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2019 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

1. The New Left and the Marxian Legacy: Early Encounters in the United States, France, and Germany

Author : Dick Howard

Published in: The Marxian Legacy

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

In the mid-1960s, as the Cold War seemed frozen into place after the Soviet repression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956, and the stalemate that defused the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, the spirit of a ‘New Left’ began to emerge in the West. Although encouraged by events in the Third World, its common denominator was the idea that the misunderstood (or misused) work of Karl Marx must have offered a theory that both explained the discontent with the present among a new generation of youth and could also offer them guidelines for future action. At once personal and social, critical and political, this expectation was encouraged by publications of the writings of the young Marx as well as the discovery of non-orthodox theorists and political activists whose critical work had been ignored or suppressed by Soviet-dominated communist parties. These theories represented an ‘unknown dimension’ that became the object of vigorous debate in the 1960s and early 1970s. The searching candle burned bright for a decade before it flamed out.

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next chapter Theory, the Theorist, and Revolutionary Practice: Rosa Luxemburg

C.f., the collection of essays that Karl E. Klare and I co-edited, The Unknown Dimension: European Marxism since Lenin (New York: Basic Books, 1972). The subtitle makes clear our political intention.

My translation from the note in the ‘Vorarbeiten’ titled by its editors ‘Nodal Points in the Development of Philosophy’ as published in Karl Marx. Frühe Schriften, H-J Lieber and Peter Furth, editors (Stuttgart: Cotta Verlag, 1962), p. 104.

John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice, published only in 1971, plays no role in the story I am telling. As for the British, the existence of a still vibrant trade union tradition helps to explain the persistence of a more-or-less orthodox Marxist orientation among leftists.

The climate changed rapidly; commercial publishers saw a market. Not known for critical perspicacity, one of the commercial editors, Doubleday, pushed their luck with the publication of a 450-page compilation of The Essential Stalin: Major Theoretical Writings, 1905–1952, edited by Stanford University professor, Bruce Franklin. C.f., the ironic critical review by Paul Breines in Telos No. 15 (Spring 1973).

C.f., ‘French New Working Class Theory’ (Vol. III, No. 2, May 1969) and ‘Genetic Economics vs. Dialectical Materialism’ (Vol. III, No. 4, August 1969). My edition of the Selected Political Writings of Rosa Luxemburg (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971) was designated ‘A Radical America Book’.

Robert Zwarg has recently published a lucid, richly detailed, and critically argued study of Die Kritische Theorie in Amerika. Das Nachleben einer Tradition (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2017). Zwarg uses the development of Telos and New German Critique to trace the afterlife of the Frankfurt tradition of critical theory. In the course of his presentation, he also offers a generous account of Radical America as well.

The issue also included my essay ‘On Marx’s Critical Theory’ which used the recently discovered manuscript of Marx’s Resultate des unmittelbaren Produktionsprozesses to demonstrate a continuity between the social analysis of the young Marx and the work of the mature political economist. As Rosa Luxemburg (whose work I was editing at the time) intuited, capitalism and its contradictions can only be understood as a system of social reproduction.

I had an early experience of the weight of Marxist orthodoxy at a conference on Rosa Luxemburg in Italy in 1973. My presentation asked how Rosa Luxemburg could beat once the most innovative of Marxist activists and yet the most dogmatic defender of Marx’s texts (e.g., against Bernstein’s revisionism). As it happens, the following day saw the coup d’état in Chile against the Socialist government of Salvador Allende. I instantly became persona non grata! A revised version of that paper was published in Telos, issue 18, ‘Rethinking Rosa Luxemburg’ (and reprinted in the first edition of The Marxian Legacy). Another example of this kind of pressure is seen in Trent Schroyer’s article in issue 12 of Telos, ‘The Dialectical Foundations of Critical Theory’, the author feels compelled to begin his discussion of Habermas with an apology: ‘Despite the vilification of the left, and to the dismay of the academy, Jürgen Habermas remains a Marxist’.

My introductory essays situated historically the two co-founders of the journal Socialisme ou Barbarie in the context of French leftist politics and political theory. They became the basis of the chapters on Lefort and Castoriadis published in The Marxian Legacy.

The last article that I published, ‘Enlightened Despotism and Democracy’ (in issue 33, Fall 1977), built from a historical reconstruction to pose a question that led me to turn from the model of the French Revolution to reconsider the history of the American Revolution. The article touched as well on themes that became basic to the critique of totalitarianism.

A far-reaching synthesis that I found convincing was published in 1992 by two editors whose contribution to Telos had been significant; c.f., Jean L. Cohen and Andrew Arato, in Civil Society and Political Theory (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992). Both Cohen and Arato, as well as Heller and Feher, finally left Telos by the early 1990s, when they were unable to overcome the influence of the right-wing Schmittian grand theorists.

C.f., ‘A Politics in Search of the Political’, Theory and Society, 1, 1974, pp. 271–306; ‘The Return of the Political’, Thesis Eleven, Nr. 8, 1984, pp. 77–91; and ‘A Political Theory for Marxism’, New Political Science, Nr. 13, Winter 1984, pp. 5–26.

C.f., his declaration of refusal, reprinted in http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1964/12/17/sartre-on-the-nobel-prize/

I later used my pseudonym when I published an article on Czech student dissidents that relied on information that could have harmed friends there. C.f., ‘Czech-Mating Stalinism’ in Commonweal, May 17, 1968. I refer below to my debt to the dissidents whom I knew in the 1960s. It should be noted that although both Communists and Trotskyists claimed the legacy of Marx, they both were far more justified when they presented themselves as heirs to Lenin!

I knew already from reading one of the few books on Marx that was widely available in the United States, C. Wright Mills’ The Marxists (New York: Penguin Books, 1962), that the crucial problem for a contemporary Marxist would be to define what the ‘working class’ could mean in contemporary societies.

All three of these books were published by the Éditions du Seuil. I discuss the theories of Mallet and Gorz in The Unknown Dimension, op. cit. I return to Gorz’s later work in the ‘Afterword’ to the second edition of The Marxian Legacy, reprinted in this edition, and reconsider his philosophical path in Chap. 7 of Between Politics and Antipolitics.

Gorz’s idea of a ‘New Left’ differed from my own vague understanding; his was strongly influenced by the Italian trade union theorists around the CGIL. After we had become friends, he once told me that he was the editor who had refused to publish my essay on the American New Left in Les Temps Modernes, even though it had been accepted in an official letter to me by his colleague, Claude Lanzmann. I have been unable to find a copy of my manuscript.

The former, I came to learn, identified with Maoism, the latter with one of the two Trotskyist factions. At the time, neither my knowledge of French nor my understanding of Marxist scholastics was sufficient to grasp the distinction. I did write, in early June, an account of the May events on the basis of my experience. A copy was sent by courier (the post office was closed) to the journal Viet Report. I do not know whether it arrived. Meanwhile, a friend in London who borrowed by carbon copy never returned it!

I was part of the overflow crowd at Althusser’s lecture, ‘Lénine et la philosophie’, at the Société Française de Philosophie on February 24, 1968. Althusser, who remained a party member, could appeal to the science of structures to criticize forms of ‘ideology’ that didn’t fit the prevailing party views.

(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1972).

Published in Towards a New Marxism (St. Louis: Telos Press, 1973). This publication was no doubt a sign of Telos’ self-confidence rather than of the result of its rejection by commercial publishers. I would similarly publish my first work with small leftist publications ‘outside the mainstream’. Another reason for these publications was the intense desire to communicate, immediately, with others caught up in the same ‘movement’. C.f., the chapter on Sartre in The Marxian Legacy.

The volume was published under the pseudonym of Epistémon (Paris: Fayard, 1968). Its author was Didier Anzieu, a psychoanalyst and professor of psychology at Nanterre; and his title is of course a wordplay on John Reed’s well-known account of the Russian Revolution as ‘Seven Days That Shook the World’.

C.f., Esprit, mars 1968, pp. 506–508.

The German edition was first published in 1936. The English translation by David Carr appeared in 1970. Telos published some fragments of Husserl’s text without authorization (in Number 4, Fall 1969). Affirming its political principles, the editorial page insisted that ‘Since ideas should neither be sold nor bought, none of the included material is copyrighted and can be used for any purpose whatsoever by anyone’. It did the same with chapters from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s as yet untranslated Adventures of the Dialectic in Numbers 6 and 7. The English translation by Joseph Bien appeared only in 1973.

C.f., volume 4, Fall 1969.

I had been there and agreed. It had been Ricoeur’s support that brought me to Paris, in part on the basis of an exchange of letters in which I tried to show how I thought phenomenology could provide the basis for rethinking New Left and anti-war politics. See Ricoeur’s letters of May 15, 1965, and November 5, 1965, and my letter of February 6, 1966, in DH Archive at Stony Brook University.

I should add, however, that David Carr, the English translator of Husserl’s Krisis, who was also at the conference, pointed out to me that his impression was that there was perhaps too much, but too vague, a discussion of the life-world. He himself had presented a paper on that theme. C.f., his ‘Diskussionsbeitrag’, to the publication of the papers presented: Vérité et vérification/Wahrheit und Verifikation (Actes du 4ème Collques internationale de Phénoménologie), ed. H. L. Van Breda (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1974), pp. 95–96.

I leave aside the very different interpretation of the life-world and lived-experience by Heidegger. It did not play a significant role among readers of Telos, although most did read the (difficult if not unreadable) translation into English and some were fascinated by its still influential French variant.

Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) had been the youth organization of the Social Democratic League for Industrial Democracy. It declared its autonomy from its parent in 1960.

In fact, the generally available and inexpensive East German edition (the Marx Engels Werke, familiarly called ‘die blauen Bänder’) did not include many of the early philosophical works of the young Marx. These could be found in the more expensive edition of the Frühe Schriften published by the Cotta Verlag only in 1962, which I took care to cite in my writings about the young Marx.

Perhaps in the Enlightenment tradition, when Amsterdam was a center of pirate editions, the last-named book had a publisher (Amsterdam: Verlag de Munter, 1967), the others were usually done by anonymous collectives and were undated. There were other pirate editions, for example, of Karl Korsch and of Wilhelm Reich’s 1934 journal called Sex-Pol (as well as a pocket-sized, illustrated version of Der sexuelle Kampf der Jugend). One found also editions of authors who had abandoned their former political theories, such as Karl August Wittfogel, Franz Borkenau, and Richard Löwenthal (under the pseudonym Paul Sering). Another large volume, retyped by anonymous collaborators (like the Samizdat publications that helped bring down the Soviet Union), previously published texts from academic journals under the title Kritik und Interpretation der Kritischen Theorie: über Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, Benjamin, Habermas.

All three essays appeared in volume 6 of the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung (1937), which was copyrighted in Paris by the Librairie Félix Alcan in 1938.

(München: Verlag C.H. Beck, 2015).

C.f., the reconstruction of Habermas’ philosophical development in the first edition of The Marxian Legacy. I keep this theoretical development separate from his political writings in Chap. 5 of this edition, which are the subject of that chapter, ‘Citizen Habermas’, republished in Between Politics and Antipolitics: Thinking About Politics After 9/11 (New York & London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). At the time, international connections were strong, as reflected in, for example, Alfred Schmidt’s contribution to The Unknown Dimension. I knew many of the SDS leaders from Frankfurt criticized by Habermas, including the charismatic Hans-Jürgen Krahl, whose necrology, as noted above, was published in Telos. Others, such as Rainer Zoll, a life-long friend, who had left the university to work for the IG Metall (but returned to a post in Bremen somewhat later), helped put the excesses in perspective.

Title: The New Left and the Marxian Legacy: Early Encounters in the United States, France, and Germany
Author: Dick Howard
Publisher: Springer International Publishing
Book: The Marxian Legacy
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-04410-7

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-030-04411-4

Copyright Year: 2019
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04411-4_1