvest in the form of community spirit and action ...greater sisterhood and brotherhood...compared with the realpolitik rhetoric of education for competitiveness. ...On this score, America 2000’s message is contradictory. Despite an avowed goal to create communities of learners, its emphasis on choice seems premised on the benefits that education confers on individuals, not on society. ..this aspect of the president’s plan relies on a market-driven paradigm of self-isolated consumers of educational services. ...Girls, Gilligan notes, speak in a different voice-are more likely to follow a path of connectedness and caring rather than isolated absolutes in their moral reasoning; and this feeling of shared responsibility toward others is central to their development of self. Unfortunately, our schools ...As in much ofour culture, are too often organized in ways that subvert such connectedness. the emphasis in school is all too often on “me” and not “we.” Similarly, another Cambridgebased psychologist, Howard Gardneer, ainseminal work...has proposed a theory of multiple intelligences, suggestingthat beyond mathematical logical and linguistic skills lie other intelligences such as ...interpersonal, and intraper~onal.’~ That Rockefeller’s ideas sound quite reasonable shows how accepted they have become and how innocently they can be formulated. What can be wrong with teaching and promoting “interpersonal” and “intrapersonal” skills along with the more traditional academic disciplines,or with giving greaterimportance to the“we” over the “I”? Yet the same ideas have structured the educational system in every socialist country: Teachers made students’ grades depend not merely on academic skills, but on compliance with specific collectivist behavioral criteria carefully formulated by the best minds in charge. Teachers thuswere directly responsible for the thorough politicization of society and for the creation of what Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr Nekrich called “the Cog in the Whee1”-the Soviet Man, the communi-

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tarian-minded, interconnected, and altruistic man of the future. Worth noticing in Rockefeller’s statements is his repetition, in the context of educational policies, of assertions that openly privilege the collective over the individual and self-sacrifice over selfishness. One may recall Gentile’s Fascist rendering of these ideas: “For at the root of the ‘I’ there is a ‘We.’ The community [Gemeimchafi, as the National Socialists called it] to which an individual belongs is the basis of his spiritual existence; it speaks through his mouth, feels with his heart, and thinks withhis brain.”I5 Along with altruism and collectivism, so has the search for equality of results already entered the debate over “school choice” and educational “vouchers” in the United States. One typical proposal, called “The Scholarship Initiative,” argues that the “choice” and “voucher” system ought to be in fact tilted toward the poor.“ Whereas Capitalist thinkers on educational policy (such as those in the Cat0 Institute, the Reason Foundation, or the Heritage Foundation) advocate giving everyone is being treated credit so that all children can chooseamong private schools (everyone the same), egalitarian professors want to limit “choice” to the poor. If a poor child has a handicap, he would get even more money. The objective is to treat children unequally to secure equality of results: “Without giving the poor this protection we fear that, for a variety of reasons, they will too often lose out to nonpoor children in the competition for places in popular schools.” “Losing out” is inadmissible in the case of “the poor”; therefore their “winning” must be secured: “Finally, the initiative would permit scholarship schools to charge beyond the scholarship, but only for nonpoor families and only according to their capacity to pay.” This scheme treats middle-class children differently and therefore unjustly, while rich children will not be affected, since their parents can afford anything: Middleclass parents who now cannot afford to send their children to a private because school they are already paying all sorts of taxes to support the public ones, would remain unable to “choose”; whereas parents who have been on the dole all their lives will be able to send their children to schools that the working parents cannot afford.” In fact, professors who claim to support “the right of the family to choose the type of education the child should receive regardless of the wealth of the family” balk at extending this right to every family: “If [a legal suit by parents to get the right to “choose” a school] were expanded to include upper-middle-class families, then I think it would be a misuse of the theories I have advanced.”” The altruistic and egalitarianethos also informsdeclarationsagainst “magnet schools” (where so-called superior students and teachers are put together) by the superintendent of the notorious Chicago school system. According to this educator, magnet schools discriminate against the poor, minorities, etc., because the parents of magnet school children “know the system to make it work for them. They know all those thingsto put on the applications. The access is not equitable.”” The magnet school system, he argues, “has institutionalized a 2-tiered education system: one for children with access to power and one for children who don’t have those options.” As Marxism teaches and this American educator repeats, it is, after all, powerthe hegemony of one groupover the rest-that has determined (“constructed,” etc.) the so-called excellence of the children of one group and the so-called inferiority of

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the children of the other group. Therefore, the superintendent of the Chicago school system hopes to initiate school programs that keep top studentspom going to magnet schools and instead make them stay in the inferior schools within their neighborhoods.2o In other words, the superior student must be forced to remain at the level of the inferior. Such progressive ideas do further equality and deepen democracy.

FROM ACADEMIA TO THE WORKPLACE Even a mediocre educational system can succeed in transmitting its values to a nation at large. Seeping from the professors to the general population, a philosophy extolling mediocrity and dismissing excellence (for what is “excellence” anyway but criteria arbitrarily set by the dominant classes?) has already made its way to the business world, whereexcellence is rapidly disappearingas a valid operational notion: “Consider, for example, how retired Motorola Inc. Chairman Bob Galvin defined the new axioms of manufacturing excellence at a symposium that Lord Corp. sponsored late last month at Duke University. Like the other axioms, ‘striving for perfection’-the tougheststandardof all-was dubbeda ‘heresy’ by Mr. Galvin, because so few managements believe such a goal is even practical, let alone attainable.”” Not just mediocrity, but also outright inferiority, are already not merely a desideratum but a factual reality in American productivity. A former U.S. secretary of labor has charged that the nation faces a “work force” crisis: “Employers repeatedly tell her that new workers coming out of high schools cannot meet the needs of today’s jobs.”’’ A poll of 775 electronics executives indicates pessimism regarding the future ofAmerican electronics and its connection to what U.S. the school system is not producing: “The executives expect America’s technology edge to decline significantly in the next five years, as other countries match the U . S ...in innovation and new products. New customers will be attracted only by increasing productivity, product quality and consumer service. The main concern among electronics executives is a growing shortage of American engineers graduating from the nation’s uni~ersities.”~~ But as compensation, American students are now perhaps more caring. Be that as it may, while professors teach their students and write about how “caring” is more admirable because it is less unfeeling than studying the hard sciences, or about how is to pay more relative the concept of excellence is, or about how important it attention to the “we” rather than to the “I,” more than half of all doctorates in engineering and 40 percent of the Ph.D.s in physics, mathematics, and computer science granted by American universities arenow awarded to foreign-born nationals who have not been subjected from early childhood to the U.S. educational system. Over half of the associate professorship openings in engineering go to the foreignborn because of the lack of American prospects. American nationals now constitute a minority of those applying for admission to engineering schools. Americans are obviously shying away from the hard sciences into more “caring” fields. While the interest in engineering and the hard sciences declines, the status of

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social workers and their job opportunities are on the upswing. By 1990, there were already 438,000 social workers nationwide working for government agencies, “nonprofit” (often quasi-governmental) social service agencies, community and religious organizations, hospitals, nursing homes, and home health agencies. School applications to study social work and the number of social workers is expected to increase fister than the averagefor alloccupations tbrougb the end of the century.’* The United States is thus developing into a gigantic “care-taking’’ apparatus where “helping others” (and therefore extending as much as possible the number of those declared by the care-takersto be in need of help) is becoming a proportionately greater source of jobs than other occupations.

LOVE, SHARING, SELFLESSNESS, CARING, AND SO ON “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs,” teaches The CommunistManiferto. Many learned professors continue to seem unaware of the explicitly parasitic nature of the agenda set forth in this famous formula. The opinion of a pedagogue (a “moderate liberal” by his own confession) is representative: “Even a skepticalutopian like myself can still believe in the worthof the guiding principle: from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” This academician writes his encomium of one of Marx’s central ideas at the conclusion of a presumably dismissive essay he calls “A Requiem for Karl mar^."'^ It is true that in the Age of Late Marxism the views of citizens from the socialist and ex-socialist countries sometimes differ from those of the more progressive and influential members of the Western educational establishment. After witnessingand experiencing the consequences of Marx’s formula, some intellectuals in the former socialist countries have begun to think differently about altruism: “The Soviet’s love of his neighbour-that’s what will suffocate the world,” mutters Anton Zimin in The Radiant Future.26 Altruism, Zimin has come to believe, hurts more than selfishness and is more difficult to combat, because altruistic people are extremely difficult to get rid of. (The same idea was expressed in the 1930s by American poet Robert Frost, who feared the insidious damage caused by an institutionalized and everexpanding altruism: Commenting on thepolicies of the New Deal, Frost confessed to finding it “harder to bear the benevolence than the despotism” of New Deal politician^).^' After more than half a century of having their social consciousness reconstructed by their social being, some hardened veterans of the institutionalized altruism of the socialist countries have not wholly accepted the progressive axioms. The skeptics can be found not only among intellectuals but also among factory workers. While describing how, in the Union of Socialist Soviet Republic, wealth was extracted from the more successful and productive, an uneducated but shrewd worker from Vilnius contrasts the materialist ethics in which he was brought up with the alternative ethicsthat he happens to favor: “‘[the profitfrom thesuccessful] was used to support inefficientfactories,’Ramanauskassaid. ‘The goodworker, through the ministries, would support the bad worker. Each businessshould live on its own finances, and those that do not should suffer the consequences.’

”’*

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This socialist worker’s observations deserve close study because they encapsulate not just two approaches to economic policy but two ethical systems. O n the one hand, the worker from Vilnius rejects an ethics that teaches, first, that everyone has a moralduty tohelp everyoneelse in “need’ andthat, therefore, themore productive people must always support the less productive; and second, that this approach is both moral and good for society (economically wise). T o p u t it otherwise: The worker from Vilnius rejects an ethics that teaches that each person exists for the sake of another; and thatif one does not want toexist for the sake of another, one should be reeducated to learn to like doing so; and if that also fails, then legally sanctioned compulsory altruism will do the trick. The parasitic ethics rejected by the worker from Vilnius is summarized in the dictum “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need”: The more productive, efficient, skilled, prudent, successhl, and creative must be forced to give part of the product of their minds (the amount to be decided always by the brain trust in charge) to the less productive, efficient, and worse. This procedure is presumably not only moral in itself, but also reduces poverty and inequality. As a literature professor observes, an individual must not have the “right to choose” if “this means the right to buy one’s child an expensive private education while other children are deprived of their school meals.”29 Helping others (once known as “charity”) is thus effectively defined not throughindividual free decisions but compulsorily and collectively: “In terms of a societal [collective] objective that takes precedence over the goals of individual^."^^ To this end, a group of people who are supposedly the “best minds” in the nation for this delicate task (the public “servants”“po1iticians, bureaucrats, their academicadvisers, etc.), rather than each individual citizen acting on his own, is given sufficient power to make the various economic (but ultimately moral) choices. O n the other hand, the worker from Vilnius defends an ethics that teaches that nobody has a right, no matter the circumstances, to somebody else’s wealth; that responsible citizens take careof their own needs and no onehas the right to demand that they take care of his needs regardless of how irresponsibly he has behaved;that each person has the right to keep the total productof the work of hismind without anyone getting any part of it without his (as opposed to the electorate’s, the collective’s, etc.) consent; that each person has the moral right to enjoy the results and suffer the consequences of his character, degree of self-discipline, ability, productivity, prudence, good or bad luck, and so forth; that a moral act (such as giving part of the product of one’s productivity-labor-to someone else) presupposes and necessitates free will and a sense of justice (as Aristotle taught), and also, therefore, lack of coercion (electorally sanctioned or not) and carehl evaluation of individual desserts; that therefore no one in “society” has a moral duty to help just anyone else inneed; that, conversely, no one in “society” has the right to mooch from any individual or group; that no individual, group or institution (no matter how supported by a voting “majority”) should takeaway from some to “subsidize” or in any way “help” others; that government’s primary duty is merely to defend life and property, thus creating favorable conditions for individualsto improve and to desire

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to improve their condition; that those responsible for feeding childA are his parents and not the parents of child B, who prudently postponed having children until it was economically viable to do so, nor single people who have chosen not to have children at all; that productive people in Appalachia should notbe forcedto subsidize (“help”)Arkansasfarmers; that PalmSprings taxpayers should not be forced to subsidize (“help”) Appalachian welfare; that Alaskans should not be forced to subsidize (“help”) public housing in Atlanta; that law-abiding citizens Kansas in should not have to dole out money to riot-tornLos Angeles; that, in short, a person should not be mandated to exist for the sake of another-that is to say, should not be mandated to exist to be his unremunerated servant; and that doingotherwise is both immoral and socially corrupting.

NOTES 1. Alexandr Zinoviev, The Radiant Future (1978; New York: Random House, 1980), 259. Chicago Tribune, 11 2.HerbertLondon,“Bewarethelureofradicalegalitarianism,” September 199 1. 3. Chester E. Finn, Jr., “Up from Mediocrity,” Policy Review, Summer 1992, p. 80. 4. John E. Chubb and Terry M. Moe, Politics, Markets, andAmerica? Schools (New York: Brookings Institution, 1992). 5. “Ne1 Noddings finds mathematics and morality part of the same equation,”Stanford Observer, January 1988. 6. Rita Kramer,Ed School Follies: The Miseducation ofAmerica i Teachers (New York: Free Press, 1991). 7. BonitaBrodt, “ ‘KnockonanyDoor’ is principal’smotto,” Chicago Tribune, 16 May 1988. His high school has been notorious for its low reading scores. It is true, however, that according to the Stanford School of Education, the Ford Foundation, and other is the result of nothing but socioeconomic progressive groups, this evidence of inferiority inequality. 8. Charles R. Day, “High Schools, Low Goals: Subpar Standards May Be the Real Reason Education Suffers,” Industry Week, 15 October 1990, 5. 9. Ibid.,5. 10. Cited in Jim Bowman, “Nerds at risk, or Racial diversity above all,”Chicago Tribune, op-ed page, 21 June 1990. 11. Max Friedman, “From Cambodia’s Tragedy, Two Testaments to the Human Spirit,” review of Gail Sheehy,Spirit of Survival (New York: Morrow, 1988)and Molyda Szymusiak, The Stones Cry Out (New York: Hill and Wang, 1988), The Chicago Tribune, 8 July 1986. 12. Cited in D. L. Cuddy, “The new leadership neglects the old basics in today’s schools,” Chicago Tribune, 14 August 1990. Cuddy is a former public school and university teacher who worked for the US. Department of Education from 1982 to 1988. 13. Reported by Jim Bowman, “Nerds at risk.” 14. David Rockefeller, Jr., “America 2000 and Philanthropy’s Education Agenda,” Teachers College Record, Spring 1992, 372-73. 15. Giovanni Gentile, Genesis and Structure of Socieg, trans. M. S. Harris (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1960), 82.

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Education 16. Lynn Olson, “Professors Craft Model Ballot Initiative to Promote Choice,” Week, 17 June 1992, p. 19. 17. Jeffrey A. Tucker, “Kemp’s Neo-Welfare State,” The Free Market (Auburn, Ala.: The Ludwig von Mises Institute), July 1992, p.8. 18. Professor Stephen Arons, cited in Mark Walsh, “2 Lawsuits Seek State Vouchers for Poor Youths,” Education Week, 17 June 1992, p. 19. 19. “Magnet schools discriminate against poor, Kimbrough says,”Chicago Tribune, 4 August 1990. 20.Ibid. 21. Day, “High Schools, Low Goals,” 5. 22. Casey Banas, “Nation faces ‘workforce crisis,’ U.S. labor secretary charges,” Chicago Tribune, 6 March 1990. 23. Jon Van, ‘‘Poll of industry shows shakyfuture for U.S. in electronics,”Chicago Tribune, 18 March 1990. 24.CarolKeliman,“Socialworkerstatus,jobsontheupswing,” Chicago Tribune, 13 September 1992.

25. Frank E. Manuel, “A Requiem for Karl Marx,” Daedalw: Journal of the American Academy ofArts and Sciences (Spring 1992): 19. 26. Zinoviev, The Radiant Future, 259. 27. Peter J. Stanlis, “Robert Frost: Social and Political Conservative,”Chronicles:A Magazine ofAmerican Culture, August 1992, 23. 28. Vincent J. Schodolski, “In Vilnius, independence brings profit,” Chicago Tribune, 11 October 1988. 29. Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983), 200. Use of NaturalRe30. E. C. Pasour,Jr.,“Conservation,‘X-Inefficiency’andEfficient sources,” The Journal ofLibertarian Studies 3, no. 4 (Winter 1979): 379.

Chapter Six

The Marxist Defenses I: From “Denial”

to “Apocalyptic Visions and Elastic Displacement of the Objects of Oppression and the Sources of Liberation” Despite having been bitten 2,000 times, Partasarathy, a40-year-old snake charmer from India, says he has special powers over venomous scorpions. -Associated Press report, 2 February 1993 Though still alive in academia, materialist discourse hasnot remained unaffected by the distressing “objective relations” of the Late Marxist Age. Under their pressure, some of the less conspicuous characteristics of the discourse have been suddenly foregrounded. Goodexamples ofthis are seenin its defense mechanisms, which have become increasingly baroque: Twisting and turning on endless objections, changes of front, paradoxes, expedients, new proofs,and systematic blurrings of distinctions, thesedefenseshavehelped themoretenacious among academicpractitionersof materialist discourse to continue to entertain-at least to their own satisfaction-a way of thinking that thehistory ofthe late twentieth centuryhas managed to destroy.

DENIAL Denial is the most fundamental defense against the cognitive dissonances of the Late Marxist Age. It can be detected under every other defense. In its purest form, it simply affirms that noreal socialism has ever existed on the face of this earth and that therefore no triumphant socialist revolutionary leader has ever been a truly real triumphant socialist revolutionary leader. With this outright denial, materialist discourse disposes of all possible empirical arguments against its (always potentially) beneficial effects.’ Denial is thus the materialist equivalent of the “avoidance coping styles” sometimes used by people to deal with the unacceptable. The defense is now so popular that even former Russian communists have adopted

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it. Any really progressive Soviet educator used to teach his students that the system they lived under was real socialism. But now the still extant Marxists claim that, on second thought, it was really not so. One such recent convert is experienced Communist Party activist G. I. Yanayev (one of the members of “the gang of eight” that in August 1991, in a failed coup, temporarily deposed Mikhail Gotbachev because of the latter’s coincidentallysudden ill health). Yanayev still believes in the old ideas because what existed in the former Union of Socialist Soviet Republicswas only the “shadow of socialism” (Yanayev’s poetic rendition of the more standard expression “a distortion of socialism”). The ideal of communism, hard-liner Yanayev insists, is not affected at all by the Soviet experience.’ Blaming the leaders rather than their ideas is in fact a standard procedure in this defense: Thus, aRussian graduatestudent (and still Communist Party member) explains that the USSR’s “misfortunes are not due to afailure of communism but to themistakes of an incompetent leader~hip.”~ The defense has also been adopted by the French Communist Party-a particularly hard-line branch of Western communism (it was the only Western European Communist Party that did not condemn theSoviet invasion of Afghanistan).While tryingin 1991 to stem the loss ofmembershipinhisparty,itsleaderGeorges Marchais declared that “In this century a lot of bad things have been done in the name of communism. But that does not necessarily condemn the objectives of socialism or of communism. We don’t claim to possess revealed truth, but we have certain ideas ...to present to those who search, reflect and hopefor a differentlife.”* The head of the U.S. Communist Party, Gus Hall, dutifully echoes the defense: The “problem [in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics]was not in the system, it was in the individuals who made mistake^."^ Thus, Marxist-Leninists have ended up adopting a defense developed after 1917 by German Social Democrats against the Marxist-Leninists themselves, whom they accused of not being real Marxists. Denial has not always enjoyed such widespread favor among progressives. Once upon a time, professors in the socialist countries routinely assumed that socialism indeed existed in their midst; and progressives in the West agreed. In works like Communism and Terrorism, Trotsky insisted, well into the 1920s, that Russian socialism was the real thing. Then, coincidental with his defeat by Stalin and subsequent exile, Trotsky and his followers suddenly adopted the Denial defense. Denial has since become a regular part ofthe publicity leaflets put out by the Trotskysts of the “International Socialist Organization,” who to the present day continue to enjoy a certain following on American university campuses.‘ For years after 1917, non-Trotskyst Western sympathizersof socialism agreed with academicians from the socialist countries that theirs was indeed real socialism. Eminent professors like Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and, later, Louis Althusser, taught their students that the infrastructure of the Soviet Union was really s ~ c i a l i s tSartre .~ and Merleau-Ponty wentso far as to write notorious defenses of the Soviet system under Stalin-apologies inwhichrepression was occasionallylamented, yet explained as necessary, and in which, in any case, the professors agreed that one must continue defending the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics as the

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“home of world socialism” and the Communist Party as the trusted ‘‘political leadership.”* Even questioning some of the achievements of the land of “real socialism” was politically incorrect.When a proven friend ofthe Soviet Union like Andrt Gide returned from a visit in 1936, his reportage about the great socialist experiment was on the whole favorable. Nonetheless, he included in his published diary a number of somewhat critical remarks. These remarks created a scandalamong Western progressives, who then branded Gide as an enemy of socialism.’ American progressives also believed there was “real socialism” after all.’’ Their notorious anti-anti-communism usually responded to what a materialist professor himself has described as “the widespread belief in these circles that, other problems notwithstanding [!l, the Soviet Union remained a firm ally of independence movements.”” That is to say, “other problems notwithstanding,” the USSR was a place where socialism had at last replaced Capitalism and therefore was a place whose leaders supported those progressive movements that tried to liberate people from the oppression of foreign corporations, native commercial enterprises, and so forth. As late as 1939, WaldoFrank, Granville Hicks, Matthew Josephson, Max Lerner, Vincent Sheehan, I. F. Stone, and other leading progressives formed the famous Committee of 400, which declared that “the Soviet Union continues as always to be a bulwarkagainst war and aggression.” Two weeks laterStalinsignedtheSovietGerman pact. In 1957, longafter the crimes and misery of the great Marxist experiment had beenpublicizedin the West by both “conservatives” and “liberals,” famous sociology professor C. Wright Mill praised the Soviet Union for its foresighted development of heavy industry. Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith consistently spoke of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics as socialist. As late as the 198Os, Berkeley economics professor Laura D’Andrea Tyson (eventually head of the United States Presidential Council of Economic Advisors to President Clinton) praised Nicolae Ceausescu’s Romania for its “dazzling growth rates” under socialism.” American progressives believed that China’s socialism was also the real thing.I3 Harrison Salisbury from the New York Times called Mao’s China “the miracle of the modern world.” Harvard professor John King Fairbank, the famous sinologist, said that Mao’s revolution was “the best thing that has happened to the Chinese people in centuries.” After the socialist Great Leap Forward of the late fifties had wiped out morepeople than any othergovernment policy in Chinese history, notable New Leftist Mark Rudd continued to proclaim the exemplary quality of China’s socialism. At Stanford University in the late sixties and early seventies, I used to see Mao’s little red book for sale in both English and Spanish among the best-selling items at the university bookstore. Agreeing that real socialism has existed on this earth, but then having to deal with this obviously troublesome fact, has shaped entire professorial careers in the West. One can describe the research and teaching of French Communist Party member and immensely influential French professor of philosophy Louis Althusser as a relentless effort to explain-through things like “overdetermination,” “hegemony,”

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and “ideo1ogy”“how it could be that, contrary to Marx’s teachings, real socialist economic infrastructures like those of the Soviet Union were not producing a real socialist consciousness and a really happier life. Teaching that real socialism actually existed on this earth had other unintended consequences, such as the dialectical need to overlook not only the facts of reality but also those who point them out. In France before the 1960s, for example, few progressive intellectuals had even lookedat“Relationsof Productioninthe U.S.S.R.,” an important 1949 essayby then-materialist thinker Cornelius Castoriadis.’* One reason for the oversight might have been that Castoriadis’ essay meticulously demonstrated that in the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics the mode of production was not Capitalist, that the bourgeoisie had not been restored, that private property had not been reestablished, that one could not speak of “State Capitalism” because a planned economy had replaced a competitive market one, and that, nevertheless, things were prettybad in the land of thisreal socialism. From his evaluation of the Soviet experiment, Castoriadis concludedthat publicownership of the means of production-regarded by Marx and others as the most important condition for the implementation of socialism on this earth-inevitably leads to a bureaucratic society. For this fact, M a n , alas, had made no pro~ision!’~ Raymond Aron remindsus that Castoriadis’ embarrassinganalysiswas “considered null and void by the leading lights of the intelligentsia.” It was not circulated among the main body of the French public until after 1968-when Marxism as a philosophical option for French intellectuals had already begun to decline, partly as a result of the appearances by Alexandr Solzhenitsyn on French television. Afterwards “everyone expressed their astonishment that themost enlightened minds could have been blind forso long.”“ Yet anyone in the West who hadlooked objectively at the socialist countries, from East Germany to China, should have noticed that all ten recommendationsof Marx’s CommunistManiferto had been thoroughly implemented. Seemingly oblivious to reality, academic studies demonstrating the dynamism of life under real socialism proliferated in the West. A respected Frenchprofessor argued that there was a serious danger of the Soviet Union surpassing the West’s standard of living-an impending occurrence that would make communism irresistible. “If it is true, as we believe,” wrote the professor in 1954, “that the standard of living in the Soviet Union shows an increase of nearly 10% annually and should reach ours [the French‘s] towards the end of the year 1960, then surpass it rapidly, our most effective protection against communist expansion will disappear.”” Like so many before and after, thisprofessor was particularly impressed bythe “rapidresults” that the Statewas capable of bringing about in dirigiste a system of national economic planning.I8 The only solution, the educator concluded, was to have a “pre-emptive” drastic change in France-of course in the direction of socialism (the professor’s reasoning being that, since socialism had worked so well for the Soviet Union, the only way to prevent Soviet hegemony was for the West to become socialist too). Real socialism therefore should be transferred from the rising Soviet Union to the declining West.

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Aron suggested that these fantastic assessments and even wilder recommendations by seemingly learnedand intelligent Western pedagogues wereonly possible because of two standard academic errors. First, uncritically accepting what are now known to be unreliable production statistics suppliedby the Soviets themselves; and second, deeply misunderstanding both the true nature of a socialist system and the sort of goods that it produces best: items that are of littleuse to the population atlarge and that include vast numbers of units-from huge quantitiesof steel and coal to endless rows of tanks and tractors.” (According to Ludwig von Mises, this result was inevitable, because, lacking the Capitalist function of profit and loss, socialism is structurally incapable of economic calculation and therefore of rational allocation of resources)O’. Scholarly studies assuming a really existing and very successful Russian socialism also mushroomed in the United States. As late as the 1980s, for example, eminent academicians like Stanford‘s John G. Gurley and Harvard’s Galbraith were telling their students and theAmerican public that the Soviet economy was perfectly functional (it is true that the CIA, no more reliable than the American professors, was then giving the same information to American government officials). One of Professor Gurley’s many books (Challengers to Capitalism) even repeated in the 1970s the same arguments putforward by French pedagogues in the1950s: That socialism’s achievements in the Soviet Union and elsewhere presented a real “challenge” to the Capitalist West. We now know of course that, as even former Soviet economists admit, the spectacle of thriving socialist societies in the 1970s-what Gorbachev called “the years of stagnation”-was false. Barring possible political malice, the errors ofso many intelligent and learned American pedagoguesmust have originated in the same oversights noticedby Aron in the French educators’ evaluationsof really existing socialism. But now Denial’s time has come. The collapse of so many socialist regimes and the ensuing revelations of their long-standingeconomic and social bankruptcy have pushed Denial from the ranks of the relatively obscure Trotskysts (also known as “sour grapes communists”) to the forefront of both the Communist Party and the teachings of American academicians. Before Russian communists adopted Denial, many progressive Western educators had already begun to use the new Party Line-possibly under the influence of the Trotskysts. Whatever “bad” has been done in this world presumably by socialism, these progressives argued, has been done only in the name of socialism. It has never been done by real socialism. Not really, anyway. Thus, according to two Western professors writing in 1977, theeconomic system developed inthe socialist countries was not really socialist, but in fact a variant of Capitalism that does “not constitute a fundamentally different societal type.”21 This societal type, sometimescalled “State Capitalism,” is in fact an oxymoron,since by Marxiandefinitionsocialism, not Capitalism, is characterized by public (State) ownership of the meansof production. According to Denial, Marx’s real ideas have not been really implemented yet (although even if they had been, the variabilityof HISTORICAL conditions would make any empiricaljudgment against economic democracy dialectically unprovable).

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Therefore progressive academicians who employ this defense claim that “to allude ...to the ‘events of 1989,’as though they conclusively invalidated Marxistthought, is at least a non-sequitur, in any case it seems hasty to assume that we already understand and can agree on the larger significance of events on which the historical verdict is not yet in.”22 This professor’s argument (“it is hasty to draw conclusionsor pass judgment until the historical verdict is in”) has long been a standard part of the Denial defense. In 1934, forexample, the then Marxist New Republic advised its readers that, although itmight be true that Stalin was executing many Russians,fairness demanded a suspension of judgment until all the historical facts were really available.23 Denial as the new Party Line has already had an effect on American university presses, where post-1989 developments in Eastern Europe have made especially welcome professorial works employing the Denialdefense-usually combined withgleeful accountsofthe problemsbesetting societies inturmoilandhampered by entrenched communist bureaucracies, huge unsold public enterprises, enormous foreign debts to the Capitalist West acquired under “real socialism,” an institutionalized anti-commercial mentality, and other related legacies. An American university press catalog enthusiastically describesone of these professorial worksas “A Marxist analysis of contemporary socialist [sic] societies, showing how they are not communist [sic: the catalog and the book‘s author overlook that professorsin the socialist countries never claimed that socialist countries were “communist”: only that they were socialist-a necessary prior step to the radiant future of true communism], why they are not, and how they mightbecome so. ...Not only a worthwhile book, itis a The pressing need to use Denial in view of the historical events of the twentieth century has furthered the materialist professors’ intellectual schizophrenia. O n the one hand, they need to deny that the Union ofSoviet Socialist Republics and other economicdemocracieswere really socialist. But on the other hand, they cannot accept that the progressive social policies undeniably implemented by the socialist experiment were a bust. So on the one hand they employ Denial, but on the other hand they find itvery hard to insult this strange something that Denial declareswas not socialism. An American at a pro-Marxist academic conference exemplifies this schizophrenia: After agreeingwith the clichi: that what existed in Russia was not the real thing, the professor must then qualify his position: “Nothing I say should be taken as a cheap shot against the Soviet Union. I want to have no part in that sort of thing.”25 Users of Denialalso choose to overlook that if it has been permissible,and perhaps even instructive, to study Capitalism not in its ideal form as described by many of its defenders but in its possibly imperfect yet actual practice in the Western countries-as practitioners of materialist discourse have usually studied Capitalismsurely it ought tobe equally permissible and instructive to study socialism not in its ideal form-whatever that may be-but in its real, albeit reputedly imperfect, incarnations in so many countries that not too long ago used to boast having “really existing socialism.”

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ACCEPTANCE-DENIAL Progressive academicians often modifyDenial into the Acceptance-Denial defense. This defense denies that real socialism exists in country A, while affirming that it exists in country B; then when it is discovered that real socialism does not exist in B after all, the “acceptance” formerly awarded to B is displaced to a new country C, and so on. Since 1917, many countries have been successively accepted and denied: the Soviet Union under Stalin (1930s, 1940s, and even 1950s), China under Mao (1 960s and19704, Vietnam and Cuba underHo andFidel (1960s and 1970s), and even Albania and Nicaragua (1980s). The results of applying Acceptance-Denial have been sometimes bizarre: Depending on its user, this defense has variously conferred the coveted real socialism label on such countries as England (from the nostalgically remembered “war socialism” of the 1940s through the glorious welfarism of the Labour governments of the 1960s), France (under Mitterrand), Sweden (since the 1960s) and even Canada (in the 1980s and 1990s).

RELABELING (OR: HUMPTY-DUMPTY) Relabeling (one might also call it the Humpty-Dumpty Defense: “words mean whatever I want them to mean”),consists of a direct elaboration of Denial. It asserts that the “socialist” (quotation marks arealways inserted at this point) countrieswere really “Asian Modes of Production,” or (in some versions) “State Capitalist,” or (in another version) “Stalinist” countries. This defense argues that progressive reformers have regularly set out to create a Socialist Paradise but somehow have invariably ended up with either an Asian Mode of Production oraStateCapitalisthell. Humpty-Dumpty corresponds to what Antony Flew calls the “No-true-Scotsman move” in fallacious argumentation: When a counterexample falsifies one’s proposition, then one simply rewrites the definition of one of the terms in the proposition, so that the counterexample no longer obtains.” Used in conjunction with Acceptance-Denial, the Humpty-Dumpty defense allows one to rebaptize as “socialist” such welfare Capitalist states as England, France, Germany, or Canada, which one can then present as models of socioeconomic progressivism for the merely “Capitalist” United States. Humpty-Dumpty also provides new and more comfortable labels for old but still cherished ideas. Take, forexample,thelabel “Economic Democracy,”astutely coined as a substitute for “socialism” by Derek Shearer, formerFellow of the socialist think tank Institute for Policy Studies. This label is now widely used by established American politicians like former Students for a Democratic Society member and now California lawmaker Tom Hayden.” The term offers the advantage of being free from the negative associations of the discredited“S” word; and of being loaded with the positive associations of the term “democracy.” Variations on HumptyDumpty are now employed by socialists everywhere. The Italian communists, for example, have decided to call themselves The Party of theDemocratic Left. Applying

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this relabeling technique ranges from labels for entire parties to labels for particular issues.28 Occasionally, Western progressive professors who employ thisand othervariations of Denial forget that they are not supposed to regard the former socialist countries as really socialist but as “State Capitalist,” or “Stalinist,” or “Asian Modes of Production.” For example, an eminent British educator who regularly denounces the lack of socialism of the socialist countries incautiously makes reference to “the universal crystallization of bureaucracy afterevery socialist [emphasis added] revolution in the backward (The professor also overlooks that countries like Germany and Czechoslovakia were not at all “backward,” yet also became further bureaucratized under economic democracy; and thateven Western “social democratic” governments have produced, it seems necessarily, an enormous growth of the government bureaucracy). The main problem with Humpty-Dumpty may be that intelligent and learned professors from the socialist countries used to call their system real socialism while labeling the system in the West “State Capitali~m.”~’ Infact, the collapse of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union has led pundits within and without tospeculate on what form the economy will take; and one of the possibilities mentioned is precisely State C a p i t a l i ~ m Therefore, .~~ the former USSR could hardly have enjoyed “State Capitalism” before.It is true that,according to manylearned materialist professors in the West, professors in the East did not know that they did not live under really real socialism. But it is also true that, according to learned materialist professors in the East, it was the materialist professors in the West-really “bourgeois” professors-who were really wrong. Another difference between the two sets of equally intelligent professors is that professors in the East have gradually stopped talking in these terms, but professors in the West have not. In other words, Humpty-Dumpty suffers from a weakness that only materialist dialectics can probably resolve: The defense overlooks that many intelligent and educated individuals in the most disparate areas of the planet and under the most varying conditions (ranging from “undeveloped” countries to highly industrialized and “capitalistically advanced” nations like Czechoslovakia and Germany) demonstrably transformed their societies by diligently applying their often considerable knowledge of Marx’s theoriesabout economics, history, art, politics, philosophy, and practically everything else known to man.Therefore, to say that all these progressive leaders and their adroit political cadres and their learned materialistprofessors misunderstood Marx (the maddeningly recurring “errors of the political leadership”), or set out greedily to use Marx to get rich and powerful (“there are bad guys even among committed socialists”), is unrealistic. These men and women were neither more nor less intelligent, neither morally worse nor better-and, in fact, probably more integrally dedicated to the creation of better people and a better world-than the Western professors who, with characteristic academic hubris, now claim to be their moral and intellectual superiors in theunderstanding andapplication of Marx’s economic and social wisdom. Nonetheless, it is a salient feature of the historyof materialist discourse that each

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new wave of progressive professors believes that it is more capable than its predecessors of estimating “social conditions,” so that now (whenever the “now” is) the professors know that “conditions”are thistime theright ones“to change theworld’; and that the new wave of activists (led by the professors-the new vanguard that replaces the Party) will be more intelligent, knowledgeableand purer than theearlier one, members of which were evidently obtuse, ignorant, and corrupt-since they have obviously distorted the ideal. Since each new wave of academicians presumably understands Marx better than the preceding one (and sometimes even better than Marx himself), it invariably claims that with the next experiment things will work out well (the futurism characteristic of materialist discourse satirized by Russian philosopher Alexander Zinoviev in his novel The Radiant Future is evident here).32 The truth of the matter is that what the socialist countries implemented was as close to socialism as can be implemented on this earth.33 In some cases triumphant socialism even proceeded, as Marx recommended inhis Critique of the Gotha Program (and Lenin enthusiastically reiterated inThe State and Revolution),to theelimination of money itself (presumably one of the main sources of greedand exploitation) and its replacement by little “certificates from society” with which the happy citizen of the socialist commonwealth, as Marx wrote, “draws from the social stock of means of consumption as much as costs the same amount of labor. The same amount of laborwhichhe has given to societyin one formhe receives backin (One may notice the use by Marx of the ubiquitous words “society” and “social,” which practitioners of materialist discourse from Marx to our own time have euphemistically used to refer to the State: today another substitute is the word “community”). In other cases the socialist states created “worker-managed’ enterprises in the best tradition of the most advanced social theory.3s Paul Hollander has formulated the key questions provoked by this puzzling phenomenon: “Above all, American Marxist academicshave had little appetite for raising the question, Is it not possible that something is wrong with a theory that so stubbornly resists application?. ...Neither production nor work satisfaction increased; socialist systems did not become more democratic, egalitarian, participatory or caring; the central planning that replaced ‘the anarchy of the marketplace’ failed to make the economies of socialist states more r a t i ~ n a l . ”Nor, ~ ~ one might add, did placing the means of production (especially evil Big Business) in the hands of the State (as Marx enthusiastically recommended in points one and seven of the Manifesto) lead to greater conservation of natural resources, less pollution, and greater care for the environment: in fact the opposite took place. With the Humpty-Dumpty maneuver, professors not only salvage their beliefs, but can even apply them to theSoviet Union itself by trying to use materialist “class Western professor analysis” to explain the failureof socialism!As a learned materialist points out: “The evident failure of the Soviet Union as a model for democratic socialism ...suggested that a new kind of class domination had arisen within the communist ~ o r l d . ” ~True, ’ this dialectical idea never occurred to the Soviet professors while dialectical and other materialisms held sway in their country. But then this manner of thinking studiously ignoreseven mentioning thepossibility that such

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axiomatic teachings as public ownership, national economic planning, “free” social services, “from each according to his ability and to each according to his needs,” and “what we choose as presumably better is actually chosen because of ideology or politics or culture,” might be the reason for the failures. The academic author of the “explanation” above cannot escape a discourse that she has now internalizedand thathas become not only her means of earning a living but perhaps even her very reason for existing. Therefore, she can only think in the standard and old Marxist terms ofclass “domination,” “hegemony,” and so forthrather than in terms of whether some principles are better than others in making it easier for people to live better lives. Among the various labels created by this defense, “Stalinist” (officially introduced 1930s byTrotsky‘s Stalinism and Bolshevism) is particularly to the worldinthe unrealistic. The very act of associating an entire system with a single individual contradicts collectivist teachings and assumptions. As educators in the various economic democracies (as well as many professors in the West) have taught for generations, “To discover the meaning of the concept of the individual we must first define the essence of man as a social being, because individuals exist only in human society.”38 As always, the academicians from socialist universities are correctly following Marx: “If man is social by nature, he will develop his true nature only in society, and the power of his nature must be measured not by the power of the separate individualbut by the power of society”; “the essence of man is no abstraction inherentin each singleindividual. In itsreality it is the ensemble of the social

relation^."^^ If one takes all this seriously, the label “Stalinist” then presents the problemnot insurmountable, it is true, for materialist dialectics-of explaining how a single individual (since individuals matter so little in history, compared to “social,” “cultural,” “historical,” and other “forces”) could have had such an influence on the Soviet Union as well as so many other “Stalinist” countries. The label indicates that an individual named Stalin had an enormous impact on countries in fact so diverse in economic development, history, geography, climate, and ethnic composition as China, Germany, Cambodia,Czechoslovakia, Poland, Ethiopia, Cuba, Albania, Yugoslavia, Mozambique, North Vietnam, North Korea, and so forth-whose common denominator turns out tobe the avowed use of Marx’s ideas as a basis for the transformation of societyand thecreation of better peopleand abetter world. Whoeveruses the Stalinist label to describe the failed socialist regimes must therefore realize that he is automatically turning Stalin into a veritable superman, more influential than Alexander, Napoleon, Hitler, or any other personage in history.

SOCIALISM WOULD HAVE TURNED OUT TO BE MUCH BETTER HAD CAPITALISM NOT CONTINUED TO BE AROUND TO CORRUPT IT More original than the many variations of Humpty-Dumpty is the SocialismWould-Have-Turned-Out-to-Be-Much-Better-Had-Capitalism-Not-Continued-to-

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Be-Around-to-Corrupt-It defense (also called Blame Capitalism for the Failure of Socialism). Anchored on Denial, it draws on both relabeling and the standard procedure of blaming Capitalism for practically everything bad that happens in the world. ’With this defense, the accomplishments of Capitalism have grown to include having “conditioned,” (determined, fashioned, etc.) real socialism itself. This lapsarianist defense argues that if the whole worldhad become aneconomic democracy, then (followed by a “perhaps”) socialism would have evolved into something different and (followed by a “perhaps”) better. Regrettably, Capitalism corrupted socialism, as it has corrupted everything else. Without Capitalism, the inhabitants of the economic democracies wouldnot have constantly had a bad example before their eyes, tempting them with abundance andregularly giving them aid that allowed them to survive; and so the people’s consciousness would have eventually really “changed” and they would have become real socialist men and women. In other words, without any hope or possibility of comparing different manners of existence, and changing their lives, and living like the seemingly happy but really wretched people in the Capitalist countries, these populations would have resigned themselves to a life that was not really miserable but actually really desirable and that they could not appreciate because they were distracted by the really nefarious but deceptively enjoyable Capitalist temptation. This dialectical defense probably originatedwith Trotsky, who used it to explain why the (not really) Soviet Union had gone bad: The wrong turn taken by the (not really) Soviets, Trotsky argued, proved that hewas right in wanting to turn the whole world socialist before settling down to build communism in one country-one needed to controleverything, b4ore the population’s consciousness couldeven begin to be changed. Trotksy’s dialectical point was grasped by the intellectual cadres of Ingsoc in Nineteen Eighty-Four, where Orwell made it one reason for Ingsoc’s systematic alteration of the past: to stop people not just from choosing a differentway of life, but from having any basis for comparison as a prelude to choosing.*’ One difficulty with this defenseis that itnecessitates the sort of mentality exhibited by the East German Communist Party when trying to justify the Berlin Wall: “To keep out Western spies and corrupters of socialist morality.” Fortunately for the defense, this mentalityis widespread. Many individuals aremore thanwilling to give large measures of freedom and even of personal comfort in exchange for what they believe will give them greater security, stability,and a sense of community. National Socialist Germany enjoyed the support of a majority of its citizens, at least for a while, partly because of the National Socialist promise and indeed delivery of Gemeinscbaf2 (community). In Alexandr Zinoviev’s The Radiant Future, Anton Zimin points out a similar phenomenon in thecase of Communist Russia: Large numbers, if not the majority, of Russian peasants agreed voluntarily to join the process of collectivization of agriculture; even the restoration of individual property on a countrywide scale, Zimin thought, would be probably condemned to failure if it were a t t e m ~ t e d . ~News ’ from the new Russia and the new Germany bear out Zimin’s In the United States these viewpoints are not unusual:As an American

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journalist cheerfully reminds us, “It is important to note that most Americans like big government, as long as it is doing something about theirbig p r o b l e r n ~ . ”Many ~~ influential Western academicians also share this mentality. Thus, for example, famous progressive Harvard professor John Kenneth Galbraith said, in 1977: “I think the wall is a good thing; at least it has maintained the peace.” But then educator Galbraith has openly admitted his low regard for human freedom: “I am not particular about freedom.”44 Socialism-Would-Have-Turned-Out-to-Be-Much-Better-HadA corollary of Capitalism-Not-Continued-to-Be-Around-to-Corrupt-It asserts a curious propositionboth circular and favorable to Capitalism andthe bourgeoisie: Had real or theUnited socialism been implementedinWestern countrieslikeEngland States, it actually would have been real socialism because of the strong tradition of individual liberty in those countries. The spirit of Socialism-Would-Have-TurnedOut-to-Be-Much-Better-Had-Capitalism-Not-Continued-to-Be-Around-to-CorruptIt (or Blame Capitalism for the Failure of Socialism) also fits one truly dialectical belief of much cited French materialist professor Louis Althusser: Even under real socialism and communism, people would still be subject to ideological delusionsonly this time they would be good delusions.

APOCALYPTIC VISIONSAND ELASTIC DISPLACEMENT OF THE OBJECTS OF OPPRESSION AND THE SOURCESOF LIBERATION Less cynical than Socialism-Would-Have-Turned-Out-to-Be-Much-Better-HadCapitalism-Not-Continued-to-Be-Around-to-Corrupt-It and therefore preferred by altruistic educators favoring the refreshing revolutionary simple-mindedness of “vulgar Marxism” is the Apocalyptic-Visions-and-Elastic-Displacement-of-the-Sourcesof-Oppression defense. This defense adopts the old communist apocalyptic axiom establishing that the Capitalist West will collapse-among other things because of its exploitation of the workers. Unfortunately, by now some of the more progressive Western professors (following once more on the steps of professors from the socialist countries like Georg Lukics) have largely given the proletariat up as a revolutionary “force.”Their reason is that the proletariathasbeenstupefied by the material (but not spiritual and therefore not really materialist) prosperity createdby evil businesspeople, exploitative has led to suchoppressivethings as “concorporations, and so forth-which sumerism” and“commodity fetishism”(here one canrecognizeelementsof the Socialism-Would-Have-Turned-Out-to-Be-Much-Better-Had-Capitalism-NotContinued-to-Be-Around-to-Corrupt-It defense).This lamentable situationhas been described, in the style of academic practitionersof materialism, as the workers’ wellknown “victimization and stupefaction in the face of commercial logic.”45 Therefore, the axiom that the workers are exploited has been replaced by other teachings. “What is now in crisis,” progressive academicians have come to realize, “is a whole conception of socialism which rests upon the ontological centrality of

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the working class. ...”*‘ O r in plain language: The proletariat is no longer central to the progressive educators’ project of economic democracy. Those who are both the source of liberation and in need of it are now a different set of beneficiaries of professorial activism: Capitalism will now collapse because of its exploitation and oppression of minorities, women, the earth, animals, and so forth. Soviet professors used to teach these same ideas: “The main culprit of the impending ecological crisis is capitalism. Over the years of its existence,production for the sake of profit, militarisation of the economy and the spirit of egoism and acquisition have caused immense damage to the world.”*’ One problem with these ecological admonitions is that they are falsified by the far worse state of the environment in the socialist countries, where no evil Capitalist corporations have been allowed to exist and where most property and industry have for a long time been in the hands of the public rather than the private sector and therefore in the hands of public servants,who work not for profit but for the good of society. But the political agenda explicit in much of this academic emphasis on ecology, consumerism, and related matters has little to do with a rationally justified desire to improve the environment: “Sworn enemies of liberty and property know a mainchance when they see one. Any excuse will do to realize their dream of a global redistributionist state. The plight of the proletariat was once their goal. Now it is the environment, that ill-defined entity stretching from the NorthPole to the SouthPole, from the Earth’s core to the stratosphere, encompassing every life form under the sun.”** These formerly Soviet pseudoecological positions can be found inpractically every humanistic field in the American universities. Take, for example, literary studies: Columbia University’s History of the American Novelteaches American students that Harriet Beecher Stowe was a better novelistthan Herman Melville. The reason given is that she was “socially constructive,” whereas “the captain of the Pequod was a symbol of laissez-faire capitalism with a bad attitude toward whales.”47 Like Soviet professors, American academicians organize professional meetingsaround such ecologically related topics as the dreadful “consumerism” instigated by bourgeois Capitalism. One such announcement, callingforpapers, reads: “COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. Consumerism andAutobioppby. Stephen Infantino, ForeignLangs. &L Lits., U. of Miami, P.O. Box 248093, Coral Gables, FL 33124.”50 This defense benefits professors directly. Since one can no longer count on the workers, human liberation must now depend on the heroic efforts of politically correct educators. This dependency leaves the field open for academicians to lead the new groups in need of liberation-who share with the workers of the past their being-not-quite-capable of self-liberation and therefore in need of leadership by the enlightenedintellectualsinthe common marchtowardabetterfuture. Thus, a professor of sociology at CUNY writes: “The context for the revival of interest in the economic and political positions of intellectuals is rooted, in part, in the apparently definitive passing of the era of proletarian ascendancy, even in its relatively staid social democratic ~ariety.”~’ (In this unfavorable view of Social Democracy, as in others, many Western materialist professors are in agreement also with their remaining counterparts in the socialist countries.) Similar ideas have been taught by

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eminent West German materialist professor Habermas from the “Critical Theory” Frankfurt School of Social Thought, whoprivileges right-thinking intellectuals (like professor Habermas of course), rather than thefactory workers, as the newly needed “catalysts for change.”52

NOTES 1. Cf. too, Anthony de Jasay, Market Socialism:A Scrutiny. “SquaringtheCircle”(London: Institute of Economic Affairs, 1990), 11. 2. 19 August 1991, NBC-TV newsclip of an earlier interview with G. I. Yanayev, who had been chosen by Gorbachev as his vice-president. 3. RayMoseley,“Sovietteachersconfront a crisisofcredibilitywiththeirstudents,” Chicago Tribune, 8 September 1991. 4. Sharon Waxman, “France’s Communistson ropes,” Chicago Tribune,29 August 1991. 5. James Warren, “Red tide,” Chicago Tribune, 24 January 1993. 6. The standard leaflet distributed bythe International Socialist Organization at American universities at the beginning of every school year gives the straight version of Denial: “The CaseforSocialism:ManyidentifysocialismaswhatexistedinEasternEurope.Butthis ‘socialism’ was no more than a facade behind which to hide repression and exploitation. This talk by a leading member of theI S 0 rescues socialism from this awful caricature-and offers a real alternative to a failing capitalism, East and West. [day, date, hour and university hall]. Sponsored by [the university’s name] International Socialist Organization.” 7. Vincent Descombes, Modern French Philosophy,trans. L. Scott-Fox and J. M. Harding (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1980), 126-30. 8. Raymond Aron, Mkmoires (Paris: Julliard, 1983), 312; Vincent Descombes, Modern French Philosophy, 129. 9. Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr Nekrich, Utopia in Power: The History o fthe Soviet Union /?om 1917 to the Present (New York: Summit Books, 1986), 293. 10. The vision of the Soviet Union as socialist and therefore as the living laboratory of a marvelous social experiment has been historicized by Paul Hollander and other critics of the American progressive intelligentsia. See Paul Hollander, The Many Faces of Socialism (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1983). 11.StanleyAronowitz, “On Intellectuals,”inBruceRobbins,ed.(fortheSocialText Collective), Intellectuals: Aesthetics, Politics, Academics(Minneapolis: U of Minnesota l’, 1990), 5-6. 12. According to this professor, Caeusescu was “remarkably successfd in mobilizing the kind of domestic austerity measures that are required for rapid short-term improvements in the balance of payments. T o date, moreover, these measures have not led to any significant threat to the continued domination of the Ceausescu regime.” Llewellyn H. Rockwell, “Mrs. Tyson’s Fried Economics,” National Review, 1 February 1993, 48. Professor Tyson teaches economics at the University of California, Berkeley. 13. Cf. the recent exposts of Mao’s horrors and the silence of the American intellectuals in Daniel Southerland, “Repression’s Higher Toll: New Evidence Shows Famine, Violence Spared Few,” Washington Post, 17 July 1994. 14. Descombes, Modern French Philosophy, 129-30. 15.Ibid. 16.Ibid.,130.

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17.M.Laurt, Revolution, dernikre chance de la France (Paris:PressesUniversitairesde France, 1954), 48. 18. Aron, Mkmoires, 31 1. 19.Ibid.,312. 20. Ludwig von Mises, Socialism (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1981). 21. R. Crompton andJ.Gubbay, Economy and Class Structure (London: Macmillan, 1977), 19. 22. Brian McHale, co-editor of the prestigious academic journal Poetics Today in a letter to me dated 1 July 1991. 23. Dwight D. Murphey, “Liberalism in Contemporary America,” /ournu1 of Social, Political, andEconomic Studies. Monograph Series no. 22, February 1992. 24. The University of Massachusetts Press’ catalog of September 1991, quoting Dialfrom ogue‘s evaluation of professor Donald C. Hodges, The Bureaucratization ofSocialism(Amherst: The UofMassachusetts P, 1991).Thisbook‘stitleshowsredundance:Socialismis,by operational necessity, bureaucratic. See Ludwig von Mises, Bureaucracy (Spring Mills, Pa.: Libertarian Press, 1983). 25. Professor Richard Wolff from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, cited in Andrt Ryerson, “Wither Marxism,” Academic Questions 6, no. 2 (Spring 1996): 71. 26. Antony Flew, Thinking Straight (Buffalo: Prometheus, 1977), 47. 27. Rae1 Jean Isaac and Erich Isaac, The Coercive Utopians (Chicago: Regnery Gateway, 1985), 167; S. Steve Powell, Covert Cadre: Inside the Institutefor Policy Studies (Ottawa, 111.: Green Hill, 1987), 191. 28. Language can thus reach Onvellian extremes. Compare U.S. president Bill Clinton calling taxes “contributions” and government spending “investment.” 29. Perry Anderson,Considerations on Western Marxism (Thetford: ThetfordPress Limited, 1979), 89. 30. For the view of contemporary Western capitalism as “State Capitalism” and of the socialist countries as builders of “Real Socialism” see the standard collectively written textbook A Dictionary ofScientz$c Communism (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1984). For the existence of “real” socialism in the East and the views of professors from the West, see Alec Nove, Marxism and “Really Existing Socialism” (Chur, Switzerland: Hanvood Academic Publishers, 1986). Nove thinks there was as ‘‘real” a socialism as there can be on this earth. 31. Guy Sorman, “Economie: Le Pire est a venir,” Figaro-Magazine, 7 September 1991, 55; Igor Malashenko, “The Third Way: A Soviet Strategist Argues that while Repression Is All too Possible, It Is Not Inevitable,” Time, 8 April 1991, 39. Malashenko was writing before the communist collapse. 32. Alexandr Zinoviev, The Rudiant Future (New York: Random House, 1988). 33. Nove, Marxism and %ally Existing Socialism.” 34. Cambodia under Pol Pot offers a good example of a thorough implementation of the highly egalitarian agenda inMarx’s Critique o f the Gotha Program. As a Cambodian student educated in Paris-which at the time probably benefitted from the most progressive academic circles in all of Europe-progressive leader PolPot had learned well his materialist teachings. Inspired by the humanistic writings of Marx, Lenin, and Mao, he had his Red Khmer adopt the “Marxist-Leninist ideology that abolished wages, money and private property” (the roots, as Marx taught, of practically all social evil). A Red Khmer’s pamphlet-Pol Pot’s version of The Communist Manifesto-thereforeaskedrhetorically but timely:“America,England, France, Australia, what are they? They are superpowers, supermurderers, peace violators, freedom violators, justice violators, human-rights violators, not only in their own countries but

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inothercountries,too.” (The pamphlet does devote one line to lamenting the “excesses committed” occasionally by understandably overzealous promoters of social justice in their efforts to “change the world.” In Cambodia alone, this well-meant socialist activism caused the death of afew millions.) [Uli Schmetzer (safely writing fromThailand), “PolPot horrors still torment Cambodia,” Chicago Tribune, 21 February 19891. 35. A known example has been Yugoslavia, where worker-managed factories existed for many years until 1989, when the no-longer-sustainable and low productivity of these enterprises led to a reversal of the practice. Uli Schmetzer, “Yugoslavs ready to purge party. Economics reform also on agenda,” Chicago Tribune, 16 October 1989: “In what amounts to a labor revolution, Jareditch said workers would be paid according to skills and could be dismissed if found incapable. The control of production would pass from workers’ councils to plant managers.” But the Soviet Union (as well as Israel, for that matter) also offers examplesequally instructive-of many such worker-managed businesses and cooperatives. 36. Paul Hollander, “Communism’s Collapse Won’t Faze the Marxists in Academe,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 23 May 1990, A44. 37. Barbara Ehrenreich, “The Professional Managerial Class Revisited,” in Bruce Robbins, ed. (for the Social Text collective),Intellectuals, 181. 38. F. V.Konstantinov et al., The Fundamentals of Marxist-Leninist Philosophy (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1982), 386. 39. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, cited in F. V. Konstantinov et al., The Fundamentals of Mamist-Leninist Philosophy, 87, n. 1. 40. George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (NewYork: Harcourt, Brace, and Co., 1949), 175. 41. Zinoviev, The Radiant Future, 48. 42. “On March 5, 1993,” Paul Greenberg reports, “Stalin’s mourners gathered at his grave site along the Kremlin wall. They demonstrated in downtown Moscow. They are still awaiting orders, grieving for the good old days of purge and terror and the Gulag. The lie lives.” [Paul Greenberg, “Yearning for the bad old days of Stalinist Russia,” Chicago Tribune, 12 March 1993.1 The longings of many citizens of former East Germany for the stagnant security of their communist society are also well known: “Many East Germans feel more secure with their past, despite its repressive nature, and are fearful of the future.” [Marc Silberman, professor of German at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, cited in Clifford Terry, “After Chicago Tribune, 21 February the Wall: German films look at a united, troubled nation,” 1993.1 “Many people didn’t expect reunification to come the way it did, and come so fast, and there’s a lot of nostalgic talk about the old system. They forget about the secret police [AI and the paranoia. They’re afraid they’ll be corrupted by the consumerism of the west.” Migrom, director of the University Film Society at the University of Minnesota, cited in Clifford Terry, “After the Wall: German films look at a united, troubled nation,” Chicago Tribune, 21 February 1993.1 43. Clarence Page, “Clinton’s critics’ empty threats,” Chicago Tribune, 21 February 1993. 44. Both of these gems appeared in letters by Galbraith to The Times of London, 1 April The Politics ofProcmstes (Buffalo: Prometheus, 1990), and 4 May 1977, cited in Antony Flew, 189, n.7. 45. Andrew Ross, “Defenders of the Faith and the New Class,’’ in Bruce Robbins, ed. (for the Social Text Collective), Intellectuals, 123. 46. Ernest0 Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategv:Toward a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985), 2.

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47. Z.Berbeshkina, L.Yakovleva, and D.Zerkin, What is HistoricalMaterialism?(Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1985), 32. 48. Matthew Hoffman, “Rubbish in Rio,” The Free Market, August 1992, 7. 49. Cited by Robert Hughes, “The Fraying of America,” Time, 3 February 1992, p. 47. 50. The Midwest Modern Language Association,33rd Annual Meeting, Chicago, Illinois, November 14-16, 1991, call for papers brochure. (for theSocialText 51.StanleyAronowitz, “On Intellectuals,”inBruceRobbins,ed. Collective), Intellectuals, 5. 52. Approvingly pointed out by Aronowitz, “On Intellectuals,” in Bruce Robbins, ed. (for the Social Text Collective),Intellectuals, 34. Notice that the subtitle of this series isa politically correct one: the “collective.”

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Chapter Seven

The Marxist Defenses 11: From “Misery As an Ideal” to the “Desperation Defense” An idea ...is produced that “solves” a controversy or fits someone’s preconceptions. Most scholars reject it, usually because it is absurd, unsupported or an obvious fraud. A single strong supporter, often not the originator, works tirelessly to forceit into the limelight. After contention, it is rejected except by the supporters, who almost always refuse to stop believing. All too often, believersare intelligent people with good credentials in some other field or previous good work to their credit. No matter how obvious the fraud and how thorough the debunking, many fantasies are revived by a new set of believers after a period of dormancy and copied, used, and perpetuated by other fringe thinkers. -John Whittaker, “ArcheologicalFrauds and Wild Theories,” The Skeptical Inquirer People say that we repeat phrases like parrots, but what is wrong with repeating scientific truth? If his theory hadn’t been proved in practice over and over again, would it have been elevated to the categoryof Gonzalo Thought? Of course his capture has been a blow for us, but it was not a surprise; we always knew that he could be captured, or that he could die, like any human being. What is important is that the Party is in place. -An academic follower of Peruvian professor Abimail Guzman, leader of the left-wing terrorist group Shining Path

MISERY As AN IDEAL Related to Apocalyptic Visions and Elastic Displacement o f the Sources of Oppression is the Misery-As-an-Ideal defense. Since Marxist ideashave produced misery

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wherever they have been thoroughly implemented, this defense is an effective way to claim, in dialectic fashion, that an alleged drawback is really an advantage (all these defenses hinge upon the blurring of the real and the unreal; blurring itself is an indispensable element of the discourse). This defense revolves around the known Capitalist exploitation of animals, the earth, and so on. It is therefore ecologically correct. It runs something like this: Obviously there is a crisis of natural resources, pollution, and so forth caused by Capitalist consumption, evil corporations, business greed, and so on; therefore, the

ubiquitous scarcity and rationing consistently brought about by the diligent application of Marxi teachings can now be seen as the only routeof salvation le$ to the planet. With theiremphasis on “stewardship”(control,distribution,etc.)rather

than

creation of wealth and resources, these teachings are now considered highly appro-

priate to improve the standard of living in the United States: “Barry Commoner, both a recognized environmental leader and a political radical, asserts that since ‘environmental pollution is a sign of major incompatibility between our system of production and the environmental system that supports it,’ capitalism will have to go. Commoner admits that the Soviet Union also suffers from pollution, but finds that socialism is better than private enterprise for ‘the theory [sic] of socialism does not appear to require that growth should continue indefinitely.’ ’’l In fact, Commoner is not quite right about the theory of socialism: Marx thought that by overcoming the contradictions of Capitalism, economic democracy would bring about such material abundance that the redistribution rather than the creation of wealth would then become themain concern of humanity. Socialism wouldbe a cornucopia, not a cause and means of rationing (Marx’s crackpot idea was influential even among weak socialist academicians: compare Yale’s Charles Reich, whose 1970 book, The Greening ofAmerica,claimed that the UnitedStates had become such a cornucopia, that wealth should now simply be redistributed by government so that people could have more leisure and forget bourgeois-Capitalist morality; compare, too,John Kenneth Galbraith’s equally idiotic The Afluent Society). But materialist discourse is flexible and can therefore adapt to changing historical conditions; so Misery As an Ideal cheerfully gives up nineteenth-century pie-in-thesky promises ofsocialist abundance as well as Marx’s politically (ecologically) Incor‘ rect teachingin Capital thatman is “affirmedin the objectiveworld” as he appropriates nature’s substances to human requirements.’ Instead, socialism (“Economic Democracy”) is now desirable because it both fosters and organizes scarcity. In other words, it is good not because it produces an abundunce of goods (as earlier socialists claimed), butprecisely because it does not, Thus, Marxism’s maneuvering in the field of economics parallels its maneuvering in the field of epistemology: Initially, Marxism claimed knowledge of an objective world, a knowledge superior to the ideologically clouded knowledge provided by non-Marxist or “bourgeois”approaches. Hence Marxism’swell-knownformula: “the objective conditions” (of production, of property ownership,of class relations, and so on). But in view of the problems of the many new societies built upon the teachings of Marx, materialist discourse now claims that knowledge itself is highly

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questionable. In other words, since Marxism’s “objective thinking” has apparently failed, Marxism now declares that all objective thinking (along with all ideologies) is a failure. Aprh moi, le deluge. That the approach to life envisioned by Misery As an Ideal is one that non-free market environmentalism shares with the socialist countries is made clear in a textbook authored by a professor and now widely used in American colleges. This book recommends the creation of several additional governmental bureaucracies (or,as it calls them, additional “institutions”): (1) an institution for stabilizing population, (2) an institution for stabilizing the stock of physical wealth and throughput, and (3) an institution to ensure that the stocks and flows are allocated fairly among the population.’ There is simply no difference between the recommendations of this book and the actual practices of regimes built after the teachings of materialist discourse. What theprofessor teaches as the best way to better conservationof resources, less pollution, and so on, is the sort of “economic management” approach that all socialist countries from Europe to Asia and from Africa to Latin America have enjoyed for generations: The State controls the wealth of the population; the Stare stipulates what is produced, how much and in what fashion; and the State makes sure that goods and services are allocated“wisely” (presumably as equally as possible) among thepeople. Unfortunately, itis unlikely that theresults of the implementation of socialism in the United States by the “best minds” (what Robert Frost, referring to the New Deal’s “Brain Trust” called “the guild of social planners”) will be different from those achieved by the implementation of socialism in the Soviet Union by its own “best minds” or “guild of social planners.” This bleak probability may be precisely the reason why Misery As an Ideal accepts so enthusiastically the idea of misery: for misery would be an inevitable and necessary part of the future if the world is to be saved (from misery?). Professor Terry Anderson and Capitalist think-tank researcher Donald R. Leal (authors of Free Market Environmentalism)have exposed the socialist agenda ofnonfree market environmentalism: When these institutional modifications are dissected, the “beguiling simplicity and apparent self-evident meaning’ of sustainable development are replaced with the reality of political controls to discipline the citizens ...sustainable development is a guise for political control reminiscent of the governments being rejected in Eastern Europe. Not only has that form of political control despoiled the environment and deprived people of higher living standards, it has oppressed individ~als.~ American university programs openly proclaim the connectionbetween “environmentalism” andthestandardegalitarianandredistributionistagendaofoldfashioned socialism. Thus, the Working Group on Environmental Policy of the Center for Urban Affairs and Policy Research at Northwestern University states: “New mobilization from ethnic minorities, and the recent economic decline of the U.S. middle class offer both novel challengesto environmentalmovements, and new potentials for political mobilization around joint concerns for environmental pro-

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tection and social j u s t i ~ e . ”Clearly ~ no longer just a matter of the environment, it is now a matter ofsocial justice as well. The Misery As an Ideal defense satisfies utopico-ecological yearnings widespread and long held in the West even before Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In the United States these preferences are now common among the intelligentsia. One of them is the agreed upon teaching that “the West” (or “the North,” for in these formulae directions are no more clear than the thinking) must reduce its “consumerism.” Thus a professor says: “[Earth cannot be saved because] the North, in one of the most immoral acts in the history of humanity, refuses to reduce its disproportionatelevels of consumption.”‘ This now standard formula overlooks of coursethat “the North” (or“the West”)also produces a “disproportionate” share (in fact most) of the world’s food,materialgoods, and services. Perhapsthewealth-producing, and therefore wealthy, West should reduce its immense productivity and instead let famine play its natural population control role in the poorer countries. The “ecological” claims of Misery As an Ideal preserve old revolutionary agendas of wealth redistribution and “social” change.In these claims theWest (orthe North) rest of the world (orthe South) plays the role of the exploiting bourgeoisie; while the plays the role of the exploiting proletariat. And where the previous “philosopherkings” were represented by the “political leadership” of the communist parties, the new philosopher-kings are the “ecologists.” University people have always counted themselves among the potential philosopher-kings, while disagreeing about the concrete details of the means to be used for social improvement. For his neo-primitivist effort at destruction of the existing civilized (Western) world, Bakunin counted heavily on what he called “the educated community of irreconcilable youths.”’ Engels was less sympathetic to anti-industrial utopias: By Engels account, in non-Western Russia alone there were 40,000 revolutionarystudents, “40,000 moreor less educated,ambitious, hungry Russian nihilists; all of them officer candidates without an army,” who Engels feared could only disrupt the Western European Marxist pro-industrial movement.* More sympathetic to the non-Westerngroups was Lenin, who concluded that the outcome of the “world struggle” wouldbe determined by the fact that thebackward countries had “the overwhelming majority of the population of the globe.” This Marxist-Leninist observationis today constantly repeated byprofessors who gleefully point out that the “colored’ people will “soon” be more numerous than “whites” in the United States. Marshall Lin Piao, minister ofdefense of Communist China under Mao and one of his principal henchmen, established another truism that today’s professors still repeat, but now under theguise of ecological concerns: “The contradictionbetween the revolutionary peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America and the imperialists headed by the United States is theprincipalcontradictionin the contemporary world.”’ F. A. Hayek noticed the connection between primitivism and the intelligentsia’s collectivist ideal: “An atavistic longing after the noble savage is the main source of the collectivist tradition.”” Lewis S. Feuer, and morerecently John Ellis, have traced

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this atavistic impulse of Western intellectuals as far back as Tacitus and Paulus Orosius.”“The neo-primitivistintellectual drawnto ‘guerilla warfare,’ ” writes Feuer, “is moved by an atavistic longing for the unrestraints of savagery. T o stalk the System, to strike at it suddenly from ambush, tofeel the exhilaration ofmaiming and decapitatingauthority, all thisexhilaratesthe unmanned AlienatedIntellectual.”” This atavistic longing is today fully satisfied by the various non-free market ecological agendas. Feuer lists a number of beliefs common to all of today’s “Neo-Marxist Intellectual~.’’’~ The nature of these beliefs allows the practitioner of materialist discourse to adopt non-free market ecological agendas as an effective way to further their tireless effort to create better people and a better world. The “Neo-Marxist intelleclabor movement is the tual,” according to Feuer, (1) rejects the notion that the progressive force in contemporary history; (2) believes that the Alienated Intellectual will be the principal agent in fashioning the new society; (3) believes in the personal voluntarism of guerrilla action; (4) regards the peasantry of the backward countries as offering a far greater revolutionary potentialthan the proletariat of the developed countries; (5) regards 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; (6) is anti-urban, and sees the countryside [today we say “nature”] waging a relentless war against the degenerate, exploiting an ideologyofAnticities; (7) because he is an AlienatedIntellectual,holdsto Intellectualism: He wishes not so much to raise the cultural level of the masses as to lower himself to the level of their lowest stratum, whether in language, gait, dress, morals and manners, and so rid himself of the trappings of “bourgeois” culture. This sort of professor is a neo-primitivist. This last belief does not preclude despising elements of popular culture thathave become part of the larger social mainstream. Few professors, for example, would admit to reading Reader? Digest. Many boast that they do not watch television. A majority probablydespises country western music.When progressive writers or artists become accepted, one not infrequent reaction among progressives is to complain how rapidly the stupid public has opened its arms to these writers and artists. The complaint may take the form of unselfconscious ironic comments, such as the “fifteen minutes” of celebrity status repeatedly mentioned by Andy Warhol, who intended the comment as a satire on the same culture that made him into a celebrity and a millionaire. Belief number six accounts for the notorious love affair of today’s academic intellectuals with the “colored’races of Asia, Africa, and Latin America-a love affair that replaces the old relationship between Marxists and the proletariat: This love affair displays the same signsof doting paternalism that characterized the older “proletarian” love affair (now replaced by indifference or even contempt) and that the appellation, “Father Marx,” given to the young Marx by many workers’ groups, explicitly made clear in the late nineteenth century. The beliefs mentioned by Feuer fit the behavioral model of truly activist progressive educators: supremely exemplified, for example,by Ph.D. Abimail Guzmin, the

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Peruvian philosophy professor, founder, and head of the Peruvian Shining Path guerrillas, agroup that has declaredwar on modern urban civilization and that, since the late 1970s, has been responsible for the death of more than 70,000 people and the further wreckage of what was already a precarious e ~ o n o m y . ’ ~ W h professor ite Guzmin is pro-peasant rather than pro-labor; a neo-primitivist intellectual, he sides with the “colored’ Indiansagainst the “white” oppressors; is an Alienated Bourgeois Intellectual who nonetheless, or who rather because of that, despises other bourgeois intellectuals; therefore he endeavors to identify not only with peasants but with the lowest of the lowest; and with his personal voluntarism of guerrilla action he enthusiastically wages war on the decadentcities. The non-market environmentalists’ ideal of a totally clean, ecologically harmonious society finds its full literary expression in a workby yet another academician: Ec~topia.’~ In Ecotopia, the wise authorities control people’s behavior and activities close enough to make sure that what people do does not alter too much the conditions approved as desirable by the wise authorities. The ultimate goal of the wise Ecotopian planners is a steady state of affairs. T o ensure the quality of life, the wise authorities mandate that cities be small (optimum population of about 50,000): this necessitates, of course,forcing people to stay in one place instead of migrating to the cities from the countryside or from one city to another (for although all cities will be equally desirable, so that moving from one to the other would not be much of an issue, the authorities might have to contend with other factors of attraction and repulsion, such as the climate, the seacoast, the existence of a lake, being in an area prone to hurricanes or earthquakes, and so on). All this is done, of course, for the people’s own good. This aspect of Ecotopian life is redolent of the efforts of the authorities in the socialist countries to control population movement,thereby keepingcities from being overcrowded by migrating people from the countryside and being better able to comply with Marx’s recommendation in The Communist Manifesto regarding the need to erase the distinction between the city and the countryside. Marx’s idea is one of the reasons why, in the socialist countries, internal permits have always been required to move from one place to another; and why masses of people have been ordered to move from the cities to the countryside (such mandated moves for the good of the whole continued as late as 1992: cf. the planned and, after an international outcry, called-off transfer of thousands of Chinese from thedensely populated areas to the less populated lands of the Uzbekhs, Kirghizes, and so on in 1992). The Ecotopian authorities, of course, might devise a betterway to effectively monitor and thereby control (“regulate”) the movement of the citizens within Ecotopia (always for their own good). In Ecotopia, agriculture is also very well controlled (regulated), so that farmers are allowed to use only those methods approved by the best (usually college-educated, higher-degreed) minds in charge. In Ecotopia, government is therefore (and necessarily) very powe@l at the local and regional levels. In politically correct fashion, “‘ Consumers’ is not a term used in polite conversation” in Ecotopia.“ The obviously well-meaning reason is that, always for the good of the whole, one is not

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encouraged to try to satisfy non-approved desires for goods and services. In Ecotopia, the wise government has legally banned all cars except electric ones; and by means of subsidies and other encouragements to correct behavior, the wise, best minds in charge have made people use public transportation above all else. In Ecotopia, “Wealth cannot be inherited”-as Marx recommended in point three of The Communist Manifesto. In Ecotopia, “Individualism is discouraged‘as socialism necessarily prescribes. Conversely, collectivism is intelligently fostered: “To foster a sense of group identity, most people live in groups of 20 or so instead of as traditional nuclear families.” This last idea responds to the materialist teaching according to which “social being shapes individual consciousness,” and which dictated one of the purposes of collectivizing agriculture in the Soviet Union: to discourage individualism and encourage collectivism. In “socialist countries,” Soviet professors taught their students, “the socialist transformation of small-scale peasant economy farming is implemented on cooperative principles. The life and work of the peasantry in production work collectives (formerly everybody worked on individual farms) bringabout radical changes in their views and psychology: they become collectivist, internationalist, and~ocialist.”’~ Hence, too, the clever idea of Ecotopia’s knowing planners of mandating that people give up the individualism-inducing automobile (in which one person can move whenever he wants, accompanied or not, accompanied by his own thoughts or those of another, and is relatively independent from the social whole) in favor of the train (a means of transportation where people must necessarily act more like sheep than like individuals)-as an effective way of discouraging individualism and developing instead the desired and beneficial collectivist ethos aimed at by the professorial best minds behindEcotopia. In Ecotopia productivity has somehow increased so much thatpeople work only twenty hours aweek-as in the Radiant Future once predicted by Marx for socialist societies. An “ideal” society, Ecotopia (like most other utopias) could probably only have been imagined by an educator. Adopting Misery As an Ideal has logically led contemporary intellectual com1991, the New York munists to some rather bizarre conclusions. For example, in Times’sports columnist noted approvingly that in Cuba “there are no traffic jams [because] there are very few private cars.”18 But that there are few cars, private or otherwise, is of course due to the misery brought about by collectivism, but for the journalist the result is a blessing not in disguise. Presumably, in other areas of the world where there are few cars and a similar misery, the suffering populations must be considered just as fortunate as the Cubans. It is true, however, that the New York Times has a venerable tradition of admiration for the worlds most progressive regimes: notorious examples being Pulitzer Prize-winner Walter Durante’s glowing reports on both the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics and “father” Stalin (the epithet “father,” originated in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics,was adopted by the American press) at the time of the Great Famine and purges of the 193Os, and H. Matthews’ stories lionizing Cuba’s Fidel Castro in the early sixties. Many others among the morepowerful U.S. media organizations have traditionally shown a soft spot for these progressive regimes: The media’s infatuation with Castro has

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been thoroughly historicized by William Ratiff in his book, The Selling of Fidel Castro: The Media and the Cuban Revolution.” Professors desperate to find something good to say about communismhave caught on to this defense’s ecological thrust. Thus, a professor in an article for the Los Angeles Times writes: There is an island in the Caribbean where at certain moments you feelthat you are wandering through the pages of “Ecotopia,” Ernest Callenbach‘s novel about an environmental and egalitarian utopia. There are few cars and no smog. There are no commercial billboards, signs or graffiti. The streets are cleaned, trash is picked up. Everything is recycled, nothing wasted. ...Some communities get electricity from windmills and cow-dung slurries that generate combustible methane. Small dairy herds have been established and new fields plantedto make the island self-sufficient in agriculture and break its dependenceon cash crops for export. ... Women have the right to choose abortion and the right to 18 weeks’ paid maternity leave. They constitute 56 percent of all working professionals. There are more female than male doctors and judges. Most urban neighborhoods have free day-care centers and preschools, and education is free through university and graduate school levels; literacy is 98 percent. The island is Cuba.*’ But plus Fa change, plus c’est la mPmechose: With the exception of an updated vocabulary that repeatedly bows to ecological correctness, the mixture of twisted interpretations of facts with plain lies about Cuba in these professorialand journalistic rhapsodies of the 1990s is indistinguishable from the similar mixture in the encomia of intelligent and learned Western intellectuals, such as the Webbs, or Bernard Shaw, or John Dewey, about the wondersof socialism inthe Soviet Union during the 1930s (and subsequently, when the Soviet Union was revealed for what it was, about the wonders of socialism in China, Vietnam, and so on, in the deployment of the Acceptance-Denial defense). After all the equivocations in the encomia aresifted out, itbecomes plainthat the Cuban“advantage” is but a byproduct of Cuba’s astonishing economic retrogression.The professorial and journalistic admiration therefore reveals the sometimes unconsciousand sometimes not-too-hidden desire behind ecological utopias: socioeconomic backwardnessfollowed by stasis-that is, neo-primitivism. Thus thepositive assessment ofCuban life under socialismturns out to be based on the value judgment central to the Misery As an Ideal defense: that a life of scarcity and poverty is better than one of abundance and wealth. Misery As an Ideal (like the ultimate phase of socialism: communism) requires a completely stationary state in which people will not want to improve theirsocioeconomic conditions-a goal that necessarily requires change. Indeed, as Ludwig von Mises has argued, there maybe a possibility for socialism only under this unchanging state of misery.’l This goal of stasis, of “equilibrium,” is also central to non-free market environmentalism, which claims it is the only state compatible with a harmonious existence side by side with Nature. With afew exceptions, the ideal has in fact been advocated in most Utopian schemes. It presupposes, of course,that every-

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one will be so happy as not to want toimprove his condition, because such a desire usually brings about the much dreaded phenomenon of change. Behind the similarity of axioms, goals, practices, and results there lies a similarly average man. Despite unfavorable estimationof the knowledge and intelligence of the their claimed love of the masses (or rather because of it: for Father, or rather Big Brother, knows best), for practitioners of materialist discourse the best minds of a nation have as a matter of course the duty to lead the less capable masses to a better future. Likewise, for some non-free market environmentalists, “the common man is not perceived as knowing much about the environment, and whathe does know, including knowledge of his own values, is incorrect; the high variance means that experts can manage for the good of the masses.”22This viewpoint is common to the utopian intellectuals described by Rae1 Jean Isaac and Erich Isaac.23 It is also common to many other progressive intellectuals, environmentalists or not. Thus, for example, the editor of the financial [!]section of the Chicago Tribune, criticizing the views of a maverick presidential candidate, complains that the man’s viewpoint “presupposes, of course, that the people know what is best for them.” According to the editor, this is patently absurd. “American people,” the editor believes, “aren’t exactly the fount of wisdom. ...Put them back in charge, as Reagan did, and they’ll bankrupt the country in a few The notorious bureaucratization of life brought about by socialism and analyzed by Mises,25among others, also finds its counterpart in non-free market environmentalism. What in the socialist countries has functioned as a direct government intervention (for the good of the people of course) in the economy (national economic planning), is now developing in the Capitalist Welfare State as government intervention in “ecological matters.” But in both cases intervention is ultimately economic, because government“legislation”(regulation,control,etc.) necessarily has to do with the economic conditions and the functioningof the market for goods and services. Bothsubordinatethe“private”sectortothe“public”oneandits “public” needs. “Environmental legislation will create jobs, not only in theenvironmental clean up program but in protecting natural resources and making America a leader in environmental technology,” an educator observes.26These jobs are usually government-connected, so that “environmentalism” has the effect of steadily increasing the power of the State by gradually increasing thenumber of those who, in order to make a living, must one way or another deal with the State and therefore engage in bureaucratic “dirigiste” activities.Among theprivate and government jobs for which universities will prepare students in the future are: “environmental manager” (not to become part of a goods-or service-producing effort, but of the bureaucraticelitethatdirects people’s and companies’behavior),“greenmarketing manager” (to be alert and react to government legislation that will affect a product and the way consumers look at it), “environmental lawyer” (“this legal specialty should grow with more ‘green’ legislation and regulation”). The Student Conservation Association (an educational organization that places “volunteers” in national parks, forests, wildlife refuges, and marine sanctuaries-all government enterprises)

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has openly acknowledged thisboon to educational training for government bureaucracy-related jobs: “We have 220,000 alumni of that program. Most are in natural resource and environment careers. They used it as jump-start to careers in government.””

NEW OR IMPROVED SOCIALISM A version of ReLabeling or Humpty-Dumpty is the New or Improved Socialism defense.” This defense is redolent of some well-known techniques used by Capitalist Madison Avenue. It claims that what mostprofessors and activists have been trying to implement until now (“now”being whenever thedefense is used) throughout the globe has, after all, not been “Stalinism,” or “State Capitalism,” and so on, but rather something called “classical” or “orthodox” (and therefore OLD) Marxism. Instead, what the professors are now thinking of benefitting the world with is a New or Improved kind of socialism that is therefore a better one. It is indeed socialism, but not like the “other” (Old) one. As part of this “new” socialism, these professors reject Old Teachings, such as: the revolutionary importance of the proletariat, the teleology of socialism (including its inevitability and the role played in its riseby Capitalism), the belief that the disappearance of Capitalist modes of ownership will inevitably lead to the disappearance of oppression (instead, oppression may remain after all-in the shape of patriarchalism, homophobia, and other oppressive things-so one must continue fighting against it until it is finally extirpated), and so forth. Practitioners of this defensive variation may even agree that, after all, bourgeois democracy is not that bad: However, it must be deepened (IMPROVED).29 Thisvariation rejects the universality of the “classical” Marxist categoriesand the need for a “unified” leadership. So educators who use this defense now wisely affirm that the “totalizing” tendencies of “orthodox” Marxism are wrong and must be rejected. As one of them writes, “Totalizations are always reductive.”30 This is the new “Party Line” among the most progressive professors, who often and quite correctly associate it with the “anti-establishment” and “subversive” possibilities of deconstructive discourse. An American professor, for example, feels reassured by the fact that deconstruction providesa theoretical justification for favoring the sort of much more desirable political action that aims at a multiplicity of revolutionaryfoci rather than at a “unified” political action.31 H e insists on the necessity of “deconstructing” operational “binarities” and replacing them with this famous “multiplicity” that seems essential for really good social and political criticism and therefore for addressing the “problems of justice and liberality.”32 The same teachings are echoed by another American pedagogue (not surprisingly, published by the same university press) who adds an equally fashionable attack on the “universality of reason,” which he sees (again in a politically correct fashion)as serving to legitimate formsof political domination (because reason is of course either an invention of the oppressive classes of the West or at least something that they have shrewdly used to oppress).33Other professors repeat these ideas about the need

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for this “new” socialism to reject the “totalizing” and “unifying” revolutionary procedures of “orthodox” Marxism and to replace them with said “multiplicity” of subversive political action reflected in deconstruction’s approach.34 Butthis“new” socialism is infact no differentfrom the old one, despite its vaunted rejection of the sort of epistemology still operational in Marx’s major “scientific” work, Capital. Central materialist concepts remain: from collective (class or sex or race) “hegemony” (or “domination,” “power,” etc.) and “exploitation” (“oppression,”etc.) tothe endless Old Marxistreiterationsagainstprivateproperty, “bourgeois” economics, “consumerism,” “individualism,” “unspiritual” materialism (as opposed to thespiritual kind, practicedby materialist professors), “competition,” and so on. Even the presumably new idea of “deepening” bourgeois democracy is an almost verbatim replication of Lenin’s idea (once upon a time also picked up by a now defunct “Eurocommunism”) of “deepening the Russian r e v ~ l u t i o n . ”In ~~ addition, the “old” “unified leadership” concept of “orthodox” communism is, in practice, kept alive by being displaced from that of a collectively organized Communist Party to an undoubtedly fragmented (or “multipolar”) but nonetheless identifiable collective entity: the equally courageous national leadership made up of all progressive academicians. It is true that, at the less exalted level of economic implementation, the “new” socialism has occasionally adopted a label that draws upon a central concept of Capitalist thought: the marketplace.Hence, thefrequently heard combination “market socialism” (compared by cynics to “jumbo shrimp” or “squaring the circle”). But this economic version has been exposed by critics like Anthony de Jasay as yet another name for the old socialism, since its so-called“social market” needs include pervasive direct or indirect government control and therefore a dominating sector in which private property rights are by definition not protected, transferable, or divisible. And as in other versions of socialism, what is here euphemistically called “society” invariably turns out to be “the government” and therefore the State.36

HOPE SPRINGS ETERNAL. Unlike Denial, Hope Springs Eternal agrees with critics of socialism that real socialism has been variously implemented on this earth and that socialism has not worked out in any instance. But, it asserts (taking up Denial once more), from this fact it does not follow that socialism will not work out sometime in the Radiant Future (here one finds at work once more Marxism’s characteristic Futurism). This subtle defensefollows the structureof Capitalist bourgeois philosopher David Hume’s “argumentagainst induction”: from“All known Xs are Ys” it does not follow that “All Xs are Ys.” Therefore, that the socialist countries (if indeed they were socialist: see Denial) have had difficultiesdoes not mean that Marx was wrong. Something other than his ideas may have been the cause of the difficulties. This defense allows professors to avoid relating not only the cultural, ethical, social, and economic bankruptcy of the socialist states, but also the events of 1989, to the effectiveness of Marx’s thought to cope with or even describe reality. The defense

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thus sidesteps Raymond Aron and Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s conclusions, typical of the “empirical” approach to the debunking of Marxist teaching^.^' But Hope Springs Eternal faces at least three first degree problems. First of all, Hume’s argument against inductionclashes with his commitment to and arguments in favor of the “experimental method of reasoning” both in “moral subjects” and elsewhere.38 Hume thus stands against Hume. In addition, K a r l Popper has offered a solution to the problem formulated by Hume and thusimplicitly a different first degree argument against Hope Springs Eternal.39 According to Popper, induction simply does not exist.40Moreover, it is true that, based on the repetition ofprevious instances, one cannot say that something will or will not happen again. But one can hold the “working hypothesis” (or as Popper also called it, the “conjecture”) that, given a number of earlier instances in which X is the case, it is reasonable to act on the avowedly provisional assumption that in future similar instances X will also be the case, until an instance may disprove that X is the case. If one adopts the working hypothesis, based on repeated past experiences, that Marxist ideas simply do not work and that therefore they should not be adopted again, the “form” of the Marxist instances adds an additional reason for rejecting Marxist ideas: the “form” of the instances is the enormous cost in human suffering caused by the past Marxist experimentsrelative to their presumedbenefits, especially when compared to the benefits and costs of the non-Marxist configurations (less abstractly formulated, this is in fact one of the main theses in Arthur Seldon’s imIt is reasonable therefore to conclude that it would be portant book Capitali~rn).~~ unwise to continue trying to implement the teachings of Marxeven if the argument from induction held. In other words, algebraically adding the historically ascertainable past costs of Marxism relative to its past benefits, plus the costs and benefits of its alternatives, plus the irrefragable uncertainty of Marxism’s future accomplishments (at least no less uncertain, by Hume’s own argument against induction, than the likelihood of its future failures), to continue applying Marxist ideas is not a good idea. Moreover, Hope Springs Eternal faces problems even when buttressed by an unanswered Humean argument: Thedefense rests on a principle thatif taken seriously, would condemn people to rapid extinction. Suppose that one follows the principle in order to decide whether or not it is harmful to a professor’s health to cross the Eisenhower Expressway in Chicago at a time when an extremely large truck is approaching less than twenty yards away and moving at approximately sixty miles an hour, in violation of the speed limit. It is true that, in the past, everyone struck by such aheavy object moving at such a speed has either died or suffered seriousinjuries. But according to the Marxist reasoning, this proven fact does not mean that the same result will necessarily obtain in the future. T o assert that it will is a non sequitur-especially since historical conditions “now” are not exactly the same as historical conditions “before”: The professor is a different person with historical or experiences and “social being’ different from those of people previously killed maimed when hit by big trucks moving at sixty miles an hour on the expressway.

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Besides, other historical conditions are also different, since these are not the same or the same trucks that have killed so many other people before, or the same driver, or the same moment in exact spot on the pavement where others were smashed, time, or the same elasticity or hardness of bones and flesh, and so on. Moreover, that other people died upon being hit by a truck even in quite similar circumstances (historical conditions) may in fact not be the reason they died: Something else conceivably may have been the cause of their deaths-some could, for instance, have suffered a heart attack immediatelybefore being hit; or, suffering from a particularly virulent form of cancer, others may have died suddenly, also before being hit. In neither case can the verdict of history ascertain the truth, since there is always room for argument as to the cause of death, and since one is not logically justified in connecting the crossing of the expressway under such circumstances to the deathof all those other people. Therefore, since the historical verdicton the true significance of the earlier events is inconclusive, the professor may reasonably risk being hit by said truck. Similarly, it is reasonable once more (since this time around the revolutionaries are different people and therefore possibly morally and intellectually superior to earlier ones, and since other historical conditions will not be the same either) to use Marxist ideas in order to try to create better peopleand a better world. Hope Springs Eternal must face yet another criticism: That since by the same Humean token, there is no basis for affirming that socialism will work in the future when it has not worked in the past; or for affirming that, in spite of their record, it would be good to continue performing socialist “experiments” on the backs of suffering humanity; so the defense ultimately resorts to what Luther called a “justification by faith alone.” Thus Fideism (irrationalism) becomes the last defensive ground for the true believer. Hope Springs Eternal as a defensive variation of Denial is usually “buttressed’ by yet another denial: Hope Springs Eternal denies that historical “conditions” (“objective relations ofproduction” andso forth) wereright for socialism to be implemented in any of those countries. Therefore, progressive people must continue to try socialism-because one day, some time in the(radiant) future, it will indeed work out with more favorable “historical conditions.” Fideism is again the ultimate ground for this assertion. One caveat offered by the defense is that socialist experimentation should be continued, preferably in the wealthy West, where socialism has not been as thoroughly triedas in, say, Russia and where, therefore, athorough thoughgradual attempt will likely produce good results. More important, it is in the wealthy West where the famous “historical conditions” are bound to be more favorable to the implementation of socialism (perhaps because people there, under Capitalism, have created more goods and services for socialism to distribute more equitably?). But what of the fact that some socialist policies (e.g. “social security”) have been tried in wealthy Western Capitalist countries with less than happy results? No problem: Hope Springs Eternal simplydenies the significance of theseexperiences. A l l it takes is to apply the Humeanargument: The fact that socialism has failed up to now, does not mean that it will always fail. Thus Hope Springs Eternal.

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DESPERATION The Desperation defense (called to my attention by Paul Hollander) is, as its title indicates, a sort of let-us-throw-up-our-arms-but-let-us-not-die defense. It merely states that, yes, socialism is not good (unlike Denial or Hope Springs Eternal, Desperationaccepts that the socialistcountries were indeedsocialist), but neither is Capitalism, “especially” that of the UnitedStates. In their place remains an eternally undefined, never conceptualized, and therefore not open tofactual or argumentative of the rebuttal, desideratum. In desperation, Desperation sometimes adopts some tactics of the “new” or “improved” socialism defense. Thus, it has devised all sorts of labels, from “communitarianism” to “new liberalism” to “civic liberalism,” as it claims to represent yet another “new political paradigm” that will transcend both the “left” and the “right.” Desperation usually appeals to the more historically unschooled professors, who do not know that their “new” paradigm has already and repeatedly been tried before; and who ignore, too, what both Marx and Mises independently agreed upon and Fascist Italy and National Socialist Germany illus(Zzoangszuirtscbaj?) is economically trated: That “middle-of-the-road” policy unsustainable and, unless reversed, necessitatesfirtber statist inroads and eventual de fdcto s o ~ i a l i z a t i o nBecause .~~ of its shaky conceptual foundations, this weak,though not unpopular, defense tends to merge into the stronger Misery As an Ideal.

NOTES 1. Barry Commoner, The Closing Circle (New York: Bantam, 1971), 280, cited in Rae1 Jean Isaac and Erich Isaac, The Coercive Utopians (Chicago: Regnery Gateway, 1985), 64. 2. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. I (1 867;New York: International Publishers, 1967), 177. 3. Tom Tietenberg, Environmentaland Natural Resource Economics(Glenview, Ill.: Scott, Foresman and Company, 1984), 437. 4. Terry Anderson and Donald R. Leal, Free Market Environmentalism (San Francisco: Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy, 1991), 168-70. 5. Northwestern University Centerfor UrbanAffairs andPoliy Research description booklet, 1992-1993, 34. 6. Richard C. Rockwell, “Ecologia: nuestro futuro se decide ahora,” boletin 42 editorial de El Colegio de Mexico (March-April 1992),30. 7. Lewis S. Feuer, Marx and the Intellectuals (New York: Anchor, 1969), 224. 8. Ibid. 9. Cited in ibid. 10. F. A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (Chicago: The U of Chicago P, 19881, 19. 11. John Ellis, “The Western Tradition of Political Correctness,” Academic Questions 5, no. 2 (Spring 1992): 24-31. 12. Feuer, M a m and the Intellectuals, 227. 13. Ibid.,217-18. 14. Cf. Alma Guillermo Prieto, “Down the Shining Path,” The New Yorker, 8 February 1993, 64-75.

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15. Ernest Callenbach, Ecotopia (Berkeley: Banyan Tree Books, 1975). Chicago Tribune, 16. Stevenson Swanson, “Fictional utopia rooted in ecological reality,” 26 February 1990. 17. Z. Berbeshkina, L. Yakovleva, andD. Zerkin, What is HistoricalMaterialism?(Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1987), 48. 18. George Vecsey, cited in Stephen Chapman, “Dyingor not, communism stillhas Western fans,” Chicago Tribune, 29 August 1991. with 19. William Ratiff, The Selling o f Fidel Castro: The Media and the Cuban Revolution, an introduction by John R. Silber (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1987). 20. Robert W. Benson, professor of international environmental law at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, “An Island on the way to environmental equilibrium,” Los Angeles Times, 29 March 1992. 21. Ludwig von Mises, Socialism (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1981), 186. 22. Anderson and Leal,Free Market Environmentalism, 4. On the other hand, “Free market environmentalism,” claim Anderson and Leal, “sees a much smaller knowledge gap between the experts and the average individual. In this view, individual property owners, who are in a position and have an incentive to obtain time- and place-specific information about their resource endowments, are better suited than centralized bureaucracies to manage resources.” 23. Rae1 Jean Isaac and Erich Isaac, The Coercive Utopians: Social Deception by America) Power Players (Chicago: Regnery Gateway, 1985). 24. William Neikirk, “President Perot could serve a dangerous master,” Chicago Tribune, 27 May 1992. 25. Ludwig von Mises,Bureaucracy (New Haven: YaleUP, 1944; Cedar Falls, Iowa: Center for Futures Education, 1983). 26. Cited in Casey Bukro, “Environmental careers called green-hot,’’ Chicago Tribune, 24 December 1992. 27.Ibid. 28. Ernest0 Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony andSocialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985). 29.Ibid.,176. 30. Mark Poster, Critical Theory and Poststructuralism: In Search o f a Context (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell UP,1989), 107. 31. Dominick LaCapra, Soundings in Critical Theory (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell UP, 1989), 130-32. 32.Ibid.,184. 33. Poster, Critical Theory andPoststructuralism, 107. 34. Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 3, 192. 35. “Lenin’s favorite method consisted in the gradual ‘deepening of the revolution,’ carried Lenin: Red Dictator out under his program,not all at once,but bit by bit.” George Vernadsky, (New Haven: YaleUP,1931), 319.On Eurocommunism’s similar approach see Frank Parkin, Marxism and Class Theory: A Bourgeois Critique (New York: Columbia UP, 1979). 36. Anthony de Jasay,Market Socialism: A Scrutiny. “This SquareCircle”(London: Institute of Economic Affairs, 1990), 18-19. 37. Raymond Aron, Histov, Truth, Liberty (Chicago: The U of Chicago P, 1985), 15861. 38. Antony Flew,Dictionary OfPhilosophy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979), 145. “This is one of many cases,” writes Flew, “where the skeptical outcome of the general philosophy of bookI of the Treatise [of Human Nature: An Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method

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o f Reasoning Into Moral Subjects] apparently or actually clashes with Hume’s deep concern for scholarship and for general enlightenment, to say nothing of ‘common sense.’ ” “How, to take another instance,” continues Flew, “are we to reconcile his commending in the Treatise of the supposedly unevidenced ‘natural belief in the eternal world with his insistence in the first Inquiry that, confronted by the ‘impertinent solicitations [ofl arrogant bigotry and superstition. ...A wise man ...proportions his belief to the evidence?’” 39. Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (New York: Harper, 1965); idem, ObjectiveKnowledge: An EvolutionaryApproach (Oxford:Oxford UP, 1972), 6-17.SeeDavid Miller, “Conjectural Knowledge: Popper’s Solution to the Problem of Induction,” in Paul Levinson, ed.,In Pursuit of Truth: Essays in Honor of &rl Popper) 80th Birthday (New York: Humanities Press, 1982), 1 7 4 9 for a detailed reply to Popper’s critics. 40. Popper, The Logic of ScientificDiscovery; idem, Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach. For a detailed reply to Popper’s critics see Miller, “Conjectural Knowledge: Popper’s Solution to the Problem of Induction,” 1 7 4 9 ; WilliamWarrenBartley 111, Unfithomed Knowledge, Unmeasured Wealth (LaSalle, Ill.: Open Court, 1990), 176. 41. Arthur Seldon, Capitalism (London: Basil Blackwell, 1990). 42. Ludwig von Mises, “Middle-of-the-Road Policy Leads to Socialism” (1950) in Two

Essaysby Ludwig von Mises: ‘Ziberty and Property” and YMiddle-of-the-RoadPolicyLeadsto Socialism,” ed. Thomas J. Dilorenzo (Auburn Ala.: The Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1991); Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Maniferto (New York: International Pub-

lishers, 1948), 30.

Chapter Eight

Problems of the Marxist Approach: Practice History in the hands of the Bolsheviks must be a concrete science...and thereby serve as a tremendous weapon in the struggle for socialism. “Pravda, 22 August 1937 History is not studied to learn what happened in the past but to learn what behavior will be necessary in the future to fight for the existence of our people. “Hitler, Mein Kampf

The mutability of the past is the central tenet of Ingsoc. “George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four For that evil [totalitarianism]is precisely the reduction of life to politics. “Milan Kundera, Testaments Betrayed

PRACTICAL PROBLEMS OF THE MATERIALIST APPROACH For heuristic purposes, let us call the ensemble of a d hoc assertions that constitute Marxism’s “political” (“ideological,” etc.) approach to human knowledge an “epistemology.” One basic problem with the approach is that, like ideas in general, this one also has real-life consequences.’ The historical record of the twentieth century shows that Marxism’s axiomatic subordination of ethics and epistemology to the political (practical) instance leads to disastrous results. Marxism may thus be curiously right in recognizing that theory and practice are inseparable. Western socialist professor Ernst Fischergives an instructive examplein his mem-

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oirs. While visiting the former Union of Socialist Soviet Republics, hemet a teacher who made a promise to Fischer that the teacher did not keep. When Fischer called the teacher’s attention to it, Not without charm, she laughed. “But surely you’re familiar with the laws of dialectics?” “What has dialectics got to do with not keeping a promise?” “Oh, you’re a poor dialectician. Everythingdepends on space and time. On reciprocal action [emphasis added]. Several months had passed. At that time what Isaid corresponded to the situation. Since then the situation hm changed. What wm correct then is no longer correct today [emphasis added]. Can’t you understand that?” “No.” “I’mafraid you’ll havedifficulties in the future if you don’t understanddialectical reciprocal action.” She looked at me ...kindly and unsettling.’ Unsettling indeed for Western materialist academician Fischer: The teacher’s actions and explanations were quitelogical in a countrywhere all of “society” and not just academicians-and not just in the rarified and peculiar realm of college textbooks and university research, but in actual everyday ‘‘practice’’-had accepted a “concrete”(“contextualist,”“political,”“historical,”etc.)approach to truth as a guide for thinkingand acting. The story mayalso illustrate the sortof epistemological “power” that eminent American professor of economics Robert Heilbroner has, by his own confession, always admired in materialist dialectic^."^ The denial of objective truth and the subordination of epistemology to institutional hegemony, class, collective rules, culture, and so on, found a similarly Johnsonian rebuttal in 1990. Alexander Yakovlev, one of Gorbachev’s aids, indicted an entire epistemological system when he told delegates at the 28th Communist Party Congress that, in effect, for three generations all their institutional power, all their class power, all their command of the means of information and distribution of truth, and all their political control of the means of state coercion (what French Marxist professor Althusser, speaking of course of the evil Capitalist West, called “the State Ideological Apparatuses”: the legal and educational system, the media, etc.) and of every other presumably hegemonic factor, could not alter an objective truth: That their socioeconomic system was inferior. It was therefore time to accept that there is such a thing as an independent a n d objective truth: “A decision of this congress, or a decision of the Central Committee, cannot change the fact that the volume of labor production in South Korea is 10 times that of the North, nor the fact that people in West Germany live far better than people in the East.”* The practical difficulties of the Marxistapproach have been further illustratedby Mikhail Gorbachev’s failed effortto reform socioeconomic conditions in the former Union of Socialist Soviet Republics. One problem he faced was the lack of “individual responsibility” among the population. A report on both the problem and its attempted solution is instructive: As part of Soviet leader Gorbachev’sefforts to inject some personal initiativeinto an economy that has been dominated by the dictates of central planners for decades, a new law went into

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force last January. The law requires all state-owned enterprises to shift to the new system of accounting by 1990. The effect of the change is to remove the safety net of subsidies that protected and mummified Soviet companies, making them pay their own way or, in effect, go bankr~pt.~

This example illustrates the depth of the problem created by the institutionalization of this sort of thinking.Even when rulers tried to change the mentality of the population, that mentality prevailed: T o further individual responsibility and selfreliance, the government passed a law mandating that the population acquire individual responsibility and self-reliance. The best minds in charge (the “planners,” “the brain trust,” etc.) dictated what the individual shoulddo so that the individual acted self-reliantly-that is, without needing to be dictated to by the best minds in charge. But it is, in any case, problematic to expect immediate individual responsibility and autonomy from citizens taught for generations by academic, journalistic, and governmental practitioners of materialist discourse that individual consciousness is the result of social being and that therefore the selfis not autonomous, but only a product of the we-upon which it must inevitably depend and to which it must be necessarily subordinated. Several generations of experience with the results of this curiously self-defeating (self-defeating in more ways than one) viewpoint have led many thinkers in the former socialist lands to radically reevaluate theirmost fundamentalpremises. Thus, Russian professor Oleg T. Bogomolov, Director of the Institute of International Economic and Political Studies (formerly the “Institute of the Economics of the World Socialist System”), now argues the need for a “reinstatement of liberty and humanism as universal human values.”‘ This reinstatement confines to the dustbin of history the Marxist axiom claiming that no discourse, imaginative or archival, gives access to unchanging truths or expresses inalterable human nature. The epistemology indicated by Yakovlev served as the basis of Trotsky‘s famous attack against the Menshevik objections to the Compulsory NationalLabor Service advocated by the Bolsheviks as part of their progressive social policy. Compulsory labor service, the Mensheviks complained, made labor less productive: it was disguised slavery. Not necessarily, countered Trotsky-sometimes slavery is slavery and sometimes it is freedom. That compulsory labor is less productive may be true in some historical situations-as during the transition from feudal to bourgeois Capitalistic society. But it is not necessarily less productive under every condition. How can it be, since there is no such thing as an invariable human nature independent of social,historical, and culturalconditions?Compulsorynationallabor service therefore does not have to be less productive during the transition from Capitalism to socialism. Contrary to classical liberal bourgeois teachings, man does not have a “nature” that is the same for all times and places and that therefore makes him react in the same way to similar predicaments, but in different times and places (under different HISTORICAL conditions).’ In fact, Trotsky warned, if obligatory labor wereto be less productive even during the transition from Capitalism to socialism-as the Mensheviks claimed-then so-

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cialism is doomed. Watered-down socialists like the Mensheviks did not understand the fundamental issues at play, and thus could be both for socialism and against national compulsory (national labor) service. But socialism, Trotsky argued with iron logic, is on the one hand epistemologically groundedon thehistoricity ofhuman nature and on the other hand politically grounded on compulsion if a commonplan or agenda is to be implemented nationally and comprehensively, so that everyone pitches in and no one undermines theeffort with lack of cooperation.O n the other hand, if there is, after all, a human nature that in all historical conditions balks at compulsory labor service, and therefore reacts with inferior productivity, then socialism is fundamentally mistaken and “you can erect a monument over the grave of Socialism.”’ Fortunately,Trotsky thought, thingswere not going to turn out that way, for “in twenty or thirty years’time-at that date, of course, things will be much better.”’ Trotsky was writing in 1922. It now appears that the Mensheviks were right, that materialist epistemology and Trotsky were wrong, and that-as Trotsky feared if compulsion is truly counterproductive-one must erect a monument over the grave of socialism. For productivityin thesocialist countries has been, as Yakovlev pointed out, generally inferior in qualityand quantity compared to that It is also evident that despite its total control of the in the Capitalist countries. vaunted State Ideological Apparatuses (which Marxism argues shape the population’s mind to keep it subject to the ruling class’s interests), socialism in the former Union of Socialist Soviet Republics failed even to mold that mindsufficiently to ensure the survival of the regime. There seems to be, after all, a human nature that tends to balk at compulsion and tends to prefer liberty no matter what the State Ideological Apparatuses, the changed “historical” conditions and the changed “socioeconomic formations.” (Although, how canone be sure that such is going to be the case every time until the end of time: Perhaps at one point or other, the opposite will occur, and that will prove Marxism right; by means of this Hope Springs Eternal defense, Marxism can assure itself of being always right.) All economic difficulties in the socialist countries can ultimately be traced to these epistemological problems. O n the basis of its approach to knowledge, practitioners of materialist discoursehave seen the so-called “market” economy as merely a manifestation of ideology(as allknowledge, fromhistorical to scientific knowledge, eventually is-except of course Marxist knowledge).A l l “arguments” and “proofs” used to demonstrate the validity of a theory simply constitute efforts by the groups benefitting from the theory to justify themselves.Ultimately, it is all a question of 1deology””of “politics” in the materialist sense. Materialist professors from the socialist countries routinely explained these ideas to their students: L‘.

First, the political ideologyof a class seeks to prove the necessityof the social systemof which that class is the bearer. Thus, bourgeois ideology seeks to prove the necessity of the capitalist for the mode of production, maintaining that capitalist production relations are rational, bourgeoisie has a vital stake in them. of consolidating and develSecond, the political ideology embraces the ways and methods oping a given social system.”

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This old Marxist teaching that economic “truths” (like historical, scientific, and other “truths”) are merely assumptions or the result of assumptions unselfconsciously (and therefore “ideologically”) accepted by those benefitting from them, has been enthusiastically adopted by many Western professors in the Humanities: “Conservative [bourgeois-capitalist?] assumptions in economics courses,” explains an eminent Western professor of English literature, “don’t get noticed.”” In other words, things like prices, costs, and the criteria for their determination, as well as the so-called rational allocation of resources are merely assumptions that correspond to the interests of aparticular group at a particular time; their historicity and concreteness must therefore be incessantly pointed out to the naive so that these presumed “facts” can be put in their proper perspective. Or as Trotsky said to the Mensheviks: Your ideas on the alleged ‘)roblems”of coerced labor are not for all times or places.” Since prices, costs, and even people’s reaction to them, are ultimately “ideologically” determined-like all else-by whatever group is in power in order to justify itself-and are therefore the group i ideological constructs-it follows that a socialist government, as the representative of working people now in power-the group now in a hegemonic situation-could determine all these things as well. For there are real4 no “laws” of economics saying that, for example,prices and costs are formed as the result of certain physical factors and individual tendencies that are universally valid for all humans on this planet and therefore independent of hegemony and ideology. Instead, prices, costs, and their formation correspond ultimately to the interests of those in power to determine them and the conditions for their particular existence. They, and the way they are determined, areideological-politically fashioned. Therefore, the selection of “factors” can change, and so can the ways to come up with prices and costs. Therefore, the newly hegemonic groupthe Communist Party and the best minds in it-made decisions according to their own views of what constituted correct prices and costs, and a rational allocation of resources. No wonder that Lenin thought that runningan economy was no different from running the post office: Capitalistculturehas created large-scaleproduction,factories,railways, the postalservice, telephones, etc., and on thisbasis [original emphasis] the great majority of functions of the old “state power” have become so simplified and can be reduced to such simple operations of registration, filing and checking that they can be easily performed by every literate person, and it will be possibleto perform them for “workmen’s wages,” which circumstances can (and must) strip those functions of every semblance of “official grande~r.”’~

The mindset of the socialist intellectual is here in a nutshell. As Raymond Aron observed, “Incredible as the statement may seem, Lenin really believed that capitalism would bequeath to the proletariat an economy comparable with a public service, which could be managed simply by using the few necessary experts, since the jobs of the vast majority of officials would have been so simplified that anyone could do them.”’*

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In 1932, Ludwig von Mises had pointed out thesheer obtuseness of the otherwise brilliant and learned Bolshevik when it came to economic matters: This is all, absolutely all that Lenin had to say on this problem; and no socialist has had a word more to say. They have no greater perception of the essentials of economic life than the errand boy, whose only idea ofthe work of the entrepreneur is that he covers pieces of paper with letters and figures. It was for this reason that it was quite impossible for Leninto realize the causes of the failure of his policy. In his life and his reading he remained so far removed from the facts of economic lifethat he was as great a stranger to the work ofthe bourgeoisie, as a Hottentot to the work of an explorer taking geographical measurements. When he saw that his work could proceed no further on the original lines he decided to rely no longer on references to “armedworkers”inorder to compel the “bourgeois”experts to co-operate: instead they were to receive “high remuneration” for “a short transition period” so that they could set the socialist order going and thus render themselves superfluous. He even thought it possible that this would take place withina year.I5 But Lenin’s problem, of course, was fundamentally epistemological. One result of the nationwideinstitutionalization of this epistemology has been the most colossal economic mismanagement and impoverishment of a naturally rich nation that the world has ever seen. After a meeting with Gorbachev, Margaret Thatcher zeroed in on one of the roots of the problem: “They [the Soviets] have no idea about cost or price. The difficulties are enormous.’’16 “We don’t know how price mechanisms work,” a Soviet economisthas confessed, “It is a difficult job forus to put our house in order on prices.”” These evaluations corroborate Mises’ analysis, dating back to the 192Os, regarding the indispensability of profit in economic practice and theory and the related impossibilig of a workable socialist economics: An ethics that rejects profit makes economic calculation impossible, so that the confessed inability of the socialist best minds to understand price or cost (among other things) simply reflects a contradiction ingrained in the most foundational teachings of Marxism. Marxist theory also justified the collectivization of agriculture and the creation of slave labor (“re-education”) camps (the Gulag). The collectivization of agriculture was justified, of course, on economic grounds: Accordingto Marxist economic teachings, it would lead to increased productivity. But it was also justified on epistemological and ethical grounds: The social activists now in power wanted to change the way of thinking of the population from selfish bourgeois individualism to selfless collectivism; and since consciousness is axiomatically determined by “social being,” it followed that by changing the environment where people worked, their minds would similarly change for the better. Hence the idea, first implemented by Lenin and perfected by Stalin, Mao, and others, of removing the peasants from their farms and putting them incollective farms. Hence, too, the idea of slave labor camps, also started by Lenin and perfected by his followers: Labor in such a collectivist and disciplined environment, in which people worked selflessly without pay, would correct their behavior. A materialist professor from the former Soviet Union enthusiastically explains this Marxist reasoning:

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Social being determines people’s social consciousness. This means that new social ideas do not emerge in society by accident, but area reflection of those changes that occur in society’s material life: aggravated socio-economic contradictions, vital material needs, etc. ...Radical changes in social being, in people’s material life cause corresponding changes in their social consciousness. Thus, in socialist countries the socialist transformation of small-scale peasant economy farming is implemented on co-operative principles.The life and work of the peasantry in production work collectives (formerly everybody worked on individual farms) bring about radical changes in their view and psychology: they become collectivist,internationalist, and socialist. The relation between social being and social consciousness representsa natural law. ...Communist morality, related to socialist ideology and fully developed under triumphant socialism,represents a newsetofmoral values. Communist morality counters the individualism and egotism of bourgeois morality with collectivism, solidarity, socialist humanism, friendly co-operation and internationalism.’* Also, for theoretical reasons, genetics was banned throughout the Soviet Union, because this science conflicted with the fundamental dictum “individualconsciouspolitically correct rejectionof biological ness is the result of social being” and with the heredity.I7 The entire scientific establishment of the country eventually agreed with Marxist scientist Lysenko that Gregor Mendel’s ideas were mere bourgeois mistakes. Even in the West, some materialist professors-like J. B. S. Haldane (once England’s most admired geneticist)-also accepted Lysenko’s views because they were more humane than thoseof Mendel.” The truthof the matter is, of course, that had the entire world become socialist (as Trotsky dreamed) and therefore of the same “ideology” as the immensely powerful State Ideological Apparatuses at the disposal of the hegemonic socialist culture, Mendel would still have been right and the materialist teachings againstthe “pseudoscience” of genetics would still have been wrong. Marxist teachings led not only to a backwardness in Soviet genetic theory and practice that lasts to the present day, but also to the execution or imprisonment of hundreds of scientists suspected of entertaining politically incorrect biological notions. The consequences in many related fields, such as agriculture, were severe: Whereas under the tsars Russia had been a net exporter of food, after the socialist it owned a huge revolution the Soviet Union was unable to feed itself-though portion of the world’s most fertile land. Of course, an unrepentant Marxist might always argue that all these practical consequences were not really true, but mere ideological “constructions.” But the most notorious consequences of the materialist approach may probably be found in the realm of history, where many American professors now apply the fluid materialist concept of truth. As Russian historian and playwright Edvard Radzinsky has newly reminded us, in Marxist Russia “historical truth was an everchanging process, with history being perpetually rewritten to fit the needs of the moment.’”’ But, how not, if historical truth, like all truth, is the result of concrete practice, of action, of social and cultural “rules”?22The examination of this idea and its consequences is one of the central philosophicalissues in GeorgeOrwell’s Nineteen

Eighty-Four.

The fantastic results of the Marxist approach have not been confined to the so-

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cialist countries. Marxist theoryled Frederick Engels to mishandle two of the greatest discoveries of merely “bourgeois” science: the second principle of thermodynamics and, in spite of Engels’ admiration for Darwin, the theory of evolution.23Engels rejected the second principle of thermodynamics because it clashed with the “scientifically” grounded “progressivism” of materialist discourse: and he selectively interpreted Darwin’s theory because it clashed with Marxist social doctrine, which rejects genetic factors to defend the centrality of “social being” (the environment). The problems of the Marxist approach are equally evident if one considers recent a scientific confrontations between scientific truth and untruth. In the United States, investigation of Dr. Robert C. Gallo’s research uncovered several instances of fabrications and misleading statements in his landmark 1984 scientific article reporting the isolation of the AIDS virus. By December of 1992, the U.S. Department of Health and HumanServices had notified Gallo of their conclusion that he knowingly falsified a key portion of his 1984 article on AIDS. This report agreed with the review of Gallo’s case by a group of distinguished scientists chosen by theNational Institutes of Health, whoaccused Gallo of appropriating the French AIDS virus. No verbal juggling can obscure two facts illustrated by this case: that objective standards of truth and untruth mustbe assumed if Gallo’s innocence or culpability is to be decided at all; and that objective data, the determination of which rests, again, on foundational Western epistemological assumptions about truth and the human capacity to grasp it, indicate a number of falsifications. It is interesting that defenders ofwhat one mightdescribe as rather unorthodox gnoseological pathshave also supported theidea of scientifictruth against the “ideologico-political” principle: After much resistance, the U.S. government has approved research on the use of psychedelic drugs with voluntary human subjects; and this decision was interpreted by the president ofthe Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies as proof that “they [the government’s public servants] are sincerely saying that it is time for science to take precedence over ide~logy.”’~ The problems inherent in the materialist approach to knowledge are even more sharply foregrounded if one tries to imagine how a practitioner of the discourse would face the Gallo case: perhaps by arguing that only the ‘handards” of “conver-

sation” (oras they are naively so-called by the unsophisticated, “the standards o f research

f o r scientijic truth’? as they ‘bood” at “that particukzr time” condemned the Gallo

researchen as liars, butd f e r e n t sorts of ‘itandards of “conversation” would havetransformed their assertions into indubitable truth.For truth is, like practically everything, ”

historically relative. After all, “science,” as a famous Western professor has written, is not a question of “scientific Method, involving numbers and lab-coats and so forth.” It is not now considered sophisticated among the cognoscenti to go about “splitting Art from Science, Literature from Law. ...It is better to exhibit science as rhetoric all the way down.”25According to this professor (who is not otherwise a Marxist), the same is true of the search for “justice”: “The actual human argument of law courts is [and must be] downgraded to ‘mere’ persuasion or teaching or something else without the dignity of Truth Saying.”” Or, had the collective re-

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mained “persuaded” by Gallo or Lysenko, both would have made true (or “true”?) scientific discoveries. This would also be the conclusion reached by anyone who tookseriously Thomas Kuhn’s explanations of theway science proceeds.As William Warren Bartley I11 has pointed out in his critique of Kuhn’s work,

As one of Kuhn’s admirers expresses it, the truth of a scientific theory reflects or is a projection it is rejected by that of the consensus of the scientific community-a theory is false when community, and if the scientific community has made no commitment, then the theory is neither true nor false. What is true, that is, is what we experts agree to be true; what is open is that on which we do not care or dare to be true; what is open is that on which we do not care or dare to have an opinion.”

The consequences of taking this viewpoint seriously are rather chilling. Western physicians helping famine victims in Sudan during the late 1980s observed that, in one month alone, 1,200 children were lost to measles-a disease easily curable with Western scientific methods-because refugees thought measles was caused by evil spirits: therefore, they did not bring their children in for medical care.’* Now, by a materialist reasoning, these Sudanese mothers were justified in turning down Western science as impotent against evil spirits: for a belief in evil spirits is, after all, as culturally justified as a belief in science. Both are equally valid “beliefs.” One is no closer to “the truth” than the other. For truth is not absolute, but culturally conditioned, and belief in evil spirits is simply a different “cultural practice,” and one pefectly valid within thecontext of the Sudanese culture.Further, since there arereally no objective, absolute standards of truth, who is to say that the 1,200 dead children really died, or that they died because of their mothers’ perfectly valid “beliefs”?

SCIENCE AS LITERATURE AND RHETORIC Efforts to put “science” in its proper, but merely rhetorical or literary or cultural or ideological or political, place as a way to subordinate science and its pursuit of truth to the arbitrary power of collective rule have found an excellent forum in the scholarly Societyof Literature and Science, whosecongresses routinely include papers relativizing scientific method to social (cultural, etc.) factors and rejecting the idea of science as an independent discipline-while incessantly pointing out its collectively fashioned,rule-bound,hegemony-governed,culturallymodelednature. Among the recent papers, the following are representative: Stuart Peterfreund,“The Metaphysics and Ideology of Scientific Models in Optics: From Metaphor to Metonymy and Back’; Margot A. Kelly, “A Feminist in a Patriarchy or, Learning to Dance in the Disciplinary Minefields”; Daniel Zin, “Personal Solutions, Political Solutions, and the EnvironmentalCrisis”; Anne Balsamo, “Cyberspace and thePossibility of the Social”; Alice Adams, “Sexual Surgery and the Gynecological Aesthetic”; Tom Weissert, “The LanguageofIdentity:CulturalEvolutionofthe

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Genidentity of Physics”; David Brande, “Cyberspace and Post-Fordist Accumulation: Mapping the Playground of C a ~ i t a l . ” ’ ~ One telling aspect of this ongoing process of “debunking” high-sounding but naive goals like the Search for Scientific Truth and so on, is that the deconstructive (demythologizing, etc.) effort never moves in the direction of turning rhetoric (or literature, fiction, and so on) into a science, but always the other way around: The old search for a science of rhetoric and literature has been superseded by a search for a rhetoric and literature of science. The effect of “debunking” in this particular direction is that scientific activity is thus immediately associated with what most professors in the humanities typically do for a living (using words) ratherthan what professors in the sciences typically do for a living (using mathematical languageand precision instruments and working in laboratories).Not too subtly, the presumably demythologizing maneuver, allegedly intended to undermine thepower of a “dominant” group or institution (scientists and science) thus serves to “empower” a different group and institution (literature professors and university literature departments): It makes them hegemonic over so-called science and scientists-now reduced by the other professors to a mere or at best just another set of academic rhetoricians-yet of course at a disadvantage, since the literature professors, unlike the scientists, are masters of the rhetorical trade. Thus, “debunking” conveniently ends up serving the interests of those who so insightfully and disinterestedly do the debunking. Pareto’s insights on the intellectuals’ egalitarianism are much to the point here. As in the case of the professors’ defense of altruism and egalitarianism, presumably “revolutionary”or“liberationist”efforts end up benefittingthe group trying to debunk the previous hegemonic group. The “debunking’ of science by reducing it to literature parallels in method andeffects the renewed academic fashion of reducing religion to literature, where the authority of religion is “debunked,” only to be replaced by the-of course not open to a similar “debunking”-authority of the professors of literat~re.~’ As in other things, in this sort of “undermining,” which invariably works to their benefit, American professors follow a tradition of long standing: The teachings of Herr Doktor Marx have for generations served the interests of many intellectuals. Former Marxist Lewis S. Feuer eventually recognized and described this self-serving pattern: of the intellectuals’ The frustration of their will to rule has been the deepest unconscious source alienation. Withit have been allied their motivesof altruism and self-sacrificeand their longing to merge themselves, in an alternating dominance and submission, with the physical power of the people-peasantry, proletariat, primitive peoples, coloredraces, or backward nation^.^'

The phenomenon parallels the attempt to conflate the public with the private: In both cases there is an eventually hegemonic result grounded on sophistic equivocation and on an intentional and preliminary blurring of distinctions. Conflating imaginativewriting with the scientificinvestigation of truth ends up “empowering”

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imaginative writing. But the preliminary blurring is propitiated by failing to distinguish between the sort of “lying” that literature carries out-creating a world different from that of the everyday world-and the sort of actual lying that according to Marxism exists as a matter of course in every historical recording, or in a societal or “cultural” set of convictions about “so-called” truth, or even in truth itself. T o be sure, a practitioner of materialist discourse shares with the writer of literature a similar will to create an imaginary reality-to “lie.” And it is in the interest of Marxism to underline the similarity between its own description of the epistemological process and the description of such aprocess in literary studies.It wins akind of “legitimacy” for the notorious lyingthat Marxism justifies epistemologically.The perceived similarity may in fact account in some obscure way for the demonstrable success of Marxismamong imaginative writers:A fantastic discourse may find a fertile ground in suggestible minds that cannot always distinguish between fantasy and reality. Thus, Stalin’s lying has, with some justification, been compared to that of poets.32His saying at the time when millions of people in Russia and Ukraine were dying of hunger in the 1930s that “Our life has become better, our life has become more joyful” seems to have the same arbitrary ring as Robert Browning’s “All is right with the world.” The effort to blur the distinction between reality and fiction has been reinforced by deconstructive discourse. Thus, Professor Paul de Man, whose words acquire a sinister meaning when placed in the Marxist context of mass annihilations from Russia to China and from Cambodiato Vietnam: [It] is always possibleto face up to any experience(to excuse any guilt), because the experience always exists simultaneously as fictional discourse and a s empirical event andit is never possible to decide which of the two possibilities is the right one. The indecision makes it possible to of guilt and excuse the bleakest of crimes because, as a fiction, it escapes from the constraints innocence.33

ORWELL AND THE hMRXIST APPROACH George Orwell was aware of the fundamentals of materialist “epistemology” and their consequences. In Nineteen Eighty-Four he showed how the approach logically justifies Ingsoc’s (“English Socialism’s’’)alteration of the past and the remolding of human beings in order to serve political goals. In Terrorism and Communism Trotsky had argued that progressives needed to control thewhole world before the consciousness of the population in even a single country could begin to be changed into a communist consciousness: otherwise people will not want to change, having “bad’ examples still before their eyes. Trotsky‘s shrewd reasoning justifies Ingsoc’s insistence on the need for control of the population’s mobility as well as the systematic alteration of the past: “[The individual in Oceania] tolerates present day conditions partly because he has no standards ofc o m p a r i ~ o n . ”Trotsky‘s ~~ reasoning would later also be used to justify the Berlin Wall. Orwell illustrated the peculiar logic and striking consequences of materialist epistemologyeven more dramatically in the so-

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phisticated intellectual O’Brien’s patient higher education of the naive intellectual Winston:35 “You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right. You also believe that the natureof reality is self-evident. When you delude yourself into thinking that you see something, you assume that everyone else sees the same thing as you. But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external” (205). Reality, O’Brien goes on to explain, exists only in the Party’s collective mind, which is immortal; for it is the collective that constructs reality. Thus, like materialist professors, O’Brien insists on the primacy of collective as opposed to falsely “individual” authorship. When Winston asks if O’Brien has read Goldstein’s book, the answer No book is produced is: “I wrote it. That is to say, I collaborated in writing it. individually, as you know” (215). This assumption underliesthe notorious“collective authorship”obsession of practitioners of materialist discourse, who not only search for collective authorship in every “text” (which, therefore, they try to reduce to a collective-cultural, social, etc.-“product”), but who also endeavor to write books and articles collectively. As a Western professor observes, “The social role of the subject is reconsidered within history and is simultaneously displacedfrom thefixed position which previouslyhad been assigned to it as individual cons~iousness.”~~ Or, once more, as Marx taught, “Consciousness is the result of social being, rather than the otherway around.” This idea has enjoyed countlesspermutations andrestatements among Westernprofessors. Thus, for famous French materialist professor Louis Althusser, “ideology”creates in people the “illusion” of autonomy: In truth, most, if not all, things that individuals think or do are fashioned (configured, determined, subject to, structured, etc.) by the collective forces responsible for “ideology.” Even people’s language is the result of “ideology” and therefore of the collective forces of society, culture, and so forth. Earlier, O’Brien had make clear to Winston that what Winston thought was the truth about something, was rfally only Winston? truth (which is, of course, collectively-culturally, socially, etc.-given to him): “The truth, please, Winston. Your truth. Tell me what you think you remember” (203). O’Brien soon taught Winston an unforgettable lesson on the non-relative (absolute) truth-that truth is relative:

O’Brien held up his left hand, its back toward Winston, with the thumb hidden and the four fingers extended. “How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?” “Four.” “And if the Party says that it is not four but five-then how many?” “Four.” (206)

Winston’s answer was epistemologically incorrect because he overlooked that according to materialist discourse there is no objective knowledge; knowledge is a mental construction politically configured by hegemonic social groups that vary with varying historical (political, cultural, social, etc.) conditions. Fortunately for him, under pressure from the social group at the time hegemonic in Oceania, Winston

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eventually realizes that truth is really socially constructed. Now he does begin to assimilate and apply the profound epistemological teachings of Ingsoc: “How many fingers, Winston?” “Five! Five! Five!” ....

“You are a slow learner, Winston,” said O’Brien gently. “How can I help it?” he blubbered. “How can I help seeing what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four.” “Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.” (206-7)

Notice the operational force of these materialist principles inthe following course description at a contemporary American university: Comparative Literature and Theory, B80 INTERPRETING CULTURE Time: M W 11:OO Expected enrollment: 180 One of the most powerful ideas of the twentieth century is that symbolic systems-culture, language, ideology-structure the world. We will focuson the concept of culture, seeing how its radical implications have been pursued, especially in the challenge it poses to other terms such as “nature” and “man”. ...We will explorethe need to read the worldthat culture makes for us [emphasis added].37 This not-unusualcourse description showshow “cultural” studies at the American university characteristically overstate the role of collective structures on individuals and groups. From the rather plain observation that human beings are variously influenced in their formation and behavior by friends, parents, symbols, traditions, language, general surroundings,and patternsof accepted behavior, these institutionalized paradigms have proceeded to develop a dogma that presents every individual as a little robot “constructed” and directed by such things as Institutions, Culture, Advertising, and the StateIdeological Apparatuses (as Marxist critic Louis Althusser calls Western universities, media, church, judiciary,etc.): In short, manas a “social” construct without a nature. This viewpoint throws overboard any pretense that individuals can have personal autonomy and exercise volitional consciousness. The dangers to freedom and ethics of acquiescingto this viewpointwere perceived by Orwell, whose character O’Brien in Nineteen Eighty-Four defends in his conversations with Winston this view of man as thoroughly malleable by hisenvironment and of truth as a socially mediated definiti~n.~’ This viewpoint conceives the “I” (the “subject”) not as a fixed concept defined within certain limitsthat do notchange for human beings, but as something highly variable, constructed by societal (collective) parameters and discourses that are themselves in constant change. The ontological status of the individual self is thus undermined: Identity is now said to be merely the product of language, culture, and so on. One may recall here Fascist

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professor Giovanni Gentile’s words: “The language that every man uses ...is his and yet not his; and he cannot use it to say ‘This is my view’ unless at the same time he can say ‘This is our view.’ Forat theroot of the ‘I’ there is aCompare the similarly collectivist injunction of famous French professor Emile Benveniste, who claims that the “I” and the “You” are simultaneous in a relation of reciprocal de~endence.~’ This approach shapes the view of history of Oceania’s intellectual^.^^ It has also animated the thinking of political collectivists like Stalin and Hitler. But O’Brien’s position-foundational for the acceptance of a benevolent Big Brother (“society,” right “government,” “the community,” “the state,” etc.) that “shapes” people the way in order to create a better world-was already present in Marx’s dictum: “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being but on the contrary their social being that determines their consciousness.” Far from “dialectical,” however, such a viewpoint is unidirectional and positivistic, and uniquely suited to the idea of a society and economy planned and governed by good “social” engineers and workers, who find in this doctrine of individual submissiveness (“one is not really free”; or “one is the product of [fill the blank]”) auseful epistemological justification for their own ways of making a living4’ At thispoint one should notice that, for some reason, no practitioner of materialist discourse, academic or otherwise, has declared that these and related ideas are not really his, but those of the “We,” culture, language, texts, and so on; that his work is merely constructedby “society,” culture, and so on; and thattherefore he will not sign his articles or books or in any way accept credit or remuneration for something that is ultimately not the productof his mind but of “society,” culture,and so forth. One last important Marxist notion mustbe examined in lightof Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. For Marxism, hegemony (collective domination, power) is an ultimate given, an often hidden factor of universal occurrence that academic practitioners of materialist discourse shrewdly and routinely unveil in their scholarly research. But that hegemony (collective domination, power) is the ultimate operational concept was similarly understood by Ingsoc. It therefore shaped its approach to reality and human behavior: for if power is a universally sought entity, then seeking it can be criticized only by hypocrites who do not want to admit that they, too, seek power. This response parallels the Marxist response to the accusation of being political: Everyone is political, so being overtly political at least has the merit of avoiding hypocrisy: “The object of poweris power. Now do youbegin to understand me?.... The real power, the power we have to fight for night and day, is not power over things, but over men.”43

NOTES 1. Cf. Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1948). 2. The story is toldbyErnstTopitsch, “How Enlightened is DialecticalReason,”in Tibor Machan, ed., The Main Debate (New York: Random House, 1987), 36, n.17.

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3. Robert Heilbroner, “The Dialectical Approachto Philosophy,” in Tibor Machan, ed., The Main Debate, 8. 4. Vincent J. Schodolski, “Gorbachev aid brands communism an utter failure,” Chicago Tribune, 8 July 1990. 5. Vincent J. Schodolski, Chicago Tribune, 11 October 1989. 6. Oleg T. Bogomolov, “Halfor Full Reform?” The Cat0 Journal2, no. 3 (Winter 1993): 362. 7. Leon Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism (Ann Arbor: The U of Michigan P, 1963), 142-44. 8.Ibid.,140,143. 9.Ibid.,170. 10. Z. Berbeshkina, L. Yakovleva, and D. Zerkin, What is HistoricalMaterialism?(Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1987), 15 1. 11. UniversityofChicagoEnglishprofessorGeraldGraff,quotedinCarolJouzaities, “Scholars stand up for colleges. Political correctness charges a bum rap, they say,” Chicago Tribune, 2 October, 1991, Section 2, p. 1. 12. Trotsky, Communism and Terrorism, 140-45. 13. V. I. Lenin, The State and Revolution, chap. 2 in Essential Works of Lenin (New York: Bantam Books, 1972), 302. 14. Raymond Aron, Histoy, Truth, Liberty: Selected Writings ofRaymondAron, ed. F. Draus (Chicago: The U of Chicago P, 1985), 157. 15. Ludwig von Mises, Socialism (1932; Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1981), 189. 16.Reutersdispatch:“Gorbachev’sgraspofeconomicsisshaky,Westernleaderssay,” Chicago Tribune, 6 December 1989, Section 1, p. 2. 17. Vincent J. Schodolski, “What price ruble? Not much in Russia,” Chicago Tribune, 8 March 1989. 18. Berbeshkina et al., What is HistoricalMaterialism?, 48, 158. 19. Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr Nekrich, Utopia in Power: The Histoy of the Soviet Union from 1917 to the Present (New York: Summit Books, 1986), 483. 20. Martin Gardner, “Notes of a Fringe-Watcher: The Sad Story of Professor Haldane,” The Skeptical Inquirer (Spring 1992):244-48. 21. Cited in Bruce Lincoln in “An Imperial Family’s Fate: New information about the life and death of Russia’sNicholas11,” Chicago Tribune, 9 August 1992, a reviewofEdvard Radzinsky, The Last Tsar: The Life and Death of Nicholas II, trans. Marian Schwartz (New York: Doubleday, 1992). 22. “Wittgenstein’s breakaway from foundationalism is most striking in the idea that justification or proof, or in general a reliance on evidence and reasons, is funded by the actions of believers and that there is no juther funding.” R. W. Newell, Objectivity, Empiricism and Truth (London: Routledge& Kegan Paul, 1986), 78. Compare Giovanni Gentile’s correlation between epistemologyand praxis: “Praticitd del conoscere” and “Unicitd del teorico e pratico.” See Genesi e struttura della societd (1943; Florence: Sansoni, 1975), G-9. See also his General Theory of the Spirit as Pure Act (1916). 23. Jacques Monod, Le hasard et la nicessiti: Essai sur la philosophie naturelle dela biologie moderne (Paris: S e d , 1970), 56-59, 218, 233. 24. Rick Doblin on the FDA decision, cited in Jacob Sullum, “Expanded Minds,” Reason (February 1993): 11. 25. Donald McCloskey, “The Essential Rhetoric of Law, Literature and Liberty,” Critical Review 5, no. 2 (Spring 1991): 221-22.

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26.Ibid.,221. 27. William Warren Bartley 111, Unfthomed Knowledge, Unmeasured Wealth (LaSalle, Ill.: Open Court, 1991), 110. 28. David Heiden, Dust to Dust: A Doctor) View ofFamine inAfrica (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1992). 29. From the program of The I992 Conference of the Society for Literature and Science. Sheraton Colony Square Hotel, Atlanta, Georgia, October 8-1 1, 1992. Sponsored by The School of Literature, Communications and Culture, Georgia Institute of Technology, with additional support from Emory University. 30. Cf. Harold Bloom, The American Religion: The Emergence o f the Post-Christian Nation (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992). 31. Lewis S. Feuer, Mam and the Intellectuals: A Set o f Post-Ideological Essays (New York: Anchor, 1969), 2-3. 32. Facetiously, by Stanislaw Baranczak, “Memory: Lost, Retrieved, Abused, Defended,” Ideas fiom the National Humanities Center, Summer 1992, 6 7 . 33. Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietuche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven: Yale UP, 1979), 293. 34. George Orwell, NineteenEigbty-Four (NewYork: Harcourt, Brace, and Co., 1949), 175. 35. Ibid., 205, 206, 207, 203. 36. Francine Masiello, Lenguajeeideologia: Las escuelas argentinas de uanguardia (Buenos Aires: Hachette, S.A., 1986), 18-19 (my translation). 37. Course taught by Professor Michael Warner at Northwestern University during the late 1980s. 38. Orwell, Nineteen Eigbty-Four, 222. 39. Giovanni Gentile, Genesis and Structure of Society, trans. H. S. Harris (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1960), 82. 40. Emile Benveniste, Proble‘mes du Linguistique Gknkrale I (Paris: Gallimard, 1974), 259. 41. Curiously, defenders of determinism are most willing to accept it in the social realm while rejecting it in genetics. The cultural theorist who uses non-chaotic paradigms can ask “Why has Chaos theory arisen now?’ (the implication being that historical factors inevitably determine cultural phenomena). Chaos theory could answer that freely acting individuals developed the computer, thus introducing “turbulences” that made Chaos possible. 42. These people are usually found among the various kinds of intellectuals, journalists, television, and movie personalities, and so forth. At the top of these groups is one made up of “Ph.D.s,” normally academicians, who make a living by telling other people what is and often what should be. Ludwig von Mises criticized the positivist approach in his preface to Epistemological Problems of Economics (New York: New York UP, 1978), xiii. 43. Orwell, NineteenEighty-Four, 215, 220.

Chapter Nine

Problems of the Marxist Approach: Theory

For the very act of summoning the notion of a supposedly objective and independently-existing reality for a confrontation with its allegedly false image is quite a Western thing to do. -Stanislaw Baranczak, “Memory: Lost, Retrieved, Abused, Defended,” Ideas from the National Humanities Center 1, no. 1 (Summer 1992): 4

Without a beliefin a logical set of laws, wewould never deduce the existence of all the particles. -Leon Lederman, 1988 Nobel Prize in Physics, The God Particle [Gottlob Frege did not] admit ...relativizing notions of truth and falsity: for him, a thought must always be true or false absolutely. -Michael Dummett, Frege: Philosophy of Language The concept of “objectivity” is essential to a rational epistemology; it is a requirement of the proper development of human consciousness and, ultimately, of human survival. “Leonard Peikoff, Objectivism

A decision of this congress, or a decision of the Central Committee, cannot change the fact that the volume of labor production in South Korea is 10 times that of the North, nor the fact that people in West Germany live far better than people in the East. -A. Yakovlev, advisor to M. Gorbachev. Chicago Tribune, 8 August 1990

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MARXISM’S EPISTEMOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS When examining the theoryof knowledge behind thework of academic practitioners of materialist discourse, one faces a potentially serious difficulty: there maybe nothing toexamine. Marx created the philosophyknown as “dialectical materialism”and made statements within all fields of philosophy. But he did not elaborate a doctrine in epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics as systematically as in economics and politics. Since Marxist ideas claim for their domain practically every facet of human action, materialist professors from both the socialist countries and the Capitalist West have for generations endeavored to fill the gap by industriously developing the seminal if incomplete ideas of the master. In the former Union of Socialist Soviet Republics alone, the resulting academic scholarship on materialist epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics has been immense. When to their writings one adds those of Western professors, the academic productivity in the area of materialist philosophy alone is simply staggering. Nonetheless, at least since 1978, Western materialist academicians have largely abandoned epistemology. It was then that French professor Louis Althusser gave up the attempthe had initiated around 1965 to endow Marxism with an epistemological foundation.’ With the vast number of philosophical writings produced by Soviet academicians either largely unknown or in any case now discredited in the West, materialism has thus been leftwith no epistemological project: it nolonger attempts to build a theoretical foundation forclaiming to know what itclaims to know whenever it claims to know something. This situation has made it necessary to restore the old Marxist ad hoc primacy of “the political” (“hegemony,” “authority,” “power,” “ideology,” “the practical,” “the concrete,” “the pragmatic,” “the subversive,” etc.) instance over the theoretical instance. Althusser explicitly decided to fall back upon sucharestoration by returning“to experience andthe ‘livedthrough.’ The seeming impossibility of developing a materialist theoryof knowledge, then, signals a Marxist return from thetheoretical instance to such old Marxist operational notions as “praxis” and “the political.” Thus, before collapsing in “practice”during the Age of Late Marxism, that is, in its real applications to real economies and real societies rather than to things like “history” and “texts,” Marxism had already collapsed in the theoretical realm. Marx was right after all when he insisted on the inseparability of “praxis” and “theory.” But a contradiction has arisen from this theoretical retreat: In the act of reverting to the hierarchization of “the political” (“hegemony”) over other categories, academic practitioners of materialist discourserun against the scholarly impulsebehind Capital-that masterpiece which professor Althusser once called “quite simply one of the three great scientific discoveries of all h u m a n h i ~ t o r y . ”(Never ~ mind that Althusser eventually confessed that he had in fact never read Capital.)*As Western materialist educator J.N. Bernstein explains, “The nature of classical Marxist theory itself presupposes the validity of the traditional philosophical formulation of the relation between subjectand object: objects,even ‘social’objects, exist independently

”’

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of knowing subjects; the fundamental relation between subject and object is episte“Capital,” continues Bernstein, “is thought to provide a theomic in ~haracter.”~ retical representation of an externally existing ‘object’, viz. the capitalist mode of production.”6 But now this explicit epistemic relation in Capital is being discarded by the more sophisticated materialists, who contemptuously refer to the relation as a mere “reification.” No wonder that this onetime marvel of Western thought is looked upon by true connoisseurs more and more as politically incorrect and less and lessas a source of revolutionary inspiration. This shift parallels a studied disregard for The Communist Maniferto in favor of Marx’s “youthful” writings, with their conveniently unprogrammatic and vague assertions favoring human liberty, social justice, and so forth. The shift may account, too, for the favorable reception of deconstruction among the more sophisticated practitioners of materialist discourse: Like other “postmodern” discourses, deconstruction offers both a rehge fromthe failed classical Marxist attempt atepistemological objectivismand aconvenient, because sufficiently nebulous, medium for a stubbornly unrepentant political agenda. The scholarly project of themore sophisticated professors now includes a critique l . ~ up a of such a “basically bourgeois” viewpointas is represented by C ~ p i t a Giving possible materialist theory of kno-wledge in favor of ad hoc things like “the political instance,” “hegemony,” “ideology,” and so forth is described by two Western professors incharacteristicallydenseMarxistacademic language-where words like “contingent,” “hegemony,” and “conjunctural” serve as surrogates for “the political,” “the concrete situation,” “empowerment,” and “domination”: “Faced with the rationalism of classical Marxism, which presented history and society as intelligible totalities constituted around conceptually explicable laws, the logic of hegemony presented itself from theoutset as a complementary and contingent operation, required for conjunctural imbalances within an evolutionary paradigm whose essential or ‘morphological’ validitywas not for a moment placed in question.”8 The professors overlook, however,that grantingpriority to the notionof “hegemony” and therefore to “the political instance” over everything else, and therefore looking upon truth-finding as a contingent (practical, action-based, concrete) operation is not in fact new. From the beginning it has been integral to classical or orthodox materialist discourse. It is indeed part and parcel of Marxism-Leninismof what Antonio Gramsci admiringly called the “great metaphysical happening’ brought about by Lenin.’ For it was Lenin who consolidated, in both his influential writings and his ruthless political practice, the Marxist equalization of philosophy and politics-the famous philosophy of “power” in which, as Gramsci approvingly observes, all is politics (TuttoL politica). So it seems that beyond such acrude and brutal notion as domination (hegemony, power, etc.) even Marx’s brightest students have been unable to make any progress. Thus, while defacto rejecting what (the nowincreasingly seen as “bourgeois”) Capital is all about, today’s more sophisticated academic practitionersof materialist discourse have unknowingly validated a standard “bourgeois” critique of Capital: that its theoretical foundation is no more sound than itseconomic pronouncements orits

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historical predictions. By giving epistemology up altogether, and no matter how reluctantly orcheerfdly,today’smaterialist professors unwittinglyconfirm what Capitalistcritics of Marx’s presumedtheoreticalachievement,fromEugenvon Bohm-Bawerk in 1898 to Ludwig von Mises and Thomas Sowell in the twentieth century, have claimed: That the contradictions of Capital are unsolvable; and that Capital‘s project, along with the entire “scientific” original agenda of materialist discourse, was destined to fail from the beginning, because serious epistemological work is simply not possible within a Marxist framework.” The even more scathing assessment that Benedetto Croce, a profound connoisseur of both Hegel and Marx, once gave of the theoretical foundations of Marxism appears now equally pertinent: “Marx never in his life gave any theoretical justification for the paradoxes which,as a youth, in the convulsions of the left wing of a moribund Hegelian school, he had invented. He confined himself thereafter to dogmatic repetition.”” In intellectual desperation, then, materialist discourse has fallen back on its old notion of “the political” (“hegemony,” etc.). But in the act of retreating from its theoretical problems, the discourse faces yet another problem: This far-from-new position makes Marxism vulnerable to an examination based on its own “practical” (“political,” “concrete,” etc.) acts; and given the history of the twentieth century, the results of such an examination are not at all favorable. Perhaps worse, the “political” instance (“hegemony”) is indistinguishable from the operational stance of Italian Fascism and German NationalSocialism. For both the naked fact of political empowering (ofpolitischeMachtergrezfing, in the German of National Socialism) and the concrete or practical situation (the in concreto, non in astratto, the “action,” of Italian fascism) were also more than sufficient, ultimate sources of “epistemological”validation. Here Fascist and National Socialistdiscourses show themselves less hypocritical than Marxism, since they have always proclaimed granting operational hegemony to naked “praxis” (“politics”).’z The presumably “new” Western materialist stance therefore completes, in a rather melancholy way, the pathetic intellectual circle of Marxism: for it was from this brutish, power-based approach, that Marxism once tried to distance itself by the philosophically sophisticatedand humanisticmeans of a theory of knowledge. Marxism’s problems in this regard are no different from those faced by the fashionable contemporary Western philosophical stance known as “anti-foundationalism”: It must similarly fall back upon and grant hegemony to “practical” (action-related, concrete, etc.) considerations of the moment, thereby opening the way to accepting the philosophy of power, epistemologicaland ethical relativism (or“historicism,” as it is often euphemistically called), and ultimately, even the falsification of history. In its retreat to the political instance (hegemony) one finds yet another example of the foundational problems of materialist discourse: It claims to stand against hierarchy, but in the rather simple yet necessary act of giving temporal and genetic priority to one notion or set of notions over another, it shows that thinking itself, contrary to materialist teachings, is not possible without some form of hierarchy. As a rhetoric of power, materialist discourse routinely replicates this conundrum. Fascist and National Socialist discourses are, in this sense, again less hypocritical and more

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consistent, because they openly include the notion of hierarchy (hegemony, domination, etc.) in their foundational propositions as well as in their practical acts.

THE NATURE OF MAN During the nineteenth century, the critiqueof the historical relativism advocated by historicism was carried out most effectively by German philosophers like Wilhelm Windelband and Heinrich Rickert. They zeroed in on the difference between, on the one hand, the naturalsciences-the model for the characteristically nineteenthcentury historicism-and, on the other hand,history as such: History, they observed, records and explains human acts, whereas the natural sciences record and explain physical events. This difference has decisive implications. “Human action,” Ludwig von Mises argued, “is purposive, it aims at the attainment of definite ends chosen, it cannot be treated without reference to these ends, and history is in this senseBut to the natural sciences the we must emphasize only in this sense-finalistic. concept of ends and final causesis foreign.”13 From this distinction, Mises drew damaging conclusions for all variants of “historical relativism” and “polylogism,” including their Marxist version: to see the fact that there is someThe philosophy of historical relativism-historicism-fails thing unchanging that, onthe one hand, constitutesthe sphere of historyor historical events as distinct from the spheres of other eventsand, on the other hand, enables manto deal with these events, i.e.,to record their successionand to try to find out their concatenation, in other words, to understand them. This unchanging phenomenon is the fact that man is not indifferent to the state of his environment (includingthe conditions of his own body) and that he tries, as far as it is possible for him to do so, to substitute by purposive action a state that he likes better for a state that he likes less. In a word: man acts.’*

Thus, the invariable fact of human action, which Giovanni Gentile, Marxist professors, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and others have made the basis of their polylogism, Mises turns into a foundation for arguing, with other defenders of epistemological objectivism like M. Hollis, that “there has to be an epistemological unity of mankind” as a condition of discourse at a l I . l 5 Classical Western ideas on ethics, reality, and truth depend on this trust of the universalityof man’s nature. The universality allows one to make important judgments and choices with transcultural validity.“ It also allows one to accept universally valid epistemological axioms, such as the existence of an independently existing realitythat can be understood given the right conditions and then confronted with its allegedly false image.” In turn, accepting these axioms makes possible the characteristicallyWestern search for scientifictruth. This viewpoint runs against Marxism’s belief that man has no unchangeable nature: That, as O’Brien claims in Nineteen Eighty-Four, “Man is infinitely malleable.” Well before the materialist approach to knowledge became the basis of the Soviet state, one of the irreconcilable contradictions in Marxism’s historically relativist approach to the nature of man had already surfaced in Marx’s evaluation of man’s

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attitudetowardwork.AccordingtoMarx,manloatheswork.Man is This assumption justified Marx’s coercive political recommendations and all subsequent Marxist coercive political practices-such as armies of workers and mandated national labor service (cf. point eight of The Communist Manifesto and Trotsky‘s Terrorism and Communism). But in affirming this universal characteristicof man, Marx failed to realize that saying that man loathes work-that he is lazy-amounted to proclaiming that manhas, afterall, a nature, onequality ofwhich is loathing workbeing lazy. Trotsky reiterated Marx’s contradiction in the course of his arguments against the Mensheviks’ opposition to national labor service: and Love for work is not at all an inborn characteristic: it is created by economic pressure social education. One might even say that man is a fairly lazy animal. It is on this quality, in reality, that is founded to a considerable extent all human progress; because if man did not strive to expend his energy economically, did not seek to receive the largest possible quantity of products in return for a small quantity of energy, there would havebeen no technical development or social culture.” Interestingly, this universal characteristic of man pointed out by Trotsky-that everywhere and at all times man purposively acts in order to improve his condition with a minimumof effort-formed the basis of Ludwig vonMises’ aprioristic theory of human action. The hard-nosed defender of Capitalism and the hard-nosed socialist coincided in their assessment of man as a creature with a nature thatexhibits certain features no matter the time or the place. Thus, to such anthropologically proven indications of a basic, unchanging human natureas the universality of certain linguistic structures, the care of offspring, the practice of marriage, birth, and death ceremonials, the concern with property ownership, the high regard forpersonal courage, truthfulness, and loyalty, the feeling of romantic love, and the desire for some measure of wealth, health, and personal freedom, one would have to add the fact of man’s purposive action to improve his condition in the most economically efficient way-in order to save himself unnecessary labor.

THE NOTIONS OF IDEOLOGY AND HEGEMONY ARE THEMSELVES IDEOLOGICAL The Marxist “historicizing” of human nature may have originated in a tactical power maneuver against nineteenth-century thinkers who called attention to the problems and contradictions in Marx’s economic theory. The famous notion of “ideology” (and its ancillary notion of “hegemony”) would then be Marx’s rather crude way of circumventing the refutation of his ideas by contemporary European economists.*’ Though originating in an economic analysis of society (Das Kapitul) that relied on the “bourgeois” premise of epistemological objectivity, Marxism could notsurvive if economics proved to be something other than “ideological,” because economics had theoretically demonstrated, long before later historical events would, the invia-

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bility of materialist teachings. Since through the application of the notion of “ideology” (and “hegemony”) the economists were labeled and summarily dismissed as knowing or unknowing lackeys of the bourgeoisie, their ideas could be declared to have no lasting value. Once the notion of “ideology” was discovered, Marx and his followers need not concern themselves further with any uncomfortable economic arguments. Should Mises be right, the very notions of “ideology” and “hegemony” should be regarded as ideological-in the materialist sense. After applying the notion of “ideology” to economics, Marxism extended it, and for the same tactical purposes, to practically every realm of human activity. Thus, dismissing economics as merely a “bourgeois” science lacking universal truth value was the first step in discrediting epistemology itself: From time immemorial men in thinking, speaking, and acting had taken the uniformity and immutability of the logical structure of the human mind as an unquestionable fact. A l l scientific inquiry was based on this assumption. ...[With Marxism] writers, for the first time in humanhistory,deniedthispropositiontoo.Marxismassertsthataman’sthinking is determined by his class affiliation. Every social class has a logic of its own. The product of of the thought cannot be anything else than an “ideological disguise” of the selfish interests thinker. It is the task of a “sociology of knowledge” to unmask philosophies and scientific theories and to expose their “ideological” emptiness. ...Only the classless society of the socialist utopia will substitute truth for “ideological” lies.’l The materialist need to relativize and thereby discredit economics has become, if anything, even more pressing in the late twentieth century. This rhetorical deployment is straight-facedly made both because of and against the factual data that the historical developments of the late twentieth centuryhave added toMises’ prescient arguments regarding the impossibility of economic calculation under real socialism and the universality of economic principles based on the ultimate fact of human action.” Today, materialist professors in the West attempt to infuse life into materialist discoursewith otherforms of polylogism, sometimes dating back to Rousseau and his anti-civilization teachings, that deprecate the universal categories of human reason as mere historically relative tools of Western oppre~sion.’~ Even if one disregards other theoretical and practical checks suffered by Marxist teachings, the notion of “ideology” faces the fundamentalproblem, also pointed out by Mises, of explaining how it has come about that so many “bourgeois,” “socially constructed,” and therefore historically relative and merely “ideological” concepts have been assimilatedand put touse by materialist discourseas part of its notoriously universally applicable framework forthe study of history and ideas. In other words, if these bourgeois concepts are ideological and historically relative, why have they been considered universally valid enough to be assimilated and universally applied by no less a genius than Marx? One example is the foundational Marxist theoryof “surplus value.” As Mises and others noted, it is a direct elaboration of the “labor theory of value” advanced by the presumably mere bourgeois and therefore merely “ideological” writings of the

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likewise mere bourgeois economists Adam Smith and David Ricardo. Now, a devoted Marxist more than anybody else would agree, Mises argues, that the presumably ideological ideas of these presumably bourgeois economists were adopted by Marx himself not because (Marx forbid!) he was ideologically co-opted or hegemonized by the ruling bourgeoisie but because Marx saw the objective value of these ideas. Therefore, neither Marx nor his followers can claim with a straight face that the ideas of the “bourgeois” economists are “ideological.” They are in fact objectively true-sufficiently so, at any rate, to be taken over and repeatedly applied by Marx. Other fundamental Marxist notions are similarly appropriated from merely “bourgeois” and therefore merely “ideological” thinking. Thus, the very history of materialistdiscoursecontradicts thenotion of“ideology”taught by materialist discourse. The connection of Marx’s surplus value theory with the ideas of the classical economists illustrates the historical irony that is materialist discourse, because according to Mises the errors of socialism in general and those of Marx in particular are traceable to the errors of classical Capitalist economics. Thus, Marxism has been not merely a colossal mistake from its very beginning but also the inglorious climax of a tragicomedy of economic errors: The illusion that a rational order of economic management is possible in a society based on public ownership ofthe means of production owed its origin to the value theory of the classical economists. ...Thus the socialist utopias were generatedand preserved by the shortcomings of those schools of thought which the Marxians reject as “an ideological disguise of the selfish class interest of the exploiting bourgeoisie.” In truth, it was the errors of these schools that made the socialist ideas thrive. This fact clearly demonstrates the emptiness of the Marxian teachings concerning “ideologies” andits modern offshoot, the sociology of knowledge.**

IDEOLOGY IS ALL AROUND The “sneering argument” used by many contemporary progressive academicians against the Great Books of the Westrests on Marxism’s teachings on “ideology” and “hegemony” and suffers from a homologous set of weaknesses. Standards of truth and excellence in humanisticworks are not as easily ascertainable empiricallyas they are in scientific writings. Nonetheless,one can point to thefact that the GreatBooks have been accepted as great for generations in widely differing “cultural” and “political” contexts. The books’ ranking within the GreatBooks canon has varied, but, with a few exceptions, their membership has seldom been questioned. This membership obtains also for non-Western Great Books such as the Upanishads, the Analects, and the Book of the Dead-all highly esteemed not only in India, China, and Egypt, but also in the West. Homologous examples in the case of Western books known outside the West might notbe hard to find in India, China, andEgypt. They have all enjoyed high transcultural esteem. Many of the strongest practitioners of materialist discourse, like Marx and Trotsky, noticed the, for them, astonishing fact that these books are still great, even though

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the groups that were “hegemonic” at the time when the books were written or accepted as “great” are no longer dominant. With their borrowing and universally valid applications of the ideas in the Great Books, Marxists have further confirmed the superiority of the Great Books. In fact, materialist discourse, which many of today’s professors use to question the books’ objective greatness, could not exist without the GreatBooks. (With this debt one may compare therise in the standard of living and status of even presumably oppressed groups under Capitalism in the West: These improvements have not andprobably couldnot have taken place outside the historical framework of a despised Western civilization and a despised Capitalism.) O f course, one might argue that materialism and its greatest practitioners may have been victim, too, of “ideology” and “hegemony” regarding the Great Books: They may have been co-opted, or coerced and dominated by the enormously powerful and hegemonic institutional forces behind the Great Books, such as the universities. Butbarringthispossibility,materialism’sappropriation and universal application of many of the ideas in the books, along with the demonstrable high transcultural esteem of these works, suggests there must be something intrinsically superior in the books that does not depend on changing historical and political configurations and therefore on changing ideologies. Wisely ignoring theseand otherproblems has facilitated the widespread academic use in the United States of the materialist notion of ideology-often without any mention of its Marxist origin. In this surreptitious use, “ideology” is often masked by words like “culture.” When used within the framework of materialist discourse, “culture” is not understood in the traditional humanistic sense of the particular form, type, or stage of intellectual development of a civilization. Rather it refers to things like “social” protest-or “political”--art, in which the artist expresses his often quite deep personal discontent while assuming he is also expressing the discontent of factory workers, blacks, women, vagrants, or any other presumably oppressed collective entity; or toeconomic factors amounting to theoldMarxist “relations of production” under a different name; or to the lower salaries earned by some group or other, or to any other similar “social” group or condition that has the potential, no matter how remote, for turning any academic study into an indictment of the Capitalist socioeconomic system within which such anti-Capitalist studies usually take place. This peculiar notion of “culture” has filtered through the American university system to the point that there are now regular conferencesand scholarly publications devoted exclusively to what materialist professors in the socialist countries have for generations called “material [as in Dialectical Materialism] culture.”Thus a planned section of the Midwest Modern Language Association requests professorial contributions and explains: “ENGLISH I: ENGLISH LITERATURE BEFORE 1800. Ways of Seeing: The Writer?PracticeandMaterialCulture. Investigations of the mutual informing of material culture and its textual representation^."'^ Another planned section, more ambitious, will develop teaching procedures to further the study of culture and perhaps improve society in the process (notice the incorporation, in the title, of the word “critical,” a hegemonic procedure borrowed from the ma-

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terialist professors of the Frankfurt School): “SOCIETY FORCRITICAL EXCHANGE I & 11. Critical Studies and Pedugogy. Classroom practices, course design, and curriculum development, the politics of the academy and society, relations with traditional disciplines and established educational programs, and relations with other criticallpolitical projects.”26 Other words serve a similar masking purpose.Thus, another plannedsection uses the polylogistic notion of “ideology” under the cover of the word “gender”: “ENReading GLISHLITERATURE 111: ENGLISHLITERATUREAFTER1900. wholwhatlhowlwhy we read, how Genre. How does gender encode reading practices; we respond? How does what we read shape our attitudes towardgender?Ellen Brown, English, Virginia Polytechnic Inst. & St. U., Blacksburg, VA 24061.”” Sometimes the notion of “ideology” is used more openly. But whether indisguise or not, “ideological” research zeroes in routinely on the class, or gender, or race, or some other collective source of a thinker’s thoughts rather than on the validity of his arguments or the factual truth of his assertions or the possible consequences of his ideas. In all applications of the materialist notion of ideology, the vaunted investigation is sooner or later displaced from the thinker’s thought (ideology in the non-materialist sense) to his “ideology” or “culture” (materialism of course denies that such a “displacement” needs to be carried out, since “ideology” is axiomatically declared to be intrinsic to, and therefore determinant of, thought), which “constructs” (“shapes,” “fashions,” and so on) thought. The approach has now become quite common among American professors who seem to have no idea that it has been long the bread and butter of academicians engaged in research about the West in the socialist countries. But this ignorance may not be entirely unintentional. Overlooking the practice of the discourse among those “Others” has an advantage: It allows one to avoid confronting the possibility of a connection, no matter how tenuous, between certain disappointing historical events and the institutionalization of certain ideas. But as its most lucid practitioners have always recognized, the Marxist approach is far more than a mere “method’ for the interpretation of a work of art or literature: instead, it has more far-reaching goals.’’ Therefore, by the same token, itnecessarily also has more far-reaching consequences. Therefore, practitioners of the discourse cannot be allowed to boast of their farreaching goals without acceptingresponsibilityforequallyfar-reachingconsequences. One can apply the materialist notion of “ideology” to practically every discipline in the humanities and the social sciences. Take, for example, art criticism. How professors of art can use the approach is illustrated by the exhibition of paintings from the American West (organized by Marxoid academicians and subsidized with U.S. taxpayers’ money) that took place at the National Museumof American Art in Washington, D.C., in the spring of 1990. Every picture in the exhibition had a caption in which the Museum’s organizers indicated to the politically ignorant Amer ican public how the oppressive ideologyof the ruling class manifests itself. Thus, a caption interpreting a scene from the Old American West pointed out thebourgeois “ideology” cleverly hidden in the painting’s representation of the blessing of a gold

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mine: According to the professorial interpretation, the painting “represents the annual blessing of the mine as a tidy ceremony in which the often disparate interests of theCatholic clergy, Hispanic workers, andwhite ownerswereconveniently united.” The art professor who wrote the caption thus declares the painting guilty of “ideology,” since it presumably tries to convince the onlooker that, as the bourgeoisie deviously wants us to believe, no such class antagonisms exist. More interesting is that, while courageously “exposing’ the hegemonic bourgeois ideology of the painting, the art professor remains wisely silent about his own materialist ideology as the possible fashioning principle behind the revealing and seeminglydisinterestedpolitical(ideological)interpretation. Nor doesthe professor mention that it is a fundamental principle of Marxism-Leninism that no unity is really possible between antagonistic classes and that such conflicts can be resolved only with the victory of one class or the other. As Lenin and Soviet academicians have repeatedly pointed out, this principle asserts that under bourgeois Capitalism (but of course not under budding socialism), social contradictions are unresolvable (antagonistic, irreconcilable, etc.).” The art professor writing the painting’s caption hides the factthat he is merely reiterating orthodox Marxist teachingsthat have been standard amongacademic practitioners of materialist discourse in the socialist countries for generations. But at least one critic of the Washington exhibition was not fooled. H e noticed that the procedure constitutes “typical academic disingenuousness. Instead of defending his own ideology, Truettner [the academic curator principally responsible for the captions] pretends that he is only pointing out to galleygoers less sophisticated than himself that there was an ideology at all.”30Thus, materialist discourse exhibits ideology, by its own definition ofthat word, in thevery act of courageously “unmasking” the ideology of the Others. This crude procedure of omission and selective “unmasking” (always of the evil bourgeois “Other”) is frequently used by Marxists in spite of their claim, as old as The Communist Manifesto, that they are upfront about their ideology and therefore, unlike the bourgeois, free of “ideology” (in the materialist sense of “false consciousness”). It isalways instructive to read what professors inthesocialistcountries have written about “material culture,” because their scholarly experience on this subject vastly surpasses that of their arriviste American counterparts:

Historicalmaterialismdistinguishesbetween the material and intellectual sides of culture which are dialectically interrelated and interdependent. Material culture embraces qualitative achievements identifying the extent to which man has mastered nature, the level of the instruments of labour, the technical level of production, people’s technical skills, the scientific organization of labour, ministering to man’s material and everyday needs. ...The level of culture is seen in other material elements of the life of society, namely, thein objects of nature worked by man (e.g. cultivated soil), in objects man uses in his everyday life (clothing, furniture, utensils-for culture implies that man uses them), scientific, academic, and medical equipment, and so on. ...Historical materialism believes in the organic unity of materialand intellectual cultures, the latter being secondary and relatively independent, but, on the whole,

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developing in organic unity with material culture. ...Lenin wrote that “to be cultured we must achievea certain development of the material means of production, must have a certain material base.” While reposing on this material base, intellectual culture ...at the same time exerts a certain influence upon As it. any socialphenomenon that is of “validityto all epochs,” ...[Elvery socio-economic as Marx said, culture is a product of definite historical conditions. formation is characterised by a culture peculiar to it. When a socio-economic formation is replaced by another, more progressive one, more progressive culture takes the place ofthe old culture. Marx wrote: “In order to examine the connection between spiritual production and material production, it is above all necessary to grasp the latter itself notas a general category but in definite historical form. ..different kinds of spiritual production correspond to the capitalist mode of production andto the mode of production ofthe Middle Ages.’’31 What materialist professors call “material culture,” is in fact the equivalentof the social structure itself, which as Frank Parkin points out, in turn comes down to a synonym for the old Marxist standby, “the mode of prod~ction.”~’ fact, In Parkin’s analysis shows that “society,” “ideology,” “culture” and so on are regularly used as euphemisms for the now discredited but built-in, and therefore indispensable, explanatory notion of Marxism-the famous “mode of production.”The careful study of the Soviet selection cited above can help one grasp the fundamentals of this “materialism”-what it values and what it subordinates, what are its premises and what is its logic. These teachings, long a standing joke among students in the socialist (and ex-socialist) universities, now permeate the research conducted in the humanities and the social sciences in American universities. For the more enthusiastic academic practitioners of materialist discourse, some fellow Western Marxoids are not orthodox enough in their handling of such basic materialist notions as the relation between art and the “modeof production.” These passionate professors, who often decry their “orthodox” Soviet peers’ ignorant or malevolent misinterpretation ofMarx’s teachings, are actually justas orthodox. This secret orthodoxy surfaces rather obviously in the writing by a famous professor from Oxford University. This academician complains that Walter Benjamin and even Stalinist author Brecht are not as politically correct as Stalinist professor Georg Lukics because they are guilty of “technologism”:

...the belief that technical forces in themselves, rather than the place they occupy within a whole mode of production, arethe determining factor in history. Brecht and Benjamin sometimes fall into this trap: their work leaves openthe question of how analysis ofart as a mode of production is to be systematically combined with an analysis itofas a mode of experience. ...Theodor Adorno, Benjamin’s friend and colleague, correctly criticized him for resorting on occasions to too simple a model of this relationship. ...Indeed this is an aspect of Benjamin’s typically idiosyncratic way of working, in contrast to the properly systematic methods of L ~ k 6 c s . ~ ~ The coincidence of operational notions between the Oxford academician and his Soviet peers is even more evident in their common understanding of what art is like under Capitalism. In Moscow, Soviet professor I. S. Kulikova explains that “Marx

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taught us that ‘Under theinfluence of the class character of bourgeois society, labor lost its creative character. The commodityfetishism inherent in capitalism suppressed man’s selfless attitude to the objects of nature.’ ”34 At Oxford University, the Western academician informs us that in “bourgeois” society, as Marx has taught us, “The painting itself becomes an object, a commodity to be bought and possessed: it is itself a piece of property, and represents the world in those terms.”35

THE ULTIMATE BANALITY OF MATERIALIST NOTIONS Materialist discourse may ultimatelyface a choice between banality and falsehood. its various component notions, such as “ideology,” “hegemony,” “politics,” and a very fluid “truth’’-claims is that people are variously influenced by their parents, friends,lovers, relatives, experiences, or misfortune, or money or lack or it, and that personal preferences, good luck sometimes or even often they are not aware that such influences affect their desires, choices, and goals-then this claim is banal or at best merely common sense, and therefore hardly a solid foundation for building a science of knowledge. But if what thecollectivist approach of Marxism claimsis that one’s consciousness (one’s self, the subject, one’s ways of thinking) is “constructed’ (fashioned, configured, produced, etc.) by one’s “social being” (class, sex, race, property relations, social institutions, culture, the media, the slyly oppressive maneuvers of the ruling class, and so forth), then this claim not only has historically demonstrable, harmful consequences for one who adopts it as an axiom for the conduct of life, but is also questionable from the theoretical point of view. Karl Popper has zeroed in on one of the problems undermining the axiomatic hegemony granted to “social being’: “Rejecting the empiricist theoryof learning as in conflictwith biological knowledge, Popper sees the mind as no passive ‘bucket’ into which experience rains and which can at most recombine that experience in various ways. O n the contrary, all experience is impregnated by theory ...hypotheses precede observationspsychologically, logically, even g e n e t i ~ a l l y . ”And, ~ ~ of course, the heredity factor, routinely ignored by Marxist theory,is alsosuggested bythe last word in these observations. No wonder that Vaclav Have1 has insisted that Marx’s equation must in fact be made to stand on its head: Consciousness precedes social being instead of the other way a r o ~ n d . ~ ’ This proposed inversion does not necessarily subjectivize objective reality: it merely rejects the arbitrary Marxist subordinationof human consciousness to thehegemony of “social being.” At the very least, consciousness must be granted equality with respect to the society, thereby turning the simplistic and undialectical (because oneway) binary relation posited by Marxinto a truly dynamic relation that reflects more accurately what actually takes place when human beings face their world and make decisions. Nor need one accept the Marxist proposition that equally and arbitrarily subordinates everything to politics understood as collective struggles for “hegemony”:The burden of proof is on Marxism to show that, without a doubt, politics and thesearch for hegemony are indeed prior to, say, sex, envy, aesthetics, friendship, religion and

If what the collectivist approach of Marxism-with

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the search for the spiritual, philosophy and the search for wisdom, science and the search for knowledge, or many other human activities, disciplines, and inclinations. One can just as convincingly argue, for example,that politics results fromthe sexual instinct, or the religious impulse, which would be therefore genetically prior, more fundamental, andfar more deserving of scholarly attention than the Marxist notions of “politics” and “hegemony.” Nor need one accept the related proposition according to which the ruling ideas of each age have been the ideas of its ruling groups. The historical record simply does not support this surprisingly influential Marxist teaching.The Germanictribes that conquered Rome politically were, conversely, culturally conquered by Rome. The Romans conquered Greece politically,yet were culturally conquered by Greece. The Spaniards conquered Southern Italy politically, yet were culturally conquered by Italy. The Mongols conquered China politically, yet were culturally conquered by China. A good student of history can easily find other examples. The Marxist proposition does not hold within given a civilization either: Featuresof black culture, for example, have entered and even reshaped the presumably hegemonic white cultural mainstream in the United States. Nor is there any reason why one must accept as universally true the related proposition stating that certain ideas or theories are successful because they are imposed upon a hapless population by some “hegemonic” group or other bent on its own advantage. One can convincingly argue that these theories and ideas are successful simply because they demonstrably work better and explain more and are therefore objectively superior and preferable to other ideas or theories. Though less easily measurable, the superiority or more enduring appeal of the Great Books can be similarly explained: They have been considered great not because they have been imposed upon thehapless public by a hegemonic cabal, but because they have proved to be richer, more complex, and more stimulating sourcesof thought and feeling at different times and in different nations, often after enduring numerous vicissitudes created both by chance and by purposeful human action. The truth of the matter is that most human phenomena, including ideas and books and how they come to be accepted, are simply too complex for the limited explanatory powers of the naive and often crude Marxist scholarly formulae. In materialist discourse, reality and truth are “not associated with the image of a truthful witness brought before the court in order to corroborate or contest the testimony of someone suspected of lying.”38 Reality and truth mean “rather, the entire court setting-‘the situation,’ as it is popularly called for the sake of brevity. This is a setting in which the decision on what is to be taken for the truth is made arbitrarily, regardless of whatever this or that witness may say.”39In other words, in the Marxist approach truth and reality are both seen and made to depend on practice-on the “concrete situation,” as Lenin said,on theexisting historical conditions, on the collectively established rules of “conversation.” Under non-Marxist conditions, truth and reality can also be misrepresented, manipulated, or downrightfalsified to some extent. Butas Stanislav Baranczak observes, this can take place only to some extent. Whereas the lying fostered by the materialist

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“epistemological” teachings “simply has no boundaries. Under the conditions of democracy and freedom of speech, lying may be outrageous, but it does have some limits. Even though at times it may appear that politicians or the media’s tinkering with some facts, concealing others, or inventing still others start slipping out of us of its existence.‘You can foolall the people control, sooner or later reality reminds some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.’ ”*O Moreover, as long as the society remains open and competitive, individuals and groups endeavor, if only because of their particular self-interest, to call attention to the established misrepresentations, distortions and lies. “Society,” or “culture,” or “social practice” or “the conversational rules” or “social being’-or whatever other expression used as a synonym for the operationalcollective entities routinely resorted to by Marxism-may decree and get blue in the face arguing that a particular X is true. But “society” (etc.) cannot make it so. Truth is not socially constructed (or “configured,” or whatever). But lies can be. Marxist theory is therefore wrong-headed also in its own peculiar hierarchization of the variables in the “society”/truth formula: for it is lies, not truth, that can be and sometimes are collectively constructed.

NOTES 1. Vincent Descomhes,Modern French Philosophy,trans. L. Scott-Fox and J.M. Harding (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1980), 134-35. 2.Ibid. 3. Louis Althusser, “Avertissement aux lecteurs du Livre I du Capital” in his edition of Marx, Le Capital, liure I (Paris: Gamier-Flammarion, 1969), 7. 4. Louis Althusser, Lzuenir dure longtemps(Paris: Stock, 1992). Neither had he read, he confessed, the main works ofAristotle and Kant, on whom, alongCapitul, with he also lectured at the university. 5. J.N. Bernstein, The Philosophyo f the Novel: Lukdcs, Marxism and the Dialectics ofForm (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1984), 3. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid. 8. Ernest0 Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony andSocialist Strategv: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (New York: Verso, 1985), 3. 9. Antonio Gramsci, “Progresso e divenire,” in his I1 materialism0 storico e h j l o s o j a di Benedetto Croce (Turin: Instituto Gramsci, 1977), 38. 10. Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk, “Unresolved Contradiction in the Marxian Economic System” (Zum Abschluss des Marxschen Systems, 1898) in Shorter Classics o f Bohm-Bawerk, vol. I (South Holland: LibertarianPress, 1962); Ludwig von Mises,Human Action (1949; Chicago: Contemporary Books, Inc., 1963); ThomasSowell, Marxism: Philosophyand Economics (New York: William Morrow, 1985). 11. Benedetto Croce, “An Essay in Communist Philosophy,” My Philosophy (New York: Collier, 1962), 67. 12. Giovanni Gentile, Genesi e struttura d e l h societd (1946 posthumously; Florence: Sansoni, 1975) (Genesis and Structure of Socieg, trans. H. S. Harris [Urbana: U of Illinois P,

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19601); Walther Hofer, ed., Der Nationalsozialismus: Dokumente 1933-1345 (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1957). Money, Method, and the Market Pro13. Ludwig von Mises, “Epistemological Relativism,” cess, ed. Richard M. Ebeling (Norwell, Mass.: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1990), 40. 14. Ibid., 47. See also Mises’ Theory and History: An Interpretation o f Social and Economic Evolution (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1957). 15. M. Hollis,“TheSocialDestructionofReality,”inM.Hollis and S. Lukes,eds., Rationality and Relativism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1982), 84. “Wittgenstein’s breakaway from foundationalism is most striking in the idea that justification or proof, or in general a reliance on evidence and reasons, is funded by the actions of believers and that there is no jkrther funding.” R. W. Newell, Objectivity, Empiricism alzd Truth (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986),78. Compare Giovanni Gentile’s Fascist correlation between epistemology and praxis: “Praticiti del conoscere” and “Uniciti del teorico e pratico.” SeeGenesi e struttura d e l h societrt (1943; Florence: Sansoni, 1975), 6-9. See also his General Theory o f the Spirit as Pure Act (1916). 16. Cf. Charles Van Doren, The Idea ofProgress (New York: Praeger, 1967), chap. 14. 17. Stanislav Baranczac, “Memory: Lost, Retrieved, Abused, Defended,” Idem from the National Humanities Center 1, no. 1 (Summer 1992): 4. 18. Karl Marx,Economic and PhilosophicalManuscr~ts1844, of ed. D. Struik (New York: International Publishers, 1982), 111. 19. Leon Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1963), 133. 20. Mises, Human Action, 78. 21.Ibid., 4-5. 22.LudwigvonMises, Socialism (1922;Indianapolis:LibertyClassics,1979),186-96, 471-80; idem, Liberalism in the Classical Tradition (San Francisco: The Foundation of Economic Education, 1985), 70-90; idem, Human Action, passim. 23. Being “anti-reason” is such a commonplacethat examples arenot needed. But cf. Mark Poster, Critical Theoryand Poststructuralism: In Searcho f a Context (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell UP, 1989) or Kirkpatrick Sale’s recent The Conquest o f Paradise. 24. Mises, Human Action, 206. 25. The 33rd Annual Meeting of the Midwest Modern Language Association in Chicago, November 14-16, 1991, call for papers brochure. 26. Call for papers for the 33rd Annual Meeting of the Midwest Modern Language Association, November 14-16, 1991, Chicago, Illinois. 27. Brochure calling for papers for the 33rd Midwest Modern Language Association Meeting in Chicago, Illinois, November 14-16, 1991. 28. Terry Eagleton, Marxism and Literary Criticism (London: Methuen, 1976), 76. These goals are the transformation of society and the creation of better people and a better world. 29. As a Western professor of literature explains the principle, “[Tlrying to resolve conflicting viewpoints into a consensus implies a refusal of the truth that some conflicts can be resolved on one side alone.” (Terry Eagleton,Literary Theory [Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 19831,199.) 30. James Bowman, “A Few Reservations,” Reason (AugudSeptember 1991), 49-50. 31. Z. Berbeshkina, L. Yakovleva,and D. Zerkin, What is HistoricalMaterialism?(Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1987), 173-76. 32. Frank Parkin, Marxism and Class Theory (New York: Columbia UP, 1979), 7-8. 33. Eagleton, Marxism and Literary Criticism, 74-75. 34. I. S. Kulikova, “The Classics of Marxism-Leninismon Creativity as the Expression of

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Man’s Essential Powers,” in Marxist-Leninist Aesthetics and the Arts (Moscow: Progress Publishers,1980), 59. 35. Eagleton, Marxism and Literary Criticism, 75. 36. William Warren Bartley 111, Unfithomed Knowledge, Unmeasured Wealth (LaSalle, Ill.: Open Court, 1990), 176. 37. VaclavHavel,speechbeforethe U.S. Congress, February 21, 1990 (Time, 5 March 1990, 15). These words have been incorrectly interpreted by learned academicians as indicating that the pace of reform in Eastern Europe is too slow. See Deadline, Summer 1990, published by NW’s Center for War, Peace and the News Media. 5. 38. Baranczac, “Memory: Lost, Retrieved, Abused, Defended,” 39.Ibid. 40. Ibid.

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Conclusion: The Strange World of the Academic Intellectuals “[Pjeople’s democracy” whereeverybody does a s he’s told under the rule of a worldwide superstate ...can that be what the dogooding college professors wanted? “Strange, strange,” sang Sophocles, “is the mind of man.” -John Dos Passos, Midcentusy While the sentiments of most Americans in politics and morals, if a little vague, are very conservative, their democratic instincts, and the forceof circumstances, have produced a system of education which anticipates all that the most extreme revolution could bring about; and while no one dreams of forcibly suppressing private property, religion, or the family, American education ignores those things, and proceeds as much as possible as if they did not exist. “George Santayana, Character and Opinion in the United States Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other. ”Poor Richard, Poor Richard’s Almanac

THE PERSISTENCE OF MARXISM As AN ACADEMIC RHETORIC Using Carl Menger’s concept, one could argue that the socialist societies functioned (or rather malfunctioned) as the unintended result of utopian aspirations interacting with a refractory reality. The aspirations, predicated on a theory with characteristic assumptions and propositions, went repeatedly unfulfilled because the theory was

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not good enough to cope with or even describe reality adequately.That everywhere the implementationof the economicand social teachings of materialist discourse has failed can no longer be ascribed to the universal stupidity or the incredible malice of those in charge of adapting and enforcing such ideas about the way things are or should be. A good many of these individualswere extremely intelligent, learned,and convinced-at least to their own satisfaction-of their dedication to societal improvement. They understood as well as and perhaps even better than Western professors what Marx was all about. Moreover, they applied their presumably superior knowledge to practically every type of existing conditions: from industrially advanced countries with a large middle class (Czechoslovakia, Germany) to basically peasant economies (Cambodia, China) to everything in between. The problem would then seem to lie with the epistemological premises and the economic, social, historical, and ethical axiomsof the discourse, whichcannot be used effectively to interact with factual reality. That practice determines what is true is a materialist axiom. But practitioners of materialist discourse seldom apply it to their own cases. Consequently, the blows administered by refractory realityplay little or no role in their thinking. Perhaps one reason, which one might call “ideological” in the materialist sense, is that, having become institutionalized, materialist discourse is now the bread and butter of so many professors that it would take a revolution like those that occurred in some socialist countries for them to give it up. These academicians find it difficult to accept that there is little difference between their discourse and the discourse of the failed societies of the Age of Late Marxism,because accepting it wouldrequire carrying out a great deal of intellectual and emotional excavation and abandoning much intellectual and emotional baggage. They would have to admit not only that they were wrong, but that wittingly or not they were accomplices to what has been arguably the most murderous anddurable form of twentieth-century despotism. What they do instead is not unlike what bright people often do to avoid facing up to facts that undermine their cherished or long-held beliefs. What psychologist Ray Hayman has said of the followers of the Maharishi can be said of academic practitioners of materialist discourse: “Once an individual, especially a fairly bright one, latches onto a belief that offers comfort and universal answers, then nature has provided him with innumerable mechanisms to avoid facing up to discomforting challenges to that belief. [There are] ways of avoiding facing up to both the inconsistencies and the immoral features.”’

ACADEMIA AS A SOCIALIST COMMONWEALTH But examining why substantial numbers of professors in the humanities and the social sciences continue to practice materialist discourse must go beyond acknowledging their emotional as well as material investment in this scholarly rhetoric.One must also look atthe natureof the professors’ work andtherefore atthe conditionsthe “social being,” as Marx would say-in which they exist. This social being plays a role in many professors’ consciousness and therefore in their discursive choices.

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The modern higher education behemoth has gradually become a socialist microstate and this change helps explain a number of characteristics of university life. As Peter Brimelow haspointed out, academia increasinglydisplays the classic symptoms of deterioration observed in thoroughly socialized economies: “These are, count them: 1) politicized allocation of resources, 2) proliferating bureaucratic overhead, 3) chronic mismatching of supply and demand, 4)susceptibility to top-down panaceas, usually requiring more input and 5) qualitative and quantitative collapse. ... Significantly. ..both the proportion and the absolute number of students scoring above 650 on either the verbal or mathematical half of the SAT have also declined since the mid-1970’s. In other words, the education industry is just plain turning out fewer top students.”’ Characteristically, the university is no longer just in the business of selling education-a goal routinely undermined anyway by the vocally articulatedanticommercial mind-set of the more morally fervent educators. Like the increasingly socialized Capitalist welfare state, academia is now also in the business of offering social services, parenting services, advice and psychological services, housing services, health services, and even services for turning legally adult individuals into people who behave correctly in areas where the professors decide that correct behavior (as defined of course by the professors) is urgently needed-from racial relations to sexual behavior to many other things in between. Coincidentally, the education industry is not only run along statist lines but is also increasingly government-directed. As George Roche has recently documented, this government presence extends to the so-called private universities because of the enormous growth of government research contracts, government subsidies to both universities and students, and theconsequent increase in government regulationand supervision and thereforein effective government contr01.~Here,too,the wellknown socialist (and Fascist) collapse of the distinction between the private and the public (or “political” or “social”) spheres is at work. The public sector is not the only source of outside helpthe universities need and get. One source of revenue not directly based on the taxpayers’ wealth (though it indirectly draws on that wealth through various forms of government-granted tax privileges) is the conveniently called “endowment,” which consists of financial investments privately owned by the universities. Other private support comes from donations and grants-wealth given to the universities by successful and therefore profit-makmg businesspeople and corporations. Thus, universities and professors, though allegedly not very interested in base things like commercial transactions, profit,and loss (“Universities attract the loyalty of faculty and alumni and, to degree, a the respect of the public,” Harvard president Derek Bok observes, “precisely because they act for reasons other than money and will not compromise certain values simply to gain immediate monetary rewards”),* can exist only because of various types of productive for-profit investments. The same is true of so-called “not-for-profit” philanthropic organizations often linked to anti-Capitalist academic research, such as the Rockefeller, Guggenheim, and MacArthur foundations.

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A setup that masks so well the true economic situation allows many professors to imagine themselves as superior individualsworking within superior a worldin which base commercial interests are, or at least ought to be, unimportant. Simultaneously, they can believe that what they do is so crucial for the common good that it must be paid for by everyone (euphemistically called “society” or “government”) from whom some wealth can be taken, while resenting the fact that consumers often are not willing to pay academicians as much as these same consumers are willingto pay for the products of the minds and labors of what professors clearly consider far less deserving individuals-such as superiorathletes,high-poweredsurgeons, or Big Business executives. As the university turns into a socialized behemoth, bureaucratization correspondingly increases: The number of university administrators, support personnel, social services personnel, and university rules has grown vastly out of proportion to the increase in the numberof students. Thissocialization can perhaps be illustrated most easily if one examines closely the “social being” of undergraduates,but theprinciples involved can be detected in other areas of academic life. In their new world, these legally adult people find themselves taken care of by a system carefully set up by the best minds in charge-the professors, who function as their effective Guardians and who variously channel them into certain ways of living and behaving. Take, for example, medical care. Student medical care shows all the classic characteristics of socialized medicine. It is accessible to all, and no one pays up front, no matter whathis illness. But as critics of socialized medicine point out, such a system presents ethical and practical problems. First of all, it is not really free, since it is paid for by the students through a universal “tax” (part of their tuition) that students mustpay whether they use the system or not.It is compulsory, as it forces every student to pay for the care of everyone elseas well as himself. Moreover, the system does not take into account an individual student’s efforts or lack of effortsto live healthily, thus ineffect penalizing studentswith a sound lifestyle because they are forced to pay anyway, while rewarding those with an unhealthy lifestyle because they generally are ill more often and more seriously, yet pay the same. The system suffers from a resulting overcrowding and therefore from long waiting lines, as students wisely try to take advantage, under pretext of even a minor problem, of a service for which theyhave already been forcedto pay: and thesystem consequently must inevitably ration and place limits on the kind and quality of medical care it provides and on the choice, quality, and specialty of its personnel. Eating is similarly organized. Undergraduatesreceive meal tickets with which they can eat-usually in specificstudent cafeterias where students canuse only a particular kind of ticket. This system is redolent of the “purchase certificates” destined to replace money in the future ideal society sketched by Marx in his Critique of the Gotha Program. In these diningareas, the students eat “communally.” Many students also live communally in dorms carefully supervised and regulated by the authorities-for the good of the students, of course. The students do not have to search and payfor rooming arrangements on their own unless theychoose to live off campus. The undergraduate hands over his room and board money to theuniversity,

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which then relieves him of the trouble of finding accommodations in the outside are distributed by means world by assigning him to a dorm. These accommodations of lotteries orsome other form of allocation usually unrelated to the student’s ability to pay a price. Allocation of resources for the various student activities also takes place according to classic statist methods. Student “government” organizations collect wealth from the students along with tuition, and then spend it in those areas that the student authorities decide must be supported. This peculiar mode of social being has helped condition academic discourse: Making, maintaining, and functioning within this system helps many a pedagogue assume that these ways should be not only normal but quite good for society as a whole. They obviously work for themselves and the students, so why not then “organize” all of society in such a rational manner, where their high-minded collective goals canbecometheultimateorganizational social guide? Professors, needless to say, would presumably be the necessary components of the social planning and thesocial mobilization involved in reorganizing society in this superior manner, because of their proclaimed superior knowledge of how to make better people and a better world. That this form of social organization reflects well-known academic interests and preferences is all too often overlooked. One often finds this same sort of mentality among individuals who have lived most of their lives enjoying the paternal (or perhaps maternal) ways of a socialist system, and who for one reason or another have no hope or desire to escape from or change it. It is the mind-set of many state-subsidized intellectuals, artists, and journalists in formerly socialist Germany or Russia. It is also the mind-set of older men and women,pensioners, handicapped, and even average, mediocre, or ordinary people for whom it is important that “they feel someone cares for them”;5 and for whom, in the absence of a belief in God, or a controlling Church, or tribal ties, or an extended family, this “someone” is the all-embracing welfare state. These people feel happier in the security of a non-changing, managed system, where personal freedom and the possibility of greater prosperity are relinquished for security; and where commercial factors can be, at least superficially, pushed into the background, deleted from one’s consciousness, and for awhile at least hidden in the same sort of ineffectual but psychologically soothing way that the vast fact of unemployment was routinely hidden in thesocialist countries through bothsuperfluous employment and universally mediocre living standards. For this sort of mentality, selling one’s labor in a free market where other people may not want what one has to sell and may prefer what others produce is immoral: One with such a mind-set, be he a factory manager or worker, an artist, or a professor, would rather have a situation in which the authorities determine which services the population mustbuy from him and for how much.

NATURE VERSUS NURTURE IN PROFESSORIAL BEHAVIOR But the peculiar structure of academia only promotes certain professorial dispositions. It does not change the consciousness and therefore the discursive choices of

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every professor. To affirm that it does not only runs against easily observable facts, but would support Marxist “epistemology,” with its emphasis on the environment (social being) as a supreme constructor of human consciousness. It is not that, as Marx would say (along with J.C. Mills and other academic practitioners of materialist discourse), the professors’ “mode of existence” (social being) constructs (configures, fashions, conditions, etc.) theirthought (their “consciousness”). It is, rather, that their individual consciousness often finds this mode of existence most congenial and so chooses to adopt it. Misesian purposeful human action, not just the environment,is therefore at work here. If social being really determined consciousness, there would not be a number of anti-socialists and even some pro-Capitalists among university professors in the humanities and the social sciences, whose viewpoints remain unchanged by their statist, socialized environment. Analogously, generations of socialist “social being” in a number of countries did not turn everyone into a true believer in the benefits of socialism-as post-l989 events demonstrated. These and other empirical falsifications of the Marxist axiom have been routinely overlooked by practitioners of materialist discourse. The relation between milieu and ideology (in the non-Marxist sense of a set of ideas) is far from the sort of one-way, non-dialectical relation that the presumably dialectical discourse axiomatically postulates.The academic mode of “social being” merely reinforces a type of consciousness that manyprofessors bring to theuniversity world. There is already a character predisposition in some of those who choose to become professors, a preexisting inclination that the university setup first welcomes and then proceeds to reinforce. It is not just that the academic world channels the views of the professors in a certain direction; it is also that some of those who enter the profession alreadyhave a certain bent of mind that attunes them to the environment inwhich they live and toward which they gravitate because it fulfills their needs better than any other environment. True, this protective system has allowed many honest professors to cultivate and turn into a wonderful way of life their admirable passion for learning and books. Within this world, academicians have produced important and exemplary works: thus, not only the discovery of DNA, or the years of painstakingly assembling a Sumerian dictionary by a group of scholars buried in university libraries,G but also the intellectual integrity accompanying such research, stand as canonical instances of what academic work can be like.The professional lovers of wisdom who stillexist in academia, and may indeed still be a majority, can only be praised for their sincere dedication to the life of the mind. But less flatteringly, some of those who choose the profession are all too often willing to be turned intoclones of their tenuredand established peers and, for similar reasons, having little to do with a love of learning or of free intellectual activity. Academia has always demanded a high degree of institutionalconformity from anyone hoping to survive the elaborate rituals and obeisances of the tenure process. University life tends to be formulaic, and, appearances to the contrary, surprisingly traditional. It remains medieval in the less attractive sense of that word. Truly in-

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dividualist, self-reliant, and independent minds are less likely to choose a profession marked, as Professor Jacob Neusner has observed, by the spirit of the guild rather than by the spirit of the entrepreneur.’ No wonder that so many academicians feel antagonistic to anything redolent of businesspeople, the free market, or Capitalism. This spirit of the guild certainly benefits many types of academic research, just as it benefits many types of art, writing,and craft that thrive on traditional or unchanging forms and procedures. But it can also discourage different, though equally creative, types of artists, writers, craftsmen, and researchers; and it can prevent the success or even the admission of anyone holding political ideas and moral values different from those officially or unofficially supported by the guild. Even peer review, an admirable tool of intellectual integrity, can contributeto this phenomenon. It can weed out unsound and cranky scholarship,but itcan also whip into conformity a freethinking researcher. After all, the collectivist procedure of peer review decides who gets the grants and who gets published; and peer review helps determine promotion, tenure, and salary increases. In fact, it is seldom acknowledged that peer review can and does weed in unsound, cranky, and even fraudulent research not only in the“softer” realms of the humanities and the social sciences, but even, though less often, in the case of the “hard” sciences. T o these factorsmust be added another componentobserved byProfessor George Santayana as far back as 1920: that the moral values and political preferences of academicians differ markedly from the more “conservative” values and preferences of the population at large.8 What takes place, then, in this system, is partly what Professor Gary Saul Morson calls a “weeding in” of potential clones of an academic establishment in which certain ideas and values tend to predominate. If they are smart and practical, people with ideas and values noticeably different from those needed to make it inthe academic establishment chooseother fields of activity: “The fact is that by now it is not all that easy to hire many conservatives, or even many opposed to politicization, in any case. That is because such people recognize long before they get their Ph.D. that the university is not hospitable to them and pick a less intellectually conformist occupation, like accounting.”’ With its characteristic epistemology, ethics, economics, and politics, the profession thus acts not merely as a “shaper” but as a “weeder” that, through hospitality or disincentives, attracts or repulses particular human types. Those who leave are least adaptable to the peculiar norms of the system, and frequently go on to do well in the outside world. Those who remain are often as Danvinianly fit for university life as they are unfit for life outside the university. A hermeneutics of suspicion can reveal other equally unsavory factors explaining the prevalence of certain ideas and values in the university world and therefore this world’s receptiveness to Marxism. One is that, by nature, many professors are not risk-takers: This approach to life fits the spirit of the guild. Even politically “bold” professors would rather not start a business-where a far different and much more consequence-tied kind of boldness is required. One may suspect that substantial numbers of professors want not necessarily superb, but merely comfortable circumstances, where theirneeds are largely taken care

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of so they can dedicatethemselves to their readings and their thoughts, and, in some cases, to savingtheworld. They aretherefore not interested in the intrinsically insecure selling of their services to those who might or might not be willing to pay for them. Such a market approach would be too much trouble in addition tobeing too risky and inelegant. Instead, these professors prefer the guild approach. They would rather have a place where their livelihoodis eventually guaranteed, and where there is a lifetime safety net. Once tenured, they largely realize this socialist ideal. Naturally, some professors favor an extension of a system that obviously worksso well for them to the “outside” world. After all, would not what is good for the professors be best for America? Hence their preference for socialist political features in society atlarge: These academicians want society to work the way their own little worlds function. Society atlarge, they believe, should be reshaped according to and, if possible, ruled by minds with values similar to their own. But it is, again, not only that the profession and the milieu “shape” the professors, although some of that does take place, largely among the more intellectually or morally weak members of the fraternity. It is rather that many of those who gravitate toward the profession are ripe for the peculiar configurations of socialism and therefore for those of the university system-which they in turn perpetuate, reinforce, and stimulate to grow and extend as a universally valid model of existence. By temperament and metier (cf. Plato,Rousseau, Ph.D. Marx, and others),a pedagogue can slideeasily from telling peoplethe what, thehow, and the whythings are to telling them how these same things should be (a version of Hume’s “law,” evident in Marx’s dictum aboutchanging rather than merely studying the way things are). Such a pedagogue would favor a socioeconomic viewpoint that makes people like him (the “best minds” in charge of telling people what is, how it is, why it is and especially how it should be-always for the people’s own good, of course) by definition indispensable for the greater happiness of everyone on earth. The statism common amongtoday’s professors is not somethingnew in the history of the world. Though weak in contexts or epochs of relative pedagogical individualism (as in the way of life of the Greek Sophists and in some characteristics of the Medieval universities), statism is a propensity long exhibited by pedagogues-from Plato to theBismarckian German Katedersozialisten.Perhaps, as both Mises and Marx might agree, there is an economic reason for the propensity.Consumers of the product of the pedagogues’ labor have not usually paidthem much. Thepedagogues’ existence has been generally less luxurious than that of some less educated people, such as the materialistic (in the non-materialist sense of course) and relatively ignorant (of superior things at any rate) merchants, whose perceived comfortable mode of life, in obviously unjust relationto the merchants’ true desserts, pedagogues, along with other assorted intellectuals, have traditionally resented and ridiculed. They have shared this chronic resentment with members of other groups, such as artists and the nobility, who have also consistently lamented the living standards, status, and presumably unfounded self-esteem of the philistine merchants. Thus, much of a pedagogue’s supposedly disinterested abhorrence of Capitalism and its characteristic socioeconomic approach may fall squarely within the motiva-

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tional realm analyzed by Helmut Schoeck in his pioneering study Envy: A Theory of Social Behavior. In the contemporary United States, an academician’s prospects are made worse by the overproduction of Ph.D.s. This overproduction in turn results in part from the inability of departments and universities to engage in effective economic calculation-as Mises observed, a problem besetting all socialisticallyorganized economic structures. A report by the Modern Language Association acknowledges the problem of overproduction, but withoutrealizing its possible origin in the socialist organization of the universities, the consequent primacy of the political over the economic, and the resulting short-circuiting of economic calculation: “The problem of the overproduction of Ph.D.’s, with the subsequent poor salaries, is very much, though not entirely due to the long gear-down time needed in expanded programs once market demands are met or saturated.”” Thus, frequently unable to secure a good living without previously winning the favor of the most powerful among those he wants to educate and envious of those less educated yet more capable of earning a better living, from ancient times to the present the pedagogue has searched and often received the protection and support of the politically strong, who have thereby assured him of leisure and of freedom from the need to make a different kind of living while pursuing his intellectual interests-at the price, of course, of the pedagogue’s political allegianceand service. This price has frequently taken the well-known form of direct support for the politically powerful. It has also taken the form of advocacy for the idea that, as an unquestionable given, pedagogues must be supported by those in power. This idea has existed in only seemingly paradoxical conjunction with occasional antagonism toward the rulers: Such opposition has often arisen, on the one hand, because the pedagogues have considered themselves insufficiently rewarded,” and, on the other hand, because of the human tendency to bite the hand that feeds. Loftier reasons have of course been usually alleged as a justification for this occasional opposition to established authority. Centers of power courted by pedagogueshave ranged from monarchs and noblemen to, more recently, the massively encompassing modern governments and their money-dispensing and money-collecting bureaucracies-the so-called public sector. Lacking a prince, many pedagogues today claimthat it is now the “public” (society, etc.) who must give them (along with artists, writers, and other likewise superiorly deserving people) support as individuals evidently entitled to some portion of the wealth of the rest of the population-naturally for the good and improvement of this population. Afier all, do not businesspeople, too, get taxpayers’ money-from sport teams owners to farmers (notice, again, the formula: it has always been X, so let us now use X for the good of the people)? A l l sorts of variations upon these beneficent arguments have been developed to justify an idea that, as Marx would say, not accidentally happensto be of great advantageto its presumably disinterested advocates. In Marxist terms, the pedagogues’ arguments in favor of public support of their educational activities would be obviously ideological. Ideology in thissense would also inform the frequent pedagogical extension of this “public caretalung” approach to other areas of life. One may compare these general theoretical ration-

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alizations with the determined opposition of teachers' unions to therights of parents of schoolchildren to get tax breaks or vouchers allowing the parents to send their children to a school that the parents can choose and that can be free to accept or reject their children-and that will remain free not only from union, but also (and less likely) from government control: The opposition to suchradical changes is always ingeniously formulated by the teachers' unions tomake it lookas if it were motivated by the best interests of the children, rather than by the best interests of the unions. From Plato to Rousseau to Ph.D. Marx one canfind more or less ingenious restatements of the same self-serving professorial convictions in favor of statist approaches. The words of learned sixteenth-century Spanishhumanist JuanLuis Vives are as good as any as examples of the eternal pedagogue's statist political inclinations and his allegedly disinterested justifications: Learning requires freedomand leisure. This can be given by the royal power. In return, princely power will receive counsel in dealing with the difficult matters of business. Such advice is afforded to princes by the learned, in the practical wisdom gathered from learning, so that it is clear if either is lacking to the other, thathis particular gift cannot be obtained and preserved. The association of thyself with the duties of those whom thou cherishest will be of such a kind as to help and support thy skill and thy power. This will be the amplest reward of thy liberality.'2 Not by chance, Vives, the lionizer of state authority, was also Vives, the concerned and humanitarianadvocate of the sortof society in whichthe beneficent government would have practically unlimited power to intervene in the lives of the citizens-for their own good, of course.13 Yet, in spite of their traditional financial worries, it is a seldom recognized fact that many of today's tenured pedagogues are far better off than they acknowledge or perhaps even realize. If envy is a factor in their ideologicalmakeup, it is justifiable only in regard to actual salary conditions. Even in this area, however, a good percentage of college professors, if they play the game, are not too badly paid. In any event, other benefits can make up for salary disadvantages with respect to people engaged in commerce or in professions requiring university degrees and a more strenuous living. T o be sure, a professorwho, after five years at a university,is denied tenure usually faces an uphill battle for reappointment somewhere else unless he has been clearly the victim of a bad decision by those in power in his previous university or is wellconnected in the next (in whichcases the new employer may grant him tenure within two or three years). If unable to find work in academia, he will have to undergo, in his thirties or older, a painful relearning of work skills in a world quite different from that in which he has lived for decades. Once tenured, however, he enjoysfairly good job security and benefits, tolerable supervision,and flexible working hours, not to mention three months with obligatory no teaching.His working conditions would be the envy of, and wouldperhapscreate resentment and backlash among, the population at large were they more widely ~ n d e r s t o o d . ' ~

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Since professors’ values and preferences tend to differ markedly from those of the majority, they are likely to espouse, with self-interested energy,causes and modes of thinking at odds with and even resentful of those of theaverage Joe. Naturally, they project upon the hapless texts and authors that they discuss their idiosyncratic concerns, insecurities, resentments, and sometimes quite justified fears. Perhaps even more so than “creative” writers, pedagogues are in an ideal position to interpret events in such a way as to satisfy their personal needs-while making a living out of it to boot. Disguised or otherwise, materialist discourse therefore offers to them aready-made congenial means ofself-expression. After all, the discourse itself was created by some nineteenth-century individuals who moved in intellectual coteries resentful of and at odds with the larger milieu in which they existed. The discourse is thus “imprinted” from the past with a high degreeof attractiveness for the future. Professors can thus integrate their private concerns, whatever they may be, into their work, and in addition, actively promote them within and without the university. So if it is true that materialist discourse exists in a veritable ideal world, so do those academicians who practice it. The connection between the two is propitiated by their common manner of existence-as Marx would say, by their social being. Another contributing factor in their discursive choices is the economic illiteracy of many professors, conveniently justified by the Marxist axiom claiming that economic thought, like everything else, is not universally valid and therefore in need of some basic understanding, but merely a set rules of devised by some hegemonic class or other. It is true that even some presumably informed academicians have persisted in holding on to their old discursive practices. Well known in this regard are economics departments at some schools, such as the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, which remain bastions of Marxian socialism sympathizers.The joke about fired Marxist economists from the socialist countries being able to find jobs only in the American universities is only a somewhat exaggerated way of pointing out the astonishing fact of the survival of socialism in a number of American economics sodepartments. Notoriously, Harvard University, before 1989, hired Hungarian cialist professor Janos Kornai to teach economics half the school year in the United States and half in his own country-“a very good example of socialist and capitalist convergence,” according to Professor John Kenneth Galbraith. Itis similarly instructive that in 1975 famous Stanford economics professor John G. Gurley published a book in which hetalked seriously about the great challenge to Capitalism posed by the socialist econ~mies.’~ We now know of course that the picture of thriving socialism during the 1970s, Brezhnev’s “years of stagnation,” as Gorbachev called them, was false, and that not only many American professors, but even the CIA, had it all wrong. In 1988, more than ten years after Gurley, Professor Galbraith could still publish a book in collaboration with an equally famoussocialist economist from the Unionof Socialist Soviet Republics, in which theeminent Harvard educator still talked about the ongoing “convergence” of socialism and Capitalism, the superiority of the Soviet over the Czarist economy, and its extraordinary growth rates since 1917.16 At the time, Galbraith was seemingly unaware that the very benefits

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that he hadrepeatedly praisedand that he wanted to see implemented in the United States, such as national economic planning by the best minds (Galbraith?), full and secure employment, universal health and other care, and subsidized transportation and housing, were, as he spoke, bringing down the socialist economies; and that the socialist growth rates that he so admired had been only a mirage created at the price of miserable living standards.” Professors like Gurley and Galbraith, however, are not a majority. More often practitioners of materialist discourse function outside economics departments, in other areas such as the humanities and the social sciences.” A kinder explanation of such professorial behavior is that academicians, purposely, and even necessarily, as part of their professional activity, often blur the distinction between the factual and the imaginary, and between the actualand thehypothetical, then tending to remain in the world of fiction when they ought to return to the world of reality. This tendency favors flights of imagination that are oftm required inprofessorialwork, but is not particularlyconducive to realisticthinking. The academicians’ obliviousnessto reality is favored by the fact that professors, by reason of their work, usually do not implementor manage public policy.They largely teach, talk, and write about it. Theyare thereforenot immediately responsible forthe effects of what they teach, write,or talk about. N o American professor has ever been thrown out of office or sued for malpractice because the ideas he propagates have caused social and economic distress. As a group, professors are therefore not held accountable for the implementation and management of the bad policies that they may advocate. Again, this isolation is probably indispensable because it makes possible the unbridled intellectual exploration that should be part of academic work, but is not always conducive to responsible thought. O f course, professors are ultimately responsible, since history shows that their ideas do filter through society and are eventually pickedup by those in charge.One should not forget how the German Katbedersozialisten prepared the socialization of the German economy; or how the sophisticated historical theoriesof many German academicians served the National Socialists’ ideals of creating better people and a better world; or how the ideas of the Russian pedagogues helped prepare the Bolsheviks’ progressive policies.” But the majority of professors themselves are seldom in control of policy. It is true that, throughout theworld, as head of political parties and, perhaps more important, as government appointees and as managers of international and “world government” organizations, academicians can be found in increasing numbers in positions of direct authority over the present and the future of millions. But these academic public servants are seldom electorally accountable. Within their own world, academiciansencounter even less often the reality checks usually faced by elected rulers. “Refractory reality” has therefore little or no impact on their life. Professors are in effect protected from both the unintended and intended consequences of their thought, so they can go on verbally maneuvering their way through every seemingly factual setback by meansof their ingenious rhetorical strategies. These verbal maneuvers confermany practical benefits, suchas continuing to have a clear conscience in inviting to campus, under the guise of “exposing stu-

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dents todifferent points of view,” speakers who in the waning years of the twentieth century still defend Marxism-Leninism.

ACADEMIC INTELLECTUALS IN THE MIRROR OF HISTORY Harvard president Derek Bok has called attention to the clout that“progressives” now have in the university world: In recent years, the threat of orthodoxy has come primarily from within rather than outside the university. Angered by prejudice in the larger world, many students and faculty have been vocal in criticizing bigotry, opposing war, attacking discrimination and oppression, and urging that curricula be opened to underrepresented authors and neglected points of view. Whether or not one accepts all the arguments advanced, it is perfectly legitimate to express them. But zealous proponents have sometimes gone furtherto assemble a daunting list of ideas, words, and phrases-some of them quite familiar and seemingly innocuous-that one can utter only at the risk of being labeled racist, sexist, hegemonic, homophobic, patriarchal, gynophobic, or worse. ...Much worse are deliberate attempts to harass professors, censor students, or disrupt speeches by visitors believed to hold unacceptable viewson race, gender, foreign policy, or other controversial subjects. These methods arenot only unfortunate; they can and should be prohibited. Regrettably, however, incidents of this kind seem to have occurred with some to the frequency around the country. At times, university administrators have even bowed threat of such pressure by withdrawing invitations to unpopular public speakers, imposing curbs on free speech in the interest of racial harmony, or forcing professors to include more material in their courses about womenor Third World issues.20 Professor Bok, however, does not see that the intellectual premises of the “progressives” lead to the sort of actions that he finds lamentable, and that these actions are merely an academic replicationof the terror familiarto students of really existing socialist regimes: The mode of thinking and the personality types behind the terror are the same. The words of former Soviet academician Vladimir Bukovsky are apposite here: “Those of us who have lived under socialism exhibit the once bitten, twice shy syndrome. Perhaps Western socialism is in fact different and will produce different results. But we observe with growing apprehension the ominously familiar personality types, misconceptions, and attempts to institute this system of thought.”” Indeed, neither PC nor affirmative action nor their epistemological and ethical justifications are discoveries of contemporary American professors. They have been part of the socialist universities since at least 1917. T o further social justice and redress previousoppression,educatorsin the socialistcountries gave preferential treatment to working-class youth. Middle-classyouth was even banned from college in order to correct years of social inequity: and educational life was closely monitored to ensure that it did not encourage politically incorrect ideas. Including politically correct teachings in children’s books is not an innovation owed to American educators either: The Soviet social experiment managed to include politically correct ideas even in children’s textbooks on arithmetic.”

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Many American professors share such abelief in the virtueof using education for sociopolitical progress rather than for imparting mere knowledge and rational thought (for all knowledge and thought are sociopolitically conditioned anyway): “Education,” afamous Americanprofessor writes, “should be one of the places where we can get involvedthe in processtransforming of Academicians therefore struggle to liberate Western writers so that they can be analyzed from emancipatory viewpoints-not from those of bourgeois humanism, which keeps them “hermetically sealed from history [as conceived of course by materialist dis[anathema unless used to unveil course], subjected to a sterile critical formalism ‘ideology-as understood by materialist discourse], piously swaddled with external verities and used to confirm prejudices which any moderately enlightened student [enlightened by materialist discourse] can perceive to be o b j e c t i ~ n a b l e . ” ~ ~ Since examining works from the perspective of piously swaddled external verities used to confirm prejudices any moderately enlightened student can perceive to be objectionable canonly prolongexposure to oppressive humanistic practices, asocially progressive professor must make efforts to study works from the viewpoint of ideology, hegemony, culture, and politics (in their materialist sense of course). Bourgeois humanist professors may claim that such a politicalapproach does violenceto works, but they do not realize that their own approaches are also not only political (all thought is political anyway),but really violent, since they perpetuate violent relations by perpetuating oppression through oppressiveways of looking at the world. The viewpoint of these bourgeois, and usually white male, humanists compares to that of artists and writers who during the Age of Advanced Marxism protested the politicization of artand literature and their studyaccording to materialist axioms. Thus, Kazimir Malevich, one of the world‘s first abstract painters, paid the price for mistakenly insisting that art is “independent”: “Whether a portraitis being painted of some socialist or some emperor, whether a mansion is being built for a businessman or a humble dwelling for a worker-the differences cannot be taken as the starting point of art. ,..It is about time we understood at last that the problems of artandthe problems of the belly areextremely remotefrom each Little did Malevich realize that the critical approach he so despised would eventually conquer thescholarly system of the presumably Capitalist United States. H e was arguing against materialist fundamentals: “material” relations (“problems of the belly”) and the resulting ideological (political, cultural, etc.) configurations configure (construct, fashion, etc.) art. Zamyatin was also out of line and therefore blackballed when he argued that literature can be created only by “madmen, misfits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics.”” But then Zamyatin had written in 1920 that he lived in an epoch that suppressed the individual to create a better world for the masses: Unlike materialist professors, he never accepted the axiom that bourgeois individualism (as opposed to the real individualism that socialist man can dialectically findby submerging himself in his community) is incorrect.” During the Age of Advanced Marxism, politicizing the cultural realm to serve human liberation was collectively (and therefore ipsofacto correctly) sanctioned by

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the Russian Central Committee in 1928: The activist government mandated that everything from scholarship to theater, cinema, painting, literature, and music ought to help raise people’s political awareness of oppressive social practices-which included drinking vodka (for drinking has, with annoying regularity, posed a material problem in the socialist creation of better people and a better world).28 Along with the notion of “ideology,” the centrality of “politics” is a cornerstone of the Marxist world vision, so that in every country built upon these ideas, human action has beenseen as necessarily politicized. Only during theAge of Late Marxism have reformers in the socialist countries begun to react against the principle: T o improve living conditionsby freeing the human mind, many of these reformers now insist politicians be excluded from economic decisions, education, and the workplace.” Combining cultural and political readings dates of course back to Marx and Engels and their interpretations of Balzac. Institutionalized by Lenin, it became a standard feature of cultural policy during theAge of Advanced Marxism. Literaturewas then turnedintoa weaponof the “ideologicalArt,declaredthe Bolshevik Association of Russian Proletarian Writers, is “the most powerful weapon in the class struggle.”31During the early phase of the Bolshevik agenda, an important step was completed to advance this activist goal: “Teachers’ resistance to the politicization of the schools” was “broken.”” In 1922, the Ogburo passed a resolution asking for “the struggle against petit bourgeois ideology in the field of l i t e r a t ~ r e . ” ~ ~ proThe gressive government wanted to favor academic approachesthat helped further equality, social justice, and so on. Accordingly, by 1923, the school system was being reorganized on the principle of training skilled specialists who would have a progressive view of the world: “Lenin insisted that the bourgeoisie be fought in the schools as well, that education cannot proceedapartfrom p o l i t i ~ s . ”Bukharin ~~ agreed: “It is essential to us that intellectual cadres be trained in an ideologically precise way. Yes, wewill produce standardized intellectuals,produce themas though in a fact01-y.”~~ War was declared on canonical Russian literature because it represented a link with the oppressive past and an obstacle to a better future.36 Today, the equivalent in the United States is, of course, the attack on canonical Western literature. Such liberating policies have labeled Western canonical authors “dead white males,” and endeavor to replace or “supplement” them with mandated readings from a new canon of authors who, with their different class, racial, sexual, and otherperspectives, can help the cause of universal emancipation from class, race, sex, animal, child, earth, and other oppressions. More subtle than “opening” the canon is reinterpreting it so that it inevitably illustrates materialist principlesand goals. Like other methods, this one also achieved perfection in socialist Russia, where formal analysis was put at the service of “unveiling” (or “unmasking,” “revealing,” etc.-verbs that turn a professor into a fearless exposer of the naked truth) a works “ideological” content. Thus, the works of Pushkin, Griboedov, and Lermontov were analyzed to expose them ideologically as models of “the literary style of the Russian nobility during the rise of commercial-

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industrial capitali~m.”~’ Writers were supposed to be studied from the pointof view of ideology and therefore of society: “The conception of a Soviet writer,” warned Literaturnyagazetain 1929,“is not geographical, itis social.”38 “Civil history,” writes ex-Soviet professor Mikhail Heller, “was eliminated. The manipulation of social memory began.”39 But, of course, manipulating social memory in order to instill progressive ideas through deliberately changing the books that students must read was justified by materialist assumptions: The Marxist line is that since all “ruling classes” do these things, at least the Bolsheviks did them openly, and in order to teach students the need for an economically, politically, socially and just society,and help them better understand a changing world (it has always been X, etc.). A plausible American campus anecdote relates an episode that could have taken place in any American university during the late 1980s and early 1990s-the Age of Late Marxism. An eminent American practitioner of materialist discourse in the field of “literary criticismand theory” seeks out a Russian delegation of scholars and managers visiting the United States to learn about the Capitalist system. The American professor then proceeds vigorouslyto admonishthese seasoned veteran students of Marx, Lenin, and Plekhanov on the really correct meaning of the teachings of Marx, Lenin, and Plekhanov.*’ The anecdote typifies the ideological stance of today’s academic practitioner of materialist discourse in the West: Not only does this sort of professor haughtily ignore the possibility of substantial intelligence, learning, and good will in practitioners of materialist discourse other than himself; but in fact he cannot make a connection between his and theOther’s views and actions. And, of course, herefuses to consider that there mightbe a linkat all between his cherished nineteenth-century ideals and their sobering twentieth-century consequences. (In its practitioners’ refusal to acknowledge the significance of inconvenient historical facts, this presumably historical discourse may be oncemore betraying its actual lackof historical sense.)*’ In other words: academic practitioners of materialist discourse cannotrecognize themselves-no matter how massive the evidence-in the historical “Other” and its horrors. What they see in the mirrorof historyis, at best,something entirely different and, at worst, a lamentable “distortion” of themselves and their beloved ideas. Nor do the professors even consider the possibility that those countless academicians and intellectuals who came before them and who thought about andapplied their common materialist lore in the socialist countries could have been at least as capable of intelligent life and as willing “to help the world” as themselves. Many “progressive” professors have attained what can be described onlyas a new plane of existence.So massive has been the scale of disinformation provided by intellectuals of the Left that many practitioners of materialist discourse cannot let go. They therefore “dialectically” deny or explain the facts away. Perhaps Trotsky would do the same today were he confronted with the fact that the Mensheviks were right and he was wrong when they spoke in favor of, and he spoke against, the desirability of the freedom of labor and the market and when they criticized, and he defended, the benefits of compulsory national labor service.*’ Trotsky could now hardly accept his own reasoning-that if the Mensheviks were right, and such ideas led to a decrease in human

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productivity, one must once and for all bury socialism. Today, materialist academicians still vie with each other to find fault with the fledgling democracies of the ex-socialist countries and their difficult and often halfhearted efforts to dismantle the hypertrophied public sector created by generations of Marxist practice. The professors’ leniency toward some of the last bastions of Marxism-Leninism (such as Cuba and North Korea) is merely consistent. As Marx pointed out to Engels, dialectics allows one to be right in any situation.43

TERROR AND THE ACADEMIC INTELLECTUALS Yet the connection between, on the one hand, the intellectual communism of these professors as a subsection of the intelligentsia and, on the other hand, the unsavory practical consequences of their ideological stance has not escaped shrewd observers. Raymond Aron dealt with it not too systematically but very insightfully as part of his lifelong polemic againstthe French Marxist intelligentsia; anumber of American academicians have disapprovingly noted it; and French historian of philosophy Vincent Descombes has described it as the “terrorist conception of hisIn France, intellectuals became its notorious captives after World War 11, and Aron waged battle against them almost single-handedly until the 1970s. The subsequent collapse of the Marxoid French intellectuals’ Weltanschauung and of their influence upon French cultural life after the fall of the socialist regimes of Eastern Europe has been recently chronicled by Tony J ~ d tDescombes . ~ ~ observes that the academician who, in the twentieth century, didmost to disseminate this intellectual communism among theFrench was, not uncharacteristically, an otherwisekind and learned scholar: Alexander Kojkve. Since then, “The motif of terror recurs in each successive debate up to the present day.”4G Masked under academic passwords like“hegemony,”“authority,”“power,” “overdetermination,” “exploitation,” and “superstructure,” and fashionable mantras like “the personal (the private) is the political (the public)”this terrorist mind-frame remains fundamental to many practitioners of materialist discourse. The motif of terror can be found in Sartre’s purposeful avoidance of dealing with the horrors of Russian socialism, an example of Sartrean mauvaise-foi about which Ernest Gellner acidly comments: “Sartre was brazingly willingto suppress the truth aboutgulags so as to protect his darling French working class from emotional di~comfort.”~’ It “appears in the title of the book written by [eminent Professor Maurice] MerleauPonty in 1947 to justify a policy of ‘support forthe P.C.F.’ in spite of the Moscow trials: Humanisme et terreur” (Descombes overlooks the similarity betweenProfessor Merleau-Ponty’s apologetic essay and Trotsky‘s similarly titled brutal defenseof socialism in Russia: Communism and Terrorism). “It appears,” continues Descombes, “in Sartre’s analyses of the French Revolution in his Critique of Dialectical Reason (the theme of ‘fraternity-terror’) as well as in his apologies for violence. It appears finally in the great examination of conscience undertaken by the intelligentsia which led it, in the form of the New Philosophers, 1977-78, to confess to the fascination

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exercised over intellectuals by the most sanguinary powers, precisely because, unhampered by scruple, the latter are prepared to demonstrate what power is.”*’ The necessary connection between the do-goodingideas of the professors and the terrorist conception of history is sometimes less subtle. A good example of how this conception has all too often found its way from the classroom onto the streets is seen in Professor Georg Lukics, the main figure in Hungarian philosophy after his country’s conquest by the Soviet Army. By the 1960s, Lukics was already much admired and utilized by Western professors of literature. Yet during Btla Kun’s regime this intellectual had been cultural commissar in charge of the confiscation of paintings and “reactionary” books, the closing of bookshops, the establishing of mobile libraries to bring Party propaganda to the remotest Hungarian villages, the destruction of all legal documents relating to banking and private property, and the proscription of all “dilettantism in art.” H e had openly proclaimed the benefits of terror in the achievement of beneficial political aims. And he was also directly responsible for the court-martial and execution of several soldiers and the murder of one student.49 Otherexamples are not hard to find, from the Red Khmer’s Pol Pot (a student in Paris in the 1960s) to Sender0 Luminoso’s Abimail GuzmLn (a professor of Kantian philosophy atthe University of Ayacucho)to Bill Ayers (a member of the Weather Underground student organization whose bombings killed several people in the 1960s). Ayers’ case is particularly instructive: Thanks to the bourgeois legal system that he despised, Ayers managed to get away with no punishment atall. He is now an associate professor at the University of Illinois in Chicago, where, as a journalist naively observes, “instead of sticks and stones” Ayers lobbies “ideas.” The journalist fails to consider the possibility that Ayers’ ideas, shared by the likes of Kojhve, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty, are the terror.50 The puzzling recurring sympathy of so many twentieth-century intellectuals for some of the most repressive regimes in human history is not fortuitous: it is philosophically overdetermined.That is, the adoptionof certain epistemologicaland ethical premises and axioms leads logically to the horrors; and those who perpetrated the horrors (a Lenin, a Lukics, or an Abimail Guzmin) were merely more consistent and resolute than those who implicated themselves only intellectually (aHorkheimer, a Sartre, a Pablo Neruda, or a Garcia Mirquez). Understanding the Marxist viewpoint necessitates, therefore, making explicit that its key concepts and discursive maneuvers can be the bread and butter of the most mild-mannered of Western pedagogues; but that this intellectual vehicle necessarily, and against all their protestations, ties them to the educators and twentieth-century history of the so-called economic democracies. This realization has prompted manyformer French Marxists like Bernard-Henry Lkvy to proclaim (in his Barbarism with a Human Face) that Marxist ideas are inherently corrupt. But unrepentant academic practitioners of materialist discourse are not unlike Medieval theologians arguing about the Trinity: Reality need not interrupt their lucubrations. Thus, they can imperturbably continueapplying to things like “texts” and ‘‘culture’’-which do not react with stagnation,scarcity,famines,imprisonments, and masskillings-ideas that have not effectively interacted with reality

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wherever intelligent, learned, and dedicated people made strenuous efforts to apply them to thefactual world. This similarity may further help explain why assumptions and principles repeatedly falsified can continue to be used in the academic world for historical, literary, and social research, and even for the knowledge of knowledge itself. Where an engineer, a businessman, and even a politician may fail, a professor can succeed-because the blank page, unlike other forms of reality, takes everything without answering back. One can only hope that a new generation of academicians will someday emerge, who will decide, with genuine authenticity, that the scholarly rhetoric bequeathed to them by an earlier academic establishment is inadequate for the post-Marxist Age.

NOTES 1. Cited in James Randi, Flim-Flam!P.ychics, ESP, Unicorns, and Other Delusions (Buffalo: Prometheus, 1987), 106. 2. Peter Brimelow in Forbes magazine, cited in “Product quality is declining,” Chicago Tribune, 7 May 1990. The scores at the top and among white males have also gone down: so the decline is universal-not attributable to race, sex, or economic status. 3. George Roche, The Fall o f the Ivory Tower (New York: Henry Regnery, 1994). 4. DerekBok‘sannualreport toHarvard’sBoardofOverseers,fortheacademicyear 1989-1990, HarvardMagazine, May-June 1991, 47. 5. OlgaHavel,headoftheOlgaHavelFoundationandwifeofplaywright-president Vaclav Havel, cited in Shailagh Murray, “A sharing effort,” Chicago Tribune, 6 March 1994. 6. For the DNA feat, see Charles Krauthammer, “An age-old puzzle, solved modestly,” Chicago Tribune, 6 July 1993. At the University Museum of the University of Pennsylvania, scholars have been at work on a Sumerian dictionary for over twenty years. Letters A andB are now complete. 7. If “the business world is built on enterprise,” Neusner writes, academia “is a tight, closed guild.” Jacob Neusner, “Through the looking-glass of tenure,” Chicago Tribune, 16 February 1993. 8. George Santayana, “Characterand Opinion in the United States,” in Norman Henfrey, ed., Critical Writings o f George Santayana,vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1963), 48. 9. Gary Saul Morson, “Weeding In,” Academic Questions 6, no. 1 (Winter1992-93): 70. 10. Joseph E. Milosh, Jr., “Salaries and the Overproduction of PhDs,” MLA Newsletter, \ Spring 1986, 19. 11. The “student rebellion” inChina offers some recent examples. See “Sociologist returns from China: Nancy Tuma says students favor meritocracy and the rule of law,” Stanford Observer, June 1989, 7. 12. Juan Luis Vives, On Education (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1971), 5. 13. Juan Luis Vives, “The Relief of the Poor,” in James Bruce Ross and Mary Martin McLaughlin,eds., The Portable Renaissance Reader (NewYork:Penguin, 1981),348-54, excerpted from Vives’ Concerning the Reliefof the Poor, trans. M. M. Sherwood, Studies in Social Work, no. 11 (New York School of Philanthropy, February 1917). 14. Even though they feel chronically “marginalized” themselves, and thus out of fellow feeling they routinely favor equally “marginalized’ authors, works, and events, many academicians seem to prefer this “marginalization” to giving up their academic life.

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15. John G. Gurley, Challengers to Capitalism: Mam, Lenin, Mao (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1975). 16. John Kenneth Galbraith and Stanislav Menshikov, Capitalism, Communism and Coexistence (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1988). 17. But then over the years Galbraith had remained blissfully oblivious to the millions who, during the 1930s, died of hunger in the Union of Socialist Soviet Republicstoand the realities of a country that under the Czars was a net exporter of foodbut that under socialism became incapable of feeding itself. 18. In thesefieldspedagoguesexistin amentalrut: Their responsesareautomatically triggered by every new uncomfortable piece of news, which they proceedto place safely into standardized and ready-made materialist categories. 19. Ludwig von Mises, Socialism (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1981), 219, 428, 53031. 20. Derek Bok‘s annual report to Harvard‘s Board of Overseers, for the academic year 1989-1990, HantardMagazine, May-June 1991, 41. 21. Vladimir Bukovsky, To ChooseFreedom (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1987), 127. 22. Mikhail Hellerand Aleksandr Nekrich,Utopia in Power: The History o f the Soviet Union fiom 1917 to the Prespnt (New York: Summit Books, 1986), 172. 23. Frank Lentricchia, Criticism andsocial Change (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983), 2. 24. Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983), 216-17. 25. Heller and Nekrich, Utopia in Power, 196. 26.Ibid.,195. 27.Ibid. 28.Ibid.,269. 29. In Hungary, for instance, post-l989 legislation forbids political activity in the workplace. For the old Communist Party, such activity had always been a “key weapon of communist indoctrination.” In former Yugoslavia, reformers have insistedthat politicians getout of economic decisions (R. C. Longworth, “New Yugoslav leader looks to the West,” Chicago Tribune, 9 February 1989). In Western countries like Italy, whose educational system had longbeenpenetratedbymaterialistideas,andwhere the “Chinese system” (pioneered in Mao’s China, where the class-the collective-selects a student to take the exam for everyone else: from his ability to the needs of the whole, etc.) had been adopted in many humanities courses during the 1960s, students are rebelling against the politicization of the system. Like many American professors, materialist Italian teachers are shocked by what they c a l l “the egocentricity and narcissism” of their charges. “They don’t seem to give a damn about the community as a whole,” complains a teacher who has since quit in disgust. Students respond that they “don’t want to listen to their teachers’ political interpretations but want the facts.” Nor is class oppression accepted anymore as an excuse for poor work:“I am not scandalized that those who don’t study fail their examinations,” says student leader Gaia Molho, “AndI would never fight to defend them” (Uli Schmetzer, “Today’s Italian students have new lesson for adults,” Chicago Tribune, 5 December 1989). 30. Heller and Nekrich, Utopia in Power, 269. 31.Ibid. 32.Ibid.,172. 33.Ibid.,195. 34.Ibid.,172 35.Ibid.,199.

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36. Ibid., 172. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid., 271. 39. Ibid. 40. A colleague informs me that this anecdotal situation actually took place and that the protagonist was a famous Marxist professor at Duke University. 41. For materialist discoursenot only pushes aside thehistoricallyproper to grant scholarly dominance to other areas of human knowledge (economic relations, or the study of institutions, or class, or race, etc.), as Ortega y Gasset noticed, but also makes theoretical (and, once in power, also practical) tabula rasa of existing historical conditions whenever they show themselves contrary to building society anew according to Marxism’s goalsof socioeconomic equality, proper regulation of social life, creation and distribution of wealth, and so forth. 42. Leon Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism (Ann Arbor: The U of Michigan P, 1963), 142,144. 43. “Perhaps I a m giving the wrong account and explanation, but one can always get out of the bind with a little bit of dialectics. I have been careful to set up my batteries in such a way that I will be right in any possible event.” Cited in FranGoise Levy, Karl Mam: Histoire d u n bourgeois allemand (Paris: Grasset, 1976), 400, n. (my translation). 44. Raymond Aron, L’Opium des Intellectueh (Paris: Calmann-Ltvy,1955); Edward Pechter, “The New Historicism and Renaissance Drama,”PMLA 102 (May 1987):292-303; D. G. Myers, “The New Historicism in Literary Studies,” Academic Questions 2 (Winter 198889); Dario Fernindez-Morera, “Materialist Discourse in Academia During the Age of Late Marxism,” Academic Questions 4 (Spring 1991);Vincent Descombes, Modern French Philosophy, trans. L. Scott-Fox and J. M. Harding (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1980), 14-15. 45. Tony Judt, Past Impefect (Berkeley: U of California P, 1993). 46. Descombes, Modern French Philosophy, 14-15. 47. Ernest Gellner, “The mightier pen? Edward Said and the double standards of insideout colonialism,” TLS, 19 February 1993, 4. 48. Descombes, Modem French Philosophy, 14-15. 49. Arpad Kadarkay, Georg Lukdcs: L$, Thought, and Politics (London: Blackwell, 1991), reviewed by J. P. Stern, “Communism’s Man of Letters,” London Review of Books, 26 September 1991, 22. 50. The case of Bill Ayers is amazing, but that of his terrorist partner, BernardineDohrn, is comparable. When this woman finally surfaced after years of hiding, she was fined $1,500 and given three years’ probation. She then got a law degree from the University of Chicago Law School. She is now part of the legal system of the United States: She “has built a career with law-oriented organizations” [!l. These days (June 1993) “in a project with Northwestern University’s law school, she is working to reform Chicago’s juvenile courts.” See Jon Anderson, “Weathering change,” Chicago Tribune, 8 July 1993. In the late 1980s at Stanford, a conference on terrorism organized by humanities professors exonerated “progressive terror” while condemning the policies of democratic states as terroristic. See David Gress, “Talking ‘Terrorism’ at Stanford,” The New Criterion, April 1988, 15-22.

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Suggested Further Readings Aron, Raymond. The Opium of the Intellectuals. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1977. A classicon the French intelligentsia by one of France’s great political and sociological thinkers, first published as L’Opium des Intellectuels in 1955. Bartley,WilliamWarren, 111. Unfithomed Knowledge, Unmeasured Wealth. On Universities and the Wealth of Nations. LaSalle, Ill.: Open Court, 1990. A study of twentiethFull of ideas and fascinating century philosophy, economics, history, and politics. information. Includes a very good exposition of K a r l Popper‘s objectivist theory of knowledge. Flew, Antony. Thinking About Social Thinking The Philosophy of the Social Sciences. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985. By a leading British philosopher. The best critique of the “sociology of knowledge.” Frege, Gottlob. Translationsfrom the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege. Ed. Peter Geach and Max Black. Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1980. By the founding father of mathematical logic, philosophy of mathematics, and philosophy of language.The most difficult ofall the books suggested here,but important for its hard-nosed logical elucidations of such things as truth, sense, meaning, and objective knowledge. Furet, FranCois. Lepasst! d’une illusion. Essai sur l’idke comrnuniste au x x c sitcle. Paris: Editions Robert Laffont, S.A., 1995. A panoramic description of the European intelligentsia’s incredible addiction to “the opium of the intellectuals” by an important French historian. Not yet translated into English. Haack,Susan. Evidence and Inquiry. Toward Reconstruction in Epistemoloa. Cambridge, Mass.:Blackwell, 1993. Demolishes contemporary relativism and convincingly defends epistemologically grounded philosophy. Hayek, F. A. The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988. The Nobel Prize winner’s fundamental critique of Marxist ideas. Heller, Mikhail and Nekrich, Aleksandr. Utopia in Power: The History of the Soviet Union from 1917to the Present. New York: Summit Books, 1986. Superb work bytwo former Soviet historians who know their subject inside out. Especially useful for its step-by-

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step description of how Marxist ideas indeed shaped the behavior of Russian politicians, intellectuals, and educators. Hollander, Paul. Anti-Americanism: Critiques at Home and Abroad, 1765-1770. New York: Oxford UP, 1992. The standard and encyclopedic historical workon its subject and a worthy successor to his Political Pilgrims (1981). Machan, Tibor. Private Rights and Public Illusions. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1994. An academic philosopher’s well-argued moral alternative to socialist and related ethical paradigms. Mises, Ludwig von. Human Action. Chicago: Contemporary Books, Inc., 1966. By one of the giants of the Austrian School of Economics.One of the most forceful, coherent, and ambitious alternatives to Marxist ideas ever written. Not merely a formidable treatise on economics, but also a major contribution to the “social” sciences. Nozick,Robert. Anarchy, State, and Utopia. NewYork:BasicBooks, 1974. An academic philosopher’s alternative to socialist and related political paradigms. Popper, Karl. Objective Knowledge.An Evolutionary Approach.Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979. Popper’s objectivist epistemology, one of the alternativesto the “sociology of knowledge.” Rasmussen, Douglas andDen Uyl, Douglas.Liberg andNature: A n Aristotelian Defense o fthe Liberal Order. LaSalle, Ill.: Open Court, 1991. Two academic philosophers’ readable work in political philosophy favoring an Aristotelian and Lockean political model. Roche, George. The Fall of the Ivory Tower. New York: Henry Regnery, 1994. A merciless critique of the economic and statist underpinningsof contemporary academia.

Index abstraction, rejected by Fascism and materialism, 21-30. See also Fascism; practice academicians. See education; educators; intellectuals Acceptance-Denial defense, 107 action. See Fascism; practice Acton, Lord, 29 Advanced Marxism,Age of, 6 n.1, 182 advertising, 62, 65 n.39 affirmative action: basedon materialist principles, 68-74, 77-80; and quotas in the U.S., 77-80; in socialist countries, 6869, 71, 181-86. See also ethics Althusser, Louis, 1, 6 n.2, 102, 103, 104, 112, 136, 147, 152, 165 n.4 altruism: and coercion (mandates, compulsion), 70-86, 91-98; in Fascism, materialism, National Socialism, 22, 27-30, 68, 81-86, 90, 94-98, 140-41, 144-45; foundational to the socialist countries, 68-69, 82, 83, 94-95, 140-41; more dangerous than overt despotism, 97; problems of, 82-84. See also ethics; National Labor Service; National Socialism Anderson, Terry, 121 anti-foundationalism, 154. See also epistemology

Apocalyptic Visionsand Elastic Displacement of the Objects of Oppression and the Sources of Liberation defense, 11214 Argentina, Fascism in, 84 Aristotle, 98 arithmetic, used to instill political correctness in USSR, 181 Aron, Raymond, 1, 7 n.8, 104, 105, 130, 139, 185 art: Greek, transcends historical conditions, 50; U.S. and Soviet materialist professors on, 19-20, 38, 160-63, 182, 183 Asian Mode of Production.See HumptyDumpty defense atomism (social) of classical liberalism, attacked by Fascism, materialism, and National Socialism, 21-30, 148. See also Fascism; Gentile, Giovanni; liberalism: classical Austin, J.L., 49 Austrian School of Economics.See BohmBawerk, Eugen von; Menger, Carl; Mises, Ludwig von author: collective, 3, 7 n.14, 45, 117 n.52, 146, 182-83; eliminated, 45. See also collectivism

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Index

authority. See coercion (mandates, compulsion); hegemony; power Ayers,Bill, 186, 189 n.50 Balzac, Honor6 de, 183 Barabash, Yuri, 57 Baranczak, Stanislav, 15 1, 164-65 Bartley, William Warren 111, 9, 14-15, 143 Bastiat, Frederic, 67 Bauer, Peter, 18 Becker, Gary, 2 Bell, Daniel, 4 Benjamin, Walter, 162 Benveniste, Emile, 148 Berlin Wall, 11 1 Bernstein, J. N., 152-53 Big Government, liked by both Americans and people in the socialist countries, 30 n.5, 111-12, 116 n.42. See also socialism Bogomolov, Oleg T., 137 Bohm-Bawerk, Eugen von, 1, 154 Bok, Derek, 171, 181 bolsheviks, 89. See also Lenin, V. I.; Mensheviks; Trotsky, Leon bourgeoisie: the entire class must be “swept away,” 13; its way of life is neurotic, 38. See also Capitalism Boyer, Ernest, 93 brain-drain, under socialism, 69 Brecht, Bertolt, 59, 162 Brimelow, Peter, 171 Bruckner, Pascal, 65 n.37 Brustein, Robert, l 9 Bukharin, Nikolai, 183 Bukovsky, Vladimir, 83, 181 bureaucratization, 127, 171-73 calculation, economic. See economics Callenbach, Ernest. See Misery As an Ideal defense canon: literary, attacked in USSR, 183; “opened,”183-84 Capital, shunned in favor of Marx’s “youthful” writings, 153 Capitalism: bad precisely becauseit delivers the goods to an ever larger part of the population, 57, 112; blamed by both So-

viet and American professors for practically everything, 23, 38, 80, 91, 110-13, 120, 159, 183-84; a business can be run like a post office, 139-40; buying and selling are evil, 13, 171; “convergence” with socialism, 179; economically successful people are “bandits,” 74; an ideology making Capitalists pretend their system is rationally grounded, 50; and Jews, 23; not yet implemented in Russia, 185; its practice of expropriation different from that of socialism, 76; profit looked down upon by intellectuals, 27, 91, 140-41, 171; “state capitalism” a false notion, 104-5, 107-10, 115 n.24 (see also Humpty-Dumpty defense); supports universities and foundations, 17172; supremely ethical (just) system, 73, 80-82, 84, 90, 98-99, 130; truly eliminated in the USSR, 104; useful to improve U.S. education, 90 Carnegie Foundation, on educational policy, 92-93 Castoriadis, Cornelius, 104 Castro, Fidel, 61, 125, 126 Central Committee of Russia in 1928,on political correctness, 182-83 Chapman, Stephen, 18 Charles University (Prague), Marx’s books cheaper than cabbages, 2 Chase Stuart, exemplary New Deal public servant, 82-83 Chicago School System, 92, 95 choice, not desirable, 94, 95, 98. See also education; freedom Chubb, John E. and Tony M. Moe, 90 CIA, wrong on viability of socialist economies, 179 class, constructs one’s ideas, 13-14, 50, 6970, 111, 161-72 classical liberalism.See liberalism coercion (mandates, compulsion), 78, 80, 81, 85, 91, 94, 98, 124-28; intrinsic to socialism, 2 6 2 7 , 35 n.69, 58, 99, 12426; necessary, 20, 26-27, 35 n.69, 58, 60, 70, 76-77, 98; socially corrupting, 99. See also Fascism; National Labor Service; power; socialism

Index collectivism: and authorship, 3, 7 n.14, 45, 117 n.52, 146, 182-83; foundational for materialism, Fascism, and National Socialism, 20-30, 3 7 4 3 , 84-86, 95, 98; and labor camps (Gulags), 140; politically correct, 182; and primitivism, 122; related to nationalism, 29; and science, 42; undermines individual responsibility, 13637; in USSR’s agriculture, 140. See also economics; epistemology; Tribal Theory of Knowledge Collier, Peter, 84 commodity fetishism, explained similarly by Soviet and American professors, 162-63. See also Apocalyptic Visionsand Elastic Displacement of the Objects of Oppression and the Sources of Liberation defense Commoner, Barry, 120 Communist Mantfesto shunned in favor of Marx’s “youthful” writings, 153 communitarianism, 4-5; central notion in Fascism, materialism, and National Socialism, 21-30, 95, l l l ; code word for socialism/Fascism, 80-86, 90, 132; in Fascism it transcends class polarization of Marxism, 26 compulsion. See coercion (mandates, compulsion) Comte, Auguste, 7 n.18, 50 concreteness, primacy of, in materialism and Fascism, 40. See also practice conflict (or struggle), 41, 56, 161, 166 n.29. See also contradiction; hegemony; power consciousness: constructed socially and politically (by “social being”), 14, 16, 38, 92, 140, 141, 14648, 161-62; not socially and politically constructed, 13738, 151, 155-56, 163. Seealso epistemolOgY

conservatism, American, 22-23, 40, 169, 175 consumerism. See Apocalyptic Visions and Elastic Displacement of the Objects of Oppression and the Sources of Liberation defense; Capitalism; Misery As an Ideal defense; workers

195

contradiction: contradictions of materialism, 152-65 (seealso Bohm-Bawerk, Eugen von; epistemology; Mises, Ludwig von; relativism); in materialist jargon, 10, 56, 161, 166 n.29 convergence of Capitalism and socialism, 179 cooperation preferable to competition.See collectivism; education; ethics; excellence Critical Legal Theory, 3, 12 Critical Theory, 11, 12; semantic trickery of, 31 n.8. See also Frankfurters Critique of the Gotba Program, 68, 70-73, 75, 115 n.34 Croce, Benedetto, 154 Crozier, Brian, 7 n.9 Cuba: eulogized, 19-20; really socialist country, 121-26. See also AcceptanceDenial defense cultural studies, 14648, 159-60. See also culture; politics culture: adversarial, 2; all cultures are equally valid, 46, 143; code word for “mode of production,” 162

Dante, 57 Darrow, Clarence, 3 Darwin, 44, 142. See also genetics deconstruction, can serve materialist discourse,3,128-29,145 defenses, Marxist. See chapters G and 7 De Man, Paul, 145 democracy, relativized and mocked by Trotsky, 4 8 4 9 , 58. See also Orwell, George democratic socialism, 58 Denial defense, 51, 101-6, 170 Den Uyl, Douglas, 65 n.39 Descombes, Vincent, 185 Desperation defense, 132 Dewey, John, 3-5, 126 dialectics: allows one to be always right, 184-85; practical consequences of, 13536; so sophisticated that masses cannot grasp it, 61-62; undialectical quality of “social being’ notion, 17 Dictionary o f Scientific Communism, 115 n.30

196

Index

“distortion” ofsocialism. See Denial defense; socialism Dole, Elizabeth, 79 domination. See hegemony; power domination of the past by the present, 13, 111, 145. See also O’Brien (in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four)

Dos Passos, John, 169 Drieu La Rochelle, Pierre, 30 Duke University, literary theorists at, 7 n.lO, 12, 33 n.42, 189 n.40 Durante, Walter, 125 Eagleton, Terry, 1, 6 n.1 Early Marxism, Age of,6 n. 1 Eastland, Terry, 40, 78 Eastman, Max, 82 ecology, 60, 62, 88 n.53, 112-14, 120-21, 124-28. See also Misery As an Ideal defense economic democracy. See Humpty-Dumpty defense economics: Austrian School of(see BohmBawerk, Eugen von; Menger, Carl; Mises, Ludwig von); economic calculation impossible under socialism, 105, 140, 157, 177; freedom of the marketplace illusory, 13, 27; an ideology, 13839, 156-58; intellectuals’ ignorance of, 139-40, 179-80; and the problems of socialist countries, 84, 138-42, 257, 277, 179-80; rejected because it falsified materialist teachings, 120-21, 156-58; USSR economy presumably posed a challenge to the West, 105, 179-80 Ecotopia. See Misery As an Ideal defense education: against excellence and promediocrity, 71, 78, 79, 90-94, 95, 96; against individualist “ideology,” 91; against magnet schools, 95; as caring, 90; Carnegie Foundation report, 92-93; Chicago School System of, 92, 95; conformist, 174; doublethink in, 91; downgrading of testing and grading, 90, 92-93; and Gulags (re-education camps), 140; must be cooperative, 93; must treat students unequally, 72, 75, 78; in National Socialism (see N a p o h ) ; National

Standards for U.S. History, 15-16; scholarships are based on need rather than merit, 79; schools as centers to teach and provide social services, 90, 93, 170-73; schools of education follies, 78, 91; should be used to feed students, 93; should include “child care,” 93; social conditions make children flunk, 92; and socialism, 89-100, 170-73; in socialist countries, 68, 71, 79, 82-84, 89-90, 93, 102, 161-62, 181-86; teaches advantages of coercion, 91; teaches altruism, 90, 9293; tilted against the middle class, 95; a tool to train people politically, 19, 93, 182; tries to keep the superior down, 70, 71, 75, 79, 89-90, 93, 94; “voluntarism” in, 91; vouchers, 85, 95, 178; would benefit from Capitalist measures, 90. See also altruism; ethics; excellence educators: benefit from dismissal of workers as revolutionary force, 113; ignorance of economics, 178-80; profit looked down upon by, 27, 91, 171; their self-interest disguised (ideology), 113, 177-79; should be supported by government and taxpayers, 177-78. See also education; intellectuals egalitarianism. See equality elites, intellectual. See intellectuals elitism, hidden in materialist discourse,5763,67-68, 71-72 Ellis, John M., 7 n.lO, 122-23 empirical knowledge.See epistemology empiricism, merely another ideology,63. See also epistemology; science Engels, Frederick, 38, 75-76, 142, 183 environment: replaces the workers in materialist agenda, 112-14, 120; worse under really existing socialism, 109, 112, 113. See also ecology; environmentalism; free market environmentalism environmentalism: epistemological, 5; free market, 121; used to further socialism, 112-14, 120-28. See also ecology; environment envy, as principle of social behavior, 177 epistemology: abandoned by materialism for strategic reasons, 120-21, 152-55; and

Index AIDS virus, 14243; antifoundationalism, 154; common sense dismissed in materialist, 61-62; and economic problems of socialism, 138-39; and ethics, 155; in Fascism, materialism, and National Socialism, 21-30,7677, 13548, 152-55; and freedom, 41-42, 49, 62-63, 98, 155; and history, 141; impossible within a materialist framework, 152; and induction, 130; materialist, rejected by Russian reformers, 1 3 6 37; not socially and politically constructed, 152-65; polylogism in, 131, 155; problemsand contradictions of materialist, 13548, 152-65; and science, 141-45; socially and politically constructed, 30, 39-40, 57, 63, 14043; and Soviet agriculture, 140, 141; Tribal Theory of Knowledge, 40. See also hegemony; Orwell, George; politics equality: according to Marx, Mises, and Lenin people are not equal, 70, 72-73; of distribution not enough, 69, 71, 75; and Fascist approach in the U.S., 4 0 4 1 , 84-86; institutionalized in the socialist countries, 68, 71, 82-84, 89-90, 93, 115; legal equality, insufficient and bourgeois, 71, 75; of opportunity not enough, 68-71, 75; in Per6n’s neo-Fascist Argentina, 84; requires government (legal) coercion, 70-71, 73-75, 81-86, 99; requires keeping the superior down, 7075, 78-80; thoroughly implemented by the Red Khmer, 93, 115 n.34; used to create inequalities favorable to the egalitarians, 67-68, 86 n. 1, 89, 113, 122, 144-45, 177 equalizers, unequal power of, 67-68, 86 n. 1 essentialism. See hypostasis Ethical State, 22, 25, 40, 81, 84, 86. See also Fascist Ethical State and Mickey Kaus’ “Work-Ethic State” ethics (see chapters 4 and 5) of Capitalism, 73, 80-82, 84,90,98-99, 130, 140; classical liberal, 22-23, 28-29, 98-99; of infantilization, 17, 61, 62; of materialism, 67-1 10; parasitic in socialism, 9798; requires freedom to choose, 98, 155;

197

of USSR, praised by John Maynard Keynes, 83. See also altruism; coercion (mandates, compulsion); equality; excellence; politics evidence. See epistemology; truth evolution, Engels on, 142 excellence: the excellentor superior must be kept down, 69-71, 92-94; materialism’s hidden recognition of, 71-73; merely a social construction, 69-70, 90-91; striving for perfection not practical, 96. See also education; mediocrity experiments, social, in Russia, China, Cuba, etc., 69-70, 90-91, 93, 186 Fairbank, John King, 103 false consciousness. See ideology Fang Li-Zhi, 42-43 Fascism: against “social atomism” of classical liberalism, 21-30, 148; connection to materialism, 21-30, 36 n.80, 40, 49, 63, 77, 148, 154-55; and Ethical State, 22, 25, 40, 81, 84, 86; its growing acceptance in the US.,22, 26, 80-85, 87 11.37;organic viewpoint of, 26, 148; in Per6n’s Argentina, 84; and politicization, 20-22,30,77, 135, 154-55; and power principle, 22, 56, 63, 153; transcends class polarization of Marxism, 26 Fascist Ethical State and Mickey Kaus’ “Work-Ethic State,” 22, 40, 8 1 feminism: individualist or libertarian, 53 n.34; non-individualist or collectivist, 3, 38, 4 0 4 1 , 4 3 4 4 ,141-42, 163. See also genetics; sex Fest, Joachim, 21, 29 Feuer, Lewis S., 4, 5, 122, 131, 144 fideism, 131 Finn, Chester E., Jr., 90 Fischer, Ernest, 135-36 Fish, Stanley, 12, 31 n.15 Flew, Antony, 3, 39, 58, 62, 68 force. See coercion (mandates, compulsion); hegemony; power Formula, Marxist. See Marxist Formula (“It has always been X, therefore. ..”) foundations, philanthropic, 19-20, 34 11.46 Frank, Waldo, 103

198

Index

Frankfurters, 11, 12, 21, 31 n.8, 186 Frankfurt School, 12, 21. See also Frankfurters Franklin, Benjamin, 169 freedom: constructed by social rulesand politics and therefore relative, 13, 76-77 (see also Orwell, George); downgraded by materialism, Fascism, and National Socialism, 12-13, 21-22,25-26, 27, 2930, 38, 76-77; downgraded by U.S. progressives, 94, 95, 98, 112 (see also education); and epistemology, 41-42, 49, 6263, 155; of the market is illusory, 13, 27; masses do use freedom to choose, 62-63; of the mind defendedby Orwell, 49; needed for ethics, 98, 155; newly defended in Russia after 1989, 32 n.18; not too important for many, 11 1-12, 116 n.42; of science defended by Fang LiZhi, 42-43 free market. See Capitalism free market environmentalism, 121 Frege, Gottlob, 151 French Communist Party, 102 French intelligentsia: New Philosophers, 185-86 (see also Ltvy, Bernard-Henry); retreat from Marxism, 1, 6 n.2 Friedman, David, 2 Friedman, Milton, 6 n.4 Frost, Robert, 71, 97, 121 Furet, FranCois, 5 Galbraith, John Kenneth, 62, 103, 105, 112, 120, 179-81 Gallo, Robert C., 142-43 Garcia Mkrquez, Gabriel, 186 Gatto, John Taylor, 4 Gellner, Ernest, 31 n.7, 185 gender, 44. See ulso epistemology; feminism; hegemony; ideology; sex genetics, dreaded by materialist discourse, 38,44, 141-42, 163 genocide, 30 n.5, 55, 114 n.13, 115 11.34 Gentile, Giovanni, 21-22, 24-26, 40, 50, 77, 95, 148, 155 Gide, Andre, 103 Goebbels, Joseph, 23, 26, 85 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 136-37

Gramsci, Antonio, 19, 39, 153 Great Books: are not political constructs, 158-59, 164; are political constructs, 47-49 Great October Socialist Revolution, 39 Great Society, 93. See alsa Johnson, Lyndon B. Greek Art, transcends changing historical conditions, 50 Griboedov, Aleksandr, 183 Guevara, Cht, 58 Gurley, John G., 105, 179-80 Guzmin, Abimail, 186 Habermas, Juergen, 31 n.8, 114. See also Frankfurters Haldane, J.B.S., 141 Hall, Gus, 102 Halliday, Fred, 46 Harvard Law School, 12 Havel, Vaclav, 163 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 3 Hayden, Tom, 107 Hayek, F. A., 18, 30, 53 n.46, 72, 122 Hayman, Ray, 170 hegemony: foundational notion in materialism, Fascism, and National Socialism, 13, 14-15, 51, 56, 63; in Orwell, 148; the ultimate given, 55-57, 63, 95, 148, 15256. See also coercion (mandates, compulsion); epistemology; politics; power Heidegger, Martin, 23-24 Heilbroner, Robert, 136 Heller, Mikhail and Alexandr Nekrich, 4, 184 Hicks, Granville, 103 High Marxism, Age of. See Advanced Marxism, Age of historical construction of meanings. See epistemology; history; ideology history: in the classic, non-materialist sense, 50, 184; merely a political weapon and a matter of practice, 45, 47, 48, 105-6, 130-31, 135, 137, 141, 152-65;National Standards for U.S. History, 15-16 Hitler, Adolf, 21, 29, 63, 85, 135 Hoffer, Eric, 30, 36 n.80

Index holism. See organic viewpoint Hollander, Paul, 4, 5, 109, 132 Hollis, M., 155 Hope Springs Eternal defense, 5 1, 129-32 Hoppe, Hans-Hermann, 2 Horkheimer, Max, 11, 21, 31 n.8, 186. See also Frankfurters Horowitz, David, 4 Hughes, Robert, 39 human action. See Mises, Ludwig von humanism, 2; bourgeois, 182 humanistic research: inevitably a political activity, 42; very objectionable, 183 human nature: men are naturally lazy according to Marx and Trotsky, 60, 156; relative and malleable, 13-14; universal and unchangeable, 137-38, 15 1, 15556. See also O’Brien (in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four);universal values human needs, pretext for political control, 17-18 Hume, David, 129-31, 176 Hume’s Law, 176; in materialism, 12, 17, 42, 48, 56-57. See also Marxist Formula (“It has always been X, therefore ...”) Humpty-Dumpty defense, 47, 107-10 hypostasis, 8 n.28 ideological formation, notion central to materialism in USSR and U.S., 38, 52 nn.9, 10. See also socioeconomic formation ideology: according to materialist discourse, 16, 18-21, 39, 49-51, 63, 91, 104, 13848, 152-65, 177, 182; in the classical sense, 174; materialism exempts itself from iron rule of, 16, 18-20; materialist, code word for mode of production, 162; materialist, debunked by Mises, 156-58; materialist, and jury selection, 16; of professors,177-82 individual, has power only if he ceases to be an individual, 55 individualism: “excessive,” attacked by materialism, Fascism, and National Socialism,21-30, 38, 85, 140, 141, 146, 182; “excessive,” attacked by US.professors, 27-28, 91, 94, 98; an ideology, 146 individualist feminism. See feminism

199

individuality, related to inequality by Marx, 72,73 individuals: must be unequal to be individuals, 72, 73; are socially constructed, 110 induction, 129-31 inequality. See equality infantilization of the population, 17, 61, 62 Ingsoc (“English Socialism”), 11 1.See also O’Brien (in Orwell’s Nineteen EightyFour) intellectuals, 1, 3-6; and Denial defense, 105-7; elitism of, 57-63, 64 n.lO, 6768, 112-14, 122, 127, 176-79;French, 1 , 6 n.2, 30,77, 185-86; and HumptyDumpty defense, 108-9; their ignorance of economics, 138-40, 179-80; and irrationalism, 131, 152-53 (see also coercion [mandates, compulsion]); politically correct ones should be produced as in a factory, 183; and primitivism, 122-23; Russian, 2, 4-5, 182-84; schizophrenia of, 106; self-serving materialism of, 6768, 86 n.1, 89, 113, 122, 14445, 148, 161, 169; and socialism, 139-40, 17687; and terror, 185-87; utopian, 127; Western, praisers of real socialism in the socialist countries, 12, 102-5, 126. See also education; educators Isaac, Rae1 Jean and Erich Isaac, 127 James,William, 2 Jameson, Fredric, 7 n.lO, 38 Jews, 23 Johnson, Lyndon B., 85 Josephson, Matthew, 103 Jouzaitis, Carol, 70 Judt, Tony, 185 juries, 16. See also equality; justice; law justice: as literature, 142-43; a matter of practice rather than objective, 12; redefined, 71-76, 78. See also epistemology; equality; law; practice; truth Kaus, Mickey, 4 0 4 1 , 8 1-86 Kautsky, Karl, 12-13, 26, 48, 59 Kelley, David, 74 Kennedy, Eugene, 71

200

Index

Keynes, John Maynard, 83 Khmer Rouge. See Pol Pot; Red Khmer knowledge, scientific, 2; socially constructed, 40. See also epistemology Kojke, Alexander, 185-86 Konstantinov, F. V., 52 n.10 Kramer, Rita, 91 Kristol, Irving, 4 Krylenko, Nikolai V., 11-12 Kuhn, Thomas, 14-15, 143 Kulikova, I. S., 162-63 Kundera, Milan, 135 Kurowski, Stefan, 2-3 labor, militarized. See National Labor Service; Trotsky, Leon labor theory of value,2-4, 158 Laclau, Ernesto and Chantal Mouffe, 55 Lane, Rose Wilder, 2 Laski, Harold, 12 Lassalle, Ferdinand de, 38, 75 Late Marxism, Age of, 6 n.1, 101 law: in the materialist sense, 11-12, 16, 69-73, 76-78. See also equality; ethics; justice leadership principle, in National Socialism, 23 Leal, Donald R., 121 Lederman, Leon, 151 Lenin, V. I., 10, 30 n.5, 39, 50, 59-60, 73, 76, 109, 139-40, 153, 183, 184 Lermontov, Mikhail, 183 Lerner, Max, 103 Lkvy, Bernard-Henry, 30, 77, 186 liberalism: American, as social democracyor socialism, 23; classical, attacked by materialism, Fascism, and National socialism, 21-30, 38; classical, defined, 22-23, 2829, 98-99; a suburban ideology, 40; useful to further leftist goals, 55 libertarianism. See liberalism: classical liberty. See freedom Locke, John, 2 logic, merely the offspring of power, 57. See also epistemology; truth London, Herbert, 89-90 Lukics, Georg, 39, 59, 61, 152, 156, 162, 186

lying. See epistemology; truth Lysenko, Trofim, 44, 141 Machan, Tibor, 2 Mach, 56. See also hegemony; National Socialism; power macropsychology, 3. See also psychology Malevich, Kazimir, 182 Maltsev, Yuri, 1 mandates. See coercion (mandates, compulsion) Maoism, and professors, 7 n.lO, 93, 103, 114 n.13. See also Mao Tse-tung Mao Tse-tung, 7 n.10, 55-56, 60, 93, 103, 114 n.13, 140 Marchais, George, 102 Marcuse, Herbert, 57-59 marketplace, an ideology, 138. See also economics Marx, Karl, 2, 7 n.17, 12, 13, 16, 17, 31 n.12, 38, 39, 42, 58-62, 68-72, 75, 9798, 104, 108-9, 120, 132, 148, 152-53, 156-59,183-85 Marxist Formula (“It has always been X, therefore. ..”),12, 17, 42, 48, 56, 63, 69, 76, 77, 177, 184. See also Hume’s Law masses, 62-63 material culture: code word for “mode of production,” 162; Soviet professors on, 161-62 materialism: came into being out of historical necessity, 42; and the “dustbin of history,” 7 n.9; omnipotent, universally applicable, and not relative, 16, 39, 42; problems and contradictions of, 135-48, 152-65, 184, 189 n.41 (seealso BohmBawerk, Eugen von; Mises, Ludwig von); unhistorical, 141, 164, 184, 189 n.41. See also epistemology; ethics; hegemony; ideology; Marxist formula (“It has always been X, therefore ...”); politics; practice; terror material studies. See material culture mayimbes, produced by the primacy of politics, 82. See also political animals Mead, Margaret, 3 mediocrity: as educational goal in USSR

201

Index and the U.S., 71, 79, 89-96; from schools to the workplace, 96-97; sponsored by the state under real socialism, 89. See also education; excellence Mendel, Gregor, 141 Menger, Carl, 169 Mensheviks, 137-38, 156, 184-85 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 102-3, 185-86 Merquior, J. G., 3, 39 middle-of-the-road-policies and socialism, 132 military model of social organization,27, 60, 85 Mills, C. Wright, 103 Misery As an Ideal defense, 119-28 Mises, Ludwig von, 1, 2, 72-73, 105, 125, 132, 140, 155, 156, 157, 158, 177 mode of production, 162. See also economics; material culture Modern Language Association, Marxist frame of reference of, 3 Montessori, Maria, 4 Morson, Gary Saul, 175 multiculturalism, 3, 19, 39; practical problems of, 46, 62, 84 Mussolini, Benito, 21, 35 n.78 N a p o h (Nationalpolitische Erziehungsaujtalten), 2 1

nationalism, relation to collectivism, 29, 35 n.66, 84 National Labor Service: advocated by National Socialism, 23-24; advocated by Trotsky, 2627; advocated in the US., 85, 91; decried by the Mensheviks, 76, 137-38, 156, 184-85; less productive, 137-38; not voluntary, 85 National Socialism: against free market and individualism, 23, 24, 26, 85; based on notion of power, 56; connection to materialism, 21-30, 56, 63, 154; and education, 21; prepared by German educators, 180. See also epistemology; Fascism; National Labor Service; politics; power National Standards for U.S. History, 15-16 needs. See infantilization of the population Nekrich, Alexandr. See Heller, Mikhail Neruda, Pablo, 186

Neusner, Jacob, 175 New Deal, 71, 82-83, 97, 121 new historicism, 3; and materialist discourse, 39, 189 n.44 New or Improved Socialism defense, 12829 New Philosophers (French), 185-86. See also Ltvy, Bernard-Henry Nietzsche, Friedrich, 56 Nock, Albert J., 2 Nomenklatura, 2; produced by primacy of politics, 82. See also political animals objectivity, 151-65; abandoned by materialism, 120-21, 152-53, 156-57; comes back with a vengeance, 136-48, 180-81; once supported by materialism, 120, 15253, 156; rejected by Ingsoc, 145-48; and subjectivity in materialism, Fascism, and National Socialism, 9, 21-30, 37, 4243, 50. See also epistemology; truth O’Brien (in Orwell’sNineteen Eighty-Four), echoes materialist teachings, 9, 13, 37, 55, 56, 61, 63, 111, 137, 14648, 155. See also epistemology; hegemony; politics; power; truth organic viewpoint, in Fascism, materialism, and National Socialism, 26 Ortega y Gasset,Jost, 189 n.41 Orwell, George, 9-11, 13, 14, 17, 32 11.19, 53 n.46, 49, 55, 56, 61, 72, 73, 111, 115 n.28, 135, 145-48, 155. Seealso epistemology; objectivity; O’Brien (in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four) overdetermination, 103, 186 Pareto, Wilfredo, 89, 14445 Parkin, Frank, 162 past dominated by the present in Marxist thought. See O’Brien (in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four)

patriarchy, 5. See also feminism: non-individualist or collectivist PC. See political correctness Peikoff, Leonard, 22, 151 Perbn, Juan Domingo, 84 “the personal is the political,” 15-20. See also politics

202

Index

property. See Capitalism philosophy of power, 153, 154. See also heprosperity fines, 74 gemony; power psychology, 3; mental problems are social, Plato, 172, 176, 178 political animals, bred by politicization, 18, 38 public sector: hierarchical over the private 82 political correctness, 113, 116; Bertolt according to Fascism, materialism, and National Socialism, 21-30, 35 n.78, 39Brecht and Walter Benjamin not correct enough, 162; and genetics, 242; in so41. See also National Labor Service public servants, actually hold power over cialist countries, 69, 141, 182-83; theothose they serve, 69 retical basis of, 18-19, 39 public service, ideal of working without political readings: by M a x and Engels, 38, 183; by professors in the U.S., 181-82; pay, 27, 91 Pushkin, Alexandr, 183 by professors in the USSR, 183 politics: central notion in materialism, FasQueer Theory, 3 1 n. 16 cism, and National Socialism, 2, 20-22, Quindlen, Ann, 40 30, 42, 153, 154-55; central to life in quotas. See affirmative action; coercion socialist countries, 17; and literary criti(mandates, compulsion); equality; ethics; cism, 38, 183; practical consequences of justice its theoretical primacy, 17-18, 19, 2130, 33 n.39, 82, 13548, 152-65, 182race norming. See affirmative action 84; Russian artists against primacy of, Rand, Ayn, 2, 31 n.14 182. See also epistemology Raphael, 38 Pol Pot, 61, 93, 115 n.34, 186 Ratiff, William, 126 polylogism, 13, 16, 49-50,155-56 reader-response criticism: collectivist, 12, Popper, Karl, 1, 2, 130, 163 45-56; individualist, 45 power: central notion in the materialist view reality. See objectivity of the world, 55-63, 95, 148, 153; of equalizers is unequal, 67-68, 86 n.1; pro- really existing socialism.See socialism fessors’ yearning for, 57, 64 n.lO, 82-83. reason, a historical construction, 50 See also coercion (mandates, compulsion); Red Khmer, 93, 186. See also Pol Pot Reich, Charles, 120 Fascism; hegemony;Macht; National SoReich, Robert, 74 cialism; politics practice: determines truth, 14, 141, 166 Relabeling defense.See Humpty-Dumpty defense n. 15, 170; need for coercion in, 70; theoretical primacy in Fascism, materialism, relativism: in Fascism and materialism, 24, and National Socialism,12,21,40,41, 76-77, 166 n.15; problems of, 46, 4950, 130-31, 154-57, 166 n.15, 191; re44,47,4849, 50,76,141, 142, 152-56, 166 n.15. Seealso epistemology; power jected by materialism when applied to it“the private is really public” in materialism self, 16, 20, 31 n.13, 39, 48. See also epistemology; excellence;truth and Fascism, 15-20, 4 0 4 1 Ricardo, David, 158 professors. See education; educators; intelRickert, Heinrich, 155 lectuals Roche, George, 171 progressives, 4, 5, 12, 13, 18-19, 20; in Rockefeller, David, 94 both USSR and US., 68, 70, 73, 90, Rorty, Richard, 9, 42 107, 123, 180, 184 Rosenberg, Alfred, 24 proletariat, replacedby the environment, Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 122, 157 minorities, women, etc., 113. See also workers Rudd, Mark, 103

Index

203

ruling ideas and ruling class, 12, 31 11.12, 38, 164. See also hegemony; power

137-38; requires stasis, 126-27; selling and buying should be eliminated, 13; in the socialist countries praised by Western 11 1.19, 103, 105-8, sacrifice, more alluring than freedom in Naintellectuals, 12, 2 tional Socialism, 29. See also altruism; co125, 126, 141 n.2,successful 179; people under Capitalism are bandits, 74; ercion (mandates, compulsion) worker-managed factories in socialist Salisbury, Harrison, 103 Santayana, George, 22-23, 169, 175 See also altrucountries, 109, 116 n.35. ism; Capitalism; coercion (mandates, Sartre, Jean-Paul, 1, 4, 102-3, 185-86 compulsion) Schoeck, Helmut, 177 science: almost destroyed in USSR by mate- Socialism Would HaveTurned Out to Be Much Better Had Capitalism not Corrialist axioms, 141-42; cannot be free, rupted It defense, 110-12 38, 41, 44; its freedom defended, 42-43, 14148; an ideology socially constructed, socialist man, new, 39 14-15, 17,4146, 14048; as literature, socialist realism as artistic criterion, 19-20, 45, 14245; as rhetoric, 4445 38.See also art social justice, 74-75 scientists and brain-drain, 69 second law of thermodynamics politically society: code word for “mode of production,” 162;gives and takes everything, incorrect, 142 76, 109. See also ideology Seldon, Arthur, 130 service. See altruism; coercion (mandates, socioeconomic formation, notion central to materialism, 38-39, 52 n.lO, 162.See compulsion); public service servitude, involuntary. See coercion (manalso ideological formation sociology, dominates epistemology and dates, compulsion); voluntarism sex, devalued in favor of “gender,” 44 ethics, 37-40. See also epistemology; ethics Shaw, Bernard, 126 sociology of knowledge,3, 3940, 152-65. Shining Path guerrillas, 119, 123-24 Smith, Adam, 158 See also epistemology social atomism. See atomism (social) of clas- Socrates, 56 sical liberalism Solzhenitsyn, Alexandr, 1, 11, 31 n. 10, social being, constructs everything, 16. See 104, 130 epistemology; ideology: materialism Sowell, Thomas, 1, 154 social experiment. See experiments, social Stalin, Joseph, 55, 60, 85, 110, 125, Stalinism, 107-10. See also Denial defense; socialism: businesses can be run like the Humpty-Dumpty defense post office, 13940;“distorted,” 105, Stanford University School of Education, 184 (see also Denial defense); economic problems of, 105, 13840, 177-80 (see 90-9 1 also economics); and education, 89-100, State. See Fascist Ethical State and Mickey Kaus’ “Work-Ethic State” 170-73 (see also education: socialist State Capitalism. See Humpty-Dumpty decountries); eliminated exploitation of man by man in USSR, 39; and environfense mentalism, 109, 112, 113, 114,and120;State Ideological Apparatuses, 136, 138, intellectuals, 13940, 17687 (see also in141, 147 statism. See socialism tellectuals); must be buried if it lessens productivity, 138; “new,” 128-29; profit Stigler, George J., 15 171;really Stone, I. F., 103 looked down upon in, 27, 71, existed in the socialist countries, 102-10, Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 1 13 subjectivity. See objectivity 115 n.30; requires coercion, 26, 35 n.69,

135

204

Index

taxes, progressive, a materialist notion, 74 terror, and intellectuals, 185-87 Testscam, 78-79 Thatcher, Margaret, 140 theory of knowledge.See epistemology Third World: infantilization of, 62, 65 n.37; new group with revolutionary potential, 62 Thrasymachus, 56 Tribal Theory of Knowledge,40 Trilling, Lionel, 4 Trotsky, Leon, 13, 26-27, 31 n. 10, 47-48, 56, 60, 63, 76, 102, 110, 111, 137-38, 145,156,158-59,184-85 Trotskysts, in American academia, 102 truth: determined by practice, 9-14; in Fascism and National Socialism, 21-30; malleable because socially constructed, 914, 30 n.4, 14148, 164; not malleable or socially constructed, 15245; only a political weapon, 1 1, 21.See also epistemology; history;Orwell, George Tsypko, Alexandr, 83 Tyson, Laura D’Andrea, 103 unintended consequences of intended actions,180 Union of Soviet Socialist Republics: really socialist according to Western intellectuals, 102-3; shown by Castoriadis to have a socialist infrastructure, 104; its teachings replicated in the U.S., 16, 38-39, 52 nn.9, 10; a thoroughly politicized society, 17; thought to pose an economic “challenge” to the Capitalist West, 105, 179-80. See also socialism universal values: accepted by materialism for itself, 16, 31 n.13, 39, 48; but denied for others, 13, 4 7 4 9 , 76, 137-38; defended, 50, 137-38, 151, 155-56. See dlso human nature

Vietnam, 83-84 Vives, Juan Luis, 178 voluntarism: against working for profit, 27, 91; the communist approach to labor, 27; must be made compulsive (temporarily of course), 85, 91. See also altruism; coercion (mandates, compulsion); National Labor Service wealth: “given” by society rather than created or earned, 78; redistribution of, 29. See also Capitalism; socialism Webb, Patricia and Sidney Webb, 126 “We” has priority over “I.” See altruism; Fascism; Gentile, Giovanni Whittaker, John, 119 Windelband, Wilhelm, 155 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 50, 149 11.22, 155 Woiwode, Larry, 19 women’s studies.See feminism: nonindividualist workers: do not know what is best for them, 59, 61; managed factories in the socialist countries, 109, l16 11.35; naturally lazy, 60, 156; no longer have revolutionary potential, 112-14, 122-23; replaced by the environment, minorities, women, the “Third World,” 113, 12223; stupefied by Capitalist abundance, 57-59, 112. See also Capitalism Yakovlev, Alexander, 136 Yanayev, G. I., 102 Yeats, William Butler, has his value (resulting from his belonging to a specific ideological formation), 38 Zamyatin,Yevgeniy, 182 Zinoviev, Alexandr, 10, 18, 26, 89, 97, 11 1

ABOUT THE AUTHOR DARfO FERNANDEZ-MORERA is Associate Professor o f Comparative Literature and Hispanic Studies at Northwestern University. H e has published widely on critical discourse, the cultural encounter between European and Amerindians, Spanish literature, and contemporary historical and cultural events in Latin America.

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