A specter is haunting the intellectual classes—not exactly the
specter of Communism, however, so much as the specter of an
irresistible wave of nostalgia for a time when Marxism and its
utopian myth of the classless society held so many superior minds in
thrall. Now that the tyranny of Communist rule has been lifted from
the lives of millions the world over and Marxist doctrine has lost
its power to shape the future—for even in China, the last major
bastion of Communist Party control, capitalism has succeeded in
subverting the faithful–intellectuals in the West are showing signs
of a yearning for the good old days when, at no cost to the freedom
or prosperity of people like themselves, it was fashionable for
Marxism to be upheld as the fount of all wisdom.

It has long been recognized, of course, that in the heyday of its
spell over the intellectual life of the West, Marxism had always
been something more than an economic or political doctrine. Echoing
Marx’s condemnation of religion as “the opiate of the masses,” the
French political philosopher Raymond Aron described Marxism as “the
opiate of the intellectuals,” and it was certainly true that for
many of its adherents in the West the tenets of Marxist thought
functioned as a teleological substitute for religious faith, and was
thus as resistant to the tests of verification—never mind the tests
of common sense—as the most occult doctrines of the religious
mystics. For intellectuals, moreover, it was important that Marxism
presented itself not as metaphysics or mysticism but as a “science”
of history. It was a large part of its allure that it offered its
acolytes the absolute assurance that, whatever setbacks Marxism
might suffer on the way to building the New Jerusalem, they had
elected to be on the right side of history.

We now have ample reason to know that Marxism has itself suffered
the fate that its prophets used to reserve for their ideological
adversaries—which is to say, it has ended up on that famous ash
heap of history. Yet in this post-Marxist era, when Marxist ideology
has been stripped of so much of its power to tyrannize entire
societies, the will to believe in its virtues and salvage something
precious from the ruins persists as a form of conspicuous
intellectual consumption among academic minds safely removed from
the disobliging consequences of Marxist reality. This
remarkable
phenomenon is almost enough to persuade us that Marx’s celebrated
dictum about history—that it repeats itself, occuring first as tragedy
and then as farce—is essentially correct, at least as far as the
history of Marxism is concerned. With the age of Marxism as tragedy
drawing to
a close, the age of Marxism as farce is now apparently upon us.

Or so we infer from the bizarre spectacle of intellectual hoopla
that has welcomed the arrival of a fancy “gift” edition of The
Communist Manifesto,
gotten up to look like the breviary of some
Palm Springs religious sect, on the 150th anniversary of its
original publication.[1]
It would be tempting to regard this
publishing event as an episode in political camp—and thus
dismissible—were it not for the hosannas that have marked its
publication on both sides of the Atlantic.

In New York, for example, Steven Marcus
—the George Delacorte
Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University celebrated the
occasion with a hortatory essay in The New York Times Book Review
of April 26 entitled “Marx’s Masterpiece at 150.” This effusion
hailed The Communist Manifesto as nothing less than the kind of
achievement “we ordinarily associate with great works of the
literary imagination—with the imagination of art.” Though
acknowledging that Marx got certain things a little wrong—“the
revolution it hailed was not successful; the proletariat did not
become the gravediggers of the bourgeoisie; the ever-deeper
pauperization of the working class was not part of the [capitalist]
system’s ‘inevitable tendencies’”—Professor Marcus nonetheless
praised the Manifesto’s “incandescence” in fusing “prediction,
vision, prophesy,” etc.

Then, in the London Times Literary Supplement of May 8, John
Gray—professor of European thought at the London School
of
Economics—grandly announced that “Marx’s view of capitalism has
been in some crucial respects vindicated.” Professor Gray
acknowledged, to be sure, that there was the little problem of what
he delicately described as “the historical experience of central
economic planning”—in other words, the Marxist “experiment” in the
Soviet Union. In his view, however, we have tended to get that
problem all wrong. “It is a mistake to think that Soviet planning
failed because it was not implemented by a democratic government,”
writes Professor Gray. “The truth is nearer the opposite. The Soviet
system lacked working democratic institutions, because the failure
of central planning necessitated tyranny.” Huh? Spoken by some
schlemiel in a Woody Allen movie, this sort of thing might pass as
an amusing bit of blague, but in a discussion of “the historical
experience of central economic planning” it is simply fatuous. For
in what nanosecond of the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia were
“democratic institutions” ever an integral part of Lenin’s vision of
the Marxist state?

“Marx’s achievement,” writes Professor Gray, “was to identify a
contradiction in liberal civilization.” Yet about which serious
writer in nineteenth-century Europe can it not be said that he—or,
indeed, she identified a contradiction in liberal civilization? In
one way or another, this was, after all, one of the dominant subjects
of European thought in the nineteenth century. Radicals, liberals,
conservatives, and reactionaries all weighed in with their grim
critiques and dire forecasts, for it was in the very nature of
liberal civilization in that period to invite criticism and to debate
fundamental principles, which inevitably entails an examination of
fundamental contradictions. That is indeed one of the ways in which
liberal civilization in the nineteenth century differed from our own
version of liberal civilization at the end of the twentieth century.
How is it possible for the professor of European thought at the
London School of Economics not to be aware of such a thing? But now
that the discussion of Marxism has entered the age of farce, we can
probably expect to see a lot more of the same.

About those much vaunted “contradictions” of late capitalism,
moreover, it is certainly time for grownups to acknowledge that
living with them has turned out to be far better than any of the
possible alternatives. The truth is that capitalism has brought greater
improvements in the quality of life for more millions of people than
any other system we know. God forbid that any society should ever again be
condemned to live under a system that is wholly lacking in such
“contradictions.”

Notes
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1. 
   The Communist Manifesto: A Modern Edition, by Karl Marx and
   Frederick Engels,
   with an introduction by Eric Hobsbawm; Verso, 87 pages, $13.
   Go back to the text.