The Young Marx and the New Left

Abstract

The apparently sudden and certainly widespread resurgence after a period of I20 years of the social doctrines of the young Marx (along with those of Fourier and some minor 'utopian socialists') is a puzzling phenomenon for which the intellectual and sociological reasons are still being sought. It is relevant to that enquiry to notice that these utopian and proto-socialist doctrines have reappeared in a peculiarly perverted form. Whereas before 1848 they were associated with a robust faith in science and industry so that they could be readily incorporated into the ideology of a proletarian socialist movement that boasted it was 'scientific', and that went on to found in Russia a new polity obsessed with industrialization and scientific achievement in their second coming these doctrines are, in contrast, marked by distrust, not to say detestation, of industry and its products, of science, and indeed of logic itself. A doctrine once dedicated to the 'associated producers' who would master nature with science and with a jointly planned division of labour, has been transmuted into the faith of'flower people' who denounce the ravages of industry, the domination of science and the absurdity of any division of labour in a free-form existence. Admittedly, as both Hegel and Marx noted, ideas that get a re-run usually are grotesquely, even comically, misunderstood second time round. So one would not expect Pop Marxism, Zen Marxism, Fourierist Marxism, existentialist Marxism, and phenomenological Marxism to be exact reproductions. In their case, however, one can pinpoint the moment at which the scientific-socialist faith in industry changed into a rebellion against 'capitalist' science and technology (rather than capitalist property relations). This occurred in Germany under the Weimar Republic amid a pullulation of irrationalist doctrines that prolonged the 'revolt against science' of before the first world war and eventually blossomed into Nazism and irrationalist Marxism. If this is correct, the problem is not to