New Left Review I/37, May-June 1966

Ben Brewster

Presentation of Gorz on Sartre

One of the major problems of a socialist movement is its relationship with the society which it must subsist in and yet oppose absolutely. It is impossible to achieve an isolation from capitalism within capitalism, but many socialist parties have tried to do just this—notably the maximalist psi in Italy and the spd in Germany in the period leading up to the October Revolution. Normal political intervention in the society compromises pure opposition to it, while active revolution threatens the organization that the isolation is based on; the only middle course is one of inaction. This is as true of political theory as of political practice. There is a strong temptation to develop a critique of the society based on an old-established theoretical position, with occasional destructive sorties against the ideologists of the society and their attempts to come to grips with their situation. Hence wholesale denunciations by Marxists of the idealism of all new bourgeois thought. The result is the same in both practice and theory; the isolationist position cannot combat the immediate material advantages of opportunist participation in the society (reformism), or of the uncritical acceptance of the ruling ideas of the society (revisionism). At the same time it cannot combat the immediate spiritual advantages of revolutionary romanticism and utopianism. Marx saw a solution to the theoretical dilemma in the concept of the critique: every false consciousness and theory has its moment of truth, which can be surpassed to create a richer theory—thus Marx’s response to Hegel or Ricardo did not involve pure rejection, but demystification. The implication of this for contemporary Marxism is that we cannot use Marx merely to destroy bourgeois ideology—Marxism must be continually recreated and made possible again for every generation by the reintegration of demystified elements of the contemporary bourgeois theory. Modern Marxism is Marxist insofar as it is a development of Marx’s work, not an exegesis of it.

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