The Present is Largely Leftist Inspired

LEFTISM: From DeSade and Marx to Hitler and Marcuse | Erik Von Keunnelt-Leddihn

[Askel5]

Viewed from a biological angle, the New Left Movement is carried largely by the young, but its original minds belong to men of an advanced age, to a European generation which has become successively disillusioned by Wilhelminian grand bourgeoise Germany, the Weimar Republic, Nazi totalitarianism, Stalinist communists, and the materialistic society of consumers. Having been formally on the left (and often still publicly professing to be so), they have seen all their gods fail, all their illusions destroyed.

None of the three [Adorno, Horkheimer & Marcuse] could or would deny their original leftist outlook. Yet is was far more young Marx, the frustrated artist, the "libertarian," the Herostratic visionary, than old Marx, the inverted commercialist, who inspired them in their thinking.

At the same time their vision remained riveted on freedom and this without their ever openly and directly admitting it, put them in the neighborhood of the anarchists rather than of the Communists. Their criticism of "bourgeois" society is perhaps even more savage than that of the deep Red Marxists—and it is more sincere, more to the point, because Sovietism is essentially petty bourgeois and bureaucratics, it has no affinity with the bohemian, the artist, the intellectual hungry for originality, the free peasant, the aristocrat. [8]

Marx's lasting enthusiasm for the working class was due to his belief that within the framework of bourgeois society the factory hand would be condemned forever to a life of misery in et ernal bondage. He never realized (as Marcuse, Adorno and Horkheimer did very clearly) that modern technological society, with or without exploitation, could even provide the working man with a middle class existence, with a great deal of security, a modicum of luxury, a minimum of work.

Though revolutionary at heart, the New Left had to abandon its innermost hopes for a revolutionary rising of a no longer existing proletariat now integrated with all with all its material interests into the process of production. [9] In addition, no modern industrialist merely want to exploit his workers—they should be happy, well-paid consumers.

The utter inanity of Marxian economics [10] is now evident and thus the person who is first and foremost a revolutionary and merely seeks for a rational excuse—an intellectual overstructure—to preach the overturn of the existing order, has to look in other directions, toward other social layers to whom to preach the revolutionary gospel.

In this case the ideologies of the New Left appeal to the outcast of modern society, the eternal Lumpen-proletariat, the term to be understood not only in the sociological sense.[11] The call for destruction without any constructive or even utopian blueprint is also somehow in keeping with the spirit of our fast-living time which quickly forgets the past and shrinks from looking at the future—no longer described by the Ballamys, but by the Huxley and Orwells (hence also the reluctance to have any or many children). [12]

The present order, no doubt, is iniquitous in many ways. However, life according to Christian precepts, is a vale of tears and the "pursuit of happiness" on this earth is more or less bound to fail. Christianity does not eliminate suffering, but gives sense to it. It does not make people "happy"; it offers joy and, by giving a sense to suffering, prevents despair.

We have to admit that the present state of our Western civilization (and of the rest of the world as well) is worse than it has been in almost any period of history. In spite of good dentists, anesthestics, better health conditions, moon flights, television, birth control and a greatly decreased mortality, it would be easy to prove that human unhappiness has reached a very high level.

Fear, loneliness, alienation, aimlessness, anguish, and melancholia are more prevalent than ever. There is not the slightest reason to believe that "progress" has made people happier. It has (above all in its technological form) an inflationary character. Technology means more regulation, the need for more controls; it increases responsibilities, makes us more dependent, more vulnerable.

All this is evident to the New Left which therefore assumes the anti-technological stand of young Marx. Not only in this respect but in many other ways, the New Left repeats knowingly-unknowingly the nineteenth-century conservatives' critique of modern society. When the latter felt that they were defeated, that the immediate future belonged to "progressive" industrial society, their prophecy as to the shape of things to come was roughly this:

You think that you can establish a social, political, economic order based merely on the profit motive, that you can achieve happiness for yourselves or for the masses with the aid of technology, medicine and the provider state. You think that your "system", your establishment, will guarantee liberty for everybody, that you will be able to eliminate a feeling of inner independence by destroying the old historic estates.

You are wrong! You will actually lay the foundations of a society in which servitude will assume a more subtle, more ubiquitous, a more oppressive character than ever before.

Life will cease to have color, to be spiced with adventure, and people will revolt against the inhuman boredom and drabness you offer them. In the long run, man will not be satisfied with a social system giving him nothing but security and a near anonymous government of laws and regulations—rotating, impersonal, lacking all glamour. Emperors, kings, princes, cardinals, bishops, and noblemen will be replaced by general dictators, bureaucrats, manufacturers, bankers, trade union bosses, party bosses and dictators: This will make rule not less burdensome, only duller and, in many ways, more oppressive.

Young people especially will rebel against an order based on the counting of noses, an order giving them nothing to live or to die for. Once all great dreams are gone, this society of identical and equal people in their purposeless solitude will start to scream!

Indeed, if we read Marcuse carefully, we shall discover just these accusations, just this lament. Theodor Adorno has actually intimated that "reactionary" arguments should be used for the Second Enlightenment, the New Left. [13]

Yet, as was to be expected, the masses, especially the working class, could not be won over to the New Left because—as its idealogues fully realize—the wage earners have at long last achieved middle-class living standards, and are not (and never will be) prepared to sacrifice them to some rather sophisticated doctrine without "practical" aims and material rewards.

Marxism could be popularized, the New Left with its sophisticated intellectual somersaults cannot. The worker, as we said, has been totally assimilated by the industrial machine which might offer him extremely monotonous work but at least feeds him well. The financial interests of workers, management, and investors are, in fact, identical—a maximum of production, an optimum of sales.

The more moderate New Left had unforeseen experiences with the young generation. It was only a question of time until, thanks to the innate radicalism of the young, old sorcerer's apprentices would find themselves first isolated and then ridiculed as timid innovators lacking the courage to draw the final deductions from their daring premises.

No wonder Professor Marcuse was lambasted and shouted down at an international student congress in Rome by Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the French-German student leader, and that Theodor Adorno was indirectly murdered by his followers. In one of his last lectures at Frankfurt University a number of female student stripped to the waist and tried to kiss the dazed scholar who fled with tears in his eyes. To the press he declared that this, indeed, was not the evolution he had hoped for, that his aims and ideas had been completely misunderstood. A few weeks later, he succumbed to a heart attack in Switzerland.

The third founder of the New Left, Professor Max Horkheimer, a particularly close friend of Theodor Adorno, has since been moving in another direction. In an interview [14] he declared that man can properly be understood only by taking his transcendent character into account, and that we have to return to theology, a declaration which caused shrieks of indignation from pious agnostics and atheists.

Yet, regardless of whether we look at the founders or at their undisciplined and even more confused disciples, the fact remains that the New Left is no longer basically left: It rather represent an inverted mental product of the Old Left plus a number of rightist vistas, though not enough to make it a rightist movement.

It is anticonservative inasmuch as it rejects and fights the existing order, the establishment.

Yet rightism is not conservative either in a strict etymological sense, since, after all, the present is largely leftist-inspired.

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[8]        See, Chapter IX, Note 65. Return to Text

[9]        Cf. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon Paperback, 1966), pp. xii-xiii, 19-25. Return to Text

[10]        I have purposely not dealt with Marxian economics. Having been proved empirically wrong, they do not merit more than a footnote. (Nor is to the New Left disciple a homo ec-onomic-us pure and simple.) Return to Text

[11]        Cf. Herbert Marcuse, op. cit., pp. 256-257, where the author appeals to "the substratum behind the conservative popular base," the outcasts and outsiders, the exploited and persecuted of other races and other colors, the unemployed and the unemployable. . . . Their force is behind every political demonstration for the victims of law and order. The fact that they start refusing to play the game may be the fact which marks the beginning of the end of a period." A very good summing up of Marcuse's "Critique of Society" can be found in Gerd-Klaus Kaltenbrunner's essay "Vorbild oder Verfahrer?" in Wort und Wahrheit, vol. 25, 1 (January-February 1970):

1. The late capitalist society succeeded, contrary to the prognostications of Marx and Engels, in gaining stability under the conditions of increasing technological perfection.
   
   
2. Coexistence with the Communist camp fosters the stabilization of Western society under the banner of forced rearmament.
   
   
3. Thanks to their increasing access to consumer goods, the working class, once an enemy of the capitalist system, has today become one of its pillars and has lost all revolutionary potentialities.
   
   
4. Without being conscious of it and without rebellion on the part of the victims, a manipulation and instrumentalization of man has taken the place of proletarian misery, brutal terror and sexual repression in a univcrse without any dialectic opposition.
   
   
5. This society is characterized by a one-dimensional conscience, a nondialectic thinking lacking utopia or transcendence, a positivistic philosophy which is the very negation of philosophy.
   
   
6. Since the discontinuation of social change is the most salient feature of modern industrial society, only those individuals, groups, and layers can bc agents of fundamental change who are outside of the democratic process: the unemployed and the unemployable, the inmates of jails and lunatic asylums, etc. Obviously all the leftist movements have a purely intellectual leadership and never start from the "grassroots." This Lenin knew only too well. Cf. his famous pamphlet Shto dyelat'? (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo politicheskoy lityeratury, 1970), p. 34. Return to Text

12        The democratic age has, above all politically, no inbuilt "futurism," One lives from one election to the other. The monarchs think about their grandchildren-and remember their grandfathers. Leftism is "antifamilistic. Return to Text

13        Cf. Theodor W. Adomo, Minima Moralia (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1969), p. 243. It would be most erroneous to think that Marcuse has any love left for Sovietism. Cf. his Soviet Marxism: A Critical Analysis (New York: Vintage Books, 1961). Return to Text

14       Cf. Der Spiegel, January 5, 1969, p. 79sq. The "shock," however, was surprising, because in a number of publications Horkheimer had previously advertised his change of heart, thus, for instance, in Horkheimer, Rahner, von Weizsdcker, Uber die Freiheit (Stuttgart: Kreuz-Verkag, 1965). Return to Text

[Askel5]

One day, when I redo it, K-L's posts will be added to this particular A-List (with a Gramscian bent ...)

For now ...

Hot Wars Destroy Bodies; Cold Wars are Waged for Immortal Souls

[hosepipe]

He sees the siruation pretty clearly I would say. But still is a hard core leftist. Pity must not be too smart hanging on to proven idiotcy as he does. Proof that, Leftism must be a serious mental disorder.

[Askel5]

Huh?

Either you read this far too quickly or you need to dummy up, my dear, on who exactly is this Erik Von Keunnelt-Ledhin.

We can pray the right will see his like again.

[Askel5]

Continued at A Leftism to End all Leftism