Marcuse: Alasdair Macintyre. Fontana "Modern Masters", 5/-.
The Fontana "Modern Masters" series seems to have been designed to blast out of the water the armada of subversive ideas that have recently invaded the fetid waters of British academic culture. If Marcuse, by Alasdair MacIntyre, is anything to go by, the threatened barrage will only be a salvo. From an interview with Frank Kermode, editor of the series, it emerges that this is intended to be "the first, and last, book about Marcuse".
Fortunately it is neither-just as it is neither the first nor the last display of the virulent philistinism of its author and of the culture of which he is a chosen, if lowly, custodian.
The formula for the series is a perfect example of what the situationists mean by recuperation. Potentially dangerous subjects are to be handled by reliable authors: George Lichtheim on Lukacs, Philip Rahv on Trotsky. Potentially dangerous authors are restricted to safe subjects: Conor Cruse O'Brien on Camus, Raymond Williams on Orwell (let's hope a miscalculation has been made here). A makeweight biography of Che Guevara, gushing with trivial romanticism, tops off the menu. Need one add that the architect of the series is a former staff worker for Encounter. presently rejoicing in he title of Lord Northeliffe Professor of English Literature at University College, London.
MacIntyre has for a long time specialised in doing hatchet-jobs on such igures as Isaac Deutsche lills, Georg Lukacs and Herbert Mar use, as well as purveying slanders on the Cuban, Chinese and Vietnamese revolutions. His reputation as a leftist makes him most useful in projects of this type, witness his frequent contrioutions to publications supported by he Congress for Cultural Freedon His "left" reputation has derived from the tolerance extended to him, over the years, by various left groups, and not from his writings or actions. But let us hope that this book will definitively mark the end of both the tolerance and the reputation. The following are characteristic political judgements which Macintyre offers in criticism of Marcuse:
"The defence of the authority of a university to teach and research as it will is in more danger immediately from Marcuse's student allies than from any other quarter." (p.91) or:
'The notion that the ruling elites are now able to treat welfare as an instrument of social control is at very best a quarter truth and a very dangerous one in so far as it distracts from concern over welfare." (p.69)
Even a sensitive liberal might refrain from claptrap of this sort. It should be stressed that MacIntyre's olitics reflect in many ways the phi sophical position which he has al ways defended. Take the following sample of argumentation:
«The paradigmatic etamm ear. The tical accident is the Vietnam war." myth of American imperialism in Vietnam is the product of a collaboration between the sternest critics of the war and its sternest supporters. In actual fact American involvement in South Vietnam came about through a series of improvisations and ad hoc measures in which Kennedy and Johnson continuously produced larger and larger unforeseen effects; they then identified themselves with what they had produced and ended by producing a war which has been destructive for every party engaged in it and from which no good can result.
What, then, of victory for the Vietnamese people? Would that not be a "good" result? Sustaining MacIntyre's aberrant political judgement is an empuricist view that social tacts must be accidental" if they are not deliberate. The notion that a given society might systematically produce "accidents' of a certain sort (wars, exploitation, invasions, etc.) which constitute imperialism does not occur to him. As we shall see, MacIntyre has always been the sworn opponent of all philosophers who seek to contest the dominant "facts" and "values". The US intervention in Vietnam can, without great difficulty, be seen as part of a pattern of similar interventions: including Russia in 1918, China and Korea after the Second World War, Guatemala in 1954, Cuba in 1961 and Santa Domingo in 1965, to mention only a verv the Vietnamese, and this explains many of what MacIntyre euphemistically calls their "improvisations and ad hoc decisions". . British empiricism has always refused to analyse social systems as coherent wholes, just as it has always denied the meaning of revolts against them. This is why it assails critical philosophers like Herbert Marcuse with such venom.
The substance of MacIntyre's slim volume is elusive. Ninety pages of pedestrian quibbles simply don't add up to a coherent critique. Those sections supposedly devoted to exposition of Marcuse's views are miserably inadequate when not flatly misleading. In a whole book devoted to Marcuse, one might have hoped for some specific reterence to those important sections of his early writing which have vet to be translated into English. No attemp is made to indicate Marcuse's distinctive relation to Adorno, Horkheimer and the Frankfurt School. Most stag gering of all is the omission of any dis cussion whatsoever of most of the central themes which unite and divide the Frankfurt philosophers. The coun terpoint of individuality and mass identity and non-identity is totally ignored. MacIntyre has not even noticed he significance of the problematic of "nature" in this work. Throughout Mareuse's writings there is an attempt to unravel the fatal link which he detects between the control of nature and the domination of man (and the natural in man) which has been characteristic of Western civilisation. Unlike most Marxists he does not conceive a liberated existence as one in which man masters nature and suppresses the natural in himself; an such attempt can only provoke the re turn, of the repressed with, as always, a vengeance. Instead a harmonious integration and pacification of existence should be sought. It was partly because nature constituted an unchangng pole of negativity to capitalis ociety that Marcuse could sustain a eloquently critical position within a neo-capitalism which deceptively ap peared to have absorbed class conflict The insight of Marcuse, the "critical Macintyre, as Dean of students, announcing expulsions theorist", was unaffected by that temporary eclipse of the proletariat as a revolutionary force which plunged the orthodox Marxist in gloom. This time, perhaps, the mystificatory kernel (the idealist dialectic of "Nature") will have to be rejected if the rational shell (the critique of bourgeois civilisation)
is to be rescued by the revolutionary movement. But in developing a critique of "critical theory" the revolutionary movement will need no assistance from fink professors or cold-war hacks. Lenin once remarked that dialectical idealism was a thousand times preferable to mechanical materialism. If one adds that mechanical materialism is a thousand times preferable to vulgar idealism, one can see what a chasm separates Marcuse, the dialectical idealist, from MacIntyre, the vulgar idealist.
The most insistent complaints which MacIntyre has to make are that (1) Marcuse violates formal logic; (2) Marcuse is unconcerned about, or even hostile to, "facts"; (3) Marcuse is intolerant of views not his own. It soon becomes clear that MacIntyre i himself hysterically intolerant of any mode of discourse which does not conform to, or still worse actually attacks, the crabbed routines of Oxford philosophy. The logic and evidence which Marcuse employs are usually rise itself which is intolerable to MacIntyre as he has, for his part, always sought to combine academic reformism with political "leftism", at the expense of the latter.
British empiricism has never criticised the civilisation of its bourgeois masters. Indeed this empiricism, usually united with traditionalism and noralism, very precisely reflects th consciousness of the world's first capi talist class whose successes owed nothing to theory or ideas. The exact nature of dialectical logic may be problematic but only the most myopic pedant could imagine that it could be refuted by an elementary exposition of the law of identity. MacIntyre Marcuse saluting Black militants.
brings to such tasks the same wretched philistinism to be found in his earlier attempt to outlaw the key concepts of psychoanalysis in his book The Unconscious. To this self-pro claimed empiricist concepts like "the unconscious" or "contradiction" are an unwarranted attempt to go beyond the categories which are spontaneously thrown up everyday life in bour geois society. Macintyre's own view of what constitutes useful evidence is bizarre in the extreme. Fantastic as this may seem, Marcuse is actually reproached with not accepting the tacts discovered in the dementec later researches of Wilhelm Reich!
Confronted with an authoritative appeal to such evidence one is forcibly reminded of its author's notorious role in perpetrating the "cattle"scandal of some years back.* MacIntyre actually has the impudence to write: "What Marcuse invites us to repeat is part of the experience of Stalinism" . At the time when Marment of Stalinism as an ideology (Sou- cuse was publishing a superb indictiet Marxism), MacIntyre was rebuking Duna yevskaya for "a fantastic undervaluation of socialist achievement in the Soviet Union. She writes of the Soviet state as though the Moscow trials, Vorkuta, and Hungary were its supreme and authentic expressions.
And because of this standpoint she tends to treat as Soviet crimes and heresies what are in fact at least attempts to face the problems of a soci alist society" . Later on in this review MacIntyre allowed himself the following "witticism": Trotskyism, he wrote wrote, "shares all the dogmatism of the Stalinists without any of their achievement". (Universities and Left Review, Autumn 1958: MacIntyre was reviewing Dunayevskaya's book Marxism and Freedom which had an introduction by Marcuse!) With this ook Macintyre is again lining up wit!
his old friends in Moscow as they con tinue their dirge of hate against Mareuse and all that is most vital in revolutionary thought.
Marcuse has helped to educate a eneration of new revolutionaries ir he West; he introduced them to muct of what is best in classical thought and culture. How can anyone imagine that they would allow a miserable charlatan like Macintyre to get away with the vicious assault contained in this book? Perhaps older groups on the Left have indulged Ma 'Intyre's politi al delinquency and intellectual bank ruptcy in the past, but this was part of the traditional philistinism of the Left in this country. It is poetic justice that Marcuse has begun for us the task of dispelling this backwardness-thus protecting the Left against chameleon pundits and professional renegades of the MacIntyre variety MacIntyre should understand that the game is up now. We know exactly who he is and what he stands for. His threadbare political and intellectual clothing can no longer hide the nakedness of his opportunism. Superficially MacIntyre has occupied nearly ever conceivable political and intellectua position but it would be truer to say he has never really understood any of them. In the past he has been a "Chris tian" without God, a "Trotskyist" without commitment to revolution, a "Marxist" patronised by the Central Intelligence Agency, an "anti-elitist" adornment of the world's most mediocre and servile bourgeois intelligentsia, a "socialist" avid for the approval of his social "superiors". Now he is a liberal who rattles the fasces of law and order, a libertarian instrument of aca. demic authoritarianism. Full of "toughness" when handling militant students, he is meek when in the shad ow of power or authority. With Professors like this one understands why British universities have not needed campus police. Robin Blackburn *In a number of philosophical papers MacIntyre made numerous references to the Azande's attitudes towards cattle to illustrate his points: familiarity with he supposedl • aristocratic discipline of anthropology is very modish among British philosophers. MacIntyre's academic colleagues were much amused when it was pointed out that the Azande do not have cattle, seeing these laborious references to non-existent animals as a comic illustration of the idealist pseudo empiric ism lying behind MacIntyre's "CarnaDWARF A WHIFF OF CLASS CONFLICT Sweden has long been held out as a model of Social Democratic peace and prosperity. Its centralised and strictly controlled wage negotiations, so the ideology goes, are the special DWARF The Black Dwarf 16th January 1970 Page 12
Dwarf sales Centre in Nottingham. For details and Beeton, 38 Wilford Grove, Nottingham discussion group, contact Nick SOLIDARITY WEST LONDON: No. 2 now out. Arti-