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Revolutionary Imagination and the Waning of Marxism
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13995 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1988 |
5,925 Words |
| Author
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A.J. Mandt
A.J. Mandt is professor in the Department of Philosophy at the
University of Kansas at Wichita. |
The intellectual legacy of Marxism grows more complex and ambiguous with the passage of time. Now that the last credible Marxist orthodoxies have disintegrated, Marxism as a significant force in intellectual life functions more as an orientation for thinkers in a variety of fields as a well-defined school of thought with a rigorous method. Reading the sober-minded analytical writings of academic Marxists makes it difficult to comprehend the revolutionary passions once aroused by Marx's evocation of class struggle. The intellectual disintegration of Marxism has not, however, eliminated its political potency. The mediocrity of Soviet Marxism is without intellectual authority, but this has not caused the wholesale abandonment of Marxism by legions of revolutionary cadres. Instead, the decay of Marxist ideas has produced a progressive de-intellectualization of revolutionary Marxism, the replacement of revolutionary theology with mere dogma. The leading revolutionaries no longer write theoretical books--as if their credibility as scientists of history were of some serious concern to them--they just give long haranguing speeches and erect pictures of themselves to hang five stories high next to similar hagiographic renderings of Marx, Engels, and Lenin.
The long-range effect of this change in the workings of revolutionary ideology is the progressive substitution of Marx's rhetorical style for his intellectual analysis of history and modern society. No one genuinely studies his books, but his catchphrases and rhetorical postures are still powerful. They generate an image of a social world and political struggle that is not even vaguely "scientific." Instead, revolutionary imagination is dominated by a mythical picture of social change that is no longer subject to the intellectual discipline of Marxist socio-historical "science." This change promises a radical transformation in the politics of contemporary revolution, a change not pleasant to contemplate. As a social philosopher and economist, Marx was a consummate modernist, a son of Enlightenment rationalism. Yet his narrative style and rhetorical themes often, even typically, have their roots not in modern rationalism, but in pre-Christian archaic myths and epics. In style, Marx's account of revolutionary struggle and social cataclysm is a story of epic adventures, heroes, demigods, and Olympians. This material has always made the witches' brew of proletarian revolution more magically potent than Marx's economics and sociology would ever have led one to imagine. Now only the boiling cauldron is left.
Marx would have had us believe that the future is visible, not in the eyes of prophets, but in the calculations of political economists equipped with the tools of
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