by Alan M Wald
This proliferation of corporation-funded projects recalls many of the same moral issues as did the dubious activities of the Congress for Cultural Freedom in the 1950s. In his 1967 article, “The CIA and the Intellectuals,” Jason Epstein shrewdly pointed to the dangers inherent in the funding of ostensibly “independent” writers and scholars by the Central Intelligence Agency, the Ford Foundation, and other agencies that established
an apparatus of intellectuals selected for their correct cold-war positions, as an alternative to what one might call a free intellectual market where ideology was presumed to count for less than individual talent and achievement, and where doubts about established orthodoxies were taken to be the beginning of all inquiry. . . . [I]t was not a matter of buying off and subverting individual writers and scholars, but of setting up an arbitrary and factitious system of values by which academic personnel were advanced, magazine editors appointed, and scholars subsidized and published, not necessarily on their merits, though these were sometimes considerable, but because of their allegiances.61
Considerable amounts of money are involved in this effort to create a new intellectual elite. The Institute for Educational Affairs was initiated by Kristol in 1978 with $400,000 in grant funds from the John M. Olin, Smith Richardson, Scaife Family Charitable Trusts, and J. M. foundations. Soon seventy-four corporate patrons were involved and the total gifts for 1980 increased to $538,868. Although the average grant from a foundation is only about $12,000, the institute’s role as a catalyst spurs gifts from other sources. A considerable amount of personnel exchange takes place among the institute’s board, the higher echelons of corporations, and government agencies. Moreover, a number of former associates of student newspapers affiliated with the institute have found a home in the Reagan administration. The institute, with contributions as much as $25,000, has also financed several “scholarly” books presenting the neoconservative position on historical, social, and cultural issues.62
In his 1982 memoir, The Truants, the neoconservative writer and critic William Barrett invokes Delmore Schwartz and Philip Rahv as a warning to the reader about the terrible fate of alienated rebels who fail to appreciate the gifts their society has bestowed on them. Throughout Barrett’s discussion of Schwartz, an impression is given that if the poet had rebelled less against the mainstream of American culture (if he had worked, for example, in an insurance office like Wallace Stevens), he might have found “more peace and in the end more time for his poetry.”63 Barrett’s treatment of Rahv is even more important because Rahv is explicitly ridiculed as a prime example of an intellectual who fails to “grow up” and repudiate his radical past.
What galls Barrett most about Rahv is that the more secure Rahv became—in 1958 he was appointed professor at Brandeis University although he had never attended college—the more he openly returned to his leftist views. Truly this was a case of biting the hand that fed him: “He was like those children of affluence during the 1960s who found their middle-class advantages a further reason for hostility toward American society. Rahv, in fact, was one of those intellectuals of the 1950s who was preparing the way for the radical outbursts of the 1960s; and when these came, he was ready to receive them with open arms. All in all, it was to be a strange turn in the career of a man who had always been an outsider: hitherto, in the 1930s and 1940s, he had fought against the dominant trend, but now in the 1960s he had turned about and was running with the pack.”64 Hilton Kramer quoted the entire passage in the New York Times Book Review, calling it “quite the best thing in Barrett’s book.” Kramer is as incredulous as Barrett that “the more he [Rahv] prospered, the more violently did he denounce the system that had brought him success.”65
Whatever one may conclude about Rahv, these remarks reveal much more about his adversaries, the contemporary neoconservatives. What is so reprehensible about self-made intellectuals, or for that matter disaffected members of the ruling elite, who ally themselves with working people and other social rebels in their struggle to construct a society in which all can enjoy the privileges presently enjoyed only by a few? Do Barrett and Kramer think that Rahv should have fallen on his knees before America’s rulers in gratitude for having saved him from the pit of poverty and a life of meaningless work? Their views confirm that the neoconservatives have not completely abandoned their quondam Marxist analysis of the dynamic of capitalist society as a struggle of the haves against the have-nots. The difference, however, is that they have chosen to align themselves with the haves.
Epilogue. Marxism and Intellectuals in the United States
For a privileged minority, Western democracy provides the leisure, the facilities, and the training to seek the truth hidden behind the veil of distortion and misrepresentation, ideology, and class interest through which the events of current history are presented to us. . . . It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and expose lies.
—Noam Chomsky, “The Responsibility of Intellectuals,” 19671
What are the conclusions one might draw from the experiences described in the preceding chapters? This book argues that the collective history of the group that began as the anti-Stalinist left and was transformed into the New York intellectuals embodies many lessons for those interested in combining cultural, artistic, literary, and scholarly activity with a socialist political practice. Yet, even though the group was free of the political positions formally associated with official Soviet-type Communism, the anti-Stalinist left never reached in practice the potential ascribed to it in theory.
In this book I have tried to demonstrate that the obscured and often misrepresented switch from Marxist anti-Communism (authentic anti-Stalinism) to liberal anticommunism (bogus anti-Stalinism) was a crucial ideological factor in this failure. As Hannah Arendt observed in a public lecture in the late 1940s, “anti-Stalinism,” a term that originated in the interior struggles of the Bolshevik Party, eventually became a catchall slogan in the United States to rally together diverse elements against radical social change. In this context, anti-Stalinism implies no reasoned approach to political philosophy. Pure and simple anti-Stalinists can, in fact, favor totalitarianism of other types; this contrasts dramatically with the political perspective of the nonconformist wing of the communist movement, which tended to be dominated by Trotskyism (and which was expressed in the 1930s by such intellectuals in the United States as Eastman, Hook, and Corey). Divorced from the context of a general anticapitalist and anti-imperialist outlook, anti-Stalinism can lead one to oppose something as basic as struggles by workers for higher wages if those struggles happen to be led by Communist-influenced unions.2 As this book argues, the logic of pure and simple anti-Stalinism is to move its adherents toward an anticommunism that views the imperialist practices of the United States as a lesser evil in a world conflict of two “camps.”
After precisely such an evolution took place, it became popular in the 1960s for some of those in the New Left to vilify the formerly radical New York intellectuals as sellouts, opportunists, and phonies. Although some may have deserved these epithets, ad hominem attacks are a poor substitute for the searching out of social and historical factors that encouraged the transformation of revolutionary intellectuals into an entirely different political species.
The ability of the anti-Stalinist left to sustain a revolutionary political outlook during the early and middle 1930s, despite their justified hostility to Stalinism, was partly dependent on events that inspired them to see the working class as a force for radical change. These include the heroic strikes of the 1930s—of dockworkers in San Francisco, truckers in Minneapolis, and auto workers in Michigan—as well as the rise of the CIO. The courage and idealism of the rank and file of the labor movement seemed to portend a new socialist order, while capitalism appeared impotent and decadent in the face of the crisis engendered by the Great Depression.
Momentous international events provided a further source of inspiration to the intellectuals—in particular, the Spanish Civil Wa
r and the activities of the Workers Party of Marxist Unification (POUM), the anarchists, and the Trotskyists in the face of both Francoism and Stalinism. It seemed possible that a revolutionary alternative to both the Stalinist bureaucracy of the Soviet Union and to Western capitalism might emerge in Europe. Trotsky was still alive, providing an authentic revolutionary voice that argued for the compatibility of communism and democracy and offered a critique of Stalinism from a Bolshevik point of view.
Most radical intellectuals did not have a secure niche within the American capitalist system. Only a few—James Burnham, Sidney Hook, Meyer Schapiro, and Lionel Trilling—held university appointments. Often the men were supported by their wives; several had jobs with the Works Project Administration from time to time; those who were students came from poor families and lived at home. They could not foresee their successful futures under existing social arrangements.
But by the end of World War II everything had changed. The very factors that had occasioned the development of the intellectuals into revolutionaries in the 1930s had dissipated. Moreover, they had abandoned their ties to those socialist groups that might have reinforced their original convictions. So by the time a resurgence of social and political struggle occurred in the 1960s, many of the intellectuals had become hardened apologists for American imperialism.
A few, however—Dwight Macdonald, Mary McCarthy, F. W. Dupee, and Philip Rahv—eventually broke free of their Cold War liberalism or political quiescence and moved unexpectedly back to the left, which demonstrated that deradicalization was not inevitable. Had the postwar labor upsurge sustained itself in the 1940s, at least some of the radical intellectuals would have remained on the left. In sum, the primary determinants in the deradicalization process were the political situation in the nation and the world in addition to the ascension of the intellectuals in status.
The lesson most knowledgeable commentators have drawn from the New York intellectuals’ experience with Marxism is usually one or another variant of the argument advanced by Julian Benda in 1927 in his classic The Treason of the Intellectuals. Benda claimed that modern intellectuals, regardless of their particular views, had betrayed the cause of speculative thought to the interests of political passion and that they should and must remain free of all alignments with powerful social movements. This is essentially Daniel Aaron’s conclusion in his recent study of Edmund Wilson’s political trajectory during the 1930s: “He [Wilson] remained at the end of the decade what he had been at its beginning—the uncommitted and determinedly independent witness.”3
No doubt this position might sound attractive to many intellectuals. Yet if one has gained nothing else from the preceding survey of the careers of the New York intellectuals, one ought to at least be alerted to the specious premise of Benda’s thesis and of its modern variations. Was it not the very ideology of becoming “independent critical thinkers,” indeed, intellectuals beyond the blinding grip of ideology itself, that became the chief means by which the New York intellectuals masked their shift in political allegiance? An axiom of Marxism, as well as of all other materialist philosophies, holds that total autonomy from the social institutions that shape lives and consciousness is a delusion, a myth that serves the ideological function of preserving the simulacrum of “free will” while sustaining the dominant institutions, social relations, and culture of the existing society.
Recently Raymond Williams powerfully argued this point in Marxism and Literature (1977). Williams theorizes that in a society riven by contending social forces, writers and intellectuals are always aligned with one force or another whether or not they understand or admit it. Therefore, it is preferable for a writer or intellectual to be committed—to make a conscious choice of alignment— rather than to be unconsciously aligned, that is, to play a role that one did not choose, or let oneself become regressively transformed by the very social institutions that one had originally set out to overturn.4 This is more or less what Frederick Engels had in mind when he described the type of consciousness that would enable humanity to achieve freedom by recognizing necessity.5 Appropriate action must be pursued with a full awareness of social reality. In the United States, conscious alignment might take the form of participation in counterinstitutions of capitalist society—trade unions, socialist political organizations, or women’s, Third World, or community organizations that work for social liberation against the dominant political order.
The career of Philip Rahv provides an instructive example of an intellectual who sought to sustain a Marxism in isolation from counterinstitutions of any sort. Throughout the 1950s, except for one blast against McCarthy, Rahv was mostly silent on political matters. Then, in 1967, he tried to draw a sharp line between himself and the liberal anticommunists who, he said, had masked an accommodation to the status quo behind a self-righteous campaign against “Stalinist totalitarianism”: “I was never a liberal anti-Communist or, for that matter, any other kind of liberal. When a small group of us broke away from the Communist movement in the late 1930s we did so because of our fundamental allegiance to democratic socialism; and substantially that is still my position today.”6
A second public political stand that differentiated Rahv from other New York intellectuals was his political orientation toward the New Left, which he sought to educate in certain elementary ideas of Marxist tactics. In the pages of the New York Review of Books and in his own Modern Occasions, Rahv quoted Trotsky on the futility of individual terrorism (“the chemistry of high explosives cannot take the place of mass action”). Rahv pointed directly to a major weakness of the radical student movement of the 1960s: “it has failed to crystallize from within itself a guiding organization—one need not be afraid of naming it a centralized and disciplined party, for so far no one has ever invented a substitute for such a party—capable of engaging in daily and even pedestrian practical activity while keeping itself sufficiently alert on the ideological plane so as not to miss its historical opportunity when and if it arises.”7
In the year or two before the latter article appeared, Rahv quarreled bitterly with William Phillips and the editorial board of the Partisan Review. According to a memoir by Mark Krupnick, Rahv believed that the others had capitulated to the “new sensibility”—a term associated with the counterculture of the 1960s and its emphasis on psychedelic drugs, rock music, pornography, science fiction, “happenings,” and the ideas of Marshall McLuhan. Krupnick recalled that in Rahv’s eyes, “Partisan read more like a pop magazine with each issue, with features on Burroughs, ‘camp,’ McLuhan’s media, the Beatles, the new Mutants, and Protean Man. The editors weren’t buying Charles Reich’s ‘greening of America,’ but they weren’t going to miss the train, either.” So Rahv broke with the Partisan Review because “there was no center, no focus, no commitment,” and he set out to lead the literary intelligentsia in a new direction with Modern Occasions.8 Ultimately, this direction was not so new because the cultural values of the new magazine were those of classical modernism, and politically Rahv’s shield of “independence” left him even more disconnected from the living movements and struggles in the 1960s and 1970s than he had been in the 1930s.
Modern Occasions was a failure and after its quick demise everything went steadily downhill for Rahv. A fire killed his second wife and destroyed his much-treasured library; his third marriage was disastrous; with his proclivity for quarrels, political and otherwise, he was isolated from most of his friends and the writers he had helped over the years. In his campaign against the counterculture Rahv became increasingly obsessed with literary vendettas, particularly against Leslie Fiedler and Norman Mailer, whom he regarded as archetypal hucksters, pandering to a mass audience in order to make a fast buck. According to Krupnick, Rahv fell into despair and depression about his failure to link up with young radicals and about the course of events in the United States in general. He drank excessively and depended on pills for innumerable ailments and violent “Timon-like rages.”9
Rahv’s elitist fixat
ion on modernist culture was of a piece with his conception of an “independent and critical Marxism.” In Rahv’s hands Marxism even became an adjunct to modernism in the sense that he reshaped his political perspectives to justify the mood of despair and isolation that he cultivated after the 1930s. It was characteristic that Rahv titled his 1967 appreciation of Trotsky “The Great Outsider.” He portrays the organizer of the Russian Revolution more as a heretic and a pariah than as a mass leader who devoted his intellectual powers to the living struggles of workers and poor peasants for social emancipation.10
The editors of a posthumous collection of Rahv’s essays say that “in his last years . . . Rahv returned to many of his youthful Marxist-Leninist ideas.”11 This statement is problematic, even granting that the editors probably have a rather loose idea as to what constitutes “Marxism-Leninism.” From the mid-1940s to the mid-1960s, the precise nature of Rahv’s politics was one of the best-kept secrets in the world. However, Rahv’s adaptability—”opportunism” is probably the more accurate word—did not suddenly appear in the Cold War years. From the beginning of his rupture with the Communist Party, Rahv prided himself on his ability to politically “maneuver.” Maneuvering is, of course, a part of politics, and no one was more astute at strategical and tactical maneuvers than Lenin. But Rahv managed to free himself completely from Marxist principles that underlie and justify, as well as rule out, certain maneuvers. Krupnick aptly refers to him as a “disillusioned Leninist.”
Rahv apparently favored a socialist revolution in the abstract and believed that such a social transformation would be impossible without the leadership of a Leninist party. He also believed, however, that no organization in existence had the potential for evolving into such a party. Such a combination of positions can be used as a rationale for abstention from participation in socialist political activity, and Rahv seems to have taken full advantage of this rationalization. Although he forcefully exposed the corruption of the exradical intelligentsia, he probably never appeared at a demonstration and may never have allowed his name to be used for any political advertisements during the 1960s and 1970s. After his death, the news that he had left his estate to the state of Israel came as a total surprise to political intimates of his last years, such as Noam Chomsky, to whom Rahv had never expressed an opinion about Israel.12
