Friday, 19 October 2018

The New Left and the marxian Legacy


The New Left and the Marxian Legacy:  Encounters in the U.S., France and Germany
by Dick Howard
In the mid-1960s, as the Cold War seemed frozen into place after the Soviet repression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956, and the stalemate that defused the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, the spirit of a “New Left” began to emerge in the West.Although encouraged by events in the Third World, its common denominator was the idea that the misunderstood (or misused) work of Karl Marx must have offered a theory that both explained the discontent with the present among a new generation of youth and could also offer them guidelines for future action.  At once personal and social, critical and political, this expectation was encouraged by publications of the writings of the young Marx as well as the discovery of non-orthodox theorists and political activists whose critical work had been ignored or suppressed by Soviet dominated communist parties. These theories represented an “unknown dimension”[1]that became the object of vigorous debate in the 1960s and early 1970s. The searching candle burned bright for a decade before it flamed out.
Meanwhile, the revolutionary spirit that Marx liked to call the “old mole” had grubbed its way underneath the Iron Curtain;  the multi-faceted movement of civil society against the repressive states anchored to the Soviet bloc brought finally the fall of communism.  But the critical spirit was too weak, economic need weighed too heavy, and the spirit of utopia waxed.  It seemed as if there were nothing to inherit from the past. As in the 1960s, the critical spirit of the young Marx, the critical philosopher searching for his path, can suggest a reason to persevere.  In a “Preliminary Note” to his doctoral dissertation, Marx justified his refusal to compromise with existing conditions by invoking the example of Themistocles who, “when Athens was threatened with devastation, convinced the Athenians to take to the sea in order to found a new Athens on another element.”[2]  This was not yet an anticipation of Marx’s turn away from philosophy to political economy. Like the New Left, Marx was trying to articulate the grounds of a critique of a present that he considered “beneath contempt” in order to hold open the political future.
I will use this idea of a New Left to conceptualize the underlying unity of diverse political experiences during the past half century.  Although Marx is not the direct object of my reconstruction, his specter is a recurring presence at those “nodal points” where the imperative to move to “another element” becomes apparent.  These are moments when the spirit that has animated a movement can advance no further; it is faced with new obstacles, which may be self-created.  I  will analyze from a participant’s perspective the development of the New Left in the U.S., France and West Germany as it tried to articulate what I call the “unknown dimension” of Marx’s theoretical project.