The Thinking Reed

Finally, Marxism itself, with its universalism and its critical orientation, could not but educate the minds of Soviet intellectuals in a way that was highly undesirable for the authorities — that is to say, in the spirit of the radical-critical ideas of Western left-wing culture. In the USSR and in the world Communist movement Marxism became, of course, degraded under the influence of Stalinism. Fernando Claudin wrote that from the beginning of the 1930s until 1956, ‘Marxism suffered from prolonged theoretical paralysis.’86 This is not entirely correct so far as the West is concerned. In those very years the famous ‘Frankfurt School’ was formed, and Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks and Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed were written. In the Soviet Union itself, however, Marxism was replaced by a set of ideological dogmas which had little in common with the ‘critical philosophy’. Its most important and valuable ideas (the theory of the state, the concept of the Asiatic mode of production, and so on) were revised and replaced with new ones devised by the authority of the ‘great teacher’ to justify the concrete facts of statocratic society. The trouble was that the Stalinists’ practice was sorely reminiscent of those theoretical utopias of ‘barracks-Communism’ with a sharp criticism of which Marx had begun to form his own revolutionary-democratic and later socialist ideas. From this standpoint, as Marcuse noted, ‘the problem of Soviet “revisions” of Marxism’ possesses special interest,87 for the ruling group was adapting revolutionary theory to suit its own needs, and each of these ‘revisions’ is instructive in its own way. Dialectics suffered especially, being banished from analysis of the historical process after the ‘critical philosophy’ had been arbitrarily divided into two parts: ‘historical materialism’, alien to dialectics, and ‘dialectical materialism’, ‘free’ from historicism. Under Stalin even the dialectical law of negation, the foundation of foundations of the ‘critical philosophy’, was eliminated and then, under Khrushchev, ‘rehabilitated’ (but, it would seem, only posthumously: in any case, it has still not been ‘restored to its rights’). On the whole, the Italian Communist Umberto Cerroni expressed the essence of what happened when he said that ‘we witnessed a dogmatization of Marxism which can also be defined as the replacement of scientific socialism by utopian socialism.’88

Nevertheless, one can concur with Marcuse when he wrote of ‘the difficulties which the regime creates for itself by constantly teaching and publicizing Marxian ideas’.89 Although in the schools and institutes they still teach, in the guise of Marxism, the dogmatic utopia of ‘state socialism’ and barracks-Communism, that same utopia which Marx constantly combated, they have not yet forbidden people to read The German Ideology, or to study The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, or to become acquainted with Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks — books that are shaping the minds of the intelligentsia in the West.

In general, history has shown that however strange this may be, it is considerably easier to preserve the spiritual property of the past than to destroy it. Shils writes:

Intellectual work is sustained by and transmits a complex tradition which persists through changes in the structure of the intellectual class. One could almost say that if these traditions did not confront the intellectual as an ineluctable inheritance, they could be created anew in each generation by the passionate disposition of the ‘natural’ intellectual to be in contact… with symbols of general scope. They are traditions which are, so to speak, given by the nature of intellectual work. They are the immanent traditions of intellectual performance, the accepted body of rules of procedure, standards of judgement, criteria for the selection of subject matters and problems, modes of presentation, canons for the assessment of excellence, models of previous achievement.. 90