Postwar

their roots in the Leninist schism that was to follow.

It was the factional struggles of the early Soviet years that gave rise to the most enduring Marxist ‘heresy’, that of Trotsky and his followers. A quarter century after Trotsky’s death in Mexico at the hands of a Stalinist assassin (and in no small measure because of it), Trotskyist parties could be found in every European state that did not explicitly ban them. They were typically small and led, in the image of their eponymous founder, by a charismatic, authoritarian chief who dictated doctrine and tactics. Their characteristic strategy was ‘entryism’: working inside larger left-wing organizations (parties, trade unions, academic societies) to colonize them or nudge their policies and political alliances in directions dictated by Trotskyist theory.

To the outsider, Trotskyist parties—and the evanescent Fourth (Workers’) International to which they were affiliated—appeared curiously indistinguishable from Communists, sharing a similar allegiance to Lenin and separated only by the bloody history of the power struggle between Trotsky and Stalin. There was a crucial distinguishing point of dogma—Trotskyists continued to speak of ‘permanent revolution’ and to accuse official Communists of having aborted the workers’ revolution by confining it to a single country—but in other respects the only obvious difference was that Stalinism had been a political success, whereas the Trotskyist record was one of unblemished failure.

It was that very failure, of course, which Trotsky’s latter-day followers found so appealing. The past might look grim, but their analysis of what had gone wrong—the Soviet revolution had been hi-jacked by a bureaucratic reaction analogous to the Thermidorian coup that put paid to the Jacobins in 1794—would, they felt, assure them success in the years ahead. Yet even Trotsky carried the whiff of power—he had, after all, played a crucial role in the first years of the Soviet regime and bore some responsibility for its deviations. To a new and politically innocent generation, the truly appealing failures were European Communism’s lost leaders, the men and women who never had a chance to exercise any political responsibilities at all.

Thus the 1960s saw the rediscovery of Rosa Luxemburg, the Polish-Jewish Socialist assassinated by German Frei Korps soldiers in the doomed Berlin revolution of January 1919; Gyorgy Lukacs, the Hungarian Communist thinker whose political writings of the 1920s briefly suggested an alternative to official Communist interpretations of history and literature before he was forced publicly to abjure them; and above all Antonio Gramsci, co-founder of the Italian Communist Party and author of a cycle of brilliant, unpublished papers on revolutionary politics and Italian history, most of them written in the Fascist prisons where he languished from 1926 until his death, at the age of 46, in April 1937.

In the course of the 1960s all three were copiously re-published, or published for the first time, in many languages. They had little in common, and most of what they did share was negative: none had exercised power (except in Lukacs’s case as the Commissar for Culture in Bela Kun’s brief Communist dictatorship in Budapest, from March to August 1919); all of them had at one time disagreed with Leninist practices (in Luxemburg’s case even before the Bolsheviks took power); and all three, like so many others, had fallen into long neglect under the shadow of official Communist theory and practice.

The exhumation of the writings of Luxemburg, Lukacs, Gramsci and other forgotten early-twentieth century Marxists[166] was accompanied by the rediscovery of Marx himself. Indeed, the unearthing of a new and ostensibly very different Marx was crucial to the attraction of Marxism in these years. The ‘old’ Marx was the Marx of Lenin and Stalin: the Victorian social scientist whose neo-positivist writings anticipated and authorized democratic centralism and proletarian dictatorship. Even if this Marx could not be held directly responsible for the uses to which his mature writings had been put, he was irrevocably associated with them. Whether in the service of Communism or Social Democracy, they were of the old Left.

The new Left, as it was starting to call itself by 1965, sought out new texts—and found them in the writings of the young Karl Marx, in the metaphysical essays and notes written in the early 1840s when Marx was barely out of his teens, a young German philosopher steeped in Hegelian historicism and the Romantic dream of ultimate Freedom. Marx himself had chosen not to publish some of these writings; indeed, in the aftermath of the failed revolutions of 1848 he had turned decisively away from them and towards the study of political economy and contemporary politics with which he was henceforth to be associated.

Accordingly, many of the writings of the early Marx were not widely known even to scholars. When they were first published in full, under the auspices of the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow in 1932, they attracted little attention. The revival of interest in them—notably the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts and The German Ideology—came thirty years later. Suddenly it was possible to be a Marxist while jettisoning the heavy, soiled baggage of the traditional Western Left. The Young Marx was seemingly preoccupied with strikingly modern problems: how to transform ‘alienated’ consciousness and liberate human beings from ignorance of their true condition and capacities; how to reverse the order of priorities in capitalist society and place human beings at the center of their own existence; in short, how to change the world.

To an older generation of Marx scholars, and to the established Marxist parties, this perverse insistence upon the very writings that Marx himself had chosen not to publish seemed deeply unserious. But it was also implicitly subversive: if anyone could just go to the texts themselves and interpret Marx at will, then the authority of the Communist (and in this case also the Trotskyist) leadership must crumble, and with it much of the justification for mainstream revolutionary politics as then understood. Not surprisingly, the Marxist Establishment fought back. Louis Althusser—the French Communist Party’s leading theoretician, an internationally known expert on Marxism and a teacher at France’s Ecole Normale Superieure—built his professional reputation and passing fame upon the claim to have constructed a firewall between a ‘young’, Hegelian Marx and the ‘mature’, materialist Marx. Only the later writings, he insisted, were scientific and thus properly Marxist.[167]

What Communists and other conservative Marxists rightly foresaw was how easily this new, humanist Marx could be adapted to contemporary tastes and fashions. The complaints of an early-nineteenth-century Romantic like Marx against capitalist modernity and the dehumanizing impact of industrial society were well adapted to contemporary protests against the ‘repressive tolerance’ of post-industrial Western Europe. The prosperous, liberal West’s apparently infinite flexibility, its sponge-like capacity to absorb passions and differences, infuriated its critics. Repression, they insisted, was endemic in bourgeois society. It could not just evaporate. The repression that was missing on the streets must perforce have gone somewhere: it had moved into people’s very souls—and, above all, their bodies.

Herbert Marcuse, a Weimar-era intellectual who had ended up in Southern California—where he handily adapted his old epistemology to his new environment—offered a helpful conflation of all these strands of thought. Western consumer society, he explained, no longer rested upon the straightforwardly economic exploitation of a class of property-less proletarians. Instead it diverted human energy away from the search for fulfillment (notably sexual fulfillment) and into the consumption of goods and illusions. Real needs—sexual, social, civic—are displaced by false ones, whose fulfillment is the purpose of a consumer-centered culture. This was pushing even the very young Marx further than he might have wished to go, but it attracted a broad audience: not just for the few who read Marcuse’s essays, but for many more who picked up the language and the general drift of the argument as it acquired broad cultural currency.

The emphasis upon sexual fulfillment as a radical goal was quite offensive to an older generation of Left-wingers. Free love in a free society was not a new idea—some early nineteenth-century Socialist sects had espoused it, and the first years of the Soviet Union had been distinctly morally relaxed—but the mainstream tradition of European radicalism was one of moral and domestic rectitude. The Old Left had never been culturally dissident or sexually adventurous even when it was young: that had been the affair of bohemians, aesthetes and artists, often of an individualistic or even politically reactionary bent.

But however discomfiting, the conflation of sex and politics presented no real threat—indeed, as more than one Communist intellectual took pains to point out, the new emphasis on private desires over collective struggles was objectively reactionary.[168] The truly subversive implications of the New Left’s adaptation of Marx lay elsewhere. Communists and others could dismiss talk of sexual liberation. They were not even bothered by the anti-authoritarian aesthetic of a younger generation, with its demands for self-government in the bedroom, the lecture hall and the shop floor; all that they perhaps imprudently dismissed as a passing disturbance in the natural order of things. What caused far deeper offence was the emerging tendency of young radicals to identify Marxist theory