Materialist Discourse in Academia During the Age of Late Marxism

Materia!ist Discourse in Academia During the Age of Late Marxism

Dario Ferndndez-Morera

hronicling the last decades of the twentieth century, a future historian of C ideas (or "worker on cultural practices") might describe ours as the Age of Late Marxism, characterized by the plight of the socialist states created during the Age of High Marxism and by the concomitant institutionalizationof materialist discourse in American academia. 1 Some states have thrown out the Communist party, which has prudendy changed its name to "Democratic So- cialism" (the party of "Economic Democracy"). All have turned to the capitalist West for economic aid and business investments (once dubbed tools of Western international exploitation). Cynicism regarding Marx's teachings had long existed even among the outwardly Marxist Nomenklatura-with the ex- ception of some members of the intelligentsia, who still hoped for a better and (always) future socialism which would salvage the (always) potentially benefic ideas of the founding father. But by the 1980s, Marx and his discourse had become the material of frequently scatological folkloric humor. In the West, "Socialist" and "Social Democratic" parties have fallen back on various forms of the capitalist Welfare State; and while still defending some socialist ideas, they have accepted fundamental capitalist structures and recon- sidered many economic assumptions of the Early Marxist Age. 2 Sweden, which had experimented with an advanced version of the Welfare State, suffers from an economic and cultural stagnation made more remarkable by the world's most humanely controlled citizenry's failure to achieve social contentment.3 In the once-socialist lands, intellectuals read subversive writers like Karl Popper, Gary Becker, Ludwig yon Mises, F. A. Hayek, James Buchanan, Rose Wilder Lane, Murray Rothbard, David Friedman, Robert Nozick, Hans- Hermann Hoppe, Isabel Paterson, Ayn Rand, and Tibor Machan. 4 Professors of economics and at least one Noble prize winner advocate the "marketplace"--a euphemism for "capitalism." Professors with marketable nonaca- demic skills complain that socialism "defrauded" them of their lives by stop- ping them from using their abilities, becoming rich, and enjoying the "material" world. An academician, become Minister of Finance, chides Americans for their ignorance of the ethical and economic principles of capitalism. The greatest genuinely proletarian leader of the twentieth century calls on exploitative West- ern corporations for investments,s Marx's discourse is being expunged from the classrooms, the work place, and the political arena; and materialist academicians, who form the bulk of the profession, face mass dismissals. 6 With the thawing of censorship, the full

Dario Fern~ndez-Morera is associate professor of Hispanic studies and comparative literature and theory at Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60201. 16 Academic Questions / Spring 1991

extent of the corruption and misery of life under "really existing socialism"- long a theme of Western critics-has been exposed with far greater effect by the erstwhile socialist countries themselves. After years of hearing from teachers, politicians, and the media that in the capitalist West people were not really free because of the tyranny of the marketplace, whereas at home people were really free because of "national economic planning," "full employment," and "free" social services, the masses are deciding that, granted its limitations, the West is after all really more free. In the Soviet Union, Lenin's contempt for democracy, and the horrors for which "the most humane of men" was responsible, are under scrutiny.7 Visitors to Prague report that cabbages and Marxist books are on sale by the pound in shops near Charles University: "a pound of cabbage costs more than a pound of Marx. ''8 Such generalized betrayal understandably angered an American academician self-exiled in the USSR. His worries echo those of many socially concerned Western professors: "I find it disturbing that in the Soviet Press these days, the word 'imperialism' is gradually disappearing and too much of a gloss is put on the Western way of life.... We are alarmed by the growing influence of bourgeois and petty bourgeois elements . . . and those who keep silent about imperialist dominance and the superexploitation of hundreds of millions in other countries." Komsomolskaya Pravda's curt editorial comment to his words was more telling than the professor's lamentations: "There still remain people who believe in the tottering ideas. ''9

There Still Remain People Who Believe in the Tottering Ideas

But while in these lands schools begin to replace the grip of dialectical, historical, and cultural materialism with alternative discourses animated by the values of "bourgeois humanism," and academicians widen their horizons or face dismissal or professional obsolescence, in the great universities of the United States, practitioners of materialist discourse continue to be held in professional esteem and chosen for positions of power in academic departments, journals, societies, and money-dispensing government agencies. Lead- ing university presses compete for materialist scholarship in the areas of literary criticism, history, philosophy, sociology, and even law and economics. Some of these academicians remain among the most highly paid members of the profession. Their courses attract large enrollments; and graduate students eagerly assimilate their leading concepts and terminology, moving on to become successful practitioners of materialist discourse. More important, colleagues with hardly any Marxist affiliation continue to apply materialist concepts to their scholarly research. Key to this curious sur- vival is that fundamental Marxist epistemological and ethical assumptions remain central to a koine which is now de rigueur among substantial numbers of university professors, and which provides the frame for apparently dissimilar academic discourses. FernS~ndez-Morera 17

It is true that materialism in academia has not remained unaffected by the new objective relations of the Late Marxist Age. Under their pressure, some of its less conspicuous characteristics have been suddenly foregrounded. Good examples are its defense mechanisms, which have become increasingly baroque. Among them is "Denial," which in its purest form affirms that no real socialism has ever existed. "Denial" is the most fundamental discursive defense and can be easily detected under every other. I~ "Relabeling" consists of an elaboration of "Denial." It asserts that the "socialist" (quotation marks are essential here) countries were really "Asian Modes of Production," or (in some versions) "State Capitalist," or (in another version) "Stalinist" countries. Basically, this defense argues that materialist reformers have regularly set out to bake a Socialist Paradise but somehow invariably end up with an Asian Mode or a State Capitalist hell. One problem with this defense is that professors from the socialist countries called their system real socialism and the system in the West State Capitalism.l~ It is true that, according to materialist professors in the West, professors in the East did not live under really real socialism. But it is also true that, according to materialist professors in the East, it was the professors in the West--really "bourgeois" professors-who were really wrong. Another difference between the two sets of equally intelligent and learned professors is that professors in the East have gradually stopped talking in these terms, but professors in the West have not. Much favored, "Relabeling" overlooks the fact that many intelligent and often selfless individuals in the most disparate areas of the planet demonstrably transformed their societies by diligently applying their considerable knowledge of Marx's theories about economics, history, politics, philosophy, art, and practically everything else known to man. To say that all these hard-working lead- ers, political cadres, and learned professors misunderstood Marx, or set out greedily to use him to get rich and powerful, is unrealistic. They were neither more nor less intelligent, neither worse nor better-- and, in fact, probably more integrally dedicated to the creation of better people and a better world-than the Western professors, who with characteristic academic hubris claim to be their moral and intellectual superiors in the understanding and application of Marx's wisdom. The label "Stalinist" is particularly unrealistic. It presents the problem-not insurmountable for materialist dialectics- of explaining how a single individual (since individuals matter so little in history, compared to "cultural," "historical," and other "forces") could have such an influence not just on the Soviet Union, but on many other "Stalinist" countries. Countries, in fact, as diverse in economic development, history, geography, climate, and ethnic composition as China, Germany, Cambodia, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Ethiopia, Cuba, Al- bania, Yugoslavia, Mozambique, North Vietnam, North Korea, and so on, whose common denominator turns out to be the avowed use of Marx's ideas as a basis for the progressive transformation of society and the creation of better people and a better world. 18 Academic Questions / Spring 1991

More original is the "Socialism Would Have Turned Out To Be Much Better Had Capitalism Not Continued To Be Around To Corrupt It" defense. Anchored on "Denial," it draws on both "Relabeling" and the standard pro- cedure of blaming capitalism for practically everything that happens in the world. With this defense, the accomplishments of capitalism grow to include having "conditioned," ("determined," etc.) real socialism itself. This lapsari- artist defense argues that if the whole world had become socialist, then (followed by a "perhaps") socialism would have "evolved" into something different and (followed by a "perhaps") better; regrettably, capitalism corrupted socialism as it has corrupted everything else. Without capitalism, the inhabitants of the socialist countries would not have had a bad example constantly before their eyes, tempting them with abundance and regularly giving them aid that allowed them to survive; and so the people's consciousness would have eventually really changed, and they would have become real socialist men and women. In other words, without any hope of changing their lives and living like the seemingly happy but really wretched people in the capitalist countries, these populations would have discovered a very different life that was not really miserable but actually really desirable and that they could not appreciate only because they were distracted by the really nefarious but deceptively enjoyable capitalist temp- tation. This truly dialectical defense may have originated with Trotsky, who used it to explain why the (not really) Soviet Union had gone bad: the wrong turn taken by the (not really) Soviets, Trotsky argued, proved him right in wanting to turn the whole world socialist before settling down to build communism in one country. One difficulty with this defense is that it necessitates the sort of mentality exhibited by the East German Communist party when trying to justify The Wall (i.e., it was needed "to keep out Western spies and corrupters of socialist morality").12 Less cynical and therefore more used by professors favoring the refreshing revolutionary simple-mindedness of "vulgar Marxism" is the "Apocalyptic Vi- sions And Elastic Displacement Of The Objects Of Oppression" defense. It takes up the old axiom establishing that the capitalist "West" will collapse-- among other things because of its exploitation of the workers. But American materialist professors have largely given workers up as a revolutionary "force" because workers are stupefied by the material (but not spiritual and therefore not really materialist) prosperity created by businesspeople, corporations, and so on, which has led to such really oppressive things as "consumerism" and "commodity fetishism." (Here one can recognize elements of "Socialism Would Have Turned Out To Be Much Better Had Capitalism Not Continued To Be Around To Corrupt It.") Those who are both the source of liberation and in need of it are now a different set of beneficiaries from professorial activism: capitalism must now collapse because of its exploitation of minorities, women, the earth, animals, and so on. As ecologically-minded Soviet professors used to teach and American professors still do: "The main culprit of the impending Fern~ndez-Morera 19

ecological crisis is capitalism. Over the years of its existence, production for the sake of profit, militarization of the economy and the spirit of egoism and acquisition have caused immense damage to the world. ,,1~ The "Misery As An Ideal" defense turns a seeming drawback into a real advantage (all these defenses hinge upon the persistent blurring of the real and the unreal-blurring is an indispensable dialectical element of materialist discourse and contributes to making it highly attractive to professors). This "ecologically correct" defense runs something like this: obviously there is a crisis of natural resources, pollution, and so on, caused obviously by capitalist consump- tion, evil corporations, and so on. Therefore, the ubiquitous scarcity and rationing consistently brought about by the diligent application of Marx's teachings can now be seen as the only means of salvation left to the planet. With their emphasis on "stewardship" (control, distribution, etc.) rather than creation of wealth and resources, these teachings are today highly appropriate. "Misery As An Ideal" cheerfully gives up nineteenth-century pie-in-the-sky promises of socialist abundance: "Economic Democracy" is now desirable because it both fosters and organizes scarcity. In other words, it is good not because #produces an abundance of goods (as earlier socialists claimed), but precisely because it does not. Unfortunately, as happens regularly in the Age of Late Marxism, the use of this defense puts Western professors at odds with the inhabitants of the once socialist countries. Instead of welcoming as weapons against "consumerism" and "commodity fetishism" the absence, shortages, shoddiness, and rationing of consumer goods and services, the unspiritual masses want to have abundance and thus enjoy the dreadful nonmaterialist materialism plaguing the West. 14 But these and other equally ingenious defenses highlight the fact that the discourse's internal contradictions have been exposed by the changes in its material base brought about by the historical conflicts of the 1980s: in spite of its institutional success, the ideology of Late Marxism in academia projects a self-doubting mood. Not surprisingly, the mood is accompanied by a compen- satory redoubled combativeness against the evil and now existent, now nonex- istent "West." For materialist academicians disagree on whether there is really a "West." First of all, many think that all the earth is one (see, for example, ex-Soviet professor Alexander Zinoviev's parody of materialist discourse: "I simply can't get through your clothes,/Your body is so encased./Everything that's in the world/Is wholly interlaced").ls Second, many think the "West" stole its ideas from the "non-West" (a displacement of the materialist theory of exploitation from the "exploited" workers to the "exploited" Third World). Thus, rejecting the validity of the concept "West" does not preclude the discursive use, for purposes of condemnation, of what "West" both (thanks to dialectics) means and is not supposed to mean. Nonetheless, despite these and other difficulties, congresses of materialist professors still draw thousands of participants who collectively (for collective, cooperative, etc., action is axiomatic among them) reaffirm their commitment 20 Academic Questions / Spring 1991

to a better world; professional meetings continue to feature large quantities of research based on materialist assumptions; and both student applicants to graduate school and professors requesting taxpayer-subsidized grants continue to display their knowledge of materialist discourse as effective means to impress academic panels of reviewers. 16

The Hegemony of "Polities," "Culture," and "Ideology"

Sewerlyn Bialer righdy observes that were the "tenacity with which some segments of academia are sticking to [Marx's] tarnished heritage.., displayed in physics departments, Newton's mechanics would still have a niche there as an overarching theory explaining how the world works. ''17 Whereas in the humanities and social sciences, Marx's ideas have encountered more than a niche: for purposes of scholarship and teaching, they are frequently the only valid explanation of how the world works. But, Bialer overlooks that materialist discourse has convenient built-in provisions that allow any enlightened professor to dissolve all not really real (nonantagonistic, nonirreconcilable, nonunre- solvable, etc.) contradictions between theory and empirical data. Among them is the fundamental axiom establishing that because epistemological activity is "culturally" and therefore politically and ideologically "conditioned" (which in materialist practice really means "determined," "shaped," "fashioned"), "truth" is not objective, but also culturally (politically, etc.) "fashioned.''is For, as Lenin said: "One of the basic principles of dialectics is that there is no such thing as abstract truth, truth is always concrete. ''19 This "concreteness" means that what may be truth in a particular "cultural" (political, historical, etc.) situation, may not be truth in the next. This viewpoint is axiomatic for practitioners of materialist discourse, who cleverly signal their position by setting the word "truth" in quotations. It also has had an interesting effect (noted in Animal Farm and 1984) on the way history has been conceived by learned professors in the socialist countries (and is conceived by many learned professors in the West). The primacy of politics is a cornerstone of the Marxist world vision, so that in every country built upon Marxist ideas, human action has invariably been seen as necessarily politicized. Only during the Age of Late Marxism have these countries begun to react against the principle: to improve living conditions by freeing the human mind, many reformers now insist that politicians (i.e., government) be excluded from economic decisions, education, and the work place. 2~ But in the United States, large segments of academia (and they are not alone) are moving in the direction of an earlier age (i.e., are reactionary); and so they advocate both political "readings" and the politicization of ever more areas of human activity. Even computers must be taken "out of the commercial realm and into the political arena"-for the good of society. 21 Famous professors agree with the Marxist teachings that "[classical] liberalism is a lie"; that Amer- Fern~indez-Morera 21

ican society is "radically askew," imbued with "wholly irrational optimism," "sordid promise of surface glitter, smug comfort," and "sham conventionality"; and that practically all is "political. ''22 Therefore they see being deliberately political to improve such an obviously rotten society as a virtue, not a vice. For a user of materialist discourse the real reason we choose one explanation over another is always "political": to serve some more or less hidden class (or gender, etc.) interest of which we may not even be aware. (This mechanism, irresistible to everyone except practitioners of materialist discourse, constitutes bad "ideology".) So giving up or not giving up Newton's views is a political, not an epistemological decision (as Bialer naively believes). It has nothing to do with the truth-value of the views (exceptions are Marx's views, including this one, which is really true). Science is ruled by politics (culture, ideology, and so on). Politics is "hegemonic" over and prior to everything else. Thus instead of examining materialist political discourse from the point of view of, say, aesthetics, or religion, or psychology, or the sexual practices of Marx-as Philos- ophy, or Religion, or Psychology, or Sexology might want-one is supposed to examine these subjects from the point of view of materialist political discourse. Privileging the materialist "political" approach is a political act, but one that does not respond to the selfish interests of the professors; for though they are avowedly political, they claim exemption from the charge of being political "for their own benefit" (of having bad ideology). One reason is that they are disin- terested and therefore not motivated by (bad) ideology, since they use the approach for the sake of humanity (good ideology). But another reason--the epistemological justification-is that the professors use the approach because it fits best the way the world is. Or, in the words of a Western professor whose books are required reading in literature courses at prestigious American and British universities: "The socialist critic does not see literature in terms of ideology or class struggle because these happen to be his or her political interests, arbi- trarily projected onto literary works. He or she would hold that such matters are the very stuff of history, and that in so far as literature is an historical phenomenon they are the very stuff of literature tOO. ''23 The same truism was once taught by his Soviet colleagues: "When Marxism regards the history of antagonistic-class societies and the history of contending classes, it is not in order to indulge its 'biased' dialectical concept of development, but because such is the actual course of history. ,,24 Or, as Lenin said, "The Marxist doctrine is omnipotent because it is true. ''25 When talking about literature, "You simply have to argue about politics, ''26 because, as professors from the Soviet Union used to teach: "The idea that in class society art is a vehicle of ideology is the corner-stone of the Marxist- Leninist conception of art. ''27 This idea remains axiomatic for Western practitioners of materialist discourse. A materialist professor merely does the same as a socialist artist: serve the progressive goals of socioeconomic equality, com- munitarianism, and so on. Such ethical imperatives were also articulated once 22 Academic Questions / Spring 1991

upon a time by no less socially committed Soviet professors (often in cooperative, collective books-which are politically correct): "In the best works of socialist art we discover the complete merging of the artist and the ideologue. In such works as Gork-y's Mother, Eisenstein's The Strike and Battleship Potemkin . . . the artist speaks as the ideologist of the working class, expressing its world outlook. ''2s Combining cultural and political "readings" dates back to Marx and Engels. Institutionalized by Lenin, it thus became a standard feature of cultural "policy" during the Age of Advanced Marxism. Then "one of the key aspects of the 'ideological front' was literature. ''29 Art, declared the Bolshevik Association of Russian Proletarian Writers, is "the most powerful weapon in the class struggle. ''3~ During the early phase of Bolshevik rule an important step was com- pleted to advance this activist agenda: "teachers' resistance to the politicization of the schools" was "broken. ''31In 1922, the Ogburo passed a resolution asking for "the struggle against petit bourgeois ideology in the field of literature. ''32 The government wanted to favor academic approaches that helped further equality, social justice, and so on. Accordingly, by 1923 the school system was being reorganized on the principle of training skilled specialists who would have a progressive view of the world: "Lenin insisted that the bourgeoisie be fought in the schools as well, that education cannot proceed apart from politics. ''33 Bukharin agreed: "It is essential to us that intellectual cadres be trained in an ideologically precise way. Yes, we will produce standardized intellectuals, produce them as though in a factory. ''34 War was declared on canonical Russian literature because it represented a link with the oppressive past and an obstacle to a better future. One method of warfare was to "open" the canon to "different" writers, in effect creating a new but progressive canon. In 1930, a professor lamented that "the terms 'Russian literature' and 'the history of Russian literature' have not yet been denied their civil rights as part of the school curriculum, of textbooks, and of teaching aids."35Writers should be studied from the point of view of ideology (politics) and therefore of "society" (the collective): "The conception of a Soviet writer," warned Literaturnya gazeta in 1929, "is not geographical, it is social. ''36 Pro- fessors taught students to think globally: "We realized a little too late," ruefully admitted a professor in his self-criticism at the First Conference of Marxist Historians, "that the term Russian history is a counterrevolutionary term. ''37 "Civic history," writes ex-Soviet professor Mikhail Heller, "was eliminated. The manipulation of social memory began."38 But manipulating social memory in order to instill progressive ideas through deliberately changing the books that students must read was justified by materialist assumptions: since all "ruling classes" do these things, at least the Bolsheviks did them to teach students the need for an economically, politically, and socially just society, and helped them better understand a changing world. Manipulating the canon has also been standard practice among Swedish Fern~ndez-Morera 23

professors. Since materialist professors constitute a majority in the educational establishment and thus control all publicly-financed "cultural" organizations, and since commercial productions are rare (for what is "public" is correct but what is "for profit" is not), authors like Holberg, Schiller, and Montherlant are not performed, because they promote an individualistic ideology. "Education," a professor declares, "is turning out people who have learned how to fit into society. So that means I won't allow any plays that glorify the individual. That excludes most of the romantic dramatists, like Schiller. And it definitely cuts out most of Ibsen. Brand and Peer Gynt are two Ibsen plays I definitely do not want to see performed." "I would not do Holberg," the professor adds, "His morality is doubtful. He's aristocratic, and we've got to be democratic.''39 At American universities during the Age of Late Marxism, the war is on canonical Western literature. Such liberating policies have labelled Western canonical authors "dead white males," and endeavor to replace or "supple- ment" them with mandated readings from a new canon of authors, who, with their different class, ethnic, sexual, and other perspectives, can help the cause of universal emancipation from class, race, sex, animal, child, earth, and other oppressions. More subde than "opening" the canon has been reinterpreting it so flaat it illustrates materialist principles. Like other methods, this one achieved perfec- tion among materialist professors in the socialist countries, where formal analysis was put at the service of "unveiling" (or "unmasking," "revealing," etc.- verbs which turn a professor into a fearless exposer of the naked truth) a work's ideological content. Thus, the works of Pushkin, Griboedov, and Lermontov were analyzed to expose them ideologically as models of "the literary style of the Russian nobility during the rise of commercial-industrial capitalism. ''4~ But the method, of course, originated with Marx, whose "reading" of Balzac "exposed" the ideology of the French bourgeoisie. To further social justice, educators in the socialist countries gave preferential admissions to working-class youth. Middle-class youth was even banned from college in order to correct years of social inequity; and educational life was monitored to ensure that it did not encourage politically incorrect ideas. 41 The Soviet social experiment managed to include politically correct ideas even in children's textbooks on arithmetic.42 Many American professors share such a belief in the virtue of using education for sociopolitical progress rather than for imparting mere knowledge and rational thought (for all knowledge and thought are sociopoliticallyconditioned anyway): "Education," a professor writes, "should be one of the places where we can get involved in the process of transforming [society].'43 Western academicians therefore struggle to liberate Western writers so they can be analyzed from emancipatory viewpoints-not from those of bourgeois humanism, which keeps them "hermetically sealed from history [as conceived by materialist discourse], subjected to a sterile critical formalism [anathema to materialist discourse unless used to unveil "ideology"- as under- 24 Academic Questions / Spring 1991

stood by materialist discourse], piously swaddled with external verities and used to confirm prejudices which any moderately enlightened student [enlightened by materialist discourse] can perceive to be objectionable.''44 Similar ideas inform so-called "New Historicism. ''45 At American universities "New Historicism" is often regarded as one of the most brilliant "new" academic contributions to human knowledge. In fact, under its verbal cloak it rests on Old Marxist principles now being questioned in the erstwhile socialist lands. For "New" Historicism, literature, like any other cultural "product" (the lurking economism of materialist discourse is revealed in this word), is a social (cultural, ideological) "construct" and therefore "fashioned" by more than one consciousness (Marxism's collectivist epistemological axiom). Consequently, the "author" matters little (the Marxist axiomatic questioning of individual creation and private ownership). Like literature, an author is a social "construct"- the "result" (as Marx asserted) of conditioning "material" ("economic," "cultural," "political") "forces." Since examining works from the perspective of piously swaddled external verities used to confirm prejudices any moderately enlightened student can perceive to be objectionable can only prolong exposure to oppressive human- istic practices, a socially conscious professor must make efforts to study works from the viewpoint of ideology, hegemony, "culture" and "politics" (in their materialist sense), and so on. Bourgeois humanist professors claim that such a political approach does violence to works, but do not realize that their own approaches are not only also political (for all thought is political) but really violent since they perpetuate violent relations by perpetuating oppression through oppressive ways of looking at the world. The viewpoint of these bourgeois and usually white male humanists com- pares to that of artists and writers who during the Age of Advanced Marxism protested the politicization of art and literature and their study according to materialist axioms. Thus, Kazimir Malevich, one of the world's first abstract painters, paid the price for mistakenly insisting that art is "independent": "Whether a portrait is being painted of some socialist or some emperor, whether a man- sion is being built for a businessman or a humble dwelling for a worker-these differences cannot be taken as the starting point of art .... It is about time we understood at last that the problems of art and the problems of the belly are extremely remote from each other. ''46 He was arguing against fundamentals: "material" relations ("problems of the belly") and the resulting political (cultural, ideological) configurations determine (fashion, etc.) art. So was Zamyatin out of line and understandably blackballed when he argued that literature can be created only by "madmen, misfits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skep- tics. ''47 But then Zamyatin had written in 1920 that he lived in an epoch that suppressed the individual to create a better world for the masses: unlike materialist professors, he never accepted the truism that bourgeois individualism Fern~adez-Morera 25

(as opposed to the real individualism that socialist man can dialectically find by submerging himself in the community) is incorrect. 4s During the Age of Advanced Marxism, politicizing the cultural realm to serve human liberation was collectively (and therefore correcdy) sanctioned by the Russian Central Committee in 1928: the activist government mandated that everything from scholarship to theater, cinema, painting, literature, and music ought to help raise people's political awareness of oppressive social practices- which included drinking vodka (for drinking vodka has with annoying regular- ity posed a material problem in the socialist creation of better people and a better world). 49

Materialist Discourse Versus Refractory Reality

Applying Carl Menger's concept, one could argue that socialist societies have functioned (or rather malfunctioned) as the unintended result of utopian aspirations interacting with a refractory reality: the aspirations were predicated on materialist theory, and they repeatedly failed because the theory was not good enough to cope with or even describe reality. In other words, that everywhere the practical implementation of Marx's ideas has been a failure cannot continue to be systematically ascribed to the profound stupidity or incredible malice of the activists ("the leadership's political errors"). The problem lies with the epistemological and ethical axioms, which obviously cannot be used effectively to interact with the world. However, the discursive practices of humanities and social science academicians are frequently impervious to refractory reality. One ("ideological") explanation is that the koine, having become institutionalized, is now the bread and butter of so many professors that it would take a revolution like those in the socialist countries for them to give it up. A kinder explanation is that academicians (sometimes necessarily as part of their work) often blur the distinction between the factual and the hypothetical, the real and the imaginary; and they tend to remain in the world of fiction when they ought to have returned to the world of reality. But perhaps a better explanation is that professors largely talk and write about policy, but do not direcdy feel the effects of what they write or talk about. No American professor has been sued by his students for malpractice because the ideas he propagated in the classroom have caused economic distress. Pro- fessors should not be held accountable for the implementation of the "public" policies they advocate (though they are ultimately responsible, since history shows that academic ideas do filter through society and are eventually picked up by those in charge). To be sure, as managers of national and "world" government agencies, academicians are found in increasing numbers in positions of unelected yet presumably accountable authority over the welfare of millions. But 26 Academic Questions ! Spring 1991

qua professors thinking out "public policy" agendas, they are necessarily pro- tected from both the intended and unintended consequences of their actions; and so they go on verbally maneuvering their way through every factual setback to their ideas. Their situation is like that of the Homoousians and the Homoiousians: mundane reality need not interrupt their lucubrations. Thus, they can imper- turbably continue applying to hapless things like "texts" or "culture" ideas that have not effectively interacted with reality wherever intelligent and capable people have made efforts to apply them in the real world. This insulation may help explain why materialist assumptions continue to be used for historical, literary, artistic, economic, and social research, and even for the "knowledge" of knowledge itself. Where businesspeople and engineers may fail, a professor can succeed-because the blank page, unlike other forms of reality, takes everything without answering back.

Notes

1. I date the beginning of the Age of Early Marxism around 1848 with the publication of The Communist Manifesto. It ends in 1917 with the onset of the High (or Advanced) Marxist Age, during which societies deliberately built upon Marx's ideas proliferated around the globe. The Age of High (or Advanced) Marxism ends in the 1980s. The annum mirabilis is 1989, when the inviability of these societies, rather obvious before, became inescapably clear. The phrase "Those who work in the field of cultural practices" has been used by materialist professor Terry Eagleton of Oxford University in his widely read textbook Literary Theory (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 214. 2. The British Labour party strives for a "moderate" image and renounces some "radical" positions. In France a businessman, Bernard Tapie, becomes the darling of the media and of the "Socialist" party, whose platform he supports. This businessman, however, is not an American creator-entrepreneur type like Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, but more of a bold wheeler and dealer ~/a Donald Trump. A friend of Franqois Mitterrand, he is described by a business journalist as being "not a bad type, but there's always a bit of murkiness to what he does. He does a lot of bluffing." Businessmen who support statism, from the late Armand Hammer to Lee Iaceocca to Tapie, are invariably ben- efieiaries of government activism. See, Sharon Waxman, "France's Answer to Trump Takes on Global Market and Critics," Chicago Tribune, 22 July 1990. For Hammer's deals and luxurious living in a Leninist Russia beset by scarcity, see, Mikhail Heller and Alexander M. Nekrich, Utopia in Power:A History of the Soviet Union from 1917 to the Present (New York: Summit Books, 1985), 214-15. For an overview of "market" socialism (akin to "jumbo shrimp" according to Robert Hessen) see, Arthur Seldon, Capitalism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 200-212. 3. Roland Huntford, The New Totalitarians (New York: Stein and Day, 1979), 325-48; Brian Crozier and Arthur Seldon, Socialism: The Grand Delusion (New York: Universe Books, 1986), 183-85; and Anton Wahlman, "The Myth of a Swedish Utopia," The Free Market 8 (July 1990): 7. Sweden is now moving back toward a free market economy (R. C. Longworth, "Market Economy Trend Bringing Changes to Swedish System," Chi- cago Tribune, 2 September 1990). 4. Cf. Llewellyn Rockwell, ed., The Free Market Reader (Burlingame, Calif.: The Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1988), 231-57. Fermlndez-Morera 27

5. Yuri N. Maltsev and Andrei Sakharov; Ray Moseley, "East Germany Catches Glimpse of West German Goods to Come," Chicago Tribune, 2 July 1990; Vaclav Klaus: "I find myself sometimes having to teach Westerners about what the market really means. They often don't realize that they might need a little of a market revolution in their own countries," in "No Third Way Out; Creating a Capitalist Czechoslovakia," Reason (June 1990): 29; Lech Walesa, in Liz Sly, "Walesa Asks Investment in Poland," Chicago Tribune, 15 November 1989. 6. "Hungary's Ruling Party Dealt a Loss," Chicago Tribune, 20 October 1989; Ray Mose- ley, "East Germans Must Learn Anew; Unification Forces Schools to Teach Western Concepts," Chicago Tribune, 8 July 1990. 7. Cathy Young, "Exciting Times," American Spectator (August 1990): 32. 8. R.C. Longworth, "Now the Hard Part: For E. Europe Revolution Was Easier than Change to Market Economy," Chicago Tribune, 29 July 1990. 9. Prof. Arnold Lockshin, quoted in Young, "Exciting Times," 32. I0. "Denial" is modified into the "Acceptance-Denial" defense, which denies that real socialism exists in country A but affirms that it exists in country B. Then when it is discovered that real socialism does not exist in B after all, the "acceptance" is displaced to a new country, C, and so on. Many countries have through the years been accepted and then denied: the Soviet Union (during the thirties, forties, and even fifties), China (during the sixties), Vietnam and Cuba (during the sixties and seventies), and most recendy Nicaragua (the eighties). This defense has sometimes taken bizarre turns: depending on its user, it has conferred the real socialism label on England (from the forties through the sixties), France (under Mitterrand), and Sweden (since the sixties). The new fashionable socioeconomic system which the United States must imitate is that renowned model of cultural and economic vitality--Canada. 11. For the view of contemporary Western capitalism as "State Capitalism" and of the socialist countries as builders of "Real Socialism," see the standard collectively written textbook, A Dictionary of Scientific Communism (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1984). For the existence of "real" socialism in the East and the views of professors from the West, see, Alec Nove, Marxism and "Really Existing Socialism" (Chur, Switzerland: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1986). Nove thinks there was as "real" a socialism as there can be on this earth. Occasionally Western materialist professors forget that they are not supposed to consider the socialist countries really socialist, but rather "Asian Modes" or "State Capitalist" or "Stalinist" countries. Thus British materialist professor Perry Anderson slips when he writes: "the universal crystallization of bureaucracy after every socialist revolution in the backward countries..." Considerations on Western Marxism (Thefford, England: Thefford Press Limited, 1979), 89. Anderson overlooks, too, that countries like Germany and Czechoslovakia were not "backward," yet also became further bureaucratized under socialism. 12. A corollary of the defense is that had real socialism been implemented in Western countries like England or the United States it would have been real socialism. This curiously circular "argument" for some reason excludes Sweden from the prospective lands of real socialism. The spirit of this defense fits materialist professor Louis Mth- usser's belief that even under real socialism and communism, people would still be subject to ideological delusions--only this time they would be good delusions. For this good delusion to work no different and possibly subversive world must be perceived: the defense's "ideal conditions" for socialism answer this need. 13. Zoya A. Berbeshkina, Lyudmila Yakovleva, and Dmitry Zerkin, What Is Historical Ma- terialism? (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1985), 32. 14. In the latest of what has become a regular litany of pleas for Western aid, Comrade Gorbachev has recendy repeated that his country needs Western aid to "rebuild its consumer industries" ("Gorbachev Renews Plea for Western Financial Help," Chicago Tribune, 27 July 1990). Elsewhere in "Eastern" Europe, of course, the masses also desperately want to be corrupted by commodity fetishism. 15. Alexander Zinoviev, The Radiant Future (New York: Random House, 1980), 18-23. 28 Academic Questions / Spring 1991

16. During 1990 at least six of more than ten top applicants to my department used assumptions of materialist discourse in their statements of purpose. One of them even quoted Terry Eagleton verbatim. 17. Sewerlyn Bialer, "How Marxism Will Survive," U.S. News & Worm Report, 30 April 1990, 33. 18. Academic presses turn out in increasing numbers works that use the materialist viewpoint on epistemology. Cf. among others, Charles Bazerman, Shaping Written Knowl- edge: The Genre and Activity of the Experimental Article in Science (Madison, Wisc.: Uni- versity of Wisconsin Press, 1988), 149. Prof. Bazerman claims that both the "scientific practitioner" and the "scientific article" are "social constructs." These emerging constructs appear as a result of "conflict" (here the professor is using the old materialist principle of "conflict"-or "contradiction": the concept is foundational for moving on to explain th/ngs in terms of class struggle, power systems, gender oppression, and so on). It cannot be otherwise, since a science's resources and expectations are (and must be, since the point is axiomatic in materialist discourse) "communally developed." Faithful to the party line, the professor opposes considering the individual as important in science. Even getting words right when presenting a discovery is not supposed to be a matter of individual "genius" but rather socially, culturally, etc., conditioned. Again, it cannot be otherwise, since materialist discourse teaches that every self is but a collectively socialized self. The goal of all these practices is to eliminate the idea of author, and replace it with collective, nonindividual, suprapersonal, and even impersonal enti- ties. 19. V.I. Lenin, One Step Forward, Two Steps Backward (1904) (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1978), 207. 20. In Hungary, for instance, new legislation forbids political activity in the work place, thus dealing a blow to the Communist party, for which such activity has always been a "key weapon of communist indoctrination" ("Hungary's Ruling Party Dealt a Loss"). In Yugoslavia, reformers insist that politicians get out of economic decisions (R.C. Long- worth, "New Yugoslav Leader Looks to the West," Chicago Tribune, 9 February 1989). Similar efforts are underway in schools and universities which, in accordance with materialist axioms, had been thoroughly politicized--with adverse consequences for the creation of knowledge and innovation (see, R.C. Longworth, "Revolutionaries Lack Flair, Not Focus," Chicago Tribune, 6 December 1989). Even in Western countries like Italy, whose educational system had been long pen- etrated by materialist ideas, and where the "Chinese system" (pioneered in Mao's China, where the class--the community--selects a student to take the exam for everyone else: from his ability to the needs of the whole, etc.) had been adopted in many humanities courses, students are rebelling against the politJeization of the system. Like many American professors, materialist Italian teachers are shocked by what they call "the egocentricity and narcissism" of their charges. "They don't seem to give a damn about the community as a whole," complains a teacher who has since quit in disgust. Students respond that they "don't want to listen to their teachers' political interpreta- tions but want the facts." Nor is class oppression accepted as an excuse for poor work. "I am not scandalized that those who don't study fail their examinations," says student leader Gaia Molho, "And I would never fight to defend them" (Uli Schmetzer, "To- day's Italian Students Have New Lesson for Adults," Chicago Tribune, 5 December 1989). 21. "Unnerving Look into the Computer Future," Chicago Tribune, 6 December 1988. 22. Frank Lenwicchia, postscript by Kenneth Burke, Critici~n and Social Change (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1983), 2; Prof. Louis Rene Beres, approvingly quoted by Washington Post columnist William Raspberry, "A Preoccupation with Villainy Solves Little," Chicago Tribune, 24 August 1990. 23. Eagleton, Literary Theory, 209. 24. Kh. Momjan, Landmarks in History (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1980), 44. Fern~dez-Morera 29

25. V. I. Lenin, "The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism," vol. 19 of Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), 23. 26. Eagleton, Literary Theory, 209. 27. Avner Zis, Marxist Aesthetics (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), 59. 28. Yuri A. Lukin, "Ideology and Art," in Marxist-LeninistAesthetics and the Arts, ed. K. M. Dolgov et al. (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1980), 109. 29. Heller and Nekrich, Utopia in Power, 269. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid., 172. 32. Ibid., 195. 33. Ibid., 172. 34. Ibid., 199. 35. Ibid., 172. The equivalent of this position in American academia is, of course, the attack on canonical Western literature. 36. Ibid., 271. 37. Ibid., 172. 38. Ibid. 39. Huntford, The New Totalitarians, 310-11. (Ibsen is politically correct, however, when properly adapted so that he serves to attack evil businesspeople, as Arthur Miller has done with Ibsen's An Enemy of the People.) This progressive viewpoint is shared at the highest levels. "Marxism," declared the late Swedish prime minister Olof Palme, "makes it possible to see art not only as a product of society, but also as a weapon in the class war." Mr. Palme was of one mind with Bolshevik professors of the Age of Advanced Marxism. For Palme, art was "an instrument for changing society," and, he admitted, "So far I will go in confessing a Marxist attitude to life and art" (Ibid., 307). Observers of American universities can cite similar practices. How many literature classes use texts by T. S. Eliot, Mario Vargas Llosa, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Octavio Paz, or Reinaldo Arenas? More important, how many ask students to read incorrect texts by these authors? But blackballing is not confined to individual writers. Two years ago I went to my university library to look up some articles in the American Spectator and Reason; I could not find these publications. I discovered that they were kept in the rare books room. Thanks to the intercession of the bibliographers I got the Spectator re- leased, and it's now available in the reading room along with The Nation and Dissent. However, I have not been successful in freeing Reason, perhaps because it is too subversive. The rare books librarian refuses to let it be moved to the reading room, and so Reason remains among the rare things at Northwestern University. Thanks again to the bibliographers' cooperation, this year I succeeded in getting the library to subscribe to Academic Questions, whose existence was hitherto unknown. 40. Heller and Nekrich, Utopia in Power, 172. 41. Vincent J. Schodolski, "Soviet Union's Brain Drain," Chicago Tribune, 5 May 1990. 42. Heller and Nekrich, Utopia in Power, 172. 43. Lentricchia, Criticism and Social Change, 2. 44. Eagleton, Literary Theory, 216-17. 45. Its own canonical text is Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioningfrom More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). For an excellent analysis of its Marxist foundation, see D. G. Myers, "The New Historicism in Literary Studies," Academic Questions 2 (Winter 1988-89). 46. Heller and Nekrich, Utopia in Power, 196. 47. Ibid., 195. 48. Ibid. 49. Ibid., 269.