VOLUME IV.

NUMBER 3 APRIL,1970

CONTENTS

Dear Herbert: Ronald Aronson 3

Marcuse's Utopia Martin Jay 21

Notes on Marcuse and the Movement Paul Sreines 2.

Intellectuals in the Debs;an Socialist

Party . . . Paul Buhle 35

"Comments on Paul Buhfe's Paper on

Socialist Intellectuals" . . . . . Jim Gilbert 5.

Toward a Critical Theory for Advanced

Industrial Society Trent Schroyer 65

Poems: Norman Temple 33

Joel Sloman 63

General Editors: Paul Buhle, Martha Sonnenberg. Dale Tomich,

Madison Staff: Dave Wagner, Edith & Philip Altbach, Jim O'Brien.
Managing Editor: "Fig" Newton. Regional Editors: Mark Naison,
Dick Howard, Paul Piccone, Franklin & Penelope Rosemont, Eric
Perkins, Elliott Eisenberg. Associates: Arthur lothstein. Evan Stark.
Val Dusek, John Heckman, Bill Burr. Representatives: Alan Block,
Stuart & Elizabeth Ewen, Robert & Susan Cohen, Joseph Mewshaw,
Peter Wiley, Ruth Meyerowitz, Eli Zaretsky. Jim Kaplan, Tom Herbst,
Brigitte Howard, William Miller, Robert Wicke.

Cover by Richard Hibberd

• •

•
This
I s sue of Radical America marks the beginning of a transition of the Socialist
Scholars Conference. It is the fIrst step away from an organization exclusively interested
in the furtherance of socialist scholarship toward one directly engaged in building a
socialist movement. It was necessitated by a variety of factors.

The general if only implied assumption of those who founded the SSC fIve years
ago was that American Capitalism had entered a period of long-run stability, eliminating
the possibility of any mass socialist opposition. Thus, socialist scholars should devote
themselves to the serious intellectual work necessary for the development of a socialist
intellectual tradition, which hopefully could be drawn upon at some propitious time in
the future.

The last fIve years, however, has witnessed a rapid disintegration of Bourgeois
hegemony in many aspects of American life. While the state remains strong and relatively
unshaken other aspects of civil society have lost much of their force, making for the
possibility of a socialist attack.

The movement that has grown in response to these developments is, however, at
this time of greatest opportunity facing its own crisis. The major white national
organization on the left, SDS, has disintegrated into a number of rival sects. There is
little sense of cohesion on the left, and a strong possibility of isolation and wide scale
suppression.

Partly in response to these· currents, partly as a result of their own internal

development, various activists and intellectuals have become involved in theoretical
work. This is reflected in the emergence in the past several years of various theoretical
magazines all attempting to relate to a broader movement.

To remain aloof from these developments would for socialist intellectuals be the
height of irresponsibility. The possibilities are there; the dangers also. Hopefully, the
commitment to serious scholarship-objective socialist scholarship-will not be lost. For
without a concern for long-term intellectual work the outlook for American socialism
will be limited and bleak.

The main purpose of the SSC will continue to be to provide a forum for socialist
intellectuals; a forum that is clearly socialist and yet free from sectarian control and
factional demagoguery. We will, however, concentrate on more topics of current political
relevanCt:, without we hope lessening attention to historical analysis or restricting the
areas for legitimate socialist intellectual work.

Also, we will seek to involve people who are concerned with relating their
intellectual work to the revolutionary struggle; who are both political ao::tivists and
intellectuals. And we hope to develop closer and more useful relationships with various
Left political and cultural journals. Beyond this, we look forward to playing a role in the
development of a Socialist Education League and the work of expanding mass socialist
consciousness.

The papers in this issue of RA were presented at the fIfth SSC. The issue was put
together by Richie Friedman and Bill Miller. Any errors are ours. not the fault of the
Madison staff. Elsewhere in this volume is an announceme,lt of our Sixth Annual
Conference which will be held in New York, June 13 and 14.

Socialist Scholars Conference

P.O. Box 933
New Brunswick, New Jersey 08903
2
 lear Herbert:
by Ronald Aronson

Dear Herbert:

My speaking at the Socialist SchQlars Conference is a frightening and exciting

chance to come to terms with you-with your effect on me as a teacher, with your
writings. with your personality. For myself and a few friends, studying with you was one
of the decisive experiences of our lives. YoUr thought, perSQ.nality, style of teaching and
writings were overpowering. During those years at Brandeis-and in many ways into the
present-we were in awe of you. Pirst, your bearing: so self-consciously dignified
distant, demanding. It was clear that your approval, even your notice, had to be won,
and we father-tormented graduate students became eager scholars and willing disciples.

You brought us into contact with the central figures in Western thought: Kant,
Hegel, Marx, Plato, Aristotle. We didn't learn system-building from the outside, but we
learned how to trace the impulses animating the thinking of each man we studied. We
learned this, we felt, from someone hving inside that movement of ideas, not an
academic but someone of that tradition. Of that tradition and yet a revolutionary; you
helped us to take our stand in Western thought and still be Marxists, to read Plato with
warmth and understanding as well as criticizing him on social-historical grounds. You
showed that the dilemma was false: Marxism or Western culture. So-called "bourgeois"
poetry and painting and psychoanalysis and aesthetics are relevant, even central, to
revolutionary thought. Your writings on art point this up: nobody I know is as able to
appreciate what is going on in modern art, what it means.

I recall those classes on Plato's Meno and Kant's Critique of Pure Reason; we
prepared hard and long, read the material two or three times, refused to miss even one
class, came expectantly, brought our friends and wives. Something was happening in
Marcuse's classes. We all sensed it, we were learning how to read, to think. Above all you
emphasized the idea of reason: the capacity of thought to understand the existing social
reality, to criticize it, to project alternatives. All this meant mastery, disciplined work,
knowledge for the sake of changing the world.

You introduced us to a perspective which was new and revolutionary, which made
sense of our lives and helped us to fmd our way as radicals. In your courses in social and
political theory and Marxian theory and in your writings you presented us with a
coheren t way of seeing history and the role of theory. How to think about nistory, how
to think about thought. Capitalist society became clear as one form of class society: the
central question became one of domination. And you gave us a way of making the
present crisis clear: domination over nature reaches its goal, complete mastery, While
domination over man is continued beyond any historical justification, using all of the
new capabilities. Perhaps above all, you gave us the message of liberation, in Eros and
Civilization-a new reality, organized according to different principles, realizing our
deepest dreams, breaking with the trend of any past or present society.

You were never humble, and for that I thank you. You insisted that reality can be
understood, that there is a single decisive issue-liberation-that dialectical thought is a
valid way to approach the world. And you refused to submit to the authority of
doctrine: you have struggled, more than anyone, to understand the present situation in
its own terms, without merely reimposing old categones on it, to let thought move with
history, freely and imaginatively.

No wonder we felt dominateo by you. No wonder we argued after every class

about what you meant, read and discussed your books as soon as they came out, quoted
you against each other, made "What would Marcllse think?" our major intellectual

3
principle. I think of those days under your tutelage sadly, warmly, so much less secure
now that it is time to locate the limits as well as the value of your impact on me.
Insecure because as I write this I am not merely drawing myself up to the level of my
teacher, declaring equality; I am reopening the intellectual field for myself and those like
me, locating our work by spelling out the limits of yours.

Reopening: breaking into the open again. Yes, for a long time it felt closed, my
world of radical thought. Why?

It is the intellectUal's task and duty, you have said, "to recall and preserve
historical possibilities which seem to have become utopian possibilities- ... it is his task
to break the concreteness of oppression in order to open the mental space in which this
society can be recognized as what it is and does ("Repressive Tolerance" p. 81)." Take
One·Dimensional Man, which descnbes the closed universes of discourse, politics,
philosophy, science, and academic concepts. It conveys a sense of suffocation, of
totalitarianism at work everywhere. As sueh it is a major step in our breaking out of that
closing universe. By naming it, by helping us to get conscious of it, by conveying its
overwhelming power, it helped us to defme ourselves in opposition to it-total
opposition. Depressing, verging on despair, the almost wholly negative analysis helped
me and the movement to fmd ourselves in a society which integrates and feeds on
conventional forms of opposition.

But your thought and teaching could only lead us so far. Secure in our ability to
think, we began to see your limitations for our own lives and the historical problems
facing us.

I want to talk about your tone: it is abstract and remote. There remains an
enormous gulf between your writings and my experience. Our experience: the first
generation of the New Left.

But strange to say, this weakness is also your strength. The "good" aspects of
your writing cannot be rescued by throwing the "bad" overboard. To spell this out is to
locate the historical place and limits of your thought-and experience. And defme the
new prospects and tasks open to those of us young enough to be born into and shaped
by postwar America.

The power of your writings goes hand in hand with their weakness. Let us see. I
quote the opening paragraphs of One·Dimensional Man:
Does not the threat of an atorm.c catastrophe \\ hich could wipe out the human
race also serve to protect the very forces which perpetuate this danger? The
efforts to prevent such a catastrophe overshadow the search for its potential
causes in contemporary industrial society. These causes remain unidentified,
unexposed, unattacked by the public because they recede before the all too
obvious threat from without-to the West and from the East, to the East and
from the West. Equally obvious is the need for being prepared, for living on
the brink, for facing the challenge. We submit to the peaceful production of
the means of destruction, to the perfection of waste, to being educated for a
defense. which deforms the defenders and that which they defend.

If we attempt to relate the causes of the danger to the way in which society is .
organized and organizes its members, we are immediately confronted with the
fact that advanced industrial society becomes richer, bigger, and better as it
perpetuates the danger. The defense structure makes life easier for a greater
number of people and extends man's mastery of nature. Under these
circumstances, our mass media have little difficulty in selling particular
interests as those of all sensible men. The political needs of society become
individual needs and aspirations, their satisfaction promotes business and the
commonweal, and the whole appears to be the very embodiment of Reason.

4
 And yet this society is irrational as a whole. Its productivity is destructive of
the free development of human needs and faculties, its peace maintained by
the constant threat of war, its growth dependent on the repression of the real
possibilities for pacifying the struggle for existence-individual, national, and
international. This repression, so different from that which characterized the
preceding, less developed stages of our society, operates today not from a
position of natural and technical immaturity but rather from a position of
strength. The capabilities (intellectual and material) of contemporary society
are immeasurably greater than ever before-which means that the scope of
society's domination over the individual is immeasurably greater than ever
before. Our society distinguishes itself by conquering the centrifugal social
forces with Technology rather than Terror, on the dual basis of an
overwhelming efficiency and an increasing standard of living.

In so many ways the statement could not be better. The inseparable and fatally
ironic connection is sharply drawn between the society's wealth and well-being and its
need to mutilate and possibly destroy us all. We are made to see it as a totality, whose
good is born of its evil and vice versa. These passages demand that we think dialectically,
that we join rather than separate, that we refuse to accept the logic of social science and
detach prospects from problems.

The passage is rich with irony, joining terms and concepts kept apart by the mass
media; perfection and waste, productivity and destruction, growth and repression, peace
and war, capabilities and domination.

At the same time you force us to think in general terms, we are drawn up from
immersion in the immediate and apparently self-jUstifying particulars of our everyday
experience. The general language distances us from that experience, gives us the
perspective we need in order to be critical. The charged terms which obstruct and entrap
thought, such as communism and capitalism are replaced by East and West, the various
ruling classes become "the forces", their class interests become "particular interests". At
once we are lifted beyond the self-enclosed ideological debates of the American center
and left and forced to think anew. The general terms, breaking wherever possible with
conventional loaded formulations, draw back into themselves current l!sages for ironic
effect: '1iving on the brink", "facing the challenge", "all sensible men" are juxtaposed
with phrases which expose how loaded they are: "Business and the commonweal". More,
such general formulations as "advanced industrial society" and "contemporary industrial
society" place us high above the events-viewing history itself, seeing contemporary
society as what it is, the current stage of development. Thus you suggest that we are
today living under a different type of repression than in earlier stages. You refuse to let
the struggle between socialism and capitalism defme the limits of history; it is a longer
process, going back at least to the beginnings of Western Civilization, whose future lines
arc still to be constructed.

Your terminology is rightly uncomfortable to read. It is open, elusive, cannot be

fixed. And abstraction of abstractions, Western Capitalism and the Soviet Union each
become "the whole". You speak of "our socIety" rather than Western Capitalism. It
has "capabilities"-what are they? It "dominates"-specifically what does this
mean?-through a never clearly dermed "efficiency" and rising standard of living. How?
Not "war material" but "the means of destruction". And what are those alluded·to but
never articulated "causes" of the-still so general-"atomic catastrophe"? Aggravating to
read, these formulations do what you intend: they re�pen meaning, they create the
� �
space for thought by destroying our sense that all it set and de ned. The h h level of
generality indicts socialism as well as capitalism: polar and self-eVIdent terms gIve way to
a search for meaning, a suspension of our typical and thoroughly indoctrinated
responses.

Reason, Technology, and Terror-all in capital letters-appear almost as

semi-autonomous. More distance. Look at this formulation: "the whole appears to be
the very embodiment of Reason"-the language of philosophy creates the greatest

5
possible distance. Two separate realms arc suggested: the other World of Reason, and our
apparently rational but false world. Standards for judging this world thus arc implied,
standards drawn from that second dimension-whose meaning is kept open as it is itself
only suggested, never explained. Opening meaning, provoking us to dialectical thought,
defeating usual loaded ways of thinking and speaking, your style thus distances us from
the world of our immediate experience so as better to see it, while suggesting standards
for evaluating it. Truly you succeed in just what you set out to do, breaking "the
concreteness of -oppression in order to open up the mental space in which this society
can be recognized as what it is and does". Anyoll(' who reads you and takes you
seriously will sooner or later find himself engaged in one of the most liberating of all
acts-thinking.

How many of us have had the experience of discovering the world through this
book? But the same paragraphs, the same formulations, the same words-suffocate and
deaden. The distance and generality which increase our critical ability in one way
destroys it in another for they safeguard us from our own experience. Yes our reason is
liberated by your method and tone, drawn and forced upward into the mansions of
critical theory -an amazing accomplishment. But the rest of us, our hopes and lives and
fears-get left behind.

The tone of remoteness which frees also stifles. I feel a bit lost after reading this
introductory passage of One·Dimensional Man and completinl!; the book hardly improves
the condition. I am restless to get back to the world, to put my feet on the ground of
hard and clear examples. Yours is a journey I can take with my intellect only-not with
my imagination, my feelings, my guts.

That remote quality of so much of your writing is present in the passage I just
quoted. Reason, Terror, Technology in capital letters-what are these self-subsistent,
self-moving entities? Elsewhere you put Eros, Self, Beauty, Ego, The Great Refusal,
Nature in capitals. Are we back with Plato, sketching a better, more real world but
denying this one we live in? Frankly I feel inferior to such a world, to the level of culture
which seems to be required for admission to it. After reading your justification for
intolerance some radicals speak of "Marcuse the elitist." And this problem isn't helped
by your refusal to translate passages from French and German,your offhand use of terms
from Latin and Greek. Oeu vre and technics, schein and L ebenswelt-a new vocabulary,
taken from and pointing towards the high culture of Western Civilization: remote and
intimidating.

High culture truly becomes a realm apart-·you speak of "the standard literary
vocabulary," " the classical Marxian theory." You speak of critical theory as if it is and
moves: "it elaborates concepts," "it continues to insist that the need for qualitative
change" is great, dialectical logic "insists that slaves must be free for their liberation."

As you move to higher and higher levels of generality the ties with our
experience slacken, then loosen. I don't e xperience "particular interests" but rather
definite forms of oppression. Terms like "domination" and "repression" and
"pacification of existence" and "intellectual and material capabilities" are so broad as to
be almost emptied of concrete content. How many people read you without
understanding, developing only a vague sense of what is wrong! How many well-read,
thoughtful intellectuals can present the main arguments. of On e·Dimensional Man or
R eason and R e volution?

Their own fault, you'll say. I disagree. Such formulations neither focus on and
illuminate our own experience nor point towards the concrete social experience needed
to grasp their meaning.

The passage I quoted seems so heavy, so dead-serious. Portraying a locked-in

social reality, it itself has a locked-in feel. It wholly lacks humor. Gone is Marx's ability

6
to poke fun, to play. The best phrases arc grimly ironic: "We submit to the peaceful
production of waste, to being educated for a defense which deforms the defenders and
that which they defend." Opposites arc brought together, but without the satisfaction a
Marx shows at having caught the bourgeoisie with its pants down, without the biting
edge, the passion to expose one fmds so often in Lenin, say, or Trotsky. Feeling, yes, but
as the play and pleasure are gone, so is the passionate anger. "The game is up," the
passage-and its sad depressed tone-seem to say. Opposites are joined, locked-in
together. They are everywhere: "Don't wait to be hunted to hide." The dialectic is
drawn into a circle, from which there is no way out, as everything turns into its opposite.
You promote a certain sad style of thought, which many in and out of the m ovement
have imbibed; "Protest only strengthens the established order by showing protest to be
possible." Why do so many who read you say this?

Your writing leaves our experience: here is the source of what is exciting in it and
what is stifling. I think I can make this clearer by a bit of speculation about the historical
function of your writing, the experience from which it springs, and how it differs from
ours.

Why leave experience? Appeals to the Germanic spirit, the influence of Hegel, the
academic environment, are so much nonsense. Look at the character of that
experience-yours, the experience of disaster in the West in the fifty years between the
beginning of World War One and the mid-sixties. Everyone knows the facts. The workers
supported and sacrificed themselves in wars so evidently against their own real interest.
The socialist revolutions failed. As the Soviet Union developed, socialism's promise of
liberaton withered. And then came fascism, wiping out radical opposition and then all
opposition, and so evidentiy popular-war, barbarism and genocide so popular. It is all
depressing enough for me to think about-what must it have been like to live through it
as a partisan of a losing cause, as a potential victim?

And for a moment, the enormous cloud drawn over the West seemed to lift: the war
was over, fascism dead. But the chance for revolution passed in France and Italy.
American democratic capitalism became the most complete and effective form of
totalitarianism. Opposition caved in, the Cold War began. Monopoly capitalism extended
itself everywhere-around the world, into people's hopes and fears, wants and needs. The
complete and systematic triumph of the principle of historical materialism: thought,
imagination, feeling, desire became wholly sucked into the society, accepted it and sang
its praises. People actually want the aggressive, guilt-ridden, thing-obsessed American
way of life! All of this done "the American way"-without agencies of control, while
preserving the feeling of freedom, civil liberties, the right to vote.

What then came out of this half-<:entury of catastrophe? The end of opposition,
the onset of a new form of totalitarianism. It seems like you saw the world close.

How did you respond to these events-how might any revolutionary intellectual?
First, by retreating to thought, where the ideas of change, of liberation, of socialism can
be preserved intact to await and hope for the reopening of opposition. The socialist
movement, the chance for liberation seemed to temporarily collapse in the thirties: the
theoretical idea of liberation had to be validated and kept alive. But as western
totalitarianism spread-as American capitalism came to exploit and organize every
conceivable area and as alternatives and even criticism became linked with the
communist Enemy -your refuge, the realm of ideas itself became attacked. Not only the
idea of socialism or liberation, but the validity of any idea which points beyond our
immediate experience. Socialism itself was no longer the issue. The issue was the mind's
very ability to think about socialism. Your response? Meta-theory, the need to validate
theory's right to exist, the need to attack a self-enclosed, self-validating ideology on
every plane of experience. Thus the strange-sounding formulation I quoted earlier from
"Repressive Tolerance": that the intellectual must "recall" and "preserve" possibilities,
that he must re-open "the mental space" in which we can recognize this society. A
last-ditch defense in the face of overwhelming odds: preserve the force of the Hegelian
dialectic, preserve negative thinking, preserve the vigorous depth-<:haracter of Freudian

7
theory, preserve the image of liberation, preserve the second dimension, thought itself,
preserve the original impulses of Marxian theory in the face of Soviet distortions.

No wonder your writings seem so heavy; was it possible to still feel confidence,
and thus lightness and wit, as opposition to capitalism dried up and seemed impossible?
No wonder you convey a sense of Them closing in everywhere, of paranoia and futility:
all the unbelievably bloody battles of the last 50 years seemed only to strengthen
capitalism and deepened its terrifying and apparently unbreakable hold over people. No
wonder you seem to take no delight in exposing tllt: system and its Masters: Marx could
rightly feel he was making fresh revelations which couldn't help but lead to social
change, while today the facts are self-evident but everywhere denied by a mystified
people. No wonder you seem obsessed with culture, ideology, consciousness: what is this
brave new world all about if not the massive falsification of people's experience, their
seeing an oppressive world as free?

And no wonder your writings sound so remote, so abstract: if experience seems

just fme, if it thus becomes self-justifying, we must lift thought far above it in order to
be able to criticize. If a totalitarian world is depicted in our locked-in and uncritical
thought, an authentic language must appear unfamiliar and brittle. If everywhere around
us the world is falsely known and falsely comfortable and self-validating, we must be
made to feel uncomfortable, to see words as strange and suggestive of undreamed-of
possibilities.

Marx hardly needed to be remote. Critical thought could merely follow and
present experience-in a clear and comprehended form. This is what Marx does in his
histories, this is what he does in Capital. 19th-Century capitalism provided its own, its
internal and universally agreed-upon standards for criticizing it: equality, freedom,
property, self-interest. Marxism could be an immanent critique-a critique of experience
in terms of its own claims-because it merely traces the inner development of the facts
and shows how capitalism denies every one of its basic c1aims= Criticism can immerse
itself in social experience when that experience contradicts and thus criticizes itself. And
this happened most dearly when a movement developed whose own life was the most
thorough indictment of the society, a life in which all the bourgeois promises were
denied.

But this has changed-one of the key themes of your writings. Experience has
ceased to be critical of itself. Which means that by and large the society fulfills its
promises, meets its claims. The American way of life: a constantly increasing standard of
living for almost everyone without giving up our abstract and formal freedoms. As it
"delivers the goods" to a people who want only the goods and more of them advanced
capitalism minimizes the distance between peoples' needs and satisfactions. On the
political and social scale this means that the working class has come to accept and defend
capitalism. Judged by its own standards the society appears to be just fme, although it
has some problems left. It is this situation, you argue, which makes an immanent critique
impossible. When only colonial outsiders or the black minority stand as the living
negation of American capitalism, where can we go to get our standards for judging it?
aose description of the facts is no longer root criticism: it is mostly affirmative. What is
our basis for criticism if few people really mind waste or a war policy, if productivity is
the social goal, if the good life is directly experienced as what the society puts out?

Critical thought must leave experience if experience ceases to be self-critical,

self-contradictory. Standards must be found outside the society's own. We must move, as
you say, into abstract, speculative thought: "from the critique of political economy to
philosophy". Radical criticism no longer stands with a class inside the system-it takes
place from outside. A transcendent critique. Critical theory must divorce itself from
experience, become remote from it, provide experience with standards, justify those
standards. Thus the other-worldly tone, thus my feeling that your analysis is external. And
thus your need to return to the remotest regions of speculative thought in order to
reshape the very tools and concepts of criticism. Thought must restore the critical distance
lost in daily experience. Remote, yes -but for a life and death reason.

8
 II

Still, I have criticized your writing! How can I do that and yet pay such warm
tribute to it?

When I criticize you for leaving experience I am implying that critical thought can
do otherwise today. Not that you were wrong to do it as you did, but that we are wrong
to follow you. We are in a different historical situation than you: our writings respond to
a different experience, have different demands built into them, must be different in form
and content. The simple fact is: it is wholly different to be born into and raised in a
totalitarian society than it is to see and struggle against its coming into being. It is a
wholly different experience to be raised in a society without opposition than it is to be
part of an opposition on the verge of win ning the greatest victory of history, to see it
lose, and then to watch it collapse entirely.

What is the difference? Just as you start from the most general level, so I would
like to reverse that and start from the most specific. Just as you write meta-theory in
the language of Hegel and high culture, so I would like to reverse that and speak of my
own experience in the language of that experience. I'm fully aware of the theoretical
implic ations of this effort: living in a totalitarian culture,' can I grasp my experience from
inside? Beginning with my experience can I understand America?

The key fact about growing up in postwar America was my need to reject
America. I needed to break, to say and act No, to leave. Why? Somehow I had gotten on
this machine in motion, had become the machine, acting on behalf of some enormous
power I couldn't even begin to fathom. To follow out its and my momentum led to the
"good life" whose every detail I already knew in some gut way: marrying, professional
work, the struggling young couple getting set up, vacation trips, a wonderful child, a
small house at first, then living better, making more money. My own steps led naturally
into the full-fledged American way of life, a life in which I could look good for other
people and smile Hello and buy and "live better and better." Phyllis and I called it "the
whole bit." Somewhere inside I knew what attitudes and feelings were requIred for entry
into this good life: despair, boredom, the relentless drive to keep moving, being
"realistic" by putting society's demands first and my own second, giving up on
happiness, lying about pain.

And a layer deeper inside, I know now, was the emotional basis for all this:
feeling inferior. Or better, hating myself. What does this psychological fact have to do
with the social facts I'm talking about? Everything. Hating myself meant hating all those
feelings, needs, reactions which were most truly mine, which were not socially approved
in advance: such as weakness, fear, hurt, anger, sexuality, dependency, loving and needing
to be loved. But such impUlses were mine, and being taught to hate them from childhood
meant disowning all those dimensions of myself, pretending to myself that they didn't
exist, pushing them back. Pushing myself back. And into this vacuum, created ultimately
by America I know now, there grew a new self, also created ultimately by America.

I recall how I struck on performance as the way to get falsely what I needed
really. Already unhappy, I had learned to get attention by being a bad boy in school and
at home-getting into trouble, destroying things, shouting and disrupting. Until an
ingenious 5th grade teacher put me in what she called "isolation," separating me from
the other boys and girls and depriving me of attention for my misdeeds. She left me
without anything to do but get high marks, and so I did. A good student, I stopped being
rowdy; the transformation was complete. TIle unhappy, angry boy turned hirnelf in to a
pleasant, courteous performer.

Thus escaping from my real needs and feelings I developed a relentless drive to
keep in motion-in order to keep my now-hateful self from catching up with me.
Denying myself, I ceased to transfer my center of gravity, my locus of self-definition
onto the world outside. And this self-denial meant accepting inferiority as my bask
state. Hating my own impulses, I became ready to acccpt the substitute impulscs offcn:d

9
by parents and teachers-all the conscioLis and unconscious shoulds. Frowning at myself
and mistrusting my every impulse, I developed a frantic drive to win smiles from other
people, the authorities. Since I clearly didn't know who I was and what I wanted, They
would have to tell me. And of course they had been telling me from earliest childhood,
so much so that by the time I fmished college I had already drawn them into me. I was
already "realistic" in that deepest sense. An all·A student, a nice guy, someone who
hated to make scenes: I was well-prepared to accept the American way of life, based on
striving, others' approval and acquiring outside things. What America offered expressed
and compensated for my misery.

But in a moment of revelation, after talking with a salesman who had once
wanted to be an actor but "well, you just can't live your dreams," I said: "I'll do what I
want." That was so vague-who knew what I wanted? But the "whole bit" was so
suffocating, so known in advance.

Could I accept part of it, only what I had to-job, or living in a dreary
neighborhood or buying a new car-and avoid the rest? No, no, no: it felt like a "whole
bit." A way of life was given, not separate materials out of which I would build my life.
Either I had to stay on the machine and live that life or jump off altogether.

So we jumped off the machine. stopped the part of ourselves that wanted it. We
had to get away and make a life of our own. Our o wn -this is what was suffocated-our
own ideas, our own pace, our own love, our own clothes, our own talk, our own sex, our
own pain, our own joy.

Could we travel into different parts of America and fmd the ground where it
would grow? But outside of the natural scenery, everywhere in America seemed so much
the same-how people look, what they think, what they want and hate, what they do. So
we searched out a remote backwater where things were not yet so modem. Teaching in a
country schoolhouse, we lived one of our dreams, going off, living our own life, escaping,
turning towards the past-old, good ways, humane habits, authentic people. But guess
what our students talked about as I drove the school bus over the hills and along the
river to the two-room schoolhouse. Last night's television programs. Still, mere was a
real country life. Part of it excluded all transients: the natives rarely befriended the
schoolteachers, outsiders from the city. But we too could live among trees and hills, with
a sense of nature, time, and space, could take slow walks, could teach in jeans. But how
long were we willing to be lonely? It slowly dawned that the America which threatened to
suffocate us was also the only real world. It drew us. Even hating It we could hardly live
our whole life outside of it and still feel real. And even if we could, the guilt and
self-hatred brought tension into the relaxed walks by the river. I wanted to perform, to
look good, to make a name. I couldn't simply sit around enjoying myself. Even here I
felt driven. How to get free of America inside myself?
First of all stop looking outside me, stop traveling. It slowly dawned that as I
searched around I carried inside me all the proper attitudes for becoming an envied
success, a responsible provider, a mindless vacationer. I was a living performance
principle. I was never satisfied, always striving. How could I get away from it? Only by
changing myself.

My personality and the American way of life fit into each other so easily, as if by
design. To get free of America outside me I had first to get free of America inside me.
How to stop performing? Break the self-hatred, the guilt, the obsession with goals, the
need for things, the drive to keep moving, the urge to look good. Psychotherapy, yes.
Learning to feel good about myself, to accept and live my desires and reactions and
impulses. And in the process I discovered that my hated self was not my fault but finally
the society's, that this isolated unique individual was really a deeply social and historical
being. And that breaking free to live humanely now meant attacking the America which
has made me fit only to live inhumanly.

What a leap I just took! An account of a life-search which doesn't once mention
politics, and suddenly I proclaim the necessity for revolution. Why? The strictly personal

10

J
revelation has hinted at why: it contains the structure of experience of this peculiar
totalitarian society.

One way of life and only one. The good life, set out ahead. No other legitimate
choices? It seems not: the only other major patterns seemed leftovers from the past. I
don't want to spell out the evils of a life turning around television, getting ahead, the
suburbs, "fine how are you," and shopping centers-liberals can do that well enough.
What suffocated was that there was only one life to move into-a single, coherent way of
life, defmed in virtually all of its actions, attitudes and gestures. Not open-ended but
closed, not subject to my activity but ready-made, not waiting to be shaped by me but
given to me, not springing from my spontaneity or rational deliberation but imposing
itself, inside me and out, not growing from my needs but already there, deciding what
they would be. The American way of life: set up, ready and waiting, and we merely need
to be realistic to slip into "the whole bit." If we begin by hating ourselves-by feeling
guilty, driven, inferior, obsessed with approval-then it is easy to live the system's life as
our own. We are already outside ourselves, already eager for a life to be given to us,
already respectful of authorities, already relentless towards ourselves, already eager to
gain a sense of power by acquiring things.

I came to see that the search for lTIyself was really a struggle to break free from these
needs. But recovering the original ana hated needs was per se a oattle with the society.
Dropping into myself meant being angry, making scenes, being peculiar, asking Why,
saying No, fighting. I could only change myself while identifying those forces outside
which had originally distorted my needs and now stood against my satisfying them.
Changing myself and becoming political. Liberation and revolution.

What are those forces? What is behind this strange totalitarian American way of
life and our need for it? Why does life seem wholly organized in advance-closed, given,
waiting? Why does this life seem to stem naturally from my own sick and distorted
needs? And worse, why is a desperate struggle necessary just to break free 01 those needs
and want to be happy? The pattern of my experience is a little clearer, but not Its social
sources.

What we need is an analysis of American society today whose questions and

categories are intimately connected with our experience. A study which starts, as Marx
did, with the experience of being oppressed and works slowly back into the social
mechanisms which oppress. I have a few questions for this study.

How does the system create the attitudes which keep it going as it expands in new
directions? Organized capitalism of the late 1960's requires men and women will ing to
see every area of life invaded by the economy, willing to live with little initiative outside
of selecting ready-made options, willing, in short, to take the whole package that is
handed them. It requires people to continue working in spite of the senselessness of it
all-knowing that they produce waste, knowing that automation is possible. It requires
an insatiable appetite for goods. And it requires that people see this life as happiness, the
only possible happiness. Beyond toothbrushes and televisions we must learn to work for
and want electric tootnOrushes and color televisions. Learn to need them: to find
satisfaction through having rather than dOillg or being, and to be willing to die and
destroy the world to prop up this way of life.

How do we learn all this? Buying meat doesn't require any special attitude: I Ileed
to eat. But to buy an electric toothbrush-and thus to be at home in the 1960's-1 must
come to want something which I don't really need. I must value it, I must connect
having it with happiness. Thus the electric toothbrush is ideological in a way that rreat is
not: buying it involves a whole world-view, just the world-view advanced capitalism
needs to survive.

Yes, people have acquired this world-view, but how securely does it grip them'!
Which means asking not only how do the system's needs get enclosea in our personalIty
structure, but what are the tensions and tendencies within us'! After all, the New Left

11
and the hippie movement have sprung from this soil. It seems that capitalism's survival
requires it to get deeper and deeper inside us; it seems that its way of life will become
more and more suffocating. In other words, might not the condition which pushed me to
become a revolutionary be felt by more and more people as time goes on?

These questions contain a criticism of you, Herbert. I'm asking for a different
One-Dimensional Man . Not 'Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society,"
but studies examining the process whereby the political economy invades our souls and
shapes us into one-dimensional men and women. Not only a critique of current
philosophy, science, academic thought, but also, or rather primarily, a study which
examines the ties between psychology and society. No mistake, your work is decisive for
us_ But we need to connect organized capitalism with the mental and emotional culture
it requires and creates-a Capital which broadens out into all the spheres which corporate
capitalism has itself invaded.

With this demand for a close internal study of one-dimensional society, I return to
my main point�. First, that in spite of its power1 your attempt to grasp this society
remains external and remote; and second, that from where I stand-up to my neck in
America-only a critique on intimate terms with my experience will do. We need more
than striking but unclarified assertions about "the unification of opposites" and the
absence of "centrifugal tendencies" and a "socially engineered arrest of consciousness."
We need critical theory which gets inside the 1960's as Capital did the 1860's, which
traces the tensions and contradictions at the heart of the system's control over us. A life
tied to commodities has become "biologically" necessary, you argue in An Essay on
Liberation, a vital need. Which means that "dysfunction of the organism" would result if
that tie was broken. But in not studying the process closely you miss the incredible
conflicts at the heart of normal functioning. You see it from the outside, as if the
appearances of comfort and stupid fun were the reality, as if anyone is really satisfied in
their guts with the American way of life. I was born there, I know it: misery is the
reality, always at least half-conscious, hidden by a veil, having to be pushed back daily.
Isn't that misery the very basis of the movement you write about so warmly?

Your Essay on Liberation is dedicated to "the young militants" and written for
them. It is a magnificent philosophical statement for our movement. But oddly missing
in a work claiming to be social theory is any attempt to "identify demonstrable
tendencies," to explain why and how the movement developed in the one-dimensional
society, of all places. Why-in the heartland of corporate capitalism-the New Left and
the hippies? What do they tell us about America?

Yes, in many ways we raise the demand you have long hoped would spur
revolutionary politics: for liberation, for a reversal of the whole way of life. Why? I am
clear on my own reason: because the only adequate response to being raised in
one-dimensional society is to demand liberation. I felt totally trapped by
America-nothing I could have or be seemed to be free from it, to be mine. To have
anything at all of my own, to break free in any one place, meant that I had to break free
everywhere. Because I was trying to overcome a whole way of life imposed inside and
out and not merely a few objectionable demands on me, it seemed like I had to answer
by developing a whole way of life of my own, a "new sensibility."

You ask intellectuals to "preserve historical possibilities" which seem to have

vanished today, to keep "open the mental space" in which we can see this society for
what it is-but these tasks make no sense to me. You were able to begin with a clear and
legitimate identity, a sense of being in opposition, a whol;) set of values, a strong sense of
being part of a tradition. That was what it must have meant to be brought up in a
two-dimensional societv. On the basis of a secure and clear identity you could take
refuge in theory when Nazism took power, you could "recall" the image of liberation as
the American way of life became total. In a strict se nse you were preserving ideas
recalling what had once been your own life-possibilities.

In that same strict sense I have nothing to preserve. When times get tough I can

12
hardly fall back on the secure corner of my identity where opposition and real freedom
are still possible. What identity? That has had to be built, by a tremendous act of will' of
creativity and resistance.

America imposed its life on me by separating me from myself, by making my

thinking dominate my desires, by keeping my values away from my actions, by giving me
roles to live, by making me hate myself and accept what satisfactions I could get. This is
what being "realistic" is all about-saying goodbye to much of ourselves, squeezing the
rest into the channels offered. Refusing all separation was one of the main ways of
locating myself-demanding that values be lived, that thinking not oppose feeling,
rejecting roles as traps, refusing to accept any less than being myself in a total, complete
way. Not preserve the wish for liberation, but live it, not keep open mental space, but
breathing and feeling and acting space for opposition. You retreated, and I think
necessarily; living and responding today I have to take the offensive merely to survive.
To be myself I must demand everything.

Why isn't your path, retreat into radical thought, enough for me? In my life it is
not capitalist values or elitist values which are oppressive, but values as such: meaning
ideals, separated from my actions, which mock my life. Not bourgeois abstract thought
is intolerable, but abstract thought as such: a thought which rejects and withdraws
from my experience. Why isn't it enough to be politically radical and leave the rest of
my life intact? Because then everything remains the same, locked into America, except
that my ideas are radical, and I make my part-time political statements and acts at
meetings with radicals. Only the sense of a new way of life will do, being radical in
working, in loving, in thinking, in feeling, in eating, in joking. Being radical: being
myself. Anything which separates me from myself oppresses, whether it comes from
America or its left-wing opposition. Not only bourgeois morality oppresses, but any
morality which imposes oughts from outside. Not only the bourgeois contempt for
ignorance, but the radical reliance on a higher culture. Not only the bourgeois
d<lmination of feeling by reason, but the radical insistence on the priority of theory, the
correct position. Not only the middle-class role-playing is oppressive, but accepung any
kind of role, even the role of radical intellectual. I have become revolutionary because
America, while willing to sell me everything, won't let me be myself. Should I give up
any part of myself in order to oppose America?

In saying this, I'm only taking seriously your demand, in Essay on Liberation, for
"a political practice which reaches the roots of containment and contentment in the
infrastructure of man, a political practice of methodical disengagement from and refusal
of the Establishment, aiming at a radical transvaluation of values." "Such a practice,"
you go on to say, "involves a break with the familiar, the routine ways of seeing, hearing,
feeling, understanding things so that the organism may become receptive to the potential
forms of a nonaggressive, nonexploitative world" (p.6). It's not my politics that are at
stake, or my ideas. My whole being is at stake. My experience is of being lost in the
smiling sick sea and of needing to wrench myself out step by step; my goal is to avoid
and destroy all of Their categories in my life, to live joyously, to reject bullshit in all its
disguises, to let America have none of myself, to get whole, and to become a guenitJa.

See, I have been sketching an immanent critique of America. It is possible, to

confront the promise with the reality which denies that promise. Theory need not take
up a position outside. Trying to spring loose trom within I am criticizing America from
within. Like Marxism? Yes and no. Marxism was certainly a theoretical description of
the experience of capitalism, of the sources of that experience. Yet it rested on visible,
universally acknowledged conditions: hunger amidst plenty, business cycles, etc. These
were facts whose force was not dependent on the individual worker's willingness to see
them. The only questions were whether and how to struggle. But to say I feel choked, I
can't be myself because American capitalism has created a totalitarian society and has
wedged me into it is sharply different than saying I'm hungry because of wage labor.
Anyone can deny the first statement, can say, ''I'm not choked, I'm myself, what is all
the fuss about?" Proof is impossible, and I can hardly point to visible facts. Can I
convince anyone that he's not hi mself? The point is that millions upon millions of

13
personal commitments are needed to keep the system going: to accept the American way
of life , to give up locating oneself, to accept living in bits and pieces, and to lie about it.
If your survival needs are met well and you can keep busy, self-ileception is possible in a
way that it's not if you're hungry . America keeps going as everyone draws a veil over his
owmlife. If so, to show the truth is no longer merely to locate the structures behind
what everyone admits to be a problem, but rather to tear away the veil.

Yet the veils don't hide only the system-they hide each and every one of us from
ourselves. And each of us distorts his experience in a different way, according to his own
particular situation. Because of this peculiar historical situation a critique of America
which tries to get inside the key place where it affects us must first be personal. It must
begin as a series of attempts to reveal the different kinds of experience possible in
America. The opposite of remoteness: talking about ourselves. And since tearing away
the veil is hardly a matter of convincing people's intellects, revolutionary thought must
engage the whole person : his feeling, his imagination, his sense of being lost. Not only
tracing the structure of capitalism, but also blowing people's minds. Disrupting,
shattering, springing people loose : we need to be personal, poetic, disturbing. To make
people want liberation.

III

Liberation. Unlike sociDlism, freedom, and happiness, this term still belongs to us.
It mems somcathing so deep and total that even American capitalism hasn't yet promised
it. Eros and Civilization shows how deep and total. What I found there-the most
profound and stirnng message corning from any book during the years of recovering
myself-is that a world is possible in which we can be happy. That my deepest, most
forlorn needs can become the organizing principle of a free society .

Aesthetics : the subversive science. Sensuousness, sensuality, beauty mean fIrst of

all freeing the body from being a tool, replacing it-and thus my feelings-in the center
of my life. Letting the order of my existence flow from my own internal rhythms, above
all the need for pleasure. To subvert reason, to end repression means eroticizing all
activities, from working to friendships to cooking. Liberation means, as you put it,
"aff'rrmation of the right to build a society in which the abolition of poverty and toil
terminates in a universe where the sensuous, the playful, the calm, and the beautiful
become forms of existence and thereby the Form of the society itself" (Essay on
Liberation, p. 25).

Yes, it is theoretically possible , you convinced me. But above all I discovered that
my inner misery was connected with everyone else's, that my deepest fantasies were
widely shared from the beginning of Western Civilization, that socialist revolution today
might make them reality, that revolutionaries had to begin by feeling in their gut the
need for liberation. Feeling it in my gut, however, drew me away from your writings.
Even mastering all your ideas has not been enough. Two themes which I didn't f'md there
helped me to get clear on what liberation means: being whole and being myself. I've
spoken about both of them, but now I want to show that this is what liberation is all
about.

Being whole means all of me being there at any given moment, and all of me being
one and in the same place. It means feeling the truth, seeing myself as social and
historical being and not merely accepting the abstract idea of society and history , not
"making up my mind" but reacting directly to situations. It means refusing to let reason
be a force over and above and outside of me, and instead making it proceed from within.
It means breaking with every external compulsion and locating the center of action and
thought in my needs and feelings and reactions. Being whole means giving up being
outside of myself, giving up trying to do wh'lt is "objectively" right and "good," giving
up trying to think what is objectively "true." And so having ideas about life which
correspond to my needs, political reactions which flow from my pain and urge tor
happiness, analyses which are drawn from my experience, actions which corne from my
sense of what is appropriate. Being whole means above all trusting myself and not forces

14
outside me, putting myself at the center of everything I do.

Being whole is being myself. A real self, underlying the mass of confused and
warring impulses? Well, yes. One-Dimenllional Man hedges this point: true needs are not
defmed as the individual's own needs, but as socially engendered needs which are
consonant with ending misery and toil. You insist on an objective, a social defInition of
true as well as false needs. Essay on Liberation talks about a biological foundation for
socialism, but refuses to call this the individual's real self or real need. It is just better. By
what standards? In Eros and Civilization you come closest to what I am saying here :
there � repsesaed needs, nwealed in phantasy, dreams and perversions, which are in some
sense more basic than the nee4s which arise trom being repressed.

A real self? Yes. It wouldn't be fIxed and prestructured, but fluid and shifting. It
would be rooted in needs and impulses developed in a climate where I can experience my
own feelings, rather than the needs and impulses which arise when I am forced to reject
myself and instead experience as my own needs which serve and come from outside
forces. Deep needs hidden somewhere inside? Yes, rooted forever in the
never-to-be-forgotten childhood experience of love and nourishment and pleasure.
Everyone has known the time when survival itself depended on being whole and living
our needs, when life itself was integral satisfaction, harmony with the environment, love,
being fully alive in every action.

To merely be alive today we must have once known jo¥. Liberation means
returning to this self. It means getting back to these basic impulses, trusting them, letting
them flourish, being true to them from moment to moml'nt, not turning them .on their
head, shackling them under a network of shoulds and objective truths and rational
analyses and roles. Revolutionary demands: Let us be ourselves, let us be whole. This
America can never permit.

What would � movement for liberation look like? This you know well, Herbert.
Its tone would be one of joy. AffIrming, celebrating life, imaginative, playful. It would
refuse to become serious, to become heavy, to become abstract. Angry yes, and
determined to overthrow American capitalism yes, but equaUy determined to develop a
new way of life in the process. Spending as much time looking inward as looking out, as
much time locating and breaking free of hang-ups as in locating and attacking the enemy.
Hang-ups: people would be encouraged to know where they are, to grow, to get strong.
To. become themselves. Organizational structures would open towards ev,ery member's
fullest growth . Therapy ? Necessarily : attacking America and freeing ourselves from it
would be seen as the same goal. Growth and depth would become criteria of political
success, not numbers of people involved. Ordinary lines between what is political and
what is not would break down. External structures, the need to be led, centralization,
ideologies developed from the top would be fought: instead there would develop loose
organizations, each determining its own needs, each analyzing its own experience, each
refusing outside direction. Any attempt to impose an ideological line or to develop the
cult of leaders would be fought: the pain and needs and liberation of each person would
be the focal point. It would be made clear that everyone has experienced America all his
or her life , that each of us has already developed the most fundamental bed of
knowledge , that turning inward to get clear on our experience is the most certain way to
know. Such a movement's actions would be free-wheeling and imaginative. It would
appeal mainly to peoples' sense of life against their death-impulses, their sense of
freedom against their shame, tlieir feeling of pain against their protective intellects, their
need to be themselves against their respect for authority. It would understand the total
hold America has over its people and formulate actions designed to break people loose,
blow their minds. It would give up the desperate attempts to fmd the "agent" of
revolution and encourage people to work wherever they feel best, and to get strong there,
and to live their impulse for liberation.

Is this our movement, is this the New Left? What do you think? These demands
haven't just sprung out of my head. At its best the American and European New Left has
or has had most of these traits. But only at its best, here and there,.and-especially in

15
America-in lesser and lesser degrees. The French students might say "All power to the
Imagination," but the American movement seems to be losing most of the imagination it
had. Take S.D.S. I began by quoting from and analyzing the language of the opening
paragraphs of One·Dimensional Man . I'll close by doiIjg the same with the S.D.S. 1969
National Convention Statement expelling Progressive Labor members.

SDS NATIONAL CONVENTION 1 969

1 . We support the struggles of the Black and Latin colonies within the U.S.
for national liberation, and we recognize those nations' rights to
self-determination (including the right to political secession, if they desire it).

2. We support the struggle for national liberation of the people of South

Vietnam, led by the National Liberation Front and the South Vietnamese
Provisional Revolutionary Government. We also support the Democratic
Republic of Vietnam, led by President Ho Chi Minh, as well as the Democratic
Republic of China, the Peoples' Republics of Korea and Albania, and the
Republic of Cuba, all waging fierce struggles against U.S. imperialism. We
support the right of all peoples to pick up the gun to free themselves from the
brutal rule of U.S. imperialism.

3. The Progressive Labor Party has attacked every revolutionary nationalist

struggle of the Black and Latin peoples in the U.S. as being racist and
reactionary. For example, they have attacked open admissions, black studies,
community control of police and schools, the Black Panther Party and their
"breakfast for children" program, and the League of Revolutionary Black
Workers.

Progressive Labor Party has attacked Ho Chi Minh, the National Liberation
Front of South Vietnam, the revolutionary government of Cuba-all leaders of
the peoples' struggles for freedom against U.S. imperialism.

Progressive Labor Party; because of its positions and practices, is objectively

racist, anti-communist, and reactionary. It has no place in SDS, an
organization of revolutionary youth. Progressive Labor Party has also in
principle and practice refused to join the struggle against male supremacy. It
has no place in SDS, an organization of revolutionary youth.

For all these reasons, which have manifested themselves in practice all over the
country , as well as at this convention, and because the groups we look to
around the world for leadership in the fight against U.s. imperialism including
the Black Panther Party [and) Brown Berets urge us to do so, SDS feels it is
now necessary to rid ourselves of the burden of allowing the politics of
Progressive Labor Party members and all people who do not accept the above
two principles are no longer members of SDS.

Look at the tone of this statement. How dead! It speaks the frozen language of
the bureaucratic left: "We support the struggles," and "waging fierce battles against U.s.
imperialism," and "the brutal rule of U.S. imperialism," and "the peoples' struggles for
freedom against U.S. imperialism," and Progressive Labor "is objectively racist,
anti-communist, and reactionary." Does this sound like the New Left, like a movement
for liberation, like a new sensibility? The language is heavy, ritualized, dull, abstract.
Does this sound like a movement growing from the inside out, based on peoples' needs,
capable of direct and honest statement? The statement is tough-assed, deliberately
external, evasive, explains nothing about why the expulsion or howS.D.S. people feel
about P.L.

P.L. is "objectively racist, anti-communist, and reactionary"-the line has been

laid down, and it is a line saying nothing, absolutely nothing about the experience of
S.D.S. members , their goals, their needs, their reactions. Truth is found outside

16
us-"objectively"-and presented in flat and doctrinaire decrees. Objectively !

External, then, in a double sense: what determines the internal politics of S.D.S.?
The most ominous note is added almost as an afterthought, that "the groups we look to
around the world for leadership in the fight against U.S. imperialism including the Black
Panther Party (and] Brown Berets urge us" to expel P.L. This and constant invocation
of "U.s. imperialism" indicates what is happening: S.D.S.'s major fight is to free the
Third World and internal colonies from America. It is not our fight we are fighting, but
theirs-and only then, and indirectly, is it ours. They detenrune what we do.

No wonder the prose is so heavy and external-the movement is in the process of

becoming joyless and external. And in the process it sets up two ideological tenets which
we must accept in order to have a "place in SDS, an organization of revolutionary
youth." In the process, what has become of liberation, our liberation? Where are the
original traits of the movement-the humor, the anarchism, the lightness, the openness,
its direct person-to-person quality? Are these men and women who, in your words,
"have the good conscience of being human, tender, sensuous, who are no longer ashamed
of themselves . . . • " (EslillY on Liberation, p. 21)1

Instead we see America turned inside out, a would-be revolutionary party

reproducing some of the worst features of the society it wants to overthrow. In this
statement it is not S.D.S., but those who rule America who have the last laugh. In saying
this, I don't want to join the "dump on S.D.S." movement on the left. So..,'ialist scholars
talk this way, most other groups talk tins way, non-affiliated radicals talk this way. S.D.S.
merely presents the attitudes in their sharpest form.

My attempts to explain why your writings share some of these traits won't do for
the New Left, for S.D.S. is part of my world, the generation raised up by totalitarian
America. Why should those in whom I would expect to fmd the "new sensibility" mirror
the old sensibility? One of your main themes which is one of the baCKbones of
everything I say in this letter, is that traditional notions of politics no longer hold, that
political liberation cannot be separated from personal hberation -developing new needs,
new reactions. I have come to speak of those new needs as my needs, to say that I locate
them by learning to experience myself.

But this is the opposite of the manly toughness the S.D.s. statement asserts:
being open to yourself, stopping to feel, rejecting aggression, being willing to feel fear
and danger, being sensitive to your weaknesses, being vulnerable. Politics, on the other
hand, has always been the very home of the external-politics traditionally defmed. It is
a trap: politics must be redefmed. The French students are doing this. Cohn-Bendit's
book and actions breathe the spirit of liberation. The American New Left began to do
this but it seems in the process of undoing its original impulses.

Why? I think it's because of feat, fear which leads people to become external.
Notice-an explanation which is not at all a part of "political analysis." Are the politicos
afraid? Yes, I think, in the strangest way. Not afraid of clubbed heads OJ jail or losing
jobs, or not being respectable. America has taught us to be terrified of all this, and the
movement has broken that terror, has won out over it. But America has also taught us
to be terrified of ourselves. Being external, not being ourselves, refusing to be whole:
this is supposed to be strength. From being outside ourselves in America to being outside
ourselves in the movement. If we accept this way of defming ourselves America wins;
America wins and liberation is a sad joke. The early New Left had its fmger on
something more vital. But It failed to follow through its anarchism IJlld rejection of
ideology and demand for a new life. Instead of deepening its demands it abandoned
them. Instead of completing its break with America it returned. "A h1>eral wants to free
others; a radical wants to free himself." Whatever became of this New Left slogan? To
really carry it out would have meant something far more painful, more threatening than
all the Chicagos put together.

Which is better, a movement appealing to our by now built-in sense of guilt and

17
seU'-1Iacritlce-and thus easy to become part of-or a movement which threatens our
whole identity by asking a commitment to joy? Which is better, a movement which
accepts us as is. and then "natllralkr" develops elitist, hierarchical, mampulative,
centralized leadership, or a movement which demands that we grow, search ourselves,
make decisions, become responsible? Which is better, a large and centrally organized
mass of people committed to the ideas of socmJisln and democracy or a loose and
chaotic movement, small and building slowly, basmg itself in our guts, giving us the room
to get ourselves together?

To me the answers are obvious, A movement for liberation must be above all,
people who are not afraid to drop into themselves, who are learning to be whole, Yes, a
total break with America, a total commitment to change.

Your role in this process has been an ambiguous one . You bring the message of
liberation, but another, older message as well. One can draw from you a justification for
elitism, vanguardism, contempt for those we claim to want to liberate. Radicals reading
you have drawn encouragement for their remoteness from real needs and fears, abstract
intellectualism, being external, putting theory ahead of reality, and their insistence on
the "Objective" ? historical meaning of people's acts. After all, of all your writings,
One·DimenSlonal Man and "Repressive Tolerance" are said to be the most widely read
among activists. In helping us to get clear about our situation, they maintain the
influence over us of some of our worst patterns of thought and feeling and action. But
there is also the message of Eros and Civilization and An ESSIlY on Liberation . To take
the idea of liberation seriously means criticizing the other side of Marcuse and its
influence, It means letting go of thought and politics as we know them and turning
inward to face what we find there. Yes, you've given us tools and ideas for that, for
becoming new men and women.

Is it too late in the day to ask this of the New Left? Has America's resistance to
change and resort to repression made my demand foolish? After all, Herbert, if I've
explained your limitations by the historical situation, mustn't I do the same with the
movement? Does it harden as America hardens?

Nonsense. The historical situation makes demands and sets limits, but it certainly
doesn't decide how people must respond. You , for example, managed to keep alive a
sense of opposition and liberation at the worst tin>P.s, so that you have vital things to say
to us today. The New Left too can rise to the full height permitted and demanded by
our historical situation. Growing out of totalitarian America it can be a movement for
Iibemtion. After all, something new and profound is happening in America. Children
seem to be growing up freer, more whole, less cowed than I was. A spontaneous coming
together in reaction to all the oppressive forces I've discussed. Nourished by new
currents, oppressed in new ways, the movement need not merely reinstate doctrinaire
and external radical politics. Will it breJllj: into the open? The French revolution was
tremendously encouraging. The Women's liberation movement seems to be growing.
And much of the original liberating impulse remains in local SDS chapters. Time will tell.
Am I forced to end with a characteristic Marcusean question mark?

Well, Herbert, enough to trying to come to jUips with you and your influence. No
point in recapitulating-or rather, it would probably be impossible. After all, you've been
truly a great teacher. You've done all that any teacher worth the name can do: I use the
tools you have helped me to acquire in order to place myself in history and explain my
differences with you; your message has taken hold so deeply that I use it to criticize
even you. You've helped me, that is, to become myself.

Life,

Ron

18
19
 TELOS
Committed as it is to investigating new philosophical horizons that see k
to rescue philosophy from the triviality and meaninglessness in which it
presently imds itself, TELOS seeks to undertake an international
dialogue concerning philosophical issues directly relevant to the current
historical context.

The official publication of the Graduate Philosophy

Association of the State University of New York at Buffalo

Contents of Most Recent Issue of TELOS

- Contributions to a Phenomenology of Historical Materialism -

Herbert Marcuse
- The Concrete Totality - Karel Kosik
- GaIileo as a Poet - TELOS Staff
- Lukacs' History and Class-Consciousness Half a Century Later - Paul
Piccone
Imperialism and Irrationalism - Herbert Aptheker
The Risk of Spontaneity and the Logic of the Institution: An Interview
With Jean-Paul Sartre

Address all correspondence to The Editors, TELOS

Department of Philosophy, State University of New York at Buffalo
4244 Ridge Lea Road, Amherst, New York 14226, U.S.A.
$2.00 per year

POEMS OF THE PEOPLE wants poems, stories, any good writing (send
with a stamped return envelope) . Distributes free to underground
papers. Subscriptions for individuals: $5/year ( 1 2 mailings).

POEMS OF THE PEOPLE

Box 521
Quincy, Illinois 62301

20

1-
 Marcuse '. Utopia
by Martin Jay
The rise of Herbert Marcuse from the relative obscurity of his first sixty-five years
to a position as one of the media's favorite seducers of the young has not been without
its cost. The dissemination of his ideas has brought with it their inevitable dilution.
Through what the French, in a delightful phrase, call "la drugstorisation de Marcuse," he
has himself become something of a commodity. No article on the New Left is complete
without a ritual mention of his name; no discussion of the "counter-culture" dare ignore
his message of liberation. What is by and large ignored, however, are the roots of his
arguments which are too deeply embedded in a tradition alien to the thinking of most
Americans to make painless comprehension likely. It is far easier, after all, to read the
unfortunate essay on "Repressive Tolerance" than to wrestle with the conceptual
subtleties and stylistic impenetrability of Reason and Revolution . As a result, Marcuse is
still to a considerable extent Cet Inconnu, as the French journal La Netl subtitled its
recent issue devoted to him. A complete exploration of the foundations of his thought is
of course beyond the scope of this essay and must await another time. A beginning,
however, can perhaps be made by probing the one aspect of his thinking which has
increasingly come to the fore in recent years: its utopian dimension. As has often been
observed, Marxist theory has steadfastly refused to offer a blueprint for post-capitalist
society. The historicist strain in Marx's own thinking was alway s in tension with his
implicit philosophical anthropology. Occasional attempts to describe "Socialist Man" by
his successors have usually been thwarted by the recognition that he will have to defme
himself in a process of self-creation, of anthropogenesis, which cannot be predicted in
advance. Few Marxists or neo-Marxist thinkers have been as sensitive to this historicist
ban on positing a normative human nature as those of the so-called "Frankfurt School"
of the Institut fur Sozialtorschung, with which Marcuse was associated during the
1930's. The Institut's reluctance to suggest anything which might be taken as a universal
view of man's essence even prevented it from accepting without reservation the
anthropological implications of Marx's Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts when
they were recovered in the early '30's. It is not insignificant that Theodor W. Adorno,
who until his sudden and untimely death last summer was the Institut's director, chose
music, the most unrepresentational of aesthetic modes, as the medium through which he
examined bourgeois culture and sought traces of its transcendent negation. In recent
years, Max Horkheimer, more than anyone else responsible for the genesis of the
Institut's "Critical Theory ," has come to believe that this refusal to picture the "other"
society beyond capitalism is not unrelated to the Jewish ban on naming or describing
God.

Whatever the source of the taboo , only Marcuse of the major fJgUres connected
with the Frankfurt School has dared in recent years to break it. Only Marcuse has tried
to speak the unspeakable in an increasingly urgent effort to reintroduce a utopian cast to
socialist theory. Eros and Civilization was his first attempt to outline the contours of the
society beyond repressive domination. The Essay on Liberation goes even further in
explicity stating the need for a new philosophical anthropology, a frankly "biological
foundation" for socialism. The desired transition, he argues, is from Marx to Fourier,
from realism to surrealism. l a The failure of socialism, he seems to be saying, has been
the failure of imagination.

By consciously donning the utopian mantle, Marcuse has invited the scorn of
"realists" in both the socialist and capitalist camps. Nevertheless, by doing so, he has
helped give substance and direction to the inchoate yearnings of those dissatisfied with
what they see as the present Hobson's Choice of authoritarian socialism or repressive
advanced capitalism. While his critiques of both these current societies are well-known
the utopian alternative he has projected has been comparatively ignored. Only i b
psychoanalytic elements-the goal of a society freed from historically grounded "surplus

21
repression" and the "performance principle" (a kind of generalized Protestant
Ethic)-have been discussed with any rigor. Far less attention has been paid to its
philosophical sources. Only by examining these can the political implications of
Marcuse's vision be adequately understood.

Those familiar solely with Marcuse's writings in English are often surprised to
learn that before joining the Institut in Frankfurt in 193 2, he spent several years with
Martin Heidegger at Freiburg. During this period, he attempted to reconcile Heidegger's
existential phenomonology with historical materialism,2 anticipating in a sense what
Merleau-Ponty and Sartre were to try to do after the war. The details of his attempt need
not concern us now} What is important to note for our purposes is that, as Alfred
Schmidt has suggested, Marxism served him as a "positive philosophy" answering
Heidegg.. question, "What is authentic existence and how is authentic existence
possible?" To Marcuse, man can exist authentically only by performing radical deeds,
only by engaging in seif-creating praxis. Man is only man as autonomous subject, never as
contingent predicate. The Marxist "fundamental situation" (Grundsituation), he argues,
is that in which the historically conscious man performs radical acts in order to liVe
authentically .

Although abandoning much of Heidegger's terminology and moving away from

his ontological approach to history, during his tenure with the Institut, Marcuse has
never fully relinquished his conviction that the free man is the man who can create
himself through radical praxis. Ot might be added parenthetically that Heidegger's
influence has persisted in another way as well. Marcuse's much debated attitude towards
technology-he has been accused of being everything from a romantic Luddite to a
technological determinist-owes much to Heidegger's hostility to the technological logos
which he interpreted as a falling away from the basic insights of the pre-Socratics, a
process which began centuries before technology itself achieved its domination over
nature and man. In One-dimensional Man ,4 Marcuse openly appropriates a passage from
Heidegger's Holzwege to attack the "technological a priori.")

Still, it would be a grave error to dismiss Marcuse as an existentialist decked out in

Marxist trappings, as have some of his critics on the left. Whatever his indebtedness to
Heidegger, he has never abandoned his belief in the necessity of rational theory. At no
time has he succumbed to an anti-intellectual web of experience. Indeed, among his most
devastating critiques is an attack on the pro-Nazi political philosopher Carl Schmitt's
anti-normative political existentialism.5 (There is, of course, no necessary connection
between the philosophical positions collectively known as Existentialist and their
political counterpart, although in the sad case of Heidegger, his Nazi sympathies cannot
be totally dissociated from his philosophy.) If there is a leftist parallel to Schmitt and his
decisionism, it can be found in those who would collapse theory into an unmediated
praxis. The most recent manifestation of this basically anarchistic position is the so-called
"Weatherman" faction of the SDS. Although Marcuse has always warned agamst the
complete separation of theory and praxis, at no time has he advocated action as
sufficient in itself. The goal may be the unity of thought and action, but at this moment
in historical time, their relationship is necessarily problematical. To declare their unity as
already existing is to fall prey to ideology. It is only as a utopian hope that the
coordination of self-creating action and rational theory should be understood in
Marcuse's work.

If one element of his utopian vision is a stress on radical praxis as authentic

behavior, which can perhaps be derived from his connection with Heidegger, there is
another, more important strain. Here his distance from existentialism of all types IS
plainly evident. This is especially clear when compared with the position taken by Sartre
in one of the classic existentialist texts, Being and Nothingness. The relevant issue here is
the possibility of the reconciliation of opposites which anyone who works within a
Hegelian framework must confront. In Being and Nothingness, the dialectic of opposing
forces remains inevitably truncated ; the redeeming power of synthesis is ultimately denied
as a possible end to the historical process. The pour-soi and en-soi, Sartre's variation on
the theme of subject and object, cannot be reconciled. "Conflict," he writes, "is the

22

1
original meaning of being-for-{)thers."6 The familiar aphorism from No Exit makes the
same point: "VEnfer. c'est les autres." Here it might be added, Marcuse's former
colleagues at the Institut fur Sozialforschung, Horkheuner and Adorno, reluctantly reach
similar conclusions in their later work. Negative Dialektik, Adorno's last great work,
slresses non-identity and the importance othegation as the last refuge of freedom. "The
totality," he wrote elsewhere, "is the untrue ." And in the 19 60's, Horkheimer has
returned to an early interest in Schopenhauer and his pessimistic denial that the world
can be made rational.

Marcuse , on the other hand, disagrees both with the gloomy reduction of man to a
"useless passion" in Being and Nothingness and with the stress On the non-identity of
subject and object in the work of the other leading figures of the Frankfurt School. So
often taken to task for his "pessimism," he maintains a belief in all his work that true
reconciliation, however frustrated in the false harmony of contemporary society, is
indeed a possibility. This is not to say, of course, that he believes the synthesis has
already been achieved, as Hegelians of the right have always assumed. Firmly grounded
in the Marxist tradition as he is, Marcuse is qui\;k to point out that social conditions,
behind the facade of one-dimensionality, are still fundamentally contradictory and
antagonistic. Qass conflict may not be the form in which contradiction now manifests
itself, but no universal class has emerged in which all antagonisms have been dialectically
resolved. Integration , as he has used it, doesn't mean true harmony. On the other hand,
he does believe that for the first time, pre-conditions do exist, created paradoxically by
the technology whose other effects he so dislikes, which make the prospects for
reconciliation favorable. With the end of scarcity, so runs the familiar argument from
Eros and Civilization, man's need to repress himself for the sake of productive work is no
longer binding. Utopian possibilities are no longer chimerical.

What then does Marcuse mean by reconciliation? What is this true harmony he so
fervently seeks? Here more than anywnere else, he reveals his roots in the German
Idealist tradition. One might even venture the observation that he has succumbed to the
lure of Greece and its alleged cultural serenity which had such an enormous influence on
German philosophy during its classical period, as E;M. Butler has shown in her masterful
The Tryanny of Greece over Germany . The image of the Greeks which was so powerful
was not that of a nation of tragedy writers, but rather that of a people in a state of
pre-alienated wholeness which Wmckelmann introduced to the German mind in the 18th
century .

In his essay on "Philosophy and Critical Theory," first appearing in the Zeitschrift
fur Sozialforschung in 1937, Marcuse wrote: 7
"Under the name of reason it (Philosophy) conceived the idea of an authentic
Being in which all significant antitheses (of subject and object, essence and
appearance, thought and being) were reconciled. Connected with this idea was
the conviction that what exists is not immediately and already rational but
must rather be brought to reason. . • . at its highest level, as authentic reality ,
the world no longer stands opposed to the rational thought of men as mere
material objectivity. Rather, it is now comprehended by thought and defined
as a concept (JJegriff). That is, the external, antithetical character of material
objectivity is overcome in a process through which the identity of subject and
object is established as the rational, conceptual structure that is common to
both."

Here then is the belief that identity between thought and being, and Marcuse
clearly means being.m-the-world, social relations, can be established on tile basis of a
shared rationality. At no time, however, does he imply that the individual should be
sacrificed to the whole in the name of an hypostatized objective rationality. In his article
On Hedonism written for the Zeitschrift in 1938, he stresses the function of hedonistic
philosophies in preserving the claim of personal human happiness against the demands of
over-arching totalities such as the state. Here the stress on sensual gratification which was
developed in his post-war work on Freud exists in embryo. Marcuse has, however, always
been careful to avoid advocating simple sexual freedom as the answer to social

23
repression, as Wilhelm Reich on occasion did. "The bogey of the unchained voluptuary,"
he wrote, "Who would abandon himself only to his sensual wants is rooted in the
separation of intellectual from material productive forces and the separation of the labor
process from the process of consumption. Overcoming this separation belongs to the
pre-conditions of freedom."8 The end of the dichotomy between internalized,
spiritualized cultural and material, sensual activity in the "real" world is thus part of his
utopian vision. The stress here on reconciling production and consumption foreshadows
his later use of Schiller's "play drive" in Eros and Civilization . Art and technology must
ultiniately converge ; the logos of gratification must be joined with a technology freed
from its project of domination.

The driving impetus in Marcuse's thinking towards harmony is further

demonstrated in his treatment of time. In Eros and Civilization, he stresses the function
of memory , of "re-membering" that which is asunder, as a vehicle of liberation. To
forget is to forgive the injustices of the past. "From the myth of Orpheus to the novel of
Proust," he argues, "happiness and freedom have been linked with the idea of the
recapture of time . . . remembrance alone provides the joy without anxiety over its
passing and thus gives it an otherwise impossible duration. Time loses its power when
remembrance redeems the past."9 And in his later essay, "Die Idee des Fortschritts im
Licht der Psychoanalyse," he more explicitly outlines a utopian idea of temporality.
"Time would no longer appear as linear, as an eternal line or eternally ascending curve,
but as a circle, a return, as last thought by Nietzsche as the Eternity of Joy." l 0

There is more than a little of the tyranny of Greece, or at least the Greek idea of
cyclical time, in all of this, not to mention the influence of one of Marcuse's colleagues
at the Institut fur Sozialforschung, Walter Benjamin. In his "Theses on the Philosophy of
History ," 1 1 Benjamin developed the ideal of "Jetztzeit" (Nowtime) as a mystical
explosion in the continuum 01 history, a kind of Messianic time qualitatively different
from the empty, linear, unfulfilled temporal experience of ordinary men. Marcuse has
always been fond of quoting Benjamin's observation that in 1 848, the revolutionaries of
Paris shot at public clocks to make time stop. The implications of this way of thinking
would seem blatantly eschatological. But Marcuse, when questioned on this point, has
denied any eschatological intentions. History will go on, he has said , short of a nuclear
disaster.

And yet, it would go on in a way very different from the way in which it has been
experienced until now. What will be particularly absent is conflict, strife, striving, in
short, all the things which have characterized Western history for millennia. In his own
words, Marcuse desires the "pacification of existence." Gratification and sensual
receptivity are the traits of his new aestheticism. Unllke Marx, or at least the nature
Marx, Marcuse believes labor can be abolished. Because Marx was more pessimistic on
this point, he never believed that the complete identity of the production and
consumption processes could be achieved. Indeed, Marx did not even fully accept the
Hegelian notion of identity of subject and object to which Marcuse seems to have
returned.1 2

The only place in his writings where Marcuse displays similar caution is in his
critique of Norman O. Brown whose mysticism demands the total negation of the
principium individuationis. .. . . . Eros lives in the division and boundary between subject
and object, man and nature," he admonished Brown, " . . . the unity of subject and
object is a hallmark of absolute idealism; however, even Hegel retained the tension
between the two, the distinction." 1 3 Elsewhere, Marcuse supports an identity theory
which, although demanding the preservation of the individual, is scarcely less utopian
than Brown's. It is not insignificant that Ernst Bloch, whose animistic belief in the
resurrection of a new natural subject marks him as a leading identity theorist, embraced
Marcuse at a conference in Yugoslavia in 1 968 and welcomed him back to the ranks of
the utopian optimists of the 1920's. Indeed, it would be tempting to say that Marcuse
has surrendered to what Freud called the "Nirvana Principle ," the yearning for the end
of tension that is life, if Marcuse were not so sure that life without tension is a
possibility. 1 3a

24
 These then are the two strains in Marcuse's vision of the liberated society. First,
the stress on radical acti,n, on the deed, on self-creation as the only mode of authentic
being.And second, the unity of opposites, the true harmony of pacified existence, the
end of conflict and contradiction. The Qne theme is basically active, one might even say
Promethean, to use Marx's own favorite metaphor, the other rather more passive, Orphic
in the sense Marcuse interprets Orpheus in Eros and Civilization : as the singer of joy and
fulfillment. And both, he has cogently argued, are denied and frustrated in the
contemporary world of repressive capitalism and authoritarian socialism.

Whether or not the two strains are compatible is a problem Marcuse doesn '( seem
to have worked out in any detail. It might be said that radical praxis is merely the means
to achieve the revollitionary breakthrough leading to the pacification of existence . This
doesn't work , however, because of Marcuse's insistence that se lf-creating action is the
only truly authentic mode of being. Another possible solution would be to divide him
into an "early" and a "late" Marcuse, as is sometimes done with Marx, with the result
that a Heideggerian Marcuse is somehow supplanted by a Hegelianized one under the
influence of Horkheimer and the Institut. Besides being too schematic, this solution fails
to do justice to the mixture of both strains in his work. It seems perhaps best to leave
this problem by saying that Marcuse, like so many other thinkers of stature, has
unresolved tensions in his thought. As to be expected, the political implications which
can be drawn from these conflicting tendencies are no simpler. It is to these that we now
turn.

I n his treatment of Heidegger's concept of authentic existence, Marcuse was

critical of the abstract, undialectical quality of his teacher's idea of history. Not
everyone, he argues, was in the position to perform the radical acts constituting
authentic behavior. At this stage in man's development. Marcuse claimed, only the
proletariat is the true actor on the historical stage because of its crucial role in the
production process. To ignore the importance of class differences would be to retreat
into Idealism. Heidegger's indifference to the real course of history was not unrelated to
the Vo?kisch ideology of the national Gemeinschaft transcending sodal contradictions.

Since 1 928, much of course has happened to em"sculate the revolutionary

potential of the working class, especially in the America to which Marcuse fled in 1 9 34
To thc consternation of those who still romanticize the proletariat. he was among the
first to face the implications of its integration. Although he has recently seen evidence of
cracks in the one'{\imensionality of the system in student protest and the rumblings of
what Marx would have dismissed as Lumpenproletan·at. at no time has he mistaken these
forces for a new proletariat or a new historical subject. As a result, he has been th�
frequent target of other theorists on the left who see the stirring of new "negative"
forces in society such as the alienated "New working-class" of white collar workers and
technicians. Wnoever may be right, it is important to note that Marcuse has alway'
identified the doers of the authentic deed with a specific historical group. To ignore the
historical element in his "existentialist" strcss on praxis is thus to falsify his analysis.
Although Marcuse has often been accused of anarchism -such disparate thinkers as Hans
Heinz Holz and George Lichtheim have leveled this charge against him 14 -and indeed
there is an anarchistic element in his work in the healthy sense of distrusting rigid
organizati �ns, it would be a grave error to interpret him as an advocate of indiscriminate
activism or pOlitical decisionism. That wing of the student movement which takes his
name as justification for such activity is misapplying his teachings, at least insofar as they
neglect his stress on present historical possibilities.

And yet, a persistent understanding of Marcuse on just this level does exist. If the
so-called existentialist element in his utopian vision ought not to be interpreted as a
justification for the indeterminate negation of the system, what of the other central
theme in his work , the yearning for harmony and reconciliation of dialectical
contradictions? Here the implications are far more problematical. In his analysis of
Marcuse's at'sthetics, 1 5 Helhert Read has argued that the achievement of a rational society
would not end the need for art, as Marcuse has implied. If in our own irrational

25
society art provides une promesse de bonheur, a promise of unfulfilled happiness, as
Marcuse has argued, there isno necessary reason to suppose that a new society, however
rational, would satisfy all of men's needs or end all his fears. Above all, the mystery of
death and the arbitrariness of suffering would make human existence a continuing
subject for the aesthetic imagination. The eternal return is forever bisected by the linear
time of mortal men who are born and must ultimately die.

If Marcuse is too quick to assume art would be aufgehoben in a rational society,

so too, and this is a vitally important point, is he overly hasty in assuming politics would
be overcome in a grand synthesis of differences. The vaunted American system of
pluralistic politics may indeed be a mask for manipulation and special interests, as he has
always argued, yet pluralism as such is the very essence of politics. The belief that
political conflict is an epiphenomenon of economic and social contradictions is a fallacy
which ought f"mally to be laid to rest. What the Czechs were trying in part to say, before
they lost the chance to say anything at all a year ago, was that politics in the sense of
readjusting priorities and working through the competition for power doesn't end when
an economy is socialized. Furthermore, the expectation that internal tension would end
when the entire world becomes socialist is a hope which drowned in the waters of the
Ussuri River last year.

Thus, in positing a utopia of identity in which all contradictions are overcome ,

Marcuse displays that basic hostility to politics which has been the curse of too many
German thinkers for too many years. Its effects spill over into the only type of political
action he sanctions today: the Great Refusal, a complete rejection of the mechanics of
political change presented by the system. Although in large measure a response to the
sadly true observation that the system all too often fails to do what it promises, it is also
a reflection of his more basic rejection of politics as such. The inevitable result of this
attitude, if apolitical quietism is to be avoided, is what the French call une politique du
pire based on the apocalyptic hope that out of total chaos will come total change.
Metapolitics rather than true political activity becomes the only authentic mode of
revolutionary behavior. In the end, it is perhaps all reducible to that "aestheticization"
of politics against which Walter Benjamin so earnestly warned' ! 6 Paradoxically, the
radical optimism of Marcuse's utopian vision is the dialectical counterpart of the
resignation about the possibilities for change within or growing out of the system which
has earned him so much abuse from liberals and the orthodox left.

It is thus ironic that the existentialist strain in Marcuse's thinking, which is

sometimes cited as the source of his anarchistic impulses, is less influential in promoting
anti-political politics than is the Idealist strain. It is almost as if Marcuse had forgotten
his tempering of the ahistorical element in Heidegger's thinking in his belief that the
metapolitical utopia is just around the corner. Reifying the status quo and rejecting any
medium of real change except the sudden and total collapse of the system is to jump out
of history. It is no accident that Marcuse has taken more and more in his recent works to
quoting that other great defector from the mundane course of history , Friedrich
Nietzsche.

Perhaps the most unhistorical element in his work is the notion that the abolition
of labor and its replacement by play, in Schiller's sense of unrepressed sensuousness
reconciled with the "order of freedom," would be the hallmark of the new age. The end
of scarcity, a task which is by no means as easily accomplished as he believes, is a thin
reed on which to base the end of social, political, and psychological contradictions. Here,
curiously, Marcuse shows himself both beyond Marx and beholden to him. He transcends
Marx's relatively cautious stance, as mentioned before , by arguing that labor can indeed
be abolished. Yet, by giving so much weight to that abolition, he reveals his indebtedness to
Marx's conviction that labor is the basic human life activity. Play, it might be argued , is
�really the same conceptual axis as labor, if at the other end.

Marcuse's interpretation of Hegel is itself colored by his acceptance of the Marxist

centrality of labor. In Reason and Revolution, he wrote : "The concept of labar is not
peripheral in Hegel's system, but is the central notion through which he conceives the

26
,

1
development of society ."17 What Marcuse was perhaps forgetting in his desire to
demonstrate the closeness of Marx and Hegel has recently been shown by tne most gifted
secondlleneration student of the Frankfurt School. Jurgen Habermas. Labor, Habermas
has argued in his article "Arbeit und Interaktion, " I S was not the only category of
self-creation in Hegel's thinking. An alternative mode existed in symbolically mediated
interaction, i.e. language and expressive gestures, which at least in his early work, Hegel
did not see as identical with the dialectic of labor. To Marcuse, however, Hegel was
saying that "Language . . . makes it possible for an individual to take a consciol1S
position against his fellows and to assert his needs and desires against those of the other
individuals. The resulting antagonisms are integrated through the process of Jabor, which
also becomes the decisive force for the development of culture." 19 Thus, in Marcuse's
thinking, the problems of symbolic interaction are contained within the larger
framework of the dialectic of labor and the production process. This permits him to give
so much emphasis to the utopian possibilities liberated by the abolition of human toil.
What he therefore neglects to note is, as Habermas has put it, "Freedom from hunger
and toil doesn't necessarily converge with freedom from slavery and degradation. because
an automatically developmental connection between labor and interaction doesn't
exist. " 20

The link between Marcuse's hostility towards politics and his neglect of the
problem of symbolic interaction should not be missed. As Hannah Arendt, 2 1 among
others, has so often pointed out, speech and political praxis are inseparable . The
abolition of labor, even if it were as easily attained as Marcuse thinks it is, would
therefore not put an end to all contradictions. Symbolic interaction and the politics with
which it is so intimately tied would continue to express the sedimented antagonisms of
the past. The question of nationalism, for example , is likely to frustrate hopes for a
reconciliation of particular and universal interests in the future as it frustrated expectations
of an international proletariat in the past. And, of course at the center of the
national question is the irreducible fact of linguistic differences. This is a reality which
Marcuse's utopianism fails to acknowledge, thus allowing him to maintain an implicit
faith in the possibility of a Benjamin-like "explosion in the continuum of history ." The
political imperative which follows from all of this is the cul-de-sac of apocaly ptic
metapolitics which is really no politics at all.

Footnotes

�
1. "Marcuse: Cet Inconnu La Nef,36 (Jan-March, 1969).
1.a. Herbert Marcuse, A n Essay on L iberation (Boston, 1969) . , p. 22.
2 . See for example, Marcuse. "Beitrage zu einer Phanemologie des Historishcen
Materialismus," Philosophische Hefte , 1 , 1 (1928).
3. For a discussion of his problem see Alfred Schmidt, "Existential.()ntologie und
historischer Materialismus bei Herbert Marcuse ," An tworten auf Herbert Marcuse,
ed. J iirgen Habermas (Frankfurt a.M., 1968).
4. Marcuse, One·Dimensional Man (Boston,1964), p. 153-4.
5. Marcuse, "The Struggle Against Liberalism in the Totalitarian View of the State,"
Negations, trans., Jeremy J. Shapiro, (Boston, 1968), p. 3 1-42.
6. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans., Hazel Barnes (New York, 1956 ) , p.
364.
7. Marcuse , Negations, p. 135-6.
8. Marcuse, Negations, p. 198 .
9. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization , (New York, 195 5 ) , p. 2 13 .
10. Marcuse, Psychoanalyse und Politik (Frankfurt a.M., 1968), p . 50.
11. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York, 1968), p. 263.
12. For a discussion of this problem in Marx, see Alfred Schmidt, Der Begriff der Natur
in der Lehre von Marx (Frankfurt a.M., 1962).
13. Marcuse, Negations, p. 238.
13.a . ln Eros and Civilization (p. 2 14-5), he writes: "The death instinct operates under
the Nirvana principle : it tends toward that state of 'constant gratification' where no
tension is felt . . . . If the instinct's basic objective is not the termination of life but
of pain -the absence of tension-then paradoxically , in terms of the instinct. the

27
 conflict between life and death is the more reduced, the closer life approximates the
state of gratification. . . . As suffering and want recede, the Nirvana principle may
become reconciled with the reality principle. The unconscious attraction that draws
the instincts back to an 'earlier state' would be effectively counteracted by the
desirability of the attained state of life ."
14. Hans Heinz Holz, Utopie und A narchismus (Cologne, 1 96 8 ) ; George Lichtheim,
"From Marx to Hegel: Reflections on Georg Lukacs, T.W. Adorno, and Herbert
Marcuse," Triquarterly, 1 2 (Spring, 1 968).
15. Herbert Read, "Rational Society and Irrational Art," The Critical Spirit, ed. Kurt
Wolff and Barrington Moore, Jr. (Boston, 1 967).
16. Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 244.
17. Marcuse , Reason andR evolution (Boston, 1 966), p . 7 8 .
18. Habermas, Technik und Wissen schaft als "Ideologie " (Frankfurt a.M., 1 968).
19. Marcuse, Reason andRevolution (Boston, 1 966), p. 75 .
20. Habermas, p. 46.
21. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, 1 958), p. 155-6 1 .

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28
 NOTES ON MARCUSE
AND THE MOVEMENT

by Paul Breines

It's ironic that the 1 969 Socialist Scholars Conference should be presenting a
panel on the importance and impact of Marcuse's work. Ironic because Marcuse's work
played a prominent role in the 1966 and 1 967 Conferences (and outside as well! ) while
today large and growing portions of the Left, including the New Left, are in theory and
practice p roclaiming either the obsolescence or the reactionary character of Marcuse and
his ideas. In '66 he was to have appeared along with Isaac Deutscher in the discussion of
"socialist man." The confrontation between classicist and modernist Marxism never
came off: Marcuse was unable to attend and his absence was only partically filled by
Shane Mage's synthesis of the early Marx and the early Leary on the one hand, and
Marcuse's letter to the conference on the other. In his two page note he outlined what he
considered the new needs of critical theory and action within the historical
developments that had outmoded both the traditional reformist and revolutionary
Marxist perspectives on socialist revolution. He referred to the explosive character of the
linkage of politics and sexuality within the youth revolt in th� advanced capitalist
countries and to the dialectically connected repressive and Iiberatory implications of
developed te chnology as two of the new and central objects of theory and practice.
Pissed off by the letter and its author's absence, few would then have predicted the
subsequent developments: the planetary detonation of student revolt and youth culture
as original revolutionary formations, and Marcuse's rapid rise to international Guru
status. Symbolic expression of this was presented at the 1967 SSC in the panel on the
Hippies and the New Left at which Marcuse made an unannounced appearanre: his brief
remarks on the prospects for a new union of cultural and political-economic rcvolullon
were mirrored in the audience as a fundamental division on those two lines, two still very
disunited conceptions of revolution.

Now, in 1 969, we gather to examine the importance and limitations of Marcuse's

work and it seems necessary to begin by taking account of the very wierd circumstances
surrounding and shaping this effort. Regarding the "situation of Marcuse-ism" there are
two broad aspects: on the one hand, a neat proof of Marcusc's theses on "one
dimensionality" and the total alienation of daily life is the process of one
dimensionalization his own work has undergone. As his friend, Walter Benjamin, noted over
twenty years ago : the bourgeois production and publicarion apparatus can assimilate and
even propogate an astonishing number of revolutionary themes without thereby
endangering its own basis or the basis of the class that controls it. In Marcuse's case the
details are well enough mown: he is reviewed and interviewed (hardly a European
newspaper or periodical made it through 1 967-68 without a few grains of Marcusenalia;
recently a silly interview in a French paper was translated into German and put out as a silly
book), photographed and monographed (in the bunch of books and dissertations soon to
appear), translated and red-baited, deified and reified. Quantity becomes quality: here as
elsewhere in the modern political-economy , the law of impoverished abundance is
operative. A Marcuse carnival has for some time been in full swing and we ought to be
conscious that this panel is but one small menagerie in the whole show.

This article is a shorter version of an essay that will appear in a book by Paul Breines called
Criticalln te"uptions (Herder and Herder 1 970)

29
 Two elements need to be added to this. The "repressive celebration" of Marcuse is
not at all peculiar to him. The pseudo-event is a constituitive moment in the impacted
structure of organized passivity, de-politicization , and frenetic consumption that
dominates contemporary life. And it slrould be clear that both Marcuse's work and the
New Left (not to speak of the Hippies, youth culture, etc.) are at every point subject to
the forces of reification and commodification against which they revolt in the first place.
Secondly, though I'm not prepared to go into it here, some thought and action ought to
be directed at the possible underlying dialectic of this development, this repressive
celebration and integration of revolt. The fact that Marcuse, the New Left, Black Power,
youth culture, etc. quickly become popular fads, marketable trinkets to be bought and
contemplated by an utterly bored populous, may also be part of the dissolution of
established patterns and mechanisms. For example, it seems clear now that "bourgeois
ideology" can no longer draw on capitalism as an economic system for social values; i.e.,
capitalism itself no longer generates meaningful values out of itself and "bourgeois
ideology" increasingly turns precisely to the anti-capitalist revolt toget what it needs. This
is of course a restatement of Walter Benjamin's point cited earlier, but to it is now added
the need to see the limits to pure and total assimilation , and the need to practically
insure the bursting of those limits.

The second circumstantial, yet determining aspect of the present discussion is

more immediately pressing: namely , this panel occurs in the midst of a deep and
pervasive freak-out and crisis within the movement for whom Marcuse's work has
apparently been SO important. A hundred sectarian flowers have suddenly bloomed;
despair, confusion, and anxiety are wide-spread ; repression is heavier than before.
Specifically, these new developments are also defmed by Murray Bookchin in his
exemplary action entitled "Listen, Marxist !," as a return of all the old shit from the '30s.
One symptom, and it is perhaps a small one, is the New Left's recent very clear tendency
to reject Marcuse's work. (1 should be clear though necessaIily crude about my
underlying assumptions at this point: I think that any radical who rejects Marcuse's work
is a moron and not a radical. I also think that Marcuse's work is not a "line," or a
Weltanschauung. It is a critique-of advanced capitalism and of the radical movement
within advanced capitalism-and its purpose is exactly to be superceded by radical
theory and action. But supercession-along lines proposed here by Ron Aronson and
Stanley Aronowitz-and rejection refer to completely opposite processes.) Some cases in
point: following the French uprising in May, 1 968, the media predictably undertook an
inane study to prove the Marcusean origins of the enrages, whose grafitti and slogans did
actually appear to leap from Marcuse's books. The point of this nonsense is the point of
all outside agitator theories: to suppress the inside agitator, to hide the common origin of
both Marcuse's thought and the real revolt in the society based on programmed
alienation at home and programmed destruction abroad. But in the midst of this
Guru-mythology and bugaboo folklore (joined, by the way, by Pravda and the PCF as
well as the liberal and right-wing press) commencs such as tn� following were
forthcoming: Pierre Frank of the 4th International, summarized the results of a mass
meeting in Paris in mid-May where a consensus was reached that the student revolt could
be no more than part of the struggle for socialism and that the key force in this struggle
was the industrial proletariat. He added : "no remarks of a Marcusean or similar type
were listened to." (See Frank's essay in Th e New R evolutionaries, T. Ali, ed., New York,
1 969). It's irrelevant that this comment may be mere sectarian wish-think, for it accurately
summarizes the main thrust of the great bulk of New Left meetings in the U.S. during
the past year or more. Another case :\it was no surprise that PL came forth with "proof'
that Marcuse is a CIA agent and that the function of his books and recent travels has been ·to
aid the international ruling class in suppressing revolt wherever it arises. That this
charge is a ludicrous twist to the orthodox Marxist view of the "role of the individual in
history ," does not make it less despicable. And it might be discounted nevertheless were
it not for the fact that many "New Lefties" have been flocking to PL and the fact that
with the sole exception of Bookchin's pamphlet not a single Left or New Left
publication has to my knowledge attacked both the charges and the mentality that
would make them. I don't know if this silence means that the movement en masse
believes the charges, but I do think that the charges themselves are no more or less than a

30
 ---

psychotic spin-off from an emerging consensus around the idea that the supposedly
meta-political, utopian, "personal liberation," "anti-working class" stage in the
movement's development-with Marcuse being taken as a key symbol of this stage-must
be exorcized.

The New Left-a drastically imperfect experiment, a "great refusal" which has yet
to discover and nurture a coherent critical theory and sustaining liberatory forms of
organization-is presently alienating itself into its own opposite, expiating but not
superceding its p ast. From an incoherent, yet experimental and open "new left"
perspective, the movement has jumped into the theoretical and practical
pseudo-coherence of Marxism-Leninism. Iconoclasts have transformed themselves into
iconists; "working class," "proletarian internationalism, " "seizure of state power," and
other totems have reappeared with the same function they possessed decades ago: to
abstractly resolve real contradictions. The inadequacies of concepts and organizational
strategie s like "participatory democracy ," and "let the people decide" are myriad but
overcoming these moments (moments which in deformed form nevertheless expre��erl
some of the most vital and essential elements of the movement) by a full flip into
Leninist or Leninized notions of the vanguard party , not only implies a flip from
anti-authoritarian to authoritarian politics but also leaves the original dilemma
untouched and untouchable by reducing a problem of social life and social consciousness
(or false consciousness) to an administrative-organizational problem. likewise, the
shortcomings of the new left's infamous "politics of the unpolitical" are evident, if not
crystal clear. Yet the movement's focus on alienation and reification, commodity
fetishism, the triviality and ennui of everyday life , the repressive character of everyday
language and of the homogenized environment-in short, the new left as a refusal, by
men and women desperate for life, to be transformed in to things-was neither the
gratuitous pecadillo of a bunch of rich , white kids nor a flight from "the real economic
and political contradictions of capitalism." The so-called politics of the unpolitical was
in fact the correct perception that nothing in advanced capitalism is unpolitical; that the
relations between "base" and "superstructure" are not as they were in Marx's time nor
as they were thirty years ago; and that a "new politics," which at every point lived and
experienced the liberation and dis-alienation it sought as the aim of revolution, had to be
invented. This thrust had the great value of pointing toward a total critique of modern
capitalism, one which grasps the system as a whole, and thus docs not lag behind the
system itself. Negatively , it had the merit of lifting the New Left well beyond the
practical and theoretical economism o f the "Old Left."

Apparently the pressure for coherence, combined with the movement's happy
anti-intellectualism on the one hand, and a whole serie s of "objective " dilemmas on the
other, was too great to bear. At the moment the New Left is in a state of implosion and
self-consumption. Unfortunately , the main e xpressions vf this crisis-the mass of sterile
dogmas that pass for revolutionary theory and strategy -are viewed by many in the
movement as the appearance of pubic hairs, signs of a new maturity, signs of a departure
from the infantile stage. I think this is bullshit. When, for example, SDS recently
expelled PL at the National Convention it did so by pointing at two specific political
positions upheld by PL which were in basic contradiction to the positions held by
SDS-the NLF and the Panthers. Not a word about PL as a repository of reified
I Marxism-Leninism, and authoritarian organizaton, a recapitulation of the prevailing

1f
repressive mores, but alot of junk about PL as "objectively counter-revolutionary,"
racist, etc. This opens the way to one of the most dangerous mechanisms there is in
radical politics: when the critique of the "quality of life" is dropped or suppressed, and
when the critique of the sociological-psy chological quality of regressive tendencies
within the movement is dropped, so is the possibility of a genuine self-critique of the
quality of the movement as a whole. And the point here is not simply that in the process
the New Left fails to dialectically overcome its own past but worse, it is wiping out .a
movement of the future. A fmal and small irony: these developments coincide with the

31
publication of Marcuse's An Essay on Libera/ion , a little book which remains true to the
movement's polymorphously perverse infancy -i.e., that which must be preserved if it is
ever to be overcome-while the young movement embraces a repressive and pseudo­
maturity , many of its numbers happily changing themselves, in Aragon's phrase, into
"fellatoIN of the useful. masturbators of necessity."

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.L
 This is a little like

a London morning
quiet cool

and bright

maybe too complacently beautiful

though that might change

with time

one complete rotation of the globe

and not awakening with a hangover

after all of last night's beer

was a real boon

we watched the new people in Harvard Square

crowded as Telegraph Avenue

streaming each conceivable way

on crosswalks

through traffic

down sidewalks

through stores

all bookstores open now at night for a while

peek through the gates into the Yard

even a feeling of sharpened political awareness

because of crowded rall ies

leafleting for a Panther rally next week

events coming up to overtake us

in our ideological stupor

What a rel ief H istory is!

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33
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1
 ----- -

Intellectuals in the
Debslan Socialist Party
by Paul Buhle
"Hereafter we shall have to suffer the lawless manifestations of this
rationalistic craziness which claims to drive the unforseen from history and
chance from the world, which would dissipate obscurity from every thing and
reduce everything to intelligible and clear concepts; and which proposes to
impose upon the universe, always tormented by desire for the irrational, the
laws of formal science." Hubert Lagardelle, In ternational Socialist Review,
1905.

"The radicals of today are only a vanguard before the immense multitude
which is all-powerful and uncertain and which ignorance may render
maleficent. Ignorance is a chasm which lurks trecherously in the path of the
beauty of the apostles. Liebknecht was killed by the German people . . . . I I I t
is the duty of those who understand . . . to achieve the revolution in men 's
minds ." Henri Barbusse, Socialist Review, 1920.

"Writing Socialist books has spoiled more promising American Socialists than
drink, and each has claimed its share." Frank Bohn, New York Call , 1 909

"Socialist Intellectuals" in the Debsian movement were at all times a rare

commodity, if by "Socialist" is meant a person who has an understanding of Marxism as
a phiiosophicalJ historical and economic system, and by "Intellectual" is meant a person
who makes an original contribution of any kind, probing social contradictions to
understand Capitalism and the forces of its potential negation. In fact, Debsian Socialists
were rarely so particular about their definitions. For them "Socialist" meant ordinarily
no more than one who favored a cooperative order and who could construe some sense
in which he saw the necessity of "Class Struggle ." And an "Intellectual"-usually a term
of approbation-was for them a paid writer of almost any kind. By the latter defmition,
the "Socialist Intellectual" was a popular writer or theoretician, usually of middle-class
background and possessing some formal education. Such "Socialist Intellectuals" joined
the Socialist Party in considerable numbers during its times of greatest popularity, and
played a role out of proportion to their actual size.

Unfortunately , no fully clear differentiation can be made between the "Socialist

Intellectuals" of the two defmitions. The limits of this study force me to restrict my
intellectual history to the former, the few writers actually involved in weighty
intellectual work. But since the Party membership as a whole lumped the two together,
and indeed most theoreticians were also practicing popularists, the latter 's role in the
Party must also be considered.

1
As theoreticians, American Socialist Intellectuals reflected in their own work the
immaturity of their movement and its lack of a firm class basis. What "Marxism" existed
in the first decade of the Party 's history (coinciding almost exactly with the first decade
of the twentieth century) was almost wholly a direct implantation of German
Social-Democratic thought with its strong bias toward natural science and evolutionary
theories. The most notable theoretical work in these years was, not surprisingly, the
translation and publication of various European Socialist classics. But after 1 9 1 0, a
certain kind of maturity was achieved: native, semi-Marxist Socialist writers began to

Revision of Paper originally presented to the Socialist Scholars Conference, September,

1969.

35
complete their historical and social studies; and numbers of file most perceptive
intellectuals, shaken by the Party's internal turbulence and the rise of a militant
industrial proletariat, strove anxiously for a new stage of theory. The impact of the
Russian Revolution and the intensive suppression of Socialist periodicals completed what
the American war entry had begun, the decimation of the ranks of potential Socialist
intellectuals of stature. Yet however meager the half-developed intellectuals' influences
upon their contemporaries or u pon later generations, their struggles for an American
Marxism retain their significance. And it is to the future of those struggles that this essay
is dedicated.

Robert Rives LaMonte, one of the outstanding socialist intellectuals, named two
types of intellectuals he had known in the fin de siecle radical movement: t"e
"Americanizers," whose interest in Marx was virtually non�xistent and who were only a
half-step from the ideas of Hemy George and Edward Bellamy; and the textualists, who
carried Capital around like a freethinkers' Bible and who remained hidden in the
immigrant ghettoes of America's great cities, little concerned about the nation's
realities ) The fust group was most articulately represented by the self-conscious
intellectuals who gathered in various sorts of utopian and reformist organizations from
the Nationalist Clubs of the late 1 880's to the municipal leagues of the 1 890's. A
tongue-in-cheek account of the New York Social Reform Club's officers in 1 89 8-99
conveys well the peculiar atmosphere:

The former president, Mr. Crosby, used to say emphatically, thinking probably
of the "class struggle," and "social revolution" and the tactics and tone of the
(Marxist Socialist Labor Party): "No, I am not a socialist;" and then, fixing his
eyes with a faraway look upon the ceiling he would reflect upon "the
brotherhood of Man," and "Equality before God," and "Love Your Neighbor
As Yourself," and "Thy Kingdom Come , " and would murmur dreamily :
"Why , yes , I am a Socialist; really, of course, we all are . " Mr. Crosby's
successor, Mr. Spahr, was at all intents and purposes a Fabian Socialist, but he
was too modest to confess it, and used blushingly to disclaim the honor when
it was thrust upon him. 2

Here, and in the reform-minded publications like the A merican Fabian, the Christian
Socialist and the less explicitly socialist Arena. a kind of predecessor of Progressivism was
mixed with other radical strains. Other non-Marxist proto-Socialist tendencies were
discernable in trade union newspapers, transformed Populist journals, and the sporadic
publications of the stumbling utopian colonies.

Among the textualists, Daniel DeLeon was considered the most orthodox Marxist
leader. His party's publication, the People , was thought to be the most erudite and stolid
of American English-language Marxist newspapers. Various non-Marxist strains continued
to e xist and display themselves within the SLP of the 1 890's. But DeLeon and his
lieutenants made every effort to purge from Socialism the wage-conscious reformi sts of
the craft unions and the sentimental dilletantes of middle-class reform movements.

r
Ironically , the People 's explanations of American events, such as the cause of America's
entry into tne Philippines and Cuba, was more crude than that of the reformists, for
"Marxism" was taken by friends and foes alike to be a super-determinism which pictured I

the Ruling Class as conspiring to construct even the details of social life. Moreover, the
I
"orthodoxy " of DeLeon and the People consisted largely in DeLeon's repetition and �
explanation of the most "scientific" aspects of German Marxism . DeLeon significantly
found his favorite classic text in the highly scientized A nti·Duehrillg, and often referred
to his system of thought as the "Marx-Morgan" complex, granting equality of
significance to the American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan who had sough t to
characterize certain universal stages of human development )

36
 T h u s the quality of English-language Marxist thought in America of the 1 890's
was very low indeed. Certain prominent intellectual figures of the next decade had begun
their public work by editing. or writing for, the variety of local Socialist sheets which
had appeared. But in the first h i storical instance. "Orthodox Marxism " had been
commonly taken to mean dogmatic insistence upon rotc learning from text, and by
implication entirel, sectarian practice. On the other SIde of the ledger, "Socialists" who
had n o solicitude for 1\larx and Marxism found a welcome place in the Social Democratic
Party, the lineal antecedent of the Socialist Party. The heterogeneity of the evolving
mass Socialist movement meant that the American counterparts of the British F ab ians,
of the German parliamentarians and revisionists. and even of the French syndicalIsts could
find a home within the same organization.

Dcbsian Socialist Intellectuals

A n e\'ent of signal importance for would-be Mae.:st intellectuals of the U . S . was

the fo undi ng of the 1I1temationai Socialist Re view in 1 900. Its owner, Chaires H . Kerr,
was the most notable entrepreneur o f educational purposes in American radical history ,
and w h i le h i, monthly journal served as a gathering point for SOCIal theory, hIS
book-publi'l1in� firm made available some of the finest European literature including
th ret' \ O illllle, of Cal'ital . Labriola's brilliant Esmys Oil the Materialist ConceptIOn of
Histor , ' , D ie t zge n ' s Posi'irc Outcome af Philosoph)' LaFargu e 's whimsical R igh t To Be
La:) ' , anJ dOTeH> of minor te,ts by notable continental authors from Emile Vandervelde
to I"ranci"co l · C'rrl' � .

of tile l l 1 l cmaliollal Sucialist R ericw from 1 900 t o 1 9 0 � , the year s of

T h e ed i t or
porulant} and grcatc:\t theuretical astuteness. was A . M . S im o n s . More
it:-; kJ.:-:t . than any
other s ingl e Ameri can SOL'iali:-.t thinker. Simons attcmpkd to di';; C llSS in the pagc� of the
ISR and i n h j, b o o \..: , thl' pt'Cliliar problems of Amencan histof'. and the enduring
sig n ifIcan c e of IlIIai sOl'ial i n " t i t u t i o l h . His b a c k ground in rural \Visconsin. and hi-; college
educltion under R i dwrd '1 . E l y , Icd h im to enri ch �13n; isJl1 \\ ith the theorie, of
F rederick Jackson T u rn e r and h i s 0\\ n empirical st udi e , of rural economic conditions.
H i s wife, May Wood Simon" sought i n the journal to yalidate �lan;isll1 by favorable
c0111parison to L on tem p o r ar �' current..; of a cadem i c though t . lik e the economic
interprctations of history by Achille Loria and the American E . R . A . SelIgman. And
S imo n s h imself made ever\' e flort to b n ng all the ISR as a relevant ,md di stinguished
journal by p ro fess io n a l standard..;. through h i ..:; c are fu l editl11g. h i ..., VO!UI111110U":; translation
of foreign authors. a qd the ed i to n a l �lnd l)OOK rc v i ew :-- \\· h i ( h h e large ly wrote himself.
Meanwhile, out of h i, ll1dependent \\'ork came 711t' .1 l11cricall Fanner ( 1 90 3 ) and Socia!
Force,' ill .4 mcrican JIiS/OlT ( 1 9 1 1 1 , ground brea ki ng studies for t h e Ameri can Left which
despite their occJ�ional ( r u d en c s:-- of int e rp re t a t i on \vere signi fi c a n t steps toward the
economic interpretation of Amcric'ln his tor) b) Charles A. Be'lJ'd and other Progressive
historians in later yC'ars.�

S imons was init i a ll y a rabid Leftist in the factional line-up of the Socialist Party
But as he turned to\\'ard the Am erican Federation o f Labor and hopes fo r a la bo r party
after 1 906 , he found a political co-thinker in a primary writer for the ISR , Lrnest
Untern1 ann . In every other way the two SCCI11cd oppos.ites: L' n termann was a generation
older, born i n 1 8 6 9 , and as an immigrant from Germany whose a bstrat'l though Is
remained in the homeland, was often apparently oblivious to his physical surroundings.
B ut Untermann was a natural contributor to the ISR , fo r he \\ as at all odds the most
learned of the American Socialist intellectuals. His ret1ections on �!ar"'s evolution
showed his fa mi li arity with Kant, Hegel, and Marx's untranslated Hcilige Fall/ilic.
Moreover, his writings for Simons' ISR were marked by the calm confidence of his
stature. He redressed the best-known American theorist, Louis B. Boudin, as if the latter
were an unschooled and undisciplined intellectual adolesce n t . And h e had the temerity
to commcnt upon his equality with Kautsky, the Maf'ian theorist at the time whose
reputation most nearly approxima ted Lenin's a generation later. Commenting upon an
attack which compared Kautsky's work to his own, Untermann admitted that the two

37
may well have differed on the particular question since he and Kautsky "had never
discussed it" -but Untermann admitted he would not be surprised if Kautsky were
simply wrong, since each of the two had his own specialties!5

The source of Untermann's purported difference with Kautsky was of central

interest to the former: a theory of cognition, elaborated by Joseph Dietzgen twenty
years before. Dietzgen, a German tanner, was reputed by Marx and Engels to have
discovered dialectical materialistic logic independently. By the turn of the century,
however. his work had been relegated to a minor position in Marxism by Kautsky,
Plekhanov and other widely-known intellectuals. The primary defenders of Dietzgen
and his theories were by then Untermann and Dietzgen's son Eugene, who had emigrated
to America for several years and returned to Germany. In the ISR , Untermann and an
intellectual disciple, Marcus Hitch, related the significance of the Dietzgen volumes that
had been translated into English (by Untermann) and published by the Kerr Company.
B y explaining that one "thinks" with not only the brain but as part of a response by the
whole body to given phenomena, Bietzgen had, according to his proponents, resolved the
tension between the old materialism which was merely mechanistic, and the idealism that
middle- and upper-class people seemed to bring into the Socialist moveme nt. 1-1'.'
implication, this theory explained the splits in the labor and Socialist movements as
essentially unnecessary, due to differences in perception of political necessities
Untermann's faith in proletarian victory through gradual reform measures caused him to
believe that factionalism in the American movement was spurious, while his mOdel, the
German Social Democracy, could contain B ernstein and Kautsky in the same party .

Untermann became the only A mer.can intellectual to enter seriously the

theoretical debates raging in Europe. In 1 908 he published a short work on dialectics in
German; in 1 9 1 1 , he published a book of more than seven hundred pages, a history of
m o d e rn philosophy which, appropriately, ended with Joseph Dietzgen's
accomplishments. Untermann later explained that neither of these had ever been
rendered into English because there was simply no market for such serious study in
America. Therefore, he wrote popularized books for Charles H. Kerr, stressing above all
the inter-relationship of modern science and socialism.6 His emphasis, like that of
Kautsky, was upon the mechanical, imperturbable processes in history, and on the
scientifically explanatory nature of Marxist theory. A s he commented in The World 's
Revolutions:

The Marxian method of historical research enables me to reconstruct the

entire life processes of each period . . . . Given the geographical conditions, the
available instruments of labor, and the prevailing mode of using them, the
stage is set and the leading human actors easily fall into their places and play
?
their economic and political role s according to their class interests'

Ultimately, such a detached pose ill-fitted Untermann for an active role in Socialist
politics despite his energetic participation in electoral activities during the early period.
His influence after 1 9 1 0 sharply declined, and he was notable primarily for his
elaboration of a municipal governing program for Milwaukee and his theoretical
exposition of the exclusionist position towards immigration that the reform Socialists
and the AF of L chose. His purely theoretical work had shown the unacceptability of
rigorous Marxism for the early Socialist movement, and his influence lay primarily with
selected individuals (including Jack London) to whom he was able to explain the
fundamentals of Marxist teaching.

The only other Debsian Socialist intellectual to be published and accepted abroad
was Louis B . Boudin, the frequent butt of Untermann'� remarks. Boudin, like many of
the Intellectuals, was trained as a lawyer, and many years after his active career as a
Socialist wrote a two-volume history of constitutional law in Amelica. Like Untermann
and most of the best known theoreticians. he was an assiduous reader of Kautsky and of
the Germany press generall y . By the turn of the century his writings had already begun to
appear in local Socialist newspapers, directed at explaining to an English-language
working class audience Marxian theory generally and economic theory par t iL'ularly. In

38
the ISR he was more energetic and was apparently allowed more difficult exposition
than Untermann, and he wrote frequently with an aim at clarifying the systematic and
consistent qualities of the Marxian world view.

The high point of Boudin's elaboration was The Theoretical System of Karl Marx ,
published in 1907 by Charles H. Kerr and later translated in Germany where it received
wide praise in the Socialist press. Unquestionably, the book was a breakthrough for
American Socialist theory, for it was the first text to expound in English, with the
difficulty the subject deserved, the complexities of a crisis-theory about American
Capitalism. As Paul Sweezy has noted, The Theoretical System of Karl Marx has the
distinction of being "the best refutation of Boehm-Bawerk" rendered originally in
English, and the best treatment of waste under Capitalism until Baran and Sweezy's own
Monopoly Capital. Untermann observed at the time of the book's publication that
Boudin was most adept at replying to the attacks of the foremost Marx-critics like
Boehm-Bawerk, but his work was badly handicapped in actual Marxian exegesis and even
more in the elaboration and extension of Marxian economic theory to comprehend the
ultimate cause of Capitalist breakdown. Boudin's theory of underconsumption and
overproduction, while foreshadowing the later efforts by Lewis Corey (in the 1 9 30's)
and Baran-Sweezy (in the 1960's) to explain economic stagnation through Capitalism's
failure to realize profits, was both outside orthodox Marxian theory and frequently
muddled by Boudin's own confusion. 8 In any case, the book sank in America almost
without a ripple, lending justification to Ernest Untermann's effort in his Marxian
Economics to offer a far more crude but also more understandable version of basic theory.

The intellectuals who proved to be the most significant after 1 9 10 were those
who , unlike Untermann and Boudin, had neither crystalized their ideas through reading
the German Socialist publications nor been as disappointed in the lack of reception for
their Marxist erudition. Robert Rives LaMonte, for instance, revealed from the beginning
of his intellectual career a fondness for French sources, a partiality which fmally turned
into a deep antipathy for everything German. In 1 900 he translated Gabriel Deville's
rather simplistic tract on the "capture" of the State machinery, The State and Socialism,
and Enrico Ferri's Socialism and Modern Science, a work which exceeded the crudity of
German Marxist thought in its dependence upon scientific theories of evolution as proof
of the m a terialist l'onception of history.

LaMonte set out his theoretical tasks in a way quite different from Boudin and
Untermann. In a typical article, "The Biogenetic Law," he used autobiographical data
from his own life to suggest that all Socialists had to lose their bourgeois "tadpole tails"
before becoming mature Marxian thinkers. He repeatedly returned to a romanticism
which stressed the need for "heart" in the Socialist movement, especially among
agitators who needed a "blazing passion" of "love for the proletariat" if they were to
make headway. And he even suggested a Christian Millenarism wholly antithetical to the
militant naturalism of the German Socialists," As Simons commentea upon LaMonte's
best known book Socialism Positil'e and Negative , LaMonte's ideas were less daring and
advanced than he himself believed, and wanted others to believe , l O

LaMonte's pe culiar character, then, forced him away from the plodding
German-American skilled workers' movement; and his romanticism made ethical
reformism even more repugnant to his beliefs . He was thrown logically in the direction
of the only force which could bring immediate, totally transforming revolution: the
industrial proletariat .

Similarly William English Walling, also independently wealthy, found German

Socialism less than satisfactory for his intellectual needs. Walling was a relative latecomer
to the actual ranks of the Party. and he spent most of his time before 1 9 1 0 writing for
muckraking non-Socialist journals on the corruption of Capitalism and Capitalist politics
Yet as early as 1905, Walling offered a hint as to the shape of his future as a Socialist
intellectual in praising without reservation Thorstein Veblen's work as "more
revolutionary than . . . Marx's." For Walling, the founder of modern Socialism had only

39
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revealed the economic outline of classes, while Veblen had shown the psychological
counterparh to the physical character of the class struggle. Moreover, Veblen had
perceived that the objective development of Capitalism's economic structure, rather than
the virility of Socialist propaganda (as many Socialists believed), would determine the
future potential of a social transformation. And most important for Walling, Veblen had
cast off "Hegelian logic, " the incubus of "any absolute and therefore unscientific social
philosophy." Veblen's work was for Walling

entirely Twentieth century science, viewing society as all the rest of the
universe . . . in a perpetual condition of evolu tion, and forsaking all accepted
terms and formulas as unfit for scientific use.

For Walling even more than for Siij1ons, it was the peculiar character of American
society which needed emphasis within the Socialist movement. In the United States,
dogmas were bound to fail because "practical life dominates America as it never
dominated any other nation in the world before. " l l

The intellectual who could claim the lengthiest attem pt to create an American
Marxist movemen t , Austin Lewis, was ironically the critical figure in later years for
stressing to younger intellectuals the similarities between American and European social
movements. Lewis' memory went all the way back to the I RRO's, when educated
American Socialists read the British historian Thomas Buckle along with Marx and
Engels for their edification in the economic interpretation of history. He had seen the
terribly slow emergence of Marxism, the acceptance of ma terial causes in history only ty
the turn of the century in the leading universities. Therefore, he hailed even a work as
prejudiced against Socialism as E . R .A . Seligman's Economic Interpretation of History ,
for it helped to make the acceptance of Marxian method ology possible among the
intelligensia. 1 2

Despite his hopes for the spread of Marxism in the colleges, Lewis was far from
pleased at the entrance of middle- and upper-class elements into the Sodalist
movements. From his reading of European events, he gathered that the struggle between
"idealistic and poetically minded people" and the proletaria ns, for the control of the
Socialist parties, was i ncreasing everywhere in intensity and bitterness. The first
generation of educated proletarians had returned to their class in every nation through
the Socialist movement, but had found their parties controlled by petty-bourgeois
elements whose concept of Socialism was limited to vacuous visions of the "Cooperative
Commonwealth" of the future. The educated proletarians and their less lucky brothers
then joined hands to struggle in the only way possible, the practical day-ta-day class
warfare with the government and the social system, as their parents and grandparents
had struggled against the individual capitalist with strikes and boycotts. ! 3

Lewis therefore conceived of the coming struggle within the proletaria t , and
within the Socialist Party, better than any other intellectual in the early period. There
was nothing inherently Marxist in his perception, and indeed it was shared in a dim way
by many rank-and-file participants in the LW.W. Similarly, Walling had indicated already
that his perception of American society would be predominately non-Ma n i s ! .
grounded instead i n t h e orp:anizational analysis o f Veblen. Characteristically th e re·.iI
perceptions of Lewis and Walling were, however, shared by neither of the experts 01
Marxian exegesis and apologia, Un termalll and Boudin. And the American Socialist
writer whose empirical studies wcre far su perior to all others, A.M. Simons, was by 1 9 1 0
retreating from the implications o f the unskilled workers' struggles, the industrial
transformation of America, and fundamental Marxian methodologj' alike.

Such \\'ere the contradictions of the leading American Socialist intellectuals in the
early Debsian period. Not only were these differences unexplored in the Party as a
whole, one might say they were scarcely noticed- tucked away, as they were, in a journal
with less circulation than some small-lown Socialist daily newspapers. Yet, given the
genuinely significant nature of the disagreements, the apathy toward theory was itself
significant. In a short run, such disinterest in deeper . historical, class and cultural

42
questions was a certain source of Socialism's vigorous infancy. The price, in the long run,
was heavy indeed.

"Intellectuals" versus the Party

The American Socialist movement as a whole, of course, regarded the

intellectuals' necessary labors as far more than the construction of a coherent social
theory. By the standards of the rank-and-filer, Boudin, Untermann and Walling were
minor lights indeed compared to the major muckrakers like Charles Edward Russell,
John Spargo (author of The Bitter Cry of Children) and Upton Sinclair, and genuinely
popular authors like William J. Ghent, (whose Industrial Feudalism was a reformist's
best-seller). Hundreds of minor writers and editors were recruited, often from the ranks
of the middle-class or skilled workers, to produce the local propaganda sheets which
James Weinstein has rightly apotheosized in his Decline of American Socialism. Yet
insofar as the more urban and middle-class minded Socialist writers were successful, the
Party itself was bound to be structurally transformed. And the influx of "Parlor
Socialists," as the non-proletarians were called, rankled not only Socialist theoreticians
and the increasingly self-defined "Left" of the Party, but especially the
non-revolutionary skilled workers in Party ranks who felt their ideas were being
subverted and their predominance pushed aside.

By 1 9 1 2 , the "Parlor Socialists" and the reformist skilled workers' movements

were to recognize in each other a common opposition to the rise of syndicalistic
socialism among the unskilled radical workers and their allies, ultimately obviating their
other internal differences. But before the gap was bridged, there were two primary
obstacles. First, there was an ideological difference of significant proportions: while
skilled workers tended to accept what was called "Economic Determinism," the
popularists and their middlec1ass audience constantly strove to reconcile "idealism" with
"materialism," publishing specious and seemingly endless articles on the subject. Second,
many older Socialists felt that the "Parlor Socialists" arrogated to themselves an undue
weight in Party decision-making. In 1 90", James F . Carey, the first Socialist in America
to have been elected to local pUblic office and a leader of the reformistic Massachusetts
Socialist movement, offered an amendment to Party internal mechanisms to the effect
that the occupations of all candidates to the Nationa! Executive Committee be listed, so
that "if the working class are [sic) to emancipate themselves," they be given the
opportunity . Carey hoped that a "working man or woman" could be thus added to an
NEC dominated by the most articulate and leisured Socialists: "two lawyers, two
professional writers, one millionare (so referred to), one minister [and) one
businessman." While Carey's resolution passed, another by him to restrict the NEC to
wage-carners was soundly defeated. 1 4

As poli tical tensions grew within the Party, they were refracted through the
complex growth of bitterness around the "Parlor Socialists" and the "Intellectuals." In
the Fall of 1 909 the editor of the ,Yew York Call answered a stock question from a
reader about post-revolutionary society, noting that intellectuals and manual workers as
such would disappear. Unexpectedly, some months later, William J . Ghent wrote to the
Call that the very notion of abolishing Intellectuals as a category brought him "repulsion
and disgust" as a reactionary measure in an increasingly complex society. "Possibly,"
Ghent reflected, "an occasional slum proletarian might look eageriy to this, but no one
to Whom civilization has any meaning" could possibly favor it. The opposition to
Specialization, Ghent later added, indicated within the Party a "savage antipathy" shared
with the proletariat at large "to learning and to educated men. " John Spargo, the Party's
leading popularist and the author of a widely read, sentimental biography of Marx,
amplified Ghent's comments into a charge against the Socialist Party program: aU this
"anti-in teUectualism" was a smokescreen to deflect the Party from reachmg the
workingc1ass "family-man" and the respectable mJOdlc-c1asses, a ruse to justify the
recruitment of the "street rabble."

The reply to these charges, by the Socialist writers Henry Slobodin and Frank
Bohn, was an attempt to isolate them into a personal phenomenon, to defuse their

43
political implications. Siobodin charged that the problem was not with the Party but
with the Intellectuals like Spargo and Ghent, whose "superciliousness" and "arrogance"
was reflected in their standing among "pink-tea radicals" and their indifference to the
"work-a-day activity of the Common Socialists." These Intellectuals, Siobodin charged ,
were "jiners," always j oining reform societies of various types but growingly
disinterested in the Socialist Party proper. Bohn, a professor at Columbia but a former
full-time agitator in the Socialist movement, amplified Siobodin's charges. The purported
"anti-intellectualism" was, for him, only a rejection of literary and intellectual
pretentions, the retention of snobbery toward workers among middle and upper-class
converts to Socialism. The Intellectuals of this sort. Bohn charged plausibly , were
outdated: they were taught Natural Righ ts philosophy in the colleges at a time when
modern industry had transformed the class forces of society beyond the stage of
nineteenth century ideals. Bohn himself, he intimated . had had to learn from Socialbt
rank-and-filers. who cUlPorehended from their lil'es "the democracy taufrht by a hundred
machines in a row or a thousand men in a modern mine," and whose reading of Socialist
literature often proved vastly superior to the Educated �Ian 's study of dated t e '\ t s . 1 5

Yet true as Bohn's charges were . they did not plumb the depths of the
controversy. By 1 90 9 , the Socialist Party had reached a kind of stasis: its prop<Jganda
machine grew increasingly larger, but the Party failed to recruit in numbers just tha:
urban, skilled proletariat (save in certain areas affected by special ethnic cond itions:
which its theory predicted would be foremost in i t s ranks. Rather the Party grew from
an amalgam of discontented social elements, including "Parlor Socialists" in the cities
and farmers or small property-owning elements in the rural areas. The Indu strial Workers
of the World, initially hoped by some moderate Socialists to supplement th e labors 0 '
the AF of L , failed to gain impetus for a mass movement by 1 9 1 0 and turned its fur)'
upon the privileged skilled workers' unions.

There were, therefore, certain fundamental choices to be made. choices whicL

could not be bru shed aside by Bohn or Slobodin's pleas for unity a"d more effective
propaganda campaigm. The Party could move more clearly towards the middle class and
the skilled proletariat by "stamping out" of Party ranks. in the word s of Sp argo. the
demagogic and avowedly incendiary proletarian elements which sympathizl'd " i th file
I .W.W. and decried "slowshulism." In so doing, it could moVe' toward a reconciliation
with the American Federation of Labor, as A .M . Simo", wished by 1 90 9 . or it could
become a "purely" political-educational and electoral-body, subtra,'ting its encrgies
from labor's eocnomic struggles. Or it could follow another path . with very different
consequences: it could seek out and mobilize itself behind the evolving industna!
proletariat, politically through stress upon militant educational ca rd'aigns, economieali)
through the support of labor's struggles in the I .W.W. and elsewhere.

The years from 1 9 1 0 to 1 9 1 5 , constantly increased the gravity of the choices to

be made. On the one hand , the Socialists made impressive ele ctoral gains in 1 9 1 0 and
1 9 1 2 , in Wisconsin alone electing a city government and the first Socialist representative
to Congress. The Party captured in the 1 9 1 2 elections sh. percent of the national vote,
over 800,000 ballots in spite of Socialist votes frequently being "counted out" on the
local level. On the other hand , the same period brough t tlle greatest moments of
expectation for the I.W.W., above all the Lawrence , �Iassachusetts, textile strike which
seemed to pit symbolically all the unskilled indu strial laborers against the combined
might of the Ruling Class. In Britain and on the Continent, masses of unskilled workers
swep t to industrial victories, and appeared to move to the edge of social revolution.

The Socialist Intellectuals, popularists and theorists, were no less immune than
any other sector of the Party to the internal strife. Indeed, since their primary function
was their exposition of political positions, they articulated and in terpreted nearly every
position for the constituency they hoped to represent. The bulk of the Old Socialism,
the skilled workers' m ovements, moved lethargically to the Right, voicing their
uncertainties and frustrations through newspaper editors and a few popularizing
intellectuals. The "Parlor Socialists" were not only anxious but frequently articulate

44
oppositionists to the wave of In�ustrial Socialism, and nearly all the leading journalists
spoke in their interest. A few of the older but many of the newer intellectuals followed
a 'hird course, in the field of journalism opened when Charles H. Kerr cashiered A.M.
Simons in 1 908 and set out to make the ISR a popular, pro-IWW, fighting Socialist
magazine.

The clash at the 1 9 1 2 Convention, in which a proscription of the advocacy of

sabotage was voted despite heated opposition , has been pictured in traditional historical
accounts as a turning point in the Socialist P:uty's history. As James Weinstein has
indicated, the situation is far more complex.! 7 While the Socialist Party languished from
1 9 1 2 to 1 9 1 5 , especially in those areas where the most trimming had been done to
accomodate Socialists to potential converts from Progressivism, the reformist wing was
denied the fruits of its victory in yet a more important way: the coming of the War.
which almost wholly transformed the Socialist Party membership. Further, the Socialist
movement had been from its birth too decentralized, too heterogeneous and too little able
to exert control over its own fate for any such decisive politicai tum .

As in the period before 1 9 10, the five critical years to 1 9 1 5 were not not�ble for
the Intellectuals' decisive influence. Yet they brought, in the pages of the ISR but above
all in the New Review, Socialist intellectualism to its maturity, stretching the ideological
potenti�s of the movement very far, perhaps to its limits. And they bore, already, the
seeds of its decline and potential transcendence.

Mature Intellectuals: Walling and the Right

From 1 9 1 1 onward, the spectre of World War loomed over the Socialists. Despite
or perhaps partly because of this threat, journalistic developments within the Party
occurred at a feverish rate, deeply affecting the Intellectual's status in a number of ways.
The Progressive Woman, which had achieved a circulation of over 1 0 ,000 as the only
American radical magazine at that time or since to devote itself to an autonomous
Women's struggle for equality and Socialism, went bankrupt and expired. The Coming
Nation , edited b y Simons in Girard, Kansas and billed as a Socialist Saturday Evening
Post lasted only three years. The Daily People, after thirteen years of political isolation,
died shortly after its editor Daniel DeLeon, in 1 9 1 4 ; and DeLeon's old enemy from the
1890's, the "One Hoss Editor" of the Appeal to Reason LA. Wayland, committed
suicide. The hopes for a nationwide Socialist daily press both grew and flagged as the
fmancially sound Milwaukee Leader was founded and the hopelessly indebted Chicago
Daily Socialist collapsed. The Socialist Left was, of course, enormously boosted by the
transformation of the ISR into a popular magazine with stories, many pictures, and
reports on the ex citing strikes that seemed to be breakmg out everywhere . The Masses was
taken over from the moderate Socialists, and cooperationist Piet V/ag by a group of
Bohemians, and shortly made in to the most journalistically exciting magazine in the
American Left. And a relatively popular theoretical journal was founded, filling in the gap
left when the ISR changed editorial hands in 1 90 8 : the New Re view.

Within the NR and to a lesser extent the ISR, the Left found time and space to
debate some of the fundamental issues which were rising vividly to demand solutions.
Unlike the ISR , the New Review had no dominating personality. The obscure Herman
Simpson was the principal editor, and his name was fur ther buried by the list of notables
on the editorial board: Max Eastman, Floyd Dell, Frank Bohn, LaMonte, W.E.B. DuBois
and Mary Ovingto n White, Boudin, Walter Lippman and the anthropologist Robert
Lowie. 1 8

Within its pages the Socialist Left appeared in its full intellectual diversity. But
the most unique current was the contribution of what LaMonte called the "New
Intellectuals," those Socialists who were not bound by the interpretations of the 1 890's
and who seemed destined to make brilliant contributions to radical literature. The main
figure was William English Walling, whose major works -Socialism As It Is, Larger

45
A spects of Socialism , and Progressivism and After -were being published in this period.
Walling perceived and conceptually developed the notion of "State Socialism" to
account for the rise of Progressivism: the next stage in social development would be the
control of the means of production through an increasing State for the benefit of the
petit bourgeoisie and the new, middle class of salaried employees. Socialists who
practiced or theorized as if Statification were Socialism received Walling's heaviest blows.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman was attacked for urging a kind of grand conscription of
Negroes in the South; HG Wells and his Fabian counterparts the Webbs, were analyzed
and denounced; and more suggestively, the American "Constructive Socialists" were
pictured as laboring enormously for goals that would come anyway, as an objective
consequence of social developments. l 9

Walling received his most bitter opposition not from the Constructive Socialists,
who did not deign to disagree in the NR 's pages, but from Robert Rives LaMonte and
Walling's prime co-thinker among the "New Intellectuals ," Walter Lippman. The
occasion was, first, the pUblication of a chapter of Walling's Lar.ger Aspects of SOCialism,
entitled "The Pragmatism of Marx and Engels." Walling's primary thrust was his attempt
to show that the "spirit" of the founders of Socialism lay above their actual theoretical
practice, which had been weighted down with metaphysics. Engels' conclusions in
A nti-Duehring, rooted in the great biological discoveries of the time, seemed already to
have discredited much of the old Hegelianism. And the advances in psychology and logic
since, Walling argued, had completely deprived the old nineteenth century notions of
their remaining viability. Thus the practical abolition of philosophy was at hand, and the
effect of negation philosophically and practically had been itself negated by the
bypassing of old social problems by new conditions and adjustments.20

LaMonte responded by labelling Walling's book "an ecstatic epic . . . in praise of

Pragmatism in general and particularly of the Pragmatism formulated by Professor
Dewey. " LaMonte could agree with Walling on the need for hard data, and the refusal to
pull conceptions "down from the metaphysical skies." But LaMonte could not help
feeling "a danger and a serious danger in such unqualified glorifications of Pragmatism."
LaMonte was unclear in the specific nature of the danger, but he felt that Pragmatism
could be tied to the Constructive Socialist movement, blinding Socialists to the reality
that "many tactics that appear to 'work' beautifully are not founded on rock-bottom
facts, and are therefore not sound in theory , and so in the long run carry us not forward
but backward." He went on to predict, perhaps prophetically for the Liberalism within
and without the Socialist and Communist movements for the next half-century, that

. . . Pragmatism may but too rapidly be converted to the uses of those who
prefer to believe in comfortable lies rather than to face disturbing truths. With
equal ease it furnishes a doctrinal support to those despisers of doctrine and
r
theory and dogma who ur e us to forget a Marx they never knew and to be
practical and "scientific. "2

At one point in the continuation of the discussion, Walter Lippman answered for
Walling . He could make little sense of LaMonte's comments, and mistakenly boiled them
down to the notion that "unpragmatic theories don't work, which is what every
Pragmatist would say." The only conclusion he drew from LaMonte was that LaMonte
feared Socialism would be taken over by people who could depart long enough from
Marxism to make the movement come alive . Walling scored his heaviest point, however,
by reminding LaMonte that LaMonte himself had defended Pragmatism in the New York
Call. LaMonte's weak response was that Pragmatism could be "rightly or wrongly used,
just as alcohol may be." Thus ended the major philosophical debate in Debsian
Socialism.

It remained for Lippman, in a late exchange with Walling to measure the fruit of
Walling's philosophical position. In a criticism of Walling's last important book as a
Socialist, Progressivism and After, Lippman saw Walling 's flaw as a non-crisis model for
the coming of the Socialist revolution. The origins of such a static analysis, Lippman
reasoned, lay in the "ideals . . . of the Middle Western American democracy, and the

46
underlying prejudice of the Eighteenth Century, from which the culture of the Middle
West derives. "22

Lippman's comments cut Walling's theories to the quick. For despite his entirely
different presuppositions about the nature of American society, Walling had come to
essentially the same conclusions as the old reform Socialists in his belief that the
transition to the higher order would be gradual, and would be influenced decisively by
the course of the middle class.

Untermann and most of the older Socialists had retained, even after 1 9 1 0 , a
nineteenth-century, essentially European analysis for their social predictions. For them
the collapse of the Populist movement had been only one step in the erosion of the
middle classes. In the meantime, the proletariat was levelling itself upward, growing in
numbers, skills and confidence in its ability to govern American society. Finally, these
Sociahsts had argued , the American political system would "catch up" with the
European, with each major party representing a defmite social group. Thus the Bryan
Democracy, before 1 9 1 2 , seemed to symbolize in its decay the wail of the dying petit
bourgeoisie ; the Republican Party in Roosevelt and Taft seemed increasingly
representative of the avaricious and arrogant American plutocracy; and the Socialist
Party appeared destined to represent the working class along with other progressive
social elements.

The growing vitality of the middle class, based economically upon the unexpected
(from the Socialist viewpoint) upswing of Capitalist economics, came as an intolerable
and ungraspable shock to the Older Socialism. While Walling looked to the aggressive
Progressives for a hastening of Capitalism's rationalization, the Old Socialists could only
guess that Progressivism was a guise, a deception with deeper purposes. The leading
Christian Socialist of the 1890's, George Herron, looked to Teddy Roosevelt as a
potential Man On Horseback, an "embodiment of man's return to the brute-a living
announcement that man will again seek relief from the sickness of society in the bonds
of an imposing savagery."2 3 And Walling viewed Roosevelt as an authentic Radical,
whose verbal indictments of individual capitalists sincerely echoed Socialist statements.
While the Older Socialists tended to accept at face value Woodrow Wilson's
anti-monopOlistic pronouncements, and Left-Socialist Frank Bohn noted the fmal
passing of the trappings of democratic decision-making on a national scale , Walling
rejoiced in the convergence of all reform programs toward the creation of State controls
and ultimately State Capitalism .24

If the Old Socialists were right, then a recession would clear away the glory of
reform and re-establish the conditions for a dissipating middle class. But by all signs
Walling was right, and the middle class had gained a sense of reform initiative even more
important than their short-term economic position . Why then, Lippman asked Walling,
need a Socialist Pariy exist at all? Walling 's answer was singularly weak, fundamentally a
rationalization for Socialism as a pressure group to agitate and insist that workers get a
larger portion of the ever-increasing economic pie. The conclusion, as Louis Fraina aptly
noted, was in either case that Capitalism, and not an active and willful proletariat, would
bring Socialism into existence. The reformists had cloaked their naive instrumentalism in
Marxian language , and portrayed the creation of a State Socialism where the workers
would continue to follow social discipline into the indefinite future; Walling had
uncloaked his instrumentalism, and even while he pleaded his friendliness toward the
IWW he offered nothing positive the working class could do but accept the discipline of
the factory system and await its turn.25

The New Left Wing

During the earliest years of Debsian Socialism a figure completely beyond the
pale, mistrusted and despised by nearly every Socialist Party member with whom he
had had contact, nearly brought American Socialism into the Twentieth Century. Daniel
DeLeon had broken the back of his own Socialist Labor Party in the 1 890's by his
inability to tolerate those who did not agree wholly with his own views. But with the

47
founding of the IWW , and in the three years to 1908, he elaborated an almost entirely
new set of views aimed at placing the proletariat in the center of Socialism and the
political party in Its secondary place to the revolutionary union. His ideas were a rather raw
:!
synthesis of others current in Europe and in the United States, but hi popularization of
Industrial Socialist notions made a decisive impact on the Socialist Left. 6

However, the tactical and strategical implications of DeLeon's hopes rested

entirely upon the rapid growth of the LW.W. into a massive union. When that promise
was not fulfilled, DeLeon was thrown back on his older weaknesses, his inability like the
rest of his generation to comprehend the vitality of the middle class and his willingness
like the more naive Wobblies to picture the American Federation of Labor's bureaucracy
as the only obstacle to the radicalization of skilled workers.

The revival of hopes for the IWW (which had long since expelled DeLeon) after
1 9 1 0, with the massive strikes at McKees' Rocks, Lawrence and Paterson, fixed the
attention of the Left-Socialist intellectuals upon the movement of the unskilled workers.
On the other hand, the Party 's proscription of the advocacy of sabotage at its 1 9 1 2
Convention stirred thinkers who were growingly uneasy about Socialism 's
bourgeoisification into considering non-political alternatives. Among the earliest and
most articulate writers on the unskilled proletariat were two foreigners who were able to
exert considerable influence upon the Left between the discrediting of Kautsky and the
German Socialists (for their adamant opposition to the Syndicalist movements) and the
ascension of Russian Bolshevist theoreticians to the status of omnipotence .

The Dutch Left-Socialist and renowned astronomer Anton Pannekoek had

written voluminously for the ISR since its earliest days upon a range of subjects from
economics and religion to Theodore Roosevelt and the middle class. With the coming of
the unskilled workers' activities, he began to elaborate the notion of "Mass Action," a
term by which he sought to convey the strategically certain but tactically vague process
that workers would follow in reaction to their fundamental living conditions , and the
social perspective that they would gain in the step-by-step process. Pannekoek's
ideological disciple S.J. Rutgers was a world-traveling Dutchman who spent about five
years in America from 1 9 1 2 to 1 9 1 7 , frequently writing for the ISR but also, and more
significantly, personally impressing his ideas upon the younger left-wing intellectuals
including L.C. Fraina. Judged by their literary output, neither Pannekoek nor Rutgers
was as important as the American Left took them to be. Their writings usually reported
rather than interpreting the movements of unskilled workers, and their interpretations
frequently swept past the complexities of organization role and the limits of
spontaneous struggle. Yet their influence upon these young activists who desperately
sought a schema to answer their most pressing questions about current developments, in
an optimistic revolutionary fashion, was undeniable-and freely admitted by Austin
Lewis and Fraina.

For Fraina, the development of Industrial Socialist views had been a natural and
logical course. He was born into a family of impoverished Italian immigrants in
Manhattan, was essentially self-educated, and had joined and left the Socialist and
Socialist Labor Parties before his twenty-first birthday. He was, despite his extreme
youth, DeLeon's last and most important protege, and revealed in his eulogy to the old
man in 1 9 1 4 that he had retained many of his teacher's ideas. He felt that DeLeon had
not been wrong in his attempt to construct a purely proletarian party and a
revolutionary movement in the 1 890's, only too early, and too anxious to see betrayal in
those who could not agree with the sternness of his measures. DeLeon had failed to
identify the unskilled workers as the sole important repository of revolutionary forces,
and had so miscalculated the development of the Socialist movement when only a vital
minority within a larger and more heterogeneous movement had been possible. 27

Fraina clearly moved beyond the limits of DeLeon's thought in his writings for
the New Review. He shared with Walling the belief that the middle-class, especially the
new middle class, was bound to grow. But he drew very different and more gloomy
conclusions. For Fraina, Roosevelt's unification of Ruling Class interests, and the

48
distribution of stocks and bonds among the new middle class,were measures which
objectively led to the galvanization of middle class forces behind the Ruling Class for the
crushing of the proletariat. Fraina insisted that the limits of Capitalism had not yet been
reached, that a Revolution was not around the corner but would follow only a grim
period of Capitalist expansion into Imperialism.

Several years before Lenin was even mentioned in the American Left press, let
alone become a Revolutionary Hero, Fraina had begun to discuss the implications of
America's growingly parasitic relationships abroad. While Walling and LaMonte failed to
consider the expansion of Imperialism in their optimistic perspectives, and Untermann
actually initially favored the invasion of Mexico by American troops, Fraina along with
Rutgers, Pannekoek and a few other ISR writers pointed with increasing alarm to the
role of the U.S. in Latin America and the spoils likely to come from a major European
war. 28

Austin Lewis limited his study to American conditions, but his conclusions were
also intended as depictions of objectively developing class relationships, and were in a
certain sense no less severe. He had attempted earlier to suggest that in the movement
and the potential solidarity of workin/!: class segments ethical attitudes played no role.
Now, with the experiences from the major I.W.W. strikes and the further bifurcation of
skilled and unskilled workers' activities, he attempted a more grand analysis. As he
explained cogently in 1 9 1 3:

The machine industry rules the mass of unskilled proletarians. It drives them
to work together in unison. It forces them to keep time with the industrial
machine and in so doing teaches them the goose step of industrial
organization, for organization by the employer is the fIrst step to the
self-<>rganization of the employed. In this fact lies the real signifIcance of the
teachings of Marx and Engels, who showed that apart from all philosophical
abstractions and ethical considerations and apart altogether from any
humanitarian notions, the machine industry itself creates the brain-stuff of the
revolution.

Preaching cannot put the idea into the mind of the worker. Facts themselves
force him to revolt. Facts also teach him the method of revolt. This method
takes more and more the form of spontaneous mass action. This is the reflex
upon the mind of workers who have nothing in common and never have had
anything in common except for the fact of common environment, a common
subjection to the machine industry. This is the reason that the unskilled are
goaded into mass action wherever the machine industry has become established .

The unskilled are in the basic industries. They really hold the strategic
position, for they can hoist the whole industrial factric into the air by
abstention from work. No sentimental bonds control them. 29

By contrast, the skilled workers who had composed much of the Socialist movement
were for the constituency of the past. Not only were they rapidly losing any strategically
critical position in industry, but more importantly they were gaining access to
representation in the evolving Corporate State. Already in 1 9 1 5 , Lewis observed that in
Southern California local politicians bragged about their union status, and skilled
workers aided in breaking strikes of agricultural laborers and in driving the laborers out
of town .

Yet the unskilled had begun, slowly and inevitably, to arise. The abuse hurled at
their strikes by orthodox Socialists proved to Lewis that the unskilled workers' struggles
were already grudgingly recognized . After the McKees' Rocks struggle , possible solidarity
with the . skilled workers had occurred to rank-and-filers in the AF of L unions, but much
more rarely to their leaders, who appeared increasingly frenzied and confused at the
collapse of their positions in the wake of the modernization of industry. Rather
dramatically, with a suddenness that surprised Socialists and capitalists alike, the

49
unskilled workers threw up massive battles across the Continent and in the U.S. over the
next several years. However unsuccessful were these efforts in the short run, they would
by implication transform the very essence of unionism. The individualistic mentality
which affected the skilled worker at his solitary machine, and permeated the Socialist
movement already distorted by petty bourgeois elements, would be utterly destroyed
and replaced by a new sense of the mass and of collective activity. 30

The analyses of Fraina and Lewis settled uneasily with other Intellectuals, most
notably LaMonte, who saw in Industrial Socialism a potential apocalypse and gate to the
New Order. In 1 9 1 2 , LaMonte wrote an extensive apotheosis of revolutionary unionism
in the ISR , reprinted by Charles H. Kerr as a pamphlet, entitled "The New Socialism."
LaMonte viewed Socialist Industrialism in the United States and Syndicalism in Europe
as having surpassed all the old forms of Socialism . While the Old Socialism dwelt on
parliamentary forms and occasionally considered barricade actions, the New Socialism
looked to the Class War fought daily in the shops and in its advanced form (as in
America) used electoral forms purposefully as an important ideological expression and
legal defense. More than ever before, LaMonte believed, peaceful revolution had become
a likely possibility. Industrial Socialism had for LaMonte even resolved the old tension
r
between Socialism and Anarchism: it was at once rigorOUSl scientific, and at the same
time capable of effecting a "moral rebirth of the workers." 3

While LaMonte's moral imperatives were unacceptable to Fraina, Lewis, Walling

and most of the other revolutionary Intellectuals, his hopes for transformation of the
Socialist Party were at that time shared by nearly every Left-wing thinker. Lewis
expressed most articulately the attitude that such a transformation was, indeed,
inevitable. The early Socialist Party had contained not only skilled workers, but a
stratum of the so-called "educated proletariat," brain workers from the middle classes
who were to Lewis mostly failures at their chosen professions, a "broken minority,
generally bankrupt, not only economically but intellectually as well." The Party's
program in these years, as LaMonte had repeatedly stressed , was loaded with archaic
Natural Rights concepts which were designed to appeal to all sorts of discontented social
elements. Thus the Party found itself surfeited with "all that heterogeneous mass of
discontented and dissatisfied which finds no other political expression," but which was
hardly good stock for a fighting proletarian organization. The Party's decision to
proscribe the advocacy of sabotage, in 1 9 12 , had been a crowning blow of opportunism,
to Lewis a betrayal of the Marxian principle of proletarian self-determination and a
decided return towards postures of good will and ethical goals as formulas for Party
strength and growth. Yet in the years ahead, the industrial movements of the unskilled
and not the machinations of conservative Socialist politicians would be determinant. The
expected waves of strikes would force the Party to line up on the side of the proletariat,
and unavoidably strip it of the position-seeking politicians and brainless reformers. 3 2

In the several years before America's entry in to the World War, this perspective of
"capture" of the Party by the Party was starkly realistic. Despite its leaders' intentions,
the Socialist movement was gaining unskilled proletarians, foreign-speaking workers from
Eastern and Southern Europe, while it failed to make headway among precisely those
semi-Progressive middle-class elements the reform Socialists had hoped to recruit.
Perhaps only the unfortuitous combination of the brutal government repression, the
misunderstood "example" of factionalism in the Bolshevik Party, and the wild fears of
the Old Socialist leaders rendered the hope, at last, impossible.

A vant Garde: Morality and Art

Robert Rives LaMonte's sense of the emerging proletarian drama was obviously
related to the romanticism of the nineteenth century revolutionary movements. Yet it
served to indicate the effect of the rising currents of hope and expectation among many
intellectuals in American society. Other, more modern forms of the belief in a totally

so
transforming social revolution came within the Socialist Party as a rebellion against the
aesthetic and moral attitudes of Old Socialism's majority.

By and large, Debsian Socialism reflected an archaic social vision of recapturing

the best of nineteenth century family life and mores through the control of twentieth
century machinery. August Bebel's Women Under Socialism, translated by DeLeon
around the turn of the century, created a scandal for its suggestion of the family as a
passing social phenomenon. Socialist speakers from the 1 890's onward had avidly denied
any connection between Socialism and free-love morality, picturing ruling class
decadence and license as a betrayal to "true" moral attitudes.

But especially after 1 9 10, as the Socialist movement underwent its own
convulsions and the larger society was obviously in extreme flux, overt and unashamed
advocacy of the movement's intervention into social relationships began to appear. One
of the most important of these was Feminism. Margaret Sanger carried on a campaign in
the New York Call in 1 9 1 3 - 1 9 1 4 for equality of sexes in marriage, and availability of
birth-control services for all women. The response to her column within the Socialist
movement, both positive and negative, was significantly emotion-charged. At last Sanger
moved politically to an anarchist position, finding the response of Socialist officials and
women Socialists discouraging. In 1 9 1 4 she founded her own short-lived newspaper,
33
Woman Rebel, directed expressly to working class girls.

Despite her limited success in the Socialist movement, Margaret Sanger and the
militantly Feminist Socialist movement that flourished for a few years poin ted up other
tendencies within the movement, reaching beyond the narrow cultural limitations of the
Old Socialism. Louis Fraina had begun in 1 9 1 3-14 to write in the New Review on
advanced poetry and painting, and when the NR collapsed he edited two numbers of
Modern Dance in 1 9 16-1 7. And the chief symbol of Socialist bohemianism, the Masses,
grew rapidly after 1 9 1 2 into one of the most remarkable Left periodicals ever published
in this country. Sufficient accounts exist of the Masses' brilliant advances in journalism,
its publication of painters' works, its humor, and its highly advanced layout. What has
rarely been sufficiently stressed is that, unlike the Partisan Review attitude of disdain
toward mass society and Left politics in its later years, the Masses was a joyfully and
confidently Socialist magazine throughout its life. There was no sense of detachment
from the Socialist Party and there was at all points an admiring acceptance of the lives of
ordinary people, as illustrated in the semi-ironic but genuinely loving cartoons about
workers' families.

And yet if the dichotomization of advanced art and advanced politics later
displayed in the Communist movement had not yet materialized, neither had any clear
awareness of the potentialities of art in a political movement appeared. Rather than
seeking to create a revolutionary esthetic as the Surrealists were latter to do in France,
Floyd Dell, Max Eastman and other Masses principals consciously separated the joy of
Art from the difficulties of making a revolution. They retained a classical European
attitude towards Art as the product of a talented elite, and thereby preserved an aura
about their own self-conscious Art which was no less archaic than the utilitarian
attitudes of rural Protestant Socialists. Since they were fundamentally hostile to
revolutionary art, their naivete may have kept them in the Socialist movement. But the
long-run price was the total collapse of the positive ideals that the Seven A rts and .the
Masses had seemed temporarily to pose for the synthesis of radical art and politics. The
Left would gain a contrived justification in burdening itself for a half-century with
self�deceptions about "proletarian art" (and later "democratic art") in the New Masses
and elsewhere. Contemporaneously, avant-garde American artists would increasingly hide
from politics in their foreign and native enclaves. 34

A similar conclusion must be made about the Socialist involvement in the sexual
struggle, except that the immediate results were even more painful to the radical cause.
The kind of enforced moral discipline Stalinism provided had not yet arrived, but the
potentiality of an advanced Socialist effort to encompass those involved in personal
struggles for sexual equality and liberated morality was simply lost. The possible linkage

51
of Socialism and Feminism, like the possible linkage of Socialism and advanced Art and
Socialism with all of the rebellious social elements whose highly personal quests were the
other side of mass revolution in advanced Capitalism, passed over the heads of the
American Socialists. What was even worse, neither the leading Debsian activists nor their
Communist successors comprehended what they had missed.

War Cris i s

World War I was i n every sense a transforming experience for the American
Socialist movement. To this day, radical historians know little about the mass of
proletarians swept into the Socialist movement during the War because Russian. Finnish,
Yiddish and other "foreign" languages were the primary means of written and spoken
communication for these proletarians within the Party. Obversely, little historical work has
been done on the pattern of departure of elements from the Party : we know only that
those fleeing had lIot been particularly indentified as the "Right," and those remaining
Socialists or becoming Communists were by no means always from the "Left" of the
prewar movement . Finally, there is no real way of separating the implications of vicious
government repression of Socialists, particularly in the exposed rural regions, from the
general disintegration of the Old Socialism, a disintegration which was only brought to
its conclusion by the events of War.

Communist historians and others have attempted to indict the Party for its
unwillingness to adequately oppose the War. Ironically. that is the one charge which was
rarely made by the Left Socialists at the time. Rather, as Fraina explained it, the
position taken by the Party was in the first instance pro-German (especially in German
strongholds like Milwaukee) and later. non-<:Iass oriented. Despite the influx of
foreign-language proletarians. the Socialist leaders sought to strike an essentially
isolationist pose, leading hopefully to a postwar America where the Socialists would be
vindicated and the movement would go forward on a more-or-Iess status quo ante basis.
Perhaps for some Socialists this was merely an acceptance of Kautsky's theoretical
leadership and the ambiguities of his German politics. But more likely. the primary
Socialist policy was based simplemindedly on the belief that the postwar world would
not be dramatically altered and Socialism could move on as if only temporarily delayed
by a distraction.

Such an archaic policy was obviously not acceptable to the intellectuals "left"
and "right" who had pinned their hopes on objective developments within American
Society. For William English Walling, Robert Hunter, Charles Edward Russell and others.
the Wilsonian Crusade for Democracy was in some ways the logical climax to what they
had sought within the Debsian Movement: a mass movement toward Collectivism and
social planning. For Left-Socialists Robert Rives LaMonte and Jack London, and for the
rightward-leaning A.M. Simons, the sense of Crusade was linked with their general
disappointment in what had seemed to them a mediocre organization governed by
pro-German bureaucrats.

LaMonte's case is particularly instructive . In 1 9 1 4 he wrote on the War after it

had engulfed him in his visit to Tours, France . He felt a "pervasive sense of sadness"
about the French mobilization, even as he felt that "the German army hung like an
awful menace over such civilization as Capitalism had achieved." For years Socialism had
been burdened internationally by the overbearing German Socialists. Now. when the latter
faced a "glorious opportunity" to stop the Prussian war machine by refusing to grant
fmancial credits, they chose to support the reactionary "Fatherland ." For years,
LaMonte believed, he had seen this coming. And the only consolation to be taken was in
the prospective destruction of the "tyranny of the Prussian doctrinaire disciplinarians"
in the Socialist movements everywhere. 35 The following year, as it became clear that
many American Socialists would not simply disavow their German comrades' actions,
LaMonte wrote a long. thoughtful article for the NR summing up the counterpart to his

52

l
disappointment in Internationalism. The American Socialist movement
had failed to
keep alive the fIre of revolution burning in the hearts of its
youth; through its
propaganda and election activities, it had turned the eager neophytes
into Natural
Rights-spouting hacks. At the same time , Socialism had failed to
advance in precisely
those geographical areas where its theory predicted success, and made
. gains in some areas
(partJc�larly Oklahoma) where the machine process was most
defInitely not rapidly
advancmg.

.
Since 'Y
�ing had shown that minor reforms would be gained by the bourgeois
parties, a SOCialist Party per se had seemed to LaMonte to have lost its raison d 'etre .
What was needed now was the abandonment of the Old Socialism and a search for the
�
�eds of revolt n the "psychology of workers who are most continuously subject to the
unpact and routme of the machine-process, and whenever we notice the emergence of a new
mental h�blt, a novel pomt �� VIew, an unconventional thought-process . . . [to 1 seize upon
It, fostent, develop it. . . ."

Two years later, in 1 9 1 7 , even that hope was gone . In exchange with the optimistic
Fraina, LaMonte asserted that the time had come to renounce the romantic fantasies of
the last years of hope, to leave at last the vision of "a proletariat made up of supermen ."
LaMonte had written only six years before, in 1 9 1 1 , "the war against industrial war is
almost won . . . The day, yes, the hour of victory is at hand ." In 1 9 1 7 , he sought the
Allied armies, fully admitting their brutality toward the peoples of backward nations,
but reminding Fraina that "our radical trend toward kicking, toward insubordination"
had come from the Parliament at Westminister and the Bastille in France ."

Now LaMonte believed, it was time to cease attempting to adapt the race to the
environment of the machine-age, and begin adapting the environment to the frailties of
the race, to "harness and alter the machinery of our lives as to make it possible for our
race to survive under conditions so unsuited to its permanent men tal habits un til we can
evolve a system in which we shall be more at home." Until that particular Millenium
arrived, all Socialists had to join the Battle to preserve democracy. LaMonte went
proudly, as a Socialist, into the Home Guard , a viciously reactionary paramilitary group
in Manhattan. "Never," he believed, "was there a worthier and nobler cause for which to
battle. I am proud to believe that the majority of those who have in the past voted for
the Socialist party will not now be found wanting." 37

Some Socialists, like John Apargo and LaMonte, clung to their illusions about
Wilson and the evolving Collectivism as a kind of surrogate Socialism. Others, probably
most, finallv came to the logical conclusion that they had no more place in a Socialist
-
t
movement hey denounced. LaMonte and several others continued after the War
their friendliness to the pro -War At' ot L bureaucracy, and earned on low-level actIvities
with that sector of the labor movement. Others, certainly most, vanished politically,
leading for the most part mediocre careers on the basis of their journalistic talents.
Unlike the leading intellectuals of the 1 9 30's Left they had 0 university positions to fall
back upon and no stimulus even to exploit their understanding of the radical movement.
The double tragedy was that some, as in the case of LaMonte, had apparently been
moving towards the most fruitful stages of their intellectual careers.

Beyond Debsianism: The Left

The Intellectuals swinging to the Left had an only slightly better fate. The
financial collapse of the New Review in 1 9 1 6 was one sign of their almost total weakness
outside the semi-friendly shell of the Party. The NR 's political attitude remained
heterogeneous, even on the War question, but in its last year the tone was increasingly

53
set by Fraina, Pannekoek and Rutgers, who issued a clarion call for a New International
and Mass Action against the capitalist regimes. In its dying issues, the New R eview
endeavored to become the spokesman of the ultra-Revolutionary Dutch bulletin
Verbote . At last, perhaps ironically, it folded into the Masses.

The following year the International Socialist Review was legally repressed, along
with a variety of Socialist papers "right" and "left." A legal battle, and a brutal illegal
repression "tolerated" by Justice Department and local authorities, ensued against the
I.W.W. and individual radicals across the country . Meanwhile, the Bolshevik Revolution
broke out, a shining hope in the worst period of e1C)om the American Left had to that
point ever known.

Louis Fraina moved to edit a new journal, the Class Struggle, with Ludwig Lore
and Louis B. Boudin. In the first number, the editors posed themselves against the might
of Capitalism and Imperialism on the one hand, and the "opportunistic leadership" of
the Party on the other. The Class Struggle remained throughout its short life definitely
pro-Communist in its diverse contributors, including Florence Kelly, and through its
openness to Socialist views of all varieties. Yet urged on by world events, it moved
decisively beyond the limits of Debsian though t to a faith in the immediate
revolutionary events of Europe and an ultimate dependence upon the Russian
Revolution.

The leading figure of the Left was surely Fraina. Between 1 9 1 7 and 1 9 1 9 he
wrote or edited three books, including Revolu tionary Socialism, a fundamental
statement of the left-Socialist position. At the time of its writing he, like most of the
other proto-Bolshevik intellectuals, retained heavy residues of interpretation from
DeLeonist theory and IWW practice, and from the "spontaneist" analyses of the Dutch
Leftists. He had gained from Lenin the notion that Capitalism had entered a new period
of development, the period of Imperialism. But he retained the theories about the mass
psychology of factory workers developed earlier by Austin Lewis. He pointed to a
decisive world class struggle, far closer than he had believed previously, with the New
Nationalism forging the ranks of reaction among the new and old middle classes and the
proletariat the sole progressive force. But he believed with Rutgers and Pannekoek that
workers' organized into political f f�ces or even into revolutionary unions was not essential
before the revolutionary Moment.

And yet Fraina was in every essential prepared for entry into the Communist
movement at its creation in America. He had pushed beyond the old demands of
Left-Socialism around the IWW and the ISR by insisting upon

a complete reconstruction of the Socialist movement, of its theory and its

practice . . . a new movement-comprehensive , aggressive, revolutionary, a
movement adapted to the new conditions of Imperialism.

Against the pro-War LaMonte he complained that he could "understand the psychology
of despair . . . because of the collapse of Socialism," but could not grasp LaMonte's
failure to appreciate the events in Russia and their "tremendous influence on our
hopes and fears, and on our future activity ." For Fraina, the proletarian revolution in
Russia marked the stage of revolutionary action in the world Socialist movement, forcing
the Socialist Left of previous years to become the active Socialist movement in the years
to come, thrusting the progress of the world proletariat so far forward that-even should
the Bolsheviki lose in Russia-the stage had been prepared for the workers of all lands to
uanniltilate the rapacious regime of Capitalism " 39 .

The intellectuals who followed Fraina were, for the most part, not those who had
had any significance in Debsian Socialism. The best-known Communist intellectuals of
the next two decades, such as Alexander Bittelman, Jay Lovestone , Bertram Wolfe and
Max Shachtman, had been too young, or too involved in ethnic activities, to make any
impact before the Russian Revolution .

54
 Louis Boudin was certainly the outstanding example of the Left-Socialist who
found no home in the future Communist movements. He had, indeed, never fully
recovered from the lack of acceptance for The Theoretical System of Karl Marx, and
many of his activities thereafter tended to be factional rather than theoretical in nature.
His next book, Socialism and War, was wholly expectable , even commonplace in its
archaic Internationalism. As S J . Rutgers noted, Boudin's intellectual pOints "would have
made a clever advocacy of the participation of Germany in a war against Russia fifty
years ago," but had little relation to the development of Imperialism and the passing of
the period in which Socialists could hope to deftly maneuver to aid the Capitalist
underdog nations. Boudin, in short, had a confidence in the rational and scientific
capture of power by Socialists which was denied on the one hand by the capitalist
bloodbath and on the other by the Russian Revolution.40

Beyond Debsianism: The Right

In the same years the Socialist Intellectuals on the Right, too, had moved beyond
the perimeters of the Debsian movement. The most articulate organ of the moderates
was curiously enough the Intercollegiate Socialist, which had been founded in 1 9 1 3
without factional intent a s the organ o f the Intercollegiate Socialist Society -a distant
but lineal predecessor to SDS . In its "rst several years the IS evolved from a mere
propaganda journal aimed at convincing college men and women to join the Party or
participate in its affairs, into a more general circulation radical periodical. It was chiefly
notable for its hea\ily ethical Socialism, and its impressive list of contributors-including
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Walter Rauschenbusch, Randolph Bourne, Paul Douglas and
Norman Angell-who did not ordinarily write for the Socialist press.

During the War the IS stuck to a general semblance of Pacifism, and proudly
noted cases of brave non-registers for the draft. More important ultimately was the
journal's curious ambiguity of Socialist disdain for bloodshed alongside a New
Republic-like enthusiasm for State-directed collectivization and mobilization. The editor
of the IS, Harry Wellington Laidler, looked specifically to the British mobilization to
furnish examples of "the practicality and necessity of public ownership and operation"
which would "lead one step nearer the Socialist goal." At its extreme point, this view
was even ambiguous about conscription, for it seemed to offer despite its intent and its
ill effec �fPon the working class a good argument for "conscripting" capitalist wealth after
the war!

As the War drew to a close, the British Guild Socialist Movement deeply
influenced this ISS milieu which was growingly pessimistic about Socialist electoral
success and yet antipathetic toward the class violence preached by the
proto-Communists. One of the outstanding Ivy League Socialists, Jesse Wallace Hughan,
wrote optimistically that American radicals were finally moving away from orthodox
Marxism into a healthful "practical revisionism." Through Guild Socialism , she believed,
the power of industrial unionism could be reunited with the Socialist political movement
for a non-violent social transformation.4 2

But such a view had little chance of acceptance in the American Left and little
credability anywhere outside college Socialist circles. By 1920, the Intercollegiate
Socialist was renamed the Socialist Review, to be renamed again in the 1920's Labor
Age. In its new forms, still edited by Laidler, it became a point of articulation for the
reform-labor movement and its remaining friends in the official Socialist Left . In its
ideological direction during Wartime, the IS had reconciled itself both to the
British-American Socialist past in the Fabian activities in the 1 890's, and the
British-American Socialist future in the nationalization efforts of the British Labor Party
and of its feeble American counterparts. As the Left moved its thoughts to Russia, the
Right returned its plans and hopes to England.

55
 CONCLUSION

The absence of Marxian theoreticians among the meager ranks of Socialist

Intellectuals in America was in the first instance due to their limited value by the
Socialist Movement's own assessment. One need only read through the popular Social
Democratic Herald, for instance, to discover in the Party's propaganda backbone -the
weekly newspapers which explained the need for Socialism in local terms-a simple and
self-sufficient, frequently repeated group of ideas which precluded theoretical
sophistication.4 3 Even exegesis of the reputed "Bible of Socialism;' Marx's Capital. was
deemed an unnecessary luxury . The very suggestion of an open-ended analysis which
questioned the optimistic Socialist perspective was enough to raise factional hostility.

Antipathy to theory generally cut across factional and regional lines throughout
the Debsian Movement. The most socially archaic sector. the subsistence farmers in the
South and West, brought with them from Populism a Natural Rights-oriented set of
values which were flatly contradictory to Marxism. The most forwarc-Iooking sector, the
unskilled working class organizers in the I.W.W., had no use whatever for the fine points
of Marxism or the theoretical rationales of the French Socialist movement. Only the
urban Socialist Left showed any consistent concern for theoretical exegesis an!!
elaboration, and then often only to provide a factional club against opponents within the
Movement.

The concern of certain segments of the Left finally bore fruit, but too late and
too little for the job at hand-the comprehension of a rapidly changing American social
structure . When Louis Fraina was granted an interview with Lenin in 1 9 2 2 in Moscow,
the Bolshevik leader stressed theoretically the need for a study of Marxian philosophical
questions. Earlier, Lenin himself had written a monograph on the nature of American
agriculture.44 Fraina and the young Communist movement had never shown the
slightest interest in the formal study of dialectics, however, and had evidently brushed
aside Fraina's own earlier concern for an understanding of the American farmer as they
had brushed aside the whole of the radical, native American farm movement. Like their
predecessors in the Left-Socialist movement and indeed the Socialist movement as a
whole, they had not even the patience to learn from Untermann's studies or from
Simons' empirical research, let alone the interest to expand and extend them.
Such a disinterest boded particularly ill for the 1 9 20's. The Left theorists
had devoted their interest almost single-mmdedly to an unskilled proletariat which had n01
only faIled to move forward to ImmeGlate revolution but seemeG generally quiescent
again st.
me combined government-busmess dnve to destroy the labor movement. Some
revolutionary thinkers had otherwise occupIed themselves with analysis of the new
cultural and aesthetical developments of American society. But the Stalinization of
cultural-artistic matters. added to the American Communists' naive hostility to
everything non-proletarian, meant that not even continuity with earlier advances would
be retained. The analyses by Walling and others of the evolving Corporate State were lost
in a return to the crude dichotomies of the early Socialist movement between
"proletarians" and the rest of society. Indeed, in many respects the theoretical level of the
American Left in the early 1 9 30's remained far below that reached by 1 9 1 7 .

Two ironic products of this discontinuity are especially worth mention. Fraina,
Walling and the rest of the New Left Wing were most certain on the question of State
Socialism. The rationalization of an economy under State control, they insisted, was not
real Socialism, which could be achieved only through workers' councils under
rank-and-file control. Yet a half-century later, both "Socialism " and "Communism "
were taken by their proponents as by the general public in America to be essentially
State propositions with no necessary relationship to a self-governing working class. A
similar and closely linked irony was the strenuous effort by Left theoreticians to show
an objective basis for the hostile divisions within the working class. Austin Lewis and
Louis Fraina pointed to an underc1ass which -much like black workers today -was in a
general sense exploited by the working class as a whole, and performed the worst jobs in

56
industry for the least money. The later Communist analysi� of "sellout leadership" in the
American Federation of Labor wholly obviated Lewis' perception and returned the
analysis to the level of abstract characterization of the working class offered by the
Milwaukee Social-Democrats. Even in today's Left, those who agree on the most
seemingly abstract questions of international Communism abuse each other bitterly over
theoretical matters whose analogues were perfectly clear three generations before.

Of course it is unlikely that a more virile Intellectual life in the Socialist movement
would have decisively changed the course of modem American radicalism. American
Socialist Intellectuals like the rest of their radical countrymen have been carried along on
the tides of historical development, able to rationalize but rarely to genuinely understand
their exact position and prospects. The failure of the Socialist Intellectuals was fmally an
indication of the failure of the Western Left as a whole to come to grips with the economic
and social viability of Capitalism, and to face that viability with the fewest possible
illusions.
FOOTNOTES

1. Robert Rives LaMonte, 'The New Intellectuals," New Review, II (January, 1914).
45-5 3.
2_ [ John Preston] , "Editorial, " A merican Fabian, November, 1898.
3 . See Olive M. Johnson, Daniel DeLeon (New York: New York Labor News Co.,
1923), 1 6 , for a comment on DeLeon's gravitation from Morgan to Marx.
4. An excellent source on A.M. Simons' intellectual career is Robert S. Huston, "A.M.
Simons and the American Socialist Movement," unpublished PhD thesis, University
of Wisconsin, 1965. Especially as an intellectual history, Huston's work far surpasses
the only published biography of Simons, Kent and Getchen Kreuter, A n A merican
Dissenter: The Life of A lgie Martin Simons (Lexington : University of Kentucky
Press, 1969).()ne important source for a discussion of Simons' significance as an
historical writer is Charles Sellers' "Andrew Jackson versus the Historians,"
Mississippi Valley Historical Review, XLIV (March, 1958), pp615-34, in which
Simons' key role in reinterpreting the Jacksonian period is thrown into relief.
5. Ernest Untermann, "An Endless Task," International Socialist Review (hereafter
refereed to as ISR) , VII (November, 1906), 285.
6. See the Untermann Papers, Wisconsin State Historical Society, Madison, Wisconsin,
particularly letters to Marius Hansome, January 1 9 , 1 9 3 5 ; and to Dan O'Truesdell,
July 25 , 1950; and two unpublished manuscripts, 'The Tragedy of Marxism" (c.
1947) and "Lenin's Maggot" (c. 1939).
7. Untermann, The World 's Revolutions (Chicago: Charles H . Kerr, 1906), 172.
8_ Paul Sweezy, 'The Influence of Marxian Economics On American Thought and
Practice," in Donald Egbert and Stow Persons, eds.,,socialism and American Life, I
(princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1952), 463.
9. 'The Biogenetic Law," ISR, VII (June, 1 907» 7 3 1-35; 'The Methods of
)
Propaganda," ibid., VIII {FebrullfY. 1908), 456-65_
10. A.M. Simons, "Book Reviews," ibid. , VIII (August, 1907), 122-23.
1 1 . W.E. Walling, "An American Socialism," ibid.,. V (April, 1905), 577-84.
12.Austin Lewis, 'The Economic Interpretation of History and the Practical Socialist
Movement," ibid. , VII (April, 1907), 609-10; "A Reply to Professor Seligman, "
ibid., III (May, 1903), 667.
13. 'The Economic Interpretation," op. cit. , 6 1 9-21.
14_ James F . Carey, Official Bulletin of the Socialist Party, February, 1909; Jesse
Wallace Hughan, A merican Socialism of the Present Day (New York: John Lane,
1 9 1 2), 224-25 .
1 5 . See William J. Ghent, in the "Letters" Column, along with the editor's reply, in New
York Call, December 4, 1909; rank-and-fIle letters attacking "Intellectuals" by
"A.Nobody," in November 12 Call and A. Rodman, December 1 5 ; also two lengthy
discussions by Party intellectuals against a favored position for intellectuals, in
"Comment and Discussion" (a regular, Sunday feature), Frank Bohn, December 12
and Henry Slobodin, November 28; also a defense of recruiting professional and
middle class elements into the Party, and attacks upon the attackers of intellectuals,
by Rose Pastor Stokes, November 17, John Spargo, November 14,and A.M. Simons,

57
 December 6; and the editor's comments on November 2 1 , 30, December 4 and 5 ,
1909. Call.
16. For the debate on these vital questions. see for instance the exchange of views
between Walling, who on December 1 1, 1909 in the Call made public a confidential
letter to him from Simons; and the replies in "Comment and Discussion" by Spargo,
November 19, 1909; and William J. Ghent, November 1 8 , 1909 Call.
17. James Weinstein, "Socialism's Hidden Heritage: Scholarship Reinforces Political
Mythology, " Studies On the Left, III (Fall, 1963); and his Decline of Socialism in
A merica, 1 912·1 925 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1967).
18. Notable contributors to the NR included Charles A. Beard, the famous scientist
Charles Proteus Steinmetz, and Anatole France.
19. See for instance Walling's "A 'Socialist' Advocate of Plutocracy," NR , II (August,
1 9 14), or his "State Socialism and the Individual," ibid. , I (May and June, 1 9 1 3) .
20. Walling, "The Pragmatism o f Marx and Engels," ibid. , I (April 5 and 1 2 , 1 9 1 3),
43449 and 464-60.
21. Robert Rives LaMonte, ''The Apotheosis of Pragmatism," ibid. , I (July 19 1 3 ) , 664.
22. Walter Lippman, "LaMonte, Walling and Pragmatism ," ibid., I (November, 1 9 1 3),
907-09; ''WaIling's 'Progressivism and After'," ibid. , II (June, 1 9 14), 348; and
LaMonte, "Pragmatism Once More," ibid. , I (November, 1 9 1 3), 909-1 1 .
23. George D . Herron, ''Theodore Roosevelt," ISR, X (June, 19 10), 105 7 .
24. Walling, Progressivism and After (New Yrok: MacMillan, 1 9 1 3), 6 .
25 . Louis C. Fraina, Revolutionary Socialism (New York: The Communist Press, 1 9 1 8) ,
8 6 and 1 1 2, n.6.
26. See especially the comments by anarcho-syndicalists and replies by DeLeon,
reprinted from the People into DeLeon , A s To Politics (New York: New York Labor
News, 1956).
27. Fraina, "Daniel DeLeon," New Review, II {July, 1914), 390-99.
28. See especially Fraina, "The Monroe Doctrine," ibid. . I (November, 1 9 1 3) , 903-06;
and "Mexico and Foreign Capital," ibid. , III (July 1 5 , 1 9 1 5 ) , 1 2 1 -2 2 .
29. Lewis, "The Organization o f the Unskilled ," ibid., I, (December, 1 9 1 3) , 96 1 .
30. "Solidarity: Merely a Word?" ibid., III (July 15 , 1 9 1 5) , 125-28; and ''The
Mechanics of Solidarity," ibid., III (December 1 and 1 5 , 1 9 1 5) , 3 32-35 and 357-59.
3 1 . LaMonte, ''The New Socialism ," 1SR , XIII (Sept., 1 9 1 2), 205-16.
32. Lewis, The Militant Proletariat (Chicago: Charles H . Kerr. 1 9 1 1 ) , 35 , 1 8 3 ; "A Positive
Platform," ibid., XII (April, 1 9 1 2), 664-65.
33. For details on the extremely unportant Femtrust movement within the Socialist
Party and Margaret Sanger's evolution, see Marl Jo Buhle's "Women and the Socialist
Party," Radical A merica. IV (February , 1970).
34. My interpretation has been heavily influenced by Martha Sonnenberg, "Masses Old
and New," ibid" III (November, 1969 ) ; James B. Gilbert, Writers and PartiSllnl
(New York: Wiley & Sons, 1969); and Irene Fokakis, "Alfred Steiglitz, Artist,"
unpublished Master's thesis, University of Wisconsin, 1968.
35. Robert Rives LaMonte, ''The War: Personal Impressions," NR , II (November, 1 914),
636-39.
36. LaMonte ''Where and Whither," ibid. , III (March, 1 915), 1 2 1-27.
38. See Fraina, Revolutionary Socialism, 30, 136, 65-66, 1 9 1 , 1 97 .
39. Fraina, "Socialists and the War," Class Struggle, I (July-August, 1 9 1 7 ) , 99;
"Proletarian Revolution in Russia," ibid., II (January-February, 1 9 1 8) , 6 7 .
4 0 . Boudin, ''The Passing of the Nation," ibid. , I (November-December, 1 9 17), 15-34.
4 t . Harry Laidler, ''The European War and Socialism ," Intercollegiate Socialist, III
(October, 1 914), 3-1 1.
42. Jesse W. Hughan, "Guildsmen and American Socialism," ibid. , VII
(December-January, 1 9 1 8-19), 19-23.
43. The Herald, which had been the official organ of the Social Democratic Party and the
first organ of the American Socialist Party , was given over to the Milwaukee Socialist
movement in 1 90 1 .
4 4 . Theodore Draper, The Roots of American Communism (New York: Viking Press,
1957), 25 3 and 2 80-8 l .

58
"Comments on Paul Boble's Paper
on Socialist Intellectuals"
by Jim Gilbert
Until now, a great deal of writing about American Socialism has been mechanistic
in its conception, speaking primarily to the conferences, splits, disagreement!!, and
failures of the American Socialist Party. Much of it amounts to nostalgic history about
the birth and death of a third party movement. I think that Paul Buhle's contribution to
our understanding of American Socialism, of its incomplete development, of the
unsuccessful efforts to establish a radical intellectual tradition within general Marxist
categories, helps to change this orientation. We must fmally talk about what American
Socialists believed they were doing; how they interpreted their experiences; and what
contributions they made toward understanding industrial society. One way to do this, is
to take a hard and critical look at Socialist intellectwiIs. This is not because intellectuals
dominated the Socialist Party-although one might get this idea in glancing at a typical
list of Party notables-but rather, because they articulated and failed to resolve a
dilemma which is directly related to the problems of building a Socialist movement in
the United States.

There have been four very general interpretations of the failure of American
Socialism. One follows Ira Kipnis and argues that the real Socialist movement was
destroyed when the I.W.W. (i.e. working class elements) split with the middle class
membership in the party. One interpretation, reflecting the Popular Front in the 1930's,
contends that a genuine revolutionary impulse can be traced from the I.W.W. to the
Communist Party. A further interpretation, offered by James Weinstein, argues that the
Socialist Party was destroyed by factionalism, and that the Party was at least potentially a
revolutionary party. A fmal interpretation, which is interesting in a backhanded sort of
way, argues that the Socialist Party was right about issues and wrong about ideology, and
that its primary mistake was to call its orientation Marxist.

Buhle's paper approaches this problem from a different angie, for its seeks to
explain what Socialist intellectuals believed, not how they reacted to specific issues, and
how thllill beliefs reflected the transient basis for Socialism built by the Socialist -Party.
Intellectua1s, in other words, despite their enormO\;, 'JUtpouring of journa1ism, and
endless words, did nothing to deepen and strengthen American Socialism.

Buhle's criticism of Socialist intellectua1s in the broadest sense arnoUJ\ts ts an

accusation that they were not intellectuals at all-if by this we mean, men and women
who think independently and profoundly. He criticizes everything about them; their
ideas, thoir lack of methodology , and even the class basis of their work. By extension,
this amounts to a criticism of American Socialism itself, for each intellectual failure.
represents to Buhle, the failure of the Party to extend beyond its origins as a middle
class movement. This is not to deny the great importance of working class membership
in the movement, but rather to demonstrate the ultimate subordination of such elements
to the non-£evolutionary aims- of the Party as a whole.

What is missing, and yet suggested by this paper, is Ii discussion of the reaSORS that
the American Socialist Party remained largely middle oiaIs in orientation. Was this more
than an intellectual failure? What missing intellectual or material link would have
provided the basis for dialectical thinking? What would dialectical thinking ha¥e
entailed? and, Was the intellectual failing merely symbolic of the broken growth of
Socialism, or did it contirbute significantly to the demise of the Socialist movement?
Rather than continue to speak about the direct relationship of Socialist
'intellectuals to the Socialist Party , I wish to examine, very briefly, their relationships to
other thinkers. Of these Socialist intellectua1s>- I want to focus particularlY upon William

S9
James Ghent, William English Walling, Charles Edward Russell, J.G. Phelps-Stokes, ftI1d
Robert Hunter, a list of men of whom Morris Hillquit of the New York SP recalls, set
out to create a specifically American Socialist literature.

The most striking thing about these men, besides their large literary production, was
that they were all part of a larger, developing community of reformer-intellectuals. They
shared most of the assumptions and aims of a large group of liberals, Progressives and
muckrakers who before 1920 formulated a complex and extensive positive attitude toward
reformed capitalism-which a few called Socialism. What did these ties amount to? What
effect did they have on the intellectual's understanding of Socialism?

Most, if not all of these intellectuals, came to Socialism as experts in another

field. William English Walling, for example had been a factory inspector among other
things. Russell was a journalist, and Robert Hunter was head worker at the University
Settlement House in New York. If one looks at their remaining correspondence and
papers, it is clear that these intellectuals were strongly committed to Socialism, but as
one of several activities. Simultaneously, many of them belonged to other active reform
organizations that were clearly non-Socialist, where they rubbed elbows and clashed
intellectually with liberal businessmen and other intellectuals.

There was, of course, nothing particularly wrong with these activities, except that
they reinforce what these writers say elsewhere about the meaning of Socialism. To
them, as well as the larger group of intellectuals, Socialism was a kind of fmal stage of
industrialism, a further evolution of capitalism toward centralism, monopoly and
administrative control from the top. At base, these men were evolutionists who chose to
celebrate the development and differentiation of corporate capitalism as the basis for a
new form of society-and hence Socialism. This vision they shared with a large number
of academics in sociology, anthropology, and political science. Thus it seemed that in the
larger sense, any reform advanced civilization toward the fmal goal of a just society. The
result was that these intellectuals saw Socialism as something rather different from the
Socialist Party or even the working class. It tended to become an abstraction toward
which they felt many forces were working (including, of course, the Socialist Party). But
such a view of Socialism made it possible in 1 9 1 7 to split with the Socialist Party over
the issue of patriotism, and still call such views radical.

To be an evolutionist in the Socialist camp at this period meant something rather

special. It meant that one admired science and organization, progress and process-all
undeniable aspects of the intensive industrial reorganization in the United States before
World War I . But it also implied an admiration of power and a desire for simple historical
explanations in terms of laws of development. And many Socialists and liberals admired
nothing quite so much as the development of the corporation. It was not size or power
which frightened these men-quite the opposite. For competition, it was felt, tied to
laissez-faire individualism was really the enemy of social development. Here was an
assumption which inevitably made their reaction to the Roosevelt and WIlson
administrations an ambiguous one, and furthermore, suggested to them that warfare (as a
kind of ultimate unifying and centralizing force) could accomplish what political struggle
could not.

Many Socialist intellectuals shared with their fellow intellectuals a rather special
attitude toward themselves and their own function. In anything, they felt that they
understood the forces of history and were familiar with the subtleties of power, and yet
as individuals they were powerless. To make their knowledge and themselves available
for social planning was thus a key concem, and one ultimately resolved in the role of the
expert. As experts, intellectuals had a function which was inherently useful to society,
and one which had all of the connotations of objectivity and science that were so
popular in the fust years of the Twentieth Century.

This self-concept, this pose, also had a negative effect. It amounted, in some
sense, to a profound anti-intellectualism, bred perhaps of insecurity and powerlessness,

60
but nonetheless real. There are two senses in which this is true. The frrst is illustrated in a
memorandum sent by the Social Democratic League (a pro-War Socialist group including
Wa1ling and Spargo) to Samuel Gompers, head of the A.F. of L. The memorandum
discussed the League and went to rather extraordinary lengths to denounce
European-lityle intellectuals. Perhaps this remarkable attack on intellectuals was done
more to please Gompers than anything else. But that of course is the point; intellectuals
were often quite willin g to demean themselves for the sake of impressing the power
brokers in American society. There is another, mere subtle sense in which the role of
expert was anti-intellectual. The expert is not a revolutionary, nor even, ultimately much
of a thinker. He solves problems posed by soCiety or peIbaps, history, out he does not
generally formulate problems. He tinkers and tampers but he does not challenge
prevailing institutions at their foundation. But most of all, he does not deal with ideas,
or ideology. His function is to make things work. This too amounts to an admiration for
power, for impersonal forces in history, lI!ld for institutions.

The dilemma which many Socialist intellectuals could not face, then, because of
their general (and loose) adherence to the prevailing reformism of the period, was clear.
How could they conceive of a new society which was not based upon contemporary
institutions, political concepts, hierarchical oIgllnizations, and industrial patterns?
Because they failed, many of them slid off into other movements, like the American
Federation of Labor or Scientific Management, or they rejected Socialism and sometimes
reformism, outright. A few persisted but were faced with two fruitless movements of the
1920's, the American Communist Party , and the remnants of American Socialism.

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61
SOCIAL THEORY AND PRACTICE

A n I nternational a n d I nterdiscipli nary Journal o f Social Philosophy

Editor: K.T. Fann; Associated Editors: D . David Gruender,

Donald C. Hodges; Advisory Editors: Christian Bay, Noam
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Wolff.

Volume I . Number 1 . (Spring, 1 970)

"Some Contradictions of Advanced U .S. Capita lism" by James

O'Connor
"The Two Faces of Civil Disobedience" by Virginia Black
" I s 'Just Vio lence' l ike 'Just War'?" by Donald A. Wel ls
"White Ethin ics and Black Liberation" by Sidney M . Peck
"Paris and Praxis: Towards Understanding Student Revolts" by Don
Ihde
"Marxism i n I ndia" by Dale R iepe
"Material versus Moral I ncentives" by Peter Clecak
" Maximization of Expected Util ity as a Criterion of Rationality I n
M i l itary Strategy a n d Foreign Policy" b y Robert P. Wolff
"On Baroness Wootton's Larceny"-by Lorenne M .G . Smith

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62
 remember ted gold best

riding to connecticut

in a car with six

young kids from the

ghetto

to a conference on the war

Five congressmen spoke

and we played

smoky and the miracles on

the portable record player

and went swimming

The kids have grown

STUDENT

PUSH E R

PANTH E R

Ted liked to go

to the Knick games

He had season tickets

last year

This year,

he is dead
Of a bomb meant for better targets

There will be no process ions

and the articles in the

Times will have no quotes

For those who lost before the battle

Who found a battle

they never really sought

Norman Temple

63
 I
TH ES ES ON MA R X I ST SC H O LA R S
�I

1. I f you regard the theoretical attitude as the only genuinely human attitude,
while conceiving and fixing practice only in its di rty-judaical manifestation, as "merely
manual," as labor. . .
2. I f you think the question of objective truth, of the reality or unreality of
thinking, is a question of theory . . .
3. I f you think that men are prod ucts of circumstances and education and therefore
of other circumstances and

64
 Towa rd A Critica l Theory
For Advanced Industrial
Society
by Trent SchrOyeT

Contemporary science and technology have become a new form of legitimating

power and privilege. Insofar as the practice of the scientific establishment is held to be
neutral, while actually justifying the extension of repressive control systems, we can
assert that the contemporary self-image of science functions as a technocratic ideology . 1
Technocratic legitimation assumes a positivist view of science. This positivist view holds:
(1) that knowledge is inherently neutral
( 2 ) that there is a unitary scientific method
(3) that the standard of certainty and exactness in the physical sciences is the
only explanatory model for scientific knowledge.
We refer to this conception of science here as scientism 2 and we argue that a critical
theory of science must reject and refute each one of those fundamental principles in the
scientistic self-image of science. Scientism is the culmination of the positivist tradition
and has become dominant in both established social science of late capitalism and in the
scientistic materialism of orthodox Marxism . Wherever scientism permeates a scientific
establishment, it functions as a societal a priori, which uncritically permits the extension
of an exploitive instrumental rationalization. 3 That is, it contributes to the generation of
decision making whose "rationality" is instrumental effectiveness and efficiency. Such
mechanisms work against a broader mode of rationalization which would maximize the
participation and individuation of affected people.

Scientism has created a crisis in man's knowledge of himself in that it mystifies

the practice and societal function of science. In so concealing its contemporary research
guiding framework scientism becomes a self-fulfilling and self-reinforcing force of
history . The faith that men will be emancipated through the extension of neutral
techniques of science and technology obscures the reality of research serving and
justifying technical control systems which accept power structures as given.

Scientism as the positivistic self-image of science separates the subject and object
of knowledge and takes the statements of science as an observational given. Knowledge is
thus conceived as 8 neutral picturing of fact. This denies that there could be any
pre definitions of the object of knowledge by the prior organization of our experience.
The positivistic philosophy of science overlooks that the societal framework within
which research practice takes place exercises a direct influence in the processing of
theory and data. This scientistic trend exemplifies what Edmund Husserl has called the
fallacy of objectivism.4 Thus while more and more able to systematize knowledge,
positivistic theory is less and less able to reflect about its own presuppositions and is left
without any way of objectifying the structuring framework of this epoch.5

Scientism and the positivistic philosophy of history are vestiges of classic

ontology in that pure theory and scientific method are held to be historically neutral.
The on-going articulation of the scientific method within the establishment, whether by
logicians or by practicing scientists, is but a later reconstruction of the results of
scientific inquiry , and as such is an idealization of the actual practice of science. Insofar
as this reconstructed-logic is held to be a guide for inquiry and superimposed upon
scientific praxis, it is distortive of both the logic-in-use 6 , i.e. the actual logic of inquiry
used by scientists, and the reality investigated.

However, this idealization of science and its method is none the less an active
force in history and does transform the human world . Thus the greatest problem that

65
social theory faces is not whether behaviorism, game theory or systems analysis are
theoretically valid, but whether they might not become valid through a self-fulfilling
prophecy justified by a technocratic ideology.

II

Science and science-based technology have become more basic to the production
processes of advanced industrial societies. 7 The institutionalization of science and
technology as "research and development" has generated a "knowledge industry" which
is itself a force of production . Knowledge production units become autonomous
structures that are perpetuated beyond their originating goals. They link directly, or
indirectly (technology transfer from state financed research , e.g. space program), to
corporate profit making capacity . 8

"Knowledge", however, is produced within the context of an instrumentally

rationalizing society . Thus scientism increasingl �
becomes the prescriptive
decision-rnatrice for ever new spheres of society . Insofar as more spheres of
decision-making are construed as "technical problems" requiring information and
instrumental strategies produced by technical experts, they are removed from political
debate) 0

The increased importance of the "knowledge industry" has led some social
theorists to conceptualize "post-industrial" society as a self-regulating system in which
information is the crucial input) 1 With this, or related images of contemporary society ,
we have an infmitely fleXIble ideology which can be inter;Jreted in ways which legitimate
public or private policy adopted by established power and privilege groups (e.g. theories
of "modernization" applied to socio-economic development») 2

We argue that the scientistic image of science has become the dominant
legitimating system of advanced industrial society. It has gradually replaced the ideology
of equivalence exchange which had performed the legitimating function for early
industrial society. Whereas Marx was able to show how equiValence of exchange between
labor and capital was the major contradiction in capitalist society, we are now unable to
express a later stage of this development in the same way. (This will be discussed below.)
The advance stage of the contradiction between labor and capital involves the distortion
of the market by the growth of state interventions. These emergent f ctions of the
�
state are necessitated for the sake of avoidance of its fmal disruption. In order to
reproduce Marx's critical-emancipatory analysis for our time we must reconstruct his
analytical framework in a way which makes for a more concrete expression of the source
of contemporary alienation. Whereas Marx was able to formulate his critical theory as a
critique of the purest ideological expression of equivilance exchange, i.e. classical
political economy, we are forced to broaden our critique to the positivistic theory of
science itself. It is our thesis that the scientistic image of science is the fundamental false
consciousness of our epoch. If the technocratic ideology is to loose its hold on our
consciousness, a critical theory of science must lay bare the theoretical reifications of
this scientistic image of science. That is the concern of this paper.

Some social theorists, such as C. Wright Mills, place Marxism in the classic
tradition of social science and then proceed in an eclectic manner to combine Marx with
Weber, Veblen, G.H. Mead and Freud. These eclectic constructions cannot generate an
alternative to established theory. They do little more than illuminate historical structures
of power and privilege , and function more or less as strain-measuring scales for these.
same structures. Not until we have a community of critical scientists who perceive social
science in a critical manner will we be able to perform the ongoing tasks of research,
critique and political program formulation.

III.

A reinterpretation of the nature of science and its relation to society has already
begun ill �ntemporary European Marxism, especially in the Frankfort school of critical

66
sociology.1 5 This particular attempt to reinterpret Marx consists of searches for the fust
principles of a critical (or emancipatory) science that can respond in a contemporary
manner to the methodology of the established social sciences.

In this reinterpretation, or this reconstruction of Marxism if you will, science is

conceived as part of the materialist model of society .But the materialist model of society
is now reinterpreted as three societal systems of action : 1 6
a. Instead of talking about the substructure, we refer to the systems of purposive
rational action;
b. Instead of talking about the superstructure, we must refer to the systems of
symbolic interaction;
c. Instead of talking about the forms of social consciousness we can speak about
the reflexive recognition of legitimate authority which is internal t.o the system
of self-reflection.
By considering scientific inquiry as the formalization of the logics-in-action of societal
systems, we can generate a new kind of logic in science. We can achieve an insight into
. the prior orientations of scientific inquiry . We can express predefmitions of the
object-of-knowledge in terms of the relation of cognition and interest. By analysing the
transcendental interests of cognition as they are linked to historically determined
conceptual schemes and behavioral systems we can arrive at an understanding of the
logical rules of the process of inquiry. The procedures of scientific inquiry are rooted in
the prescientific processes of everyday life and the finding and inventing of hypotheses,
the deduction of conditional predictions and the testing of hypotheses are parallel to the
practice of life itself.

Only within this mode of conceptualizing scientific inquiry and its rootedness in
everyday life can we see both the validity of science and relate it to chaging historical
variables. Only by integrating a logic of inquiry within an empirically transforming life
world can we achieve a dialectical theory of science and society. In so constructing a
unified theory of the logics-in-use of scientific practice and the logics-in-action of
societal systems we are able to show that cognition is never a neutral fact-picturing.
Since knowledge is never neutral, we can demonstrate that there are distinct scientific
methods and that each requires a somewhat different explanatory model. In this way we
are able to refute the theorY of science inherent in scientism.

Our pay-off is a new classification of the sciences and an analysis of the logical
interest (or transcendental principle) presupposed in each practice. We then see three
interests as fundamental to three kinds of sciences:
a. We conceive of the strict sciences as that mode of analysis which yields
information that pIelUpposel the interest of certainty and technical control.
·
b. We conceive of the hermeneutic sciences (or the historical-interpretive
sciences) as that mode of interpretation which yields an understanding of the
social cultural life world and which presupposes the interest of extending of
intersubjective understanding.
c. We conceive of a critical science as that kind of inquiry which is capable of
analysing the supposed and actual "necessity" of historical modes of authority
and which presupposes the interest of the emancipation of men from law-Uke
patterns of "nature" aM history.
Established, "official", social science understands itself as having the interest of the strict
sciences. In practice, that means that established social sciences, although it conceives
itself as neutral, is actually an inquiry which has the theoretical interest and societal
consequence of maintaining technical control.

However, within the methodological debates of established social science there

has emerged a recognition of a competing interest and a competing logic-in-use of
scientific inquiry. To cite a few of these debates in one sphere, sociology, we can see
emergent modes of analysis such as phenomenology, ethnomethodology, a priorist
sociology deriving from the late Wittgenstein and symbolic interactionism. These debates
are recognition of a competing practical interest within social science methodology, that

of the hermeneutic sciences. Despite these new methodol�gical reflections. the dominant

67
trend is to cornaue to understand social inquiry in a way which identifies it with the
strict sciences.

At this point let us go back to Marx hirnseif and reconstruct the beginnings of a
critical science. Whereas Marx was grounded in classic philosophy and discovered the key
to an emancipatory science of man in Hegel we are often less aware of these foundations.
We therefore need to fill in the philosophical dimensions of Marxism as a critical science,
seeing it as a product of its time and perhaps being able to reconstruct its main elements
more systematically than its founder.

Hegel provided for Marx the foundations of a critical theory of human

development in that he formulated a science of the experience of consciousness as a.
historical self-forming process. Marx extended this analysis to the historical conditions of
the self-formation of man by materializing the notion of dialectical synthesis. He thus
transformed the critique of knowledge into the critique of society. It is in the
teconstruction of this common link between Hegel and Marx that we will fmd the key to
a Marxi<lt theory o( science and society, to Marxism as a critical science) 7

Critical philosophy has always pointed to positivism's inability to account for

the possibility of objective knowledge, or even give an interpretation of its own historical
development and practice. The more recent development of positivism has only
increased this inability until reflective IDalysis is reduced to the JVaIginal status of the
analysis of scientific language. Positivists hold that philosophic analysis cannot produce
"knowledge". In opposition to this critical science retains philosophic reflection as a
mode of the critique of research practice and for the substantive critique of ideologies.
Hence a critical science differs from all other sciences in that it employs both logical and
empirical analysis in the framework within which it validates knowledge. Since the
modes of mediation of the object-of-knowledge will change as the historic subject
�hanges, a critical theory of science hQlds that an adequate methodology will include a
critical theory of knowledge internal to its theory of society.

The recent work of the philosopherlOciologist JUIpIl Habermas, the younger

leading figure in the Frankfort school, has focused upon this aspect of the Marxist
tradition. In his book Erkenntnis und Interesse, 1968, he has reinterpreted Marxist
theory of labor in a way which fills in its logical foundations.

Habermas argues that the Marxist notion of work is not only an economic
category, but also deals with ways in which the material base of society conditions
objectively possible knowledge. In this critical-materialism, the subject of world
constitution is not the transcendental consciousness, as in Kant, but the existing human
species which reproduces the actual conditions of its Hfe. Thus the Marxian notion of
man as homofarber fundamentally differs from all previous notions in that work is
conceptualized as both the mechanism of human development and as the objective
framework through which possible experience is constituted.

When Marx argues that "the history of industIy is the open book of the essential
human powers" he is' speaking of the empirical dynamic and the logic by which man
objectivates himself. To relate Marx's conception to transcendental logic is not falling
into an idealism; the �eory remains materialistic. Taken this way we see that Marx's
theory of work completes Hegel's critique of Kant. Whereas Kant's analysis of knowing
places the synthesis of the material perception under the transcendental rules of the pure
concepts of the understanding which are internal and unchanging, Marx stresses that the
synthesis of the materials of work are unified under the technical rules of the
instruments of production and these belong to the historically changing base of society.
It is a subtle argument. Marx has taken the transcendental mode of logic and integrated
it into an empirical science. So that when we talk about dialectics, under this
reconstruction of Hegelian-Marxist theory, we are talking about a reconceptualization of
transcendental logic in a way that brings into that mode of analysis empirical historical
concJitiOUI
 The logical dimension of this dialectical theory of work is that the knowledge we
can generate about nature is bound to the limits of the technically posSlble control over
nature. Therefore, and this is a key point, the objectivity of societal experience and of
scientific knowledge is posSlble as a function of the widening sphere of technical control
over nature, and specifically within the framework of instrumental systems which form
the basis of society. Hence the mode of mediation of subject and object is historically
bound on the empirical level as well as the logical; both the material used in work and
the living work process are historical variables. Instrumental action is a form of purposive
rational action which proceeds according to technical rules based on empirical
knowledge. It includes predictions about observable events and these are true or false,
thus providing us with knowledge whose adequacy depends on how efficiently man
controls reality. A more recent variation of instrumental behavior are systems of rational
choice which proceed from strategies that are based on analytical knowledge that include
deductions from preference rules or general maxims and may be correct or not. Strategic
behavior depends upon a correct evaluation of alternative possibilities of action by
inferring from a given system of values and maxims. Systems of instrumental action are
different forms of technical rules which are universal and not context-based and they can
be formulated in context-free language. Thus the truly universal languages are the
technologies produced by men.

However, in Marx's model of society he distinguishes the social relations from the
revolutionizing means of production. Therein lies a distinction between instrumental and
symbolic systems of action . Habermas reconceptualizes this distinction by a logical
analysis of the difference between a social norm and a technical rule.

We can see a social norm as defining reciprocal behavior expectations that are
shared by at least two persons. They are not true or false and determined by technical
success but enforced by sanction. The validity of social norms depends upon the mutual
understanding of expectations and common recognition of obligations. As such the
meaning of social norms can, as a rule, be understood via ordinary language
communication (whereas technical rules are formulated in a formalized language). Hence
social norms form context-specific systems of action whose logical status differs from
technical rules. Symbolic interaction systems are equivalent to the social-cultural life
world of society and are to be distinguished from systems of instrumental action . The
relation of systems of technics to symbolic systems is a historical variable. For example,
Marx showed that capitalism is the point in history where there is a reversal of the order
of legitimation. This is the beginning of what in oUI own time has become known as the
technological society . In this phase the extension of the systems of purposive rational
behavior begins to legitimate itself. In Marx's analysis this is expressed as the point at
which the extension of capitalistic economy produces its own reified culture: the
fetishism of the commodity form .

The work of Herbert Marcuse is primarily a documentation of the ongoing

fetishes, or reifications, of possessive individualism , consumer orientation, and the like in
the advanced stages of industrial society . Marcuse concretely documents a suggestion
made by Marx in Gnmdrisse that the production system can begin to integrate social and
cultural needs within its own development. ("Production not only furnishes the object
of a need, but it also furnishes the need for an object.") Thus there is a potential for the
total inversion of the traditional relationship between the system of instrumental
behavior and the system of symbolic interaction. The meaning of "one-dimensionality"
(Marcuse) or "instrumental rationalization" (Habermas) implies the objective possiblity
of the total control of social-cultural change. Systems of instrumental action can be
extended to the organization of human responses to a stimulus-response pattern, e.g. the
shaping of behavior in behavioral psychoanalysis. The possibility of bringing under
technical control systems of symbolically mediated interaction suggests that the practice of
life could be reduced to instrumental action. Men would resort to an artificial
necessity , guided by the standards of technical success and efficiency. 1 984 is
technologically feasible.

What this would mean is the reducing of cultural traditions of common symbols

69
to technics of adaptive behavior. Marcuse and Adorno have indeed suggested that human
behavior is becoming more and more of a mimetic acting out by an externally
conditioned ego. I S The possibility o f this degree o f loss o f ego-autonomy is, however, an
empirical question. But the critical theories of Adorno, Marcuse and Habermas are at
'
this point, an interpretation of analytical schemes and must not be taken as a fac ual t
claim. What it would mean is that the distinction between social action and adaptive
behavior, learned and "instinctive behavior" would become more and more meaningless.
This historical configuration of instrumental and symbolic interaction systems means
that the third system, self-reflection, is reduced to a minimum. Critical reflection about
the legitimacy of authority structures is replaced by an immediate indentification with the
collective ego-ideal. 1 9

While Marx kept the instrumental and symbolic action-systems separate in his
substantive research , he did not separate them in his theory of society. Thus his later
understanding of political economy as a historical natural science suppresses the logical
uniqueness of symbolic communication and reconstructs it upon the model of
mstrumental behavior . This is exactly what most modes of positivist analysis did in the
course of their development.

IV.

In our time , with its dominant technocratic ideology , the point of a critical theory
of science will be to show that instrumental action is not the only interest that guides
research practice in the social sciences. More specifically, the concern of a critical theory
is to try to formulate a view of practical scientific interests and relate those to the
societal actIon system s. Toward that end we need a reconceptualization such as the
followmg:
1 . The Logic-in-Use of the Strict Sciences
In this direction we f"md that the pragmatic philosophy of science, especially that of C.S.
Pierce, has already developed an approach to this problem which is consistent with a
dialectical epistemology.20 The pragmatic tradition has focused upon the logical analysis
of the procedures and inquiry of science, and has not restricted itself to formal
methodology and the analysis of language as have the positivists. Thus pragmatism has
conceived of methodological rules as norms guiding the practice of inquiry; the analysis
refers to the communication and interaction of the community of investigation. From
this analysis we can make a basic distinction between the logics-in-use and the
reconstructed logic of science. The former analysis explicates the rules guiding the
practice of inquiry ; the latter formulate s criteria of validity and semantic meaning in
relation to the results of science. As we noted at the start, the positivist philosophy of
science has worked exclusively with the reconstructed logic of science.

Thus Pierce gives us an analysis of tile logical (transcendental) and empirical

conditions for the validity of strict science inquiry in the form of a logics-in-use of strict
science. Pierce argues that the research interest guiding strict science is that of gaining
and expanding control over objects which we have observed. Development of this logical
argument cannot be dealt with here. What this means, however, is that in the process of
inquiry we ourselves behave as if the events of reality were the products of a subject
who, under contingent initial conditions, continuously draws conclusions from a def"mite
valid set of rules and then decides to act, permanently conforming to the predictions
thereby derived. Thus our research praxis is guided by instrumental actions which
presuppose that reality is also an actor who has internalized a set of habits we call "laws
of nature." Pierce's analysis is unique and is parallel to Marx's anlaysis of the logic of the
work process in that both logical and empirical conditions are seen as determining the
possibility of successful instrumental action. Whereas Marx's analysis can be construed as
a general critique of Kant's notion of the worid-constituting powers of human knowing,
Pierce's can be seen as a similar critique of Kant but dealing with the instrumental action
procedures of the community of strict scientists.

Pierce has shown that the synthetic modes of reasoning, i.e. induction and
abduction, are chains of inference whose validity can be accounted for only by referring

70
to the norms of procedure that are sedimented into the research practice of a
community of investigators. Within t;tis frame of reference we are able to conceive of
scientific reasoning as systems of purposive rational behavior which are essentially the
"habits" of research practice. Their function is to fixate belief, to operate as guiding
principles for the accumulation of new information, and to be revised when there are
failures in anticipated results. Belief is secured again when there is a successful acting
upon a new recipe which is repeatedly reconfirmed. Hence the systems of purposive
rational behavior embedded in the research practice of a community of investigators
functions as the transcendental scheme that constitutes possible cognition. But this
transcendental framework is within the system of instrumental action of a given
historical context, the framework determines the conditions under which we objectify
and experience "reality" as a possible object of purposive rational action, or possible
technical control.

We can therefore see that the work process and strict science inquiry are related.
Both are constituted through an instrumental logics-in-use and linked to the instrumental
action system of society. To PUl it another way we can say that they both presuppose (in
the transcendental sense) a model of certainty for the successful control of observed
processes. In short the "interest" of instrumental praxis and strict science is one, that of
technical control. Thus a social science in this category of science would be interested in
recurrent regularities of the social world toward the end of technical control, e.g.
behaviorism.

Indeed the most advanced forms of social science inquiry, such as systems analysis
and decision theory, are guided by the interest of technical control. But a critical theory
of science can show that this is not the only interest that guides research in the
established social sciences. In competition with the technical interest of strict science
inquiry we can formulate, from the tradition of the Human Sciences
(Geisteswissenschaften) a practical interest-that of the extension of communicative
understanding toward the end of the formation of the consensus) 1 This interest is
presupposed by the historical-interpretive sciences of the social-cultural life world such
as cultural sociology , history of art, etc. We will refer to this category of science as the
hermeneutic sciences. 22

2. The Logics-in- Use a/the Hermeneutic Sciences

Identification of a unique method for the hermeneutic sciences requires a return to the
debate about the differences between the natural and human sciences. At the very least,
we must go back to the theory of science which preceded the Neo-Kantian distinction
between the empirical ana the philosophical, the "is" and the "ought" dimensions.

An important beginning point for the re-discovery of a hermeneutic logics-in-use

is the last essays of Wilhelm Dllthey. 2 3 In these essays,written between 1905 and 1 9 1 0,
Dilthey is putting the distinction between the natural and human sciences in a way
which recaptures part of the Hegelian theory while addressing itself to a
twentieth-century context. He points to the logical differences between perception and
explanation in the natural sciences, and interpretation and understanding, in the human
sciences. The focus then is upon the different logic-in-use of these scientific processes.
This focus suggests that concepts, theories, methods and principles of verification are
related to the processes of inquiry for their validity.

Whereas in the strict sciences we are constrained by the range of our technical
control over natural pro cesses, in the hermeneutic sciences we are constrained by our
socially established conventions which exercise a predefinition of how we understand
symbolic communication. In this way the fundamental "communality" we have with
others constitutes a tran scendental presupposition of hermeneutic understanding. Thus in
the systems of common symbols which are sedimented, first in an ordinary language and
then in typical action patterns and typical attitudinal orientations are the rules of the
logic-in-use of hermeneutic understanding. In formulating rules of interpretation we are
trying to consciously recapture the process of interpretation which enables everyday

71
actors to understand each other. The expression of these logic-in-use rules has been
worked out by Dilthey's analysis of the "cycle of interpretation" and by what later
writers call the Henneneutic Circle. Recognition of the logical difference of the
interpretation of symbolic systems has led to the programmatic ideals for the social
sciences such as phenomenological sociology (e.g. Alfred Schutz):l4; Ethno-methodology
(e.g. Garimkel, Cicourel)25 ; Symbolic Interactionism (Herbert Blumer26 and others).
However, the result of hermeneutic inquiry in these paradigms can give us little more
than a Verstehen sociology's explanation.

But we are not concerned with a defense of the human sciences but with the
existence of a competing interest to technical control in social inquiry. The question for
social science is how to develop a mode of analysis which is both explanatory and able to
interpret symbolic communication. This fonn of science would have a still different
research guiding interest-that of emancipation.

Established social science is essentially manipulative because it has allowed itself

to be conceived as having the same research-guiding interest as the strict sciences. Insofar
as technical control is the guiding interest of social science, it is consistent with the
technocratic trend and overtly legitimates class or elite exploitation. On the other hand a
social science guided only by the practical interest would have very little explanatory
power. Thus the need for the synthesis critical science.

It is now possible to briefly summarize the above arguments. The methods of the
strict sciences and the henneneutic sciences are both but formalizations of the praxis of
the everyday systems of instrumental and symbolic interaction . These two types of
praxis are not neutral in regard to their "objects" but rather presuppose an inhereni
teleology of inquiry. Just as instrumental systems transfonn the material base of society,
symbolic interaction systems change our everyday consciousness about the world.
Otanges in these subsystems of society are not passive accumulations; the societal
context is transfonned in a way which also transfonns the subject (men). Thus the
extension of these systems are together the processes by which the human species itself
is developed historically. This development does not occur by an external necessity in
which man is the passive medium through which the "laws" of nature and history are
manifested. On the contrary, our conception stresses that men are active in the
constitution of their own world and of their own "nature". This process of
self-formation cannot be conceived within a theory which assumes that knowledge
represents "structures" and is neutral in regard to its "object".

3. Foundations ofa Critical Science

Reflection about the sub-systems of society , and their function as transcendental
frameworks which link system interests and cognition requires a unique mode of
analysis. Such methodological reflection tries to illuminate both human history and the
practice of science as historical self-forming processes, and thereby restores to men an
awareness of their position as the active, yet historically limited, subject of history. To
recognize the processes of historical self-fonnation of human history is to become aware
of the mechanisms of historical negativity and therefore to be able to generate a critique
of existing structures by objectifying the objective possitilities of a social totality .27
Hence the generation of a critical theory of science and society is at the same time the
broadest theoretical framework for a revolutionary theory .28

A critical science differs from the strict or henneneutic sciences in that it

presupposes . that all self-conscious agents can become aware of the self-fonnative
processes of society and self and with this knowledge achieve a historically conditioned
autonomy . Thus the character of a critical science is unique insofar as it is concerned
with the assessment of the socially unnecessary modes of authority , exploitation,
alienation, repression.29 The interest of a critical science is the emancipation of all
self-conscious agents from the seemingly "natural" forces of nature and history.

How is a critical science related to the history of human society? This linkage is to
the capacity of men to be reflective about their own formative process. A critical science

72
is linked to the dialectic of se lf-reflection that is present in all socialization processes,
specifically in the reflective recognition of legitimate authority . 3 0 From the point of
view of the strict or hermeneutic sciences, a critical science is a speculative science in
that it tries to reflect about the "necessity" for the conditions of law-like patterns in
society and history . It is a science which in reconstructing the dynamic of individual or'
societal development tries to assess what are necessary norms and which are but
remnants of power structures no longer humanly useful. This mode of analysis derives..
from the historic-genetic mode of conceptua1i7.ation which is inherent in Hegel's
transcendental ontology as developed in his Phenomenology of Mind. The mode of
analysis is essentially related to the Hegelian concept of reason which is fundamental to a
Marxist science. Hegel conceives of reason as inherently historical, as geared to the
"explanation" not of invariant laws (the positivistic fallacy of objectivism) but of
self-forming (Bildung) processes. 3 1

I have elsewhere interpreted Hegel's philosophy as generated by his concern to

overcome emergent cultural alienation. 32 Hence his analysis of the French Revolution,
despite its rejection of the terror and the critique of a one-sided individualism, is an
affrrmation of the revolution as releasing men from cultural systems that distorted and
suppressed thought and emotion. Hence his conception of a philosophy which could
illuminate historical contradictions by objectifying cultural sy mbols as alienated forms
of free self-conscious life. By comprehending alienated moments of the necessary
movement of Geist, Hegel thought that men could be reconciled with their actual
potential and not constrained by outmoded systems of thought and action. In this way
the Phenomenology can be seen as a philosophical form of a critical science , one that
tries to view over 2500 years of human history as a single development in which pivoted
movements are represented as alienated cultural forms, e.g. the medieval world-view as
depicted by the Unhappy Consciousness.

The Marxian critique of Hegel's claim to absolute knowledge , or the deduction of

all from the principle of Geist, is but an extension of this dialectic of reflection; Marx's
Capital is a realization of Hegel's conception of a science of reason. Marx produced,
however, not a dialectical ontology but a dialectical empiricism. That is, a science of
society which is rooted in the transcendental concept of reason but realized that this
form of science can be conceived only as an empirical science. In so refuting the residue
of classical ontology in Hegel, Marx does not thereby banish the praxis of Reason from
an empirical science. Instead the Marxi�t science is different in that it retains this mode
of historic-genetic conceptualization. The history of Marxist theory and struggle has too
often denied or ignored the fact that a Marxist science is based upon a unique
logic-in-use -that of Reason in the Hegelian sense. In so suppressing the foundations of a
Marxist science or theory, "Marxism" has repressed its own logical foundatiOns and has
therefore fallen into a sterile distinction between science and philosophy which simply
assimilates the scientistic image of science. The proble m with much of contemporary
"Marxism" is that it is unable to understand itself as a unique critical science. Beginning
with Engels, Marxists have fallen into a scientistic understanding of the work of Marx.

Marx's unique contribution to critical science was his labor theory of value which
was a self-reflexive model for the critical analysis of capitalist society. In the classical
form of the labor theory of value Marx discovered the basic ideology of a society based
upon economic exchange. By distinguishing between living-labor and labor-power Marx
broke the ahistorical equation of labor and value embedded in Ricardo's labor theory . As
long as feudal production was organized through status authority it was primarily
production for usc. However, the emergence of a class society where economic exchange
is liberated from status relations results in the gradual deterioration of production for
use and its replacement by a universal exchange value . In this epoch the equivalence
between labor and value is negated in the exchange between the seller of labor-power
and the capitalist who appropriates it. Whereas the seller receives its market price, its
exchange value, the capitalist appropriates the value-creating capacity of living labor. 3 3
Hence Marx demonstrates the non-equivalence o f the exchange between labor and
capital by working out the developmental laws of capitalism. While being the basic

73
legitimation of capitalist society, the practice of equivalence exchange was also the
source of the alienation of all labor.
"thus all the progress of civilization, or in other words, every increase in
production power of labor itself, does not enrich the worker, but capital and
thus increases the power that dominates labor." 34
Equivalence exchange was then both the principle of justice and the practice of
domination. Reflection upon this fundamental contradiction of capitalist society
liberated consciousness from the cultural reifications of the "commodity form." In the
commodity form is found the record of the alienated work process and the immanent
contradiction of capitalist society. To Marx, the dialectical analysis of the commodity
form is a "Schein", or showing forth, of the essence of human production. That is,
Marx's analysis in the rust chapter of Capital, while seemingly couched in visual
metaphor, is really attempting to make transparent the essential behind the appearance.
At every point in Capital, Marx tries to keep "the real" (use value) in the foreground
while dealing with the exchange system of Capitalism. In identifying the commodity
form he has made the real nature of human work 'show forth" to all so they can "see
through" the appearance of Capitalism. "Seeing" the commodity form is to reflexively
35
understand its real nature . The moment of "show" is the moment of negation of the
appearance and is the characteristic of a critical science. Marx thus restores the historical
dimension to a whole social process, capitalist production, thereby enabling men to
recognize the reified character of life practice under the domination of the commodity
form.

All critical science attempts to restore missing parts of the self-formation process
to men and in this way to force a process of self-reflection which will enable them to
reinterpret the legitimacy of existing control systems. Insofar as these reconstructions
are able to link repressed dimensions of historical structures to both individual and
collective self-forming processes, and can be accepted as fitting all available facts, we can
be liberated. That is, insofar as men become aware of the structuring of their
self-formation they can distinguish between historically necessary modes of control and
those that are but unnecessary patterns connected to distorted communicative systems.
In this self-reflective recognition of pseudo-"necessity", the conditions needed to
perpetuate unnecessary behavioral orientations are removed and men can enter into a
realm of self-discovery .

v.

The principle that lies behind today's advanced societies is not free competition
but systems maintenance. Growth of industrial society has seen the extension of
economic rationality into ewry sphere of society -until the entire institutional
configuration can be conceived as organized for a self-regulating system of production
and consumption.

Marx's critical theory of Capitalism must be reformulated in a way which takes

account of the following:

1 . extension of the forces of production does not, in itself, bring about the
emancipation of men but has in fact become a run-away revolution whose
manifold potentials increasingly threaten mankind with the possibility of total
control of social change. Marx was unable to imagine the stage of technological
development where control systems could begin to effectively contain social
movements and reify symbolic communication through new scientific
rationales, e.g. personality control through drugs and the institutionalization
of an adjusting therapuetic system.
2. The interests that preserve the mode of production can no longer be seen as
simple class interests. The complex integration of base and superstructure of
society suggests the emergence of a qualitatively new dynamic. The interests
that guide the reproduction process of society involve now the subsystems of
purposive rational action. That is. contemporary technocratic consciousness

74
 confronts the reproduction process as a question the answers to which derive
from technical "necessities". Thus in the new ideological consciousness the
system seems to function according to structural constraints. Given this new
complexity, expression of the basic societal contradiction as class exploitation
oversimplifies the reproduction process of advanced industrial societies.

We are not suggesting that the crisis of capitalism has disappeared but that it has
changed its character. In the last fifty years Capitalist development has self-consciously
generated national and international systems that minimize economic recessions and
maximize economic growth possibilities)7 That these "rational" control systems emerge
in the context of an ideologically polarized globe suggests that there are political
imperatives that are as central to capitalist reproduction as the enduring economic ones.

Ironically the continued viability of Capitalism has been insured by the extent to
which the struggle for economic democratization has been successful and the consumer
market kept open. Contemporary capitalism has been able to maintain both high
consumption and investment. However, this dazzling performance is increasingly
dependent upon cultural manipulation of the consumer and state interventions, such as
incentive taxation and forced savings. Hence in order to mediate the crisis between capital
and labor Capitalism's survival has stimulated the growth of manipulative or instrumental
rationalization. Into the self-destructive dynamic of capital realization, as analyzed by
Marx, have been introduced systems of purposive rational action which have thus far
sustained Capitalism's amazing staying power since World War II. But growth of
instrumental rationalization has created a broader and deeper crisis then the crisis of capital
realization. We need therefore to modify Marx's critical theory in order to cope with the
unique type of crisis which has emerged in late capitalism.

Toward this end we have the work of Herbert Marcuse and Jurgen Habermas. The
foundations for a critical theory are inherent in Marcuse's One Dimensional Man but
have been more > clearly formulated and broadened by Habermas. The unique
contribution of the latter has been to recognize that it is necessary to complete the
immanent critique by showing this: the progressive restructuring of society as a result of a
prescriptive scientism results in the distortion and repression of symbolic
communication.

A society that is being transformed in the image of a scientistic rationality but

which increasingly forces a repressive socialization process upon all members is a society
that contradicts its own principle of legitimation and justice. In order to achieve the
"rationality" of a self-regulating system, the "behavioral units" are forced to relinquish
their capacity for non-repressive communication. Such "rationality " culminates in
increased cultural manipUlation and the depolitization of the public)8 Through the
progressive privatization of individual life worlds from "public" institutions, and at the
same time growing structuring of all private life through cultural manipulation, the
individual is depolitized and yet integrated into the societal system. "Public opinion" is
managed by elaborate opinion-making processes, used most often by those with
privileged access to resources and communication systems. Classic public opinion is
replaced by an atmosphere of acclamation ; democratic process is perceived as
plebiscitary agreement. 39

Habermas has restored to a critical theory the traditional distinction between

techne and praxis; between technics and symbolic communication. This distinction can
be elaborated logically and methodologically , as the above sections demonstrate.
Anthropologically it points to the self-forming p;10l:esses that derive from symbolically
mediated interaction. Habermas' working out of the techne-praxis distinction is the new
basis for a critical theory. Marx and Marcuse hold that language systems are linked to the
process of work. Habermas, on the other hand, identifies the dialectic of symbolic
communication as logically irreducible to the dialectic of purposive rational action. In
this view resides both the unique contribution of Habermas to a critical theory for
contemporary society and his sublation of Marx and Marcuse. Hence his critique of the

75
technological utopianism of Marx and Marcuse :
"Freedom from hunger and toil doesn't necessarily converge with freedom
from slavery and degradation, because an automatic developmental connection
between labor and interaction doesn't exist." 40

Footnotes

1. Cf. Jiirgen Habermas' Technik und Wissenschaft als 'Ideologie ' (Suhrkamp, 1968),
This paper is based partly upon my interpretation of the pioneering work of
_

Habermas. It is part of a work in process that will be published by George Braziller,

Inc.
2. The term "scientism" is used to refer to the contemporary self-image of science.
Rather than honor modern forms with the term "neopositivism," it seems more
fitting to recognize a common cause with other anti-positivist methodologists, e.g.
Edmund Husserl, Eric Voegelin, etc.

3. The concept of "instrumental rationalization" is used by Habermas in his critical

reconceptualization of Max Weber's unitary concept of rationalization. Habermas is
concerned with demonstrating that extension of economic rationality to spheres of
symbolically mediated interaction is a suppression of necessary communicative
prerequisites for self-reflective consciousness. Habermas therefore reconceptualizes
"rationalization" upon a two-fold model of instIumental and symbolic interaction,
seeing both modes of rationalization necessary for a rational society.
4. Cf. Husserl,Phenomenology and the Crisis ofPhilosophy (Harper paperback,1966).
5. This point is developed in numerous ways by Gerald Radnitzky in the second volume
of his work on Contemporary Schools ofMetascience (Akademeforfaget, Goteborg,
1 968).
6. The concepts "reconstructed-logic" and "logic-in-use" are used by Abraham Kaplan
in the fust chapter of The Conduct ofInquiry (Chandler Press, 1964).
7 . On this point there is a growing consensus despite political position : "With the new,
rationalized social organization of technology and the labor process complet�d,
technical knowledge became the main form of labor power and capital." James
O'Conner "The Fiscal Crisis of the State; Part I" Socialist Revolution Vol. I No. 1
)
�
1 97 0 p . 4 ff; " . . . . knowledge has become a factor o f production, in the form o f
.
th e technological derivatives of scientific enquiry and in the indispensable
contribution of other forms of knowledge . . . to the 'organization and maintenance
of the productive process. Indeed, the ineluctable development of a fusion of
administrative, political and productive processes in neo-capitalism . . . . . has made it
difficult to specify where precisely production stops and the administrative begins,
and has rendered virtually impossible a distinction between 'political' and
'economic' decisions." Norman Birnbaum,"On the Idea of a Political Avant-Garde in
Contemporary Politics: The Intellectuals and the Technical Intelligentsia," Praxis
Nos. 1 &2 , 1 9 69, pp. 234-235 ; also see Amitai Etzioni, The A ctive Society, (Free
Press 1 968), chapter 9.
8. At the moment the disproportionate allocation of state resolU"ces to the military and
space R. & D. is legitimated by the concept of "technology transfer". Whatever the
significance of such "transfer" (this constitutes an important area for research),
there is no doubt that it presently legitimates an undiscussed commitment to a
"defense economy". For example: "The exacting demands of the space program,
which operates at the outermost limits of knowledge, have stimulated advances in
almost every discipline of science and engineering. . . . These advanced have spun off
into business and industry ." Wernher von Braun as quoted in the Wall Street
Journal, August 9, 1969.
9. cr. Radnitzky, op. cit'l p. 1 3 3 ff.; Irene Taviss, "The Technological Society : Some
Challenges for Social Science", Social Research , Vol. 35, No. 3, Autumn 1968.
1 0 . This broad speculative hypothesis is also shared by: Sheldon Wolin, Politics and
Vision (Little, Brown and Co. 1 960); Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition
(Doubleday, 1958) ; Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Beacon , 1964).
1 1 . For example Etzioni's The A ctive Society
1 2. cr. Andre Gundar Frank t "The Sociology of Development and the

76
 Underdevelopment of Sociology", Catalyst, Summer 1967.
1 3. James O'Connor, OTJ. cit. pp. 4849.

1 5 . The Frankfort school repre<;ents the only schooL of critical scientists in the West.
They have been self-consciously trying to generate a combination of critkal theory
and critical social research for several decades. Crucial statements of this collective
project are Max Horkheimer's "Traditionelle und Kritishe Theorie" in Kristische
Theorie , edited by A. Schmidt. vol. I and II (Frankfort, S. Fischer) ; and Jiirgen
Habermas's Theone u nd Praxis (Luchternand Verlag, Neuwied, 1963).
16. This is my reconstruction of Habermas's work in Its continuity with the Marxist
tradition.
17. Cf. Trent Schroyer, Alienation and the Dialectical Paradigm. Doctoral Dissertation
J
New School for Social Research.
1 8. Cf. Herbert Marcuse , One-Dimensional Man ,(Beacon, 1964) See especially Chapter 3 ;
Theodore W. Adorno "Sociology and Psychoanalysis", Part I and II, New Left
,
Review, Nos. 45&46.
19. Cf. Adorno, ibid. This point is developed most extensively in an essay by Marcuse,
which is essentially a theory of social regression. See ''The Obsolescence of
Psychoanalysis", paper given at the American Political Science Association, 1963.
20. cr. Jiirgen Habermas, Erkenntnis und Interesse (Suhrkamp, 1968), pp. 1 1 6-178.
21 . Jtirgen Habermas, Ibid. pp. 17 8-234.
22.The modern hermeneutic movement and its foundations is only now becoming
known in the Anglo-American world. For a short summary of this development
consult : R. Palmer, Hermeneutics, (Northwestern University Press, 1968); for its
l:rucial significant for a critical science methodology see : Habermas,"Zurlogik der
Sozialwissenschaft," Philosophisch e Rundschau. Feb. 1967.
23. The key essay here is "The Construction of the Historical World of the Human
Studies',' which appears in a partial translation in Pattern and Meaning in History
(Harper paper, 1962),or W. Dilthe).) Gessomalte Schrifter,vol. VII (Stutlgt, 195 8).
24. Cf. Alfred Schutz, Collected Papers,vol. I-III ,
25 . Cf. Harold Garfmke� Studies in Ethnomethodology (Prentice-Hall 1967). Aaron
,
Cicoure�Meth od and Measurement in Sociology (Free Press, 1964).
26. Cf. Herbert Blumer, "Society as Symbolic Interaction" in A. Rose (editor) Human
Behavior and Social Processes (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1962).
27. The possibility of a critical science depends upon a theoretical totalization which
can function as both a framework for the analysis of contemporary society and at
the same time serve as a hypothetical philosophy of history that can guide
hermeneutic inquiry . Cf. Marlis Kruger • "Sociology of Knowledge and Social
Theory " in Berkeley Journal of Sociology, Vol. 14 (1 969) pp. 152-163.
,
28. However, to have a theory broad enough for societal critique is not to have and
"instrument to guide praxis". A historical theory must be interpreted in regard to
specific historical conditions and hence between theory and praxis there is a crucial
mediator of judgment. It is illusory to believe that any critical theory can simple be a
"tool" in the hands of any class. Between theory and praxis there is a crucial phase
of political program formulation which requires not only theoretical clarity but
practical judgment about specific life-worlds.
29. Schroyer, op. cit., Chapter 3.
30. This distindion is crucial for a critical science. Marcuse's concept of "surplus
repression" (Eros and Civilization, Beacon Press, 1955, p. 32) is an attempt to turn
it into a category of critical theory. It is also the focus of critical research done by
the Frankfort school, notably Studien ueber A utoritaet und Familie , edited by Max
Horkheimer, 1 936. Critical research now being carried on at Frankfort focuses on the
formation of ego-identity and class-specific socialization patterns.
3 1 . Schroyer, op. cit., Chapter 1 .

77
32. Schroyer, op. cit. Chapter 2 .
33. Cf. Martin Nicolaus, "The Unknown Marx" , New Left Review,No. 4 8 .
34. Quoted i n Ni colaus, Ibid.
35. Insofar as men perceive their work, each other, and themselves through the
"phenomenal" commodity form they will be superimposing an abstracted category
upon their life activity. Hence the action-reaction character of life activity is broken
and skewed by the fixed external standard which reifies the objectification of
action. Recognition of the causal source or false consciousness in the capitalist
epoch results in a reflexive awareness of the false necessity of the reificatory
structures.

37. ef. A . Shonfleld Modern CapitalisntOxford University Press, 1965. .

,
)
38. Jiirgen Habermas Stukturwandel der Offentlichkeit (Luchterhand, 1968), p.
)
157-199.
.,
39. Habermas , Ibid Pp. 1 9 9-257.
; ,
40. Habermas Albeit und Interaktion" Technik und Wissneschaft, p. 46.

78
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