I want to respond to David Horowitz’s criticisms of my teaching of Marx.
Horowitz points to my web page, The Failure of Revolution, which, he says “faces the fact that Marx’s predictions about revolution have been refuted by history.” But he criticizes me because I go on to say “We can understand the failure of a revolution to occur as Marx predicted in Marx’s terms. The conditions that Marx expected to bring about a revolution did not arise. And we can give a powerful social class based explanation of the failure of those conditions to arise.” Thus Horowitz concludes that my point is that “In other words, even though Marx was wrong, he was right, and we can all be Marxists – or neo-Marxists – now.”
To say that this is my point is both to take one sentence entirely out of context and to hold an absurd view of what makes one a Marxist or not. When I say that we can explain the failure of revolution in Marx’s terms, I mean two things. The first is that we can understand why a proletariat revolution failed to come about by seeing what conditions Marx thought would be necessary to bring about such a revolution and then seeing why Marx was wrong in predicting that these conditions would arise. In other parts of my notes I point out that Marx held that a proletariat revolution would arise for certain reasons, because the wages of workers decline in relative or absolute terms, because the proletariat would becomes the overwhelmingly dominant class, and because capitalism would suffer frequent and severe recessions. On the page in question I show that none of these expectations came true. Indeed, I point out that “Marx’s economics were fundamentally mistaken” and I present a neo-classical theory of wage determination that explains why workers as well as capitalists benefit as productivity increases. I also show that, contrary to Marx’s expectations, a new intermediate class of professional and managers have arisen thereby insuring that proletariat does not become a majority and undermining any stark confrontation of capital and labor by providing members of the working class with opportunities to advance by means of education.
Now if it makes one a Marxist to argue that Marx’s predictions about the future course of capitalism were false precisely because the pre-conditions he set for revolution were not met, then I suppose I am a Marxist. But this is an utterly ludicrous test. Any political scientist of any persuasion would agree that rising real wages, social mobility, and the moderation of the business cycle undermined the revolutionary potential of the proletariat. Is the only way to escape from the charge of being a Marxist to think that these factors are irrelevant to whether a proletariat revolution came about?
Second, in my discussion of the failures of Marx’s theory, I point to the usefulness of social class analysis. For example, when I point to the rise of a new intermediate class between the proletariat and the capitalists, I am try to show that one can use social class analysis to understand the failure of revolution. And, when I point to the ways in which governments in the liberal democracies have taken actions that improve the living standards of the working class, I suggest that political pressure from the working class and the labor movement are partly responsible for the adoption of these public policies. Now if even talking about social classes and politics makes one a Marxist, then again I suppose I am a Marxist. But that is a ludicrous standard by which to define who is a Marxist. It is very simply a fact that there is a labor movement that has been a primary, though not the only, supporter of social welfare legislation such as Medicare. The right wing critics of social welfare legislation blame it on the labor unions. Are they Marxists? There has been a long debate about whether it makes sense to say that a “new class” or a “new middle class” or a “professional managerial class” grew up in capitalism during the twentieth century. Both leftists and rightists, Marxists and non-Marxists have debated the issue. Is the neo-conservative Irving Kristol a Marxist because not only took the idea of a “new class” seriously but did more than anyone else to popularize the notion? Whether David Horowitz likes it or not, the notion of a social class is used by political and social scientists of every orientation to explain some aspects of political and social life today. And, if we are at all intellectually honest, we have to say that Karl Marx made a contribution to the way people of all political persuasions analyze political and social life. The tools he invented are part of our Intellectual Heritage and it is worth studying them whether Marx was right or wrong about so many other things. Remember that Irving Kristol not only borrowed the notion of social class from Marx but provided a more or less Marxist style analysis of why so many professionals and managers—including some of us college professors—are hostile to capitalism.
Now one could charge that I do ignore non-social class reasons for the failure of revolution on this page in my website. That is true. But I do that for a pedagogical reason. The point of this page is to help students understand Marx’s argument. It is very useful in attaining that goal to explain the failure of revolution by identifying why the preconditions Marx set for revolution were not met. Any good teacher knows that the art of teaching is to say the same thing 13 different ways. So this is my chance to go over Marx’s account of revolution a second time and have students apply his analysis in understanding why a revolution did not occur. If I were teaching a course on political and social history, I would of course mention non-class factors for the failure of proletariat revolution. But that is not my purpose in Intellectual Heritage.
Indeed, if one looks at my notes on other texts, one will find that I teach every text from the point of view of the text itself. I do that with Genesis and Exodus, with Matthew, and with Locke. I try to show my students how the world looks from the standpoint of each text. That is why, at the end of my courses, my students often have no idea that what my political views unless they have been reading about my political activism in the local papers. (They almost never hear about my activism in class.) One way I try to explain the work of each author is by trying to follow out the logic of each text in understanding contemporary events, which sometimes means I discuss those events from the standpoint of the different texts. I very rarely criticize texts directly but prefer that students develop their own criticisms by comparing and contrasting one work with another.
In fact, Marx is the only exception to this rule. Not only do I show why Marx was wrong in his predictions for the future of capitalism, I have two pages of notes that discuss what is alive and what is dead in Marx’s thought. The page on what is alive in Marx points to some of the claims I mentioned above as well as the idea that the wealth of capitalists do give them certain advantages in politics. If one is willing to accept the notion that we might have something to learn from Marx, these claims are entirely innocuous. (After all, there are conservatives who argue against public financing of political campaigns on the ground that this would diminish the power of the wealthy. Are they Marxists, too?) And I have a fairly extensive page on what is what is dead in Marx that details a number of serious problems in Marxist thought. In particular I point out, first, that Marx’s notion that scarcity can be overcome is not plausible given his own assumptions about human nature. And second, I argue that there is a tension between the individual freedom to make what we want with our lives and the collective freedom to shape our common life. I argue that so long as we give individuals the right to individual freedom, they will act in ways that cannot be easily predicted and that, as a result, they will upset any attempt at democratic central planning.
Why do I spend so much time criticizing Marx? The second semester of Intellectual Heritage is a course that mainly focuses on a variety of points of view about modern life and, especially, life in liberal democratic regimes. A central theme of my course is the tension between Enlightenment and Romantic ideas. I try to show that one way to understand Marx’s thought is as an attempt to combine the Lockean idea that by being rational and industrious we can, in contemporary terms, expand our economy and make our lives more comfortable with the Romantic hope to enable everyone to express their deepest selves in both their individual and collective lives. I point to some of the troubles with Marx’s point of view not because I am eager to criticize Marx but to help my students to see the inherent tensions between Enlightenment and Romantic ideas. I do so at this fairly late point in the course for two reasons. First I want to help my students get a better grasp of how the various traditions of thought that animate our lives by seeing how they do or do not fit together. And, second, at this point in the course they are ready see just how complicated these issues are. I want, in other words, to get my students to think more deeply about the tensions between various perspectives on modernity and to avoid easy answers to these tensions.
That is to say, my goal in this course is precisely not to advocate for or against any one point of view about modern liberal democracy but, instead, to help my students see the appeal of a variety of points of view and to help them see why and how these points of view are compatible or incompatible. My aim, in other words, is to stop my students from making a quick and easy declaration for or against any the point of view but to force them to think deeply about our lives from the perspectives of these texts.
To be honest, I would have to admit that there is a polemical as well as intellectual purpose in how I teach this course. I learned from one of my teachers, the conservative political theorist Harvey Mansfield, the Aristotelian claim that the pursuit of philosophy teaches one, among other things, to appreciate the truth in opposing claims and, thus, to grasp that a certain moderation and practical wisdom is needed in practical life as one finds one way between different claims and theories. This Aristotelian point is not, in my view, a political imposition on the texts, but a natural outgrowth of the pursuit of knowledge itself, realized in this case, in the pursuit of a knowledge of important texts and what they say about the life we live.
It is precisely this moderation and practical wisdom that I find so lacking in David Horowitz’s one-sided polemic against the IH program and my own teaching within it. I have no animus, in principle, against his attempt to reveal that some teachers in some universities do use their classrooms for the purpose of indoctrinating their students. I agree that this is problematic. And I do not think that college professors should be above criticism or oversight.
But, if David Horowitz’s crusade against what some professors do is based on the same shoddy understanding of their class materials that he shows in reading my own, then I am afraid that he is betraying his own ideals. A polemical, one-sided critique of polemical one-sided work does no one any good. And, of course, there is nothing conservative in such an approach.