Unlike 1789, however, the social revolutionary movement of 1848 was by no means confined to France.
In 1848 organized social revolutionary forces existed in most European countries, and all over Europe these forces promptly drew together and attempted to effect a general social revolution. At this moment appears the notable figure of Karl Marx, chief author of the famous "Communist Manifesto," with its ringing peroration: "Let the ruling classes tremble at a communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working men of all countries, unite!"
The rise of Karl Marx typifies a new influence which had appeared in the revolutionary movement—the influence of the Jews.
Before the nineteenth century the Jews had been so segregated from the general population that they had exerted almost no influence upon popular thought or action.
By the year 1848, however, the Jews of western Europe had been emancipated from most of their civil disabilities, had emerged from their ghettos, and were beginning to take an active part in community life.
Many Jews promptly adopted revolutionary ideas and soon acquired great influence in the revolutionary movement. For this there were several reasons. In the first place, the Jewish mind, instinctively analytical, and sharpened by the dialectic subtleties of the Talmud, takes naturally to dissective criticism.
Again, the Jews, feeling themselves more or less apart from the nations in which they live, tended to welcome the distinctly international spirit of social trialism, by its very being, was bound rapidly to concentrate all wealth in a very few hands, wiping out the middle classes and reducing both bourgeois and working man to a poverty-stricken proletariat.
In other words, he predicted a society of billionaires and beggars.
This was to happen within a couple of generations.
When it did happen the "wage-slaves" were to revolt, dispossess the capitalists, and establish the Socialist commonwealth.
Thus would come to pass the social revolution. But note: this revolution, according to Marx, was (1) sure, (2) soon, (3) easy.
In Marx's last stage of capitalism the billionaires would be so few and the beggars so many that the "revolution" might be a mere hoHday, perhaps effected without shedding a drop of blood. Indeed, it might conceivably be effected according to existing political procedure; for, once have universal suffrage, and the overwhelming majority of proletarian wage-earners could simply vote the whole new order in.
The Bolshevik regime in Hungary represents the crest of the revolutionary wave which swept over Central Europe during the year 1919. It was short-Hved, lasting less than six months, but during that brief period it almost ruined Hungary. As in Russia, the Bolshevik coup in Hungary was effected by a small group of revolutionary agitators, taking advantage of a moment of acute political disorganization, and backed by the most violent elements of the city proletariat. The leaders were mainly young "intellectuals," ambitious but not previously successful in life, and were mostly Jews.
Under Horkheimer’s leadership the Frankfurt School attracted some brilliant scholars and intellectuals including Theodor Adorno, Eric Fromm, Wilhelm Reich, Walter Benjamin, Leo Lowenthal and Herbert Marcuse. Like Leon Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg, Georg Lukacs, Bela Kun and other notable European Marxists in the early 1900s, many of the Frankfurt scholars were secular Jews.
American Neo-Marxism
THe Columbia Connection
When Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power in Germany in 1933, the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research was shut down “for tendencies hostile to the state” and most of its library confiscated. Horkheimer was one of the first scholars to be dismissed from Frankfurt University along with luminaries such as the theologian Paul Tillich and the psychologist Karl Mannheim. Seeing the proverbial handwriting on the wall, most of the Institute’s faculty and staff fled Germany, and the trustees considered reestablishing the school in Geneva, London or Paris. Significantly, they never considered seeking sanctuary in Stalin’s USSR, the only officially-Marxist regime in the world at the time.
In previous years the ISR had developed contacts with prominent Americans including the Marxist historian Charles Beard, the sociologist Robert MacIver, and the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, all of whom were associated with Columbia University in New York City. When Horkheimer visited the U.S. in May, 1934, he was received by Columbia’s president, Nicholas Murray Butler. Much to Horkheimer’s surprise, Butler offered the ISR official affiliation with the university, including offices and classrooms in one of the university’s buildings.
The great irony, of course, was that while America was providing sanctuary to Horkheimer and his comrades, they were working to undermine the very traditions and democratic institutions that accorded them safety and security. Although Horkheimer portrayed the Institute as a non-political and “scientific” think-tank, he and his colleagues applied the same principles of Critical Theory they had developed in Germany to American society and culture as they focused on two priorities:
(1)A critique of German National Socialism (Nazism), which they disingenuously caricatured, along with Italian Fascism, as “right-wing” totalitarian ideologies. In the process, they linked Nazism and capitalism to the extent that Horkheimer declared that those who refrained from criticizing capitalism forfeited the right to criticize Nazism.
(2) A critique of American authoritarianism, including a withering attack on evils such as racism in American society and culture. Just as classism had traditionally been Europe’s most vulnerable point of attack, racism had been America’s most persistent problem. In the early 1920s Trotsky predicted that just as the oppressed proletariat constituted the revolutionary vanguard in classical Marxist thought, oppressed blacks could be mobilized as the shock troops for an American revolution. Although this was a stark departure from classical Marxist theory, Horkheimer and his colleagues were quick to realize the potential in this strategy.
Neo Marxism ...based on a seriously defective naturalistic worldview that, among other things, provides no philosophical basis for judging the morality or goodness of anything.
As Horkheimer and his ISR associates settled into America in the 1930s, and they effectively exploited the situation in their efforts to forge a new revolutionary alliance of victims – i.e., blacks, Jews, and the traditional proletariat classes of factory workers, farmers and menial laborers – along with their sympathizers in academia, the media, and in the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). A standing joke among Greenwich Village Communists in the 1930s was this exchange between two Party members discussing an upcoming cell meeting: “You bring the Negro, and I’ll bring the folksinger.” They could have added: “And we’ll ask another comrade to bring the Jewish intellectual.”
When the Institute for Social Research relocated in America, it lost much of its funding. The costs associated with resettling and employing more than a dozen refugee scholars, along with poor investments in the stock market and disastrous real estate transactions, severely strained the Institute’s economic resources. [Yes, you read that right: the Neo-Marxist and anti-capitalist ISR invested heavily in the capitalistic system.] In fact, had it not been for the financial support the Institute received from the Rockefeller Foundation, Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), the International Labour Organization, the American Jewish Committee and the Jewish Labor Committee, and the Hacker Institute (an upscale psychiatric clinic in Beverly Hills), the ISR would probably have ceased to exist.
Horkheimer was recruited by John J. McCloy, the U.S. High Commissioner for Germany, to return to Germany as part of the Allies’ “denazification” program. Horkheimer was put in charge of reforming German higher education, and he was joined in 1949 by his former ISR colleague, Theodor Adorno. Over the next several years they and their colleagues influenced the political culture in the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany), and as professors at Frankfurt University they indoctrinated a whole new generation of German scholars in the ideology of Neo-Marxism – most notably the philosopher and sociologist Jurgen Habermas.
The Sixties
Throughout the 1950s dozens of scholars who had been associated with the Institute for Social Research obtained faculty positions in American universities. Of these, Herbert Marcuse emerged as the most influential.
Through his teaching and writings, he became the key link between the Neo-Marxists of the Frankfurt School and the American New Left movement of the 1960s. The New Left incorporated the seminal ideas of Critical Theory in its critique of America as a fascist and repressive state.
For left-wing activists in the Sixties, Critical Theory was far more appealing than classical Marxism for 3 reasons: (1) It provided a comprehensive deconstruction of American culture as innately racist, sexist, imperialistic, and consumer-obsessed; (2) It incorporated the arts and popular culture into the cultural revolution; and (3) It celebrated sexual liberation and a rejection of traditional moral values.
The single most significant influence on the ideology of the New Left was Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization, published in 1955.
In the book, Marcuse argued that most of the angst and hang-ups and neuroses that young people feel are the result of sexual repression. The solution was a “non-repressive society” in which libertarian socialistic values prevailed – i.e, an egalitarian society in which individuals were free to pursue their own hedonistic impulses.
Marcuse’s call for sexual liberation and “polymorphous perversity” inspired popular Sixties’ slogans such as “Do your own thing” and “If it feels good, do it,” but he framed the erotic revolution in the larger context of a cultural and political revolution. In his words, “The fight for eros is a political fight.”
In the 1930s the Frankfurt School sponsored two psychoanalytical studies on the phenomenon of fascism in Germany: Wilhelm Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933) and Eric Fromm’s Studies on Authority and the Family (1936). Based on respondants’ answers to a questionnaire, Fromm analyzed the German populace as “authoritarian,” “revolutionary,” or “ambivalent.” (Fromm borrowed these categories from J. J. Bachofen, the controversial 19 th Century Swiss anthropologist who claimed that human societies were originally matriarchal.) From the results of his study, Fromm concluded that sadomasochism was the core characteristic of the authoritarian/fascist personality. Of course, the interpretation of the data was anything but unbiased or scientific as it was all filtered through a Neo-Marxist and Neo-Freudian values grid, but it did hold great potential in terms of its propagandistic value.
In 1942 the American Jewish Committee offered to fund a Department of Scientific Research within the ISR for the purpose of studying anti-Semitism in America. Max Horkheimer enthusiastically agreed to supervise the project, and over the next several years ISR scholars produced five volumes of research. The last and most extensive study of the subject was Theodor Adorno’s The Authoritarian Personality (1950), in which he sought to verify statistically what he called “a new anthropological type” – the prototypical fascist as characterized by a particular set of conventional moral and cultural values.
From a marketing standpoint, a major attraction of Adorno’s book was his construction of an “F-Scale” (Fascist-Scale) rating system based on nine personality variables incorporating several terms that are currently associated with Political Correctness. According to Adorno, the Fascist character type strongly identifies with the following traits:
• Conventionalism. Rigid adherence to conventional middle-class values.
• Authoritarian submission. A submissive and uncritical attitude toward authority figures.
• Authoritarian aggression. The inclination to apply or enforce conventional values on others.
• Anti-intraception. Opposition to the subjective, the imaginative, or the intuitive.
• Superstition and stereotypy. The belief in the supernatural or mystical determinism, and the disposition to think in rigid categories (i.e., racial, ethnic and gender prejudice).
• Power and “toughness.” A preoccupation with dominance-submission, strong-weak, leaderfollower; identification with power figures; exaggerated assertion of strength and toughness.
• Destructiveness and cynicism. Generalized hostility and the tendency to vilify others.
• Projectivity. “The disposition to believe that wild and dangerous things go on in the world.” [I.e., a conspiratorial mindset.]
• Sex. An exaggerated concern with conventional sexual morality and a preoccupation with other people’s sexual practices [Source: Martin Jay, p. 243.]
Borrowing from Freud and Fromm, Adorno contended that the breeding ground for the “authoritarian syndrome” was the patriarchal family headed by a “stern and distant” father. In such scenarios, he argued, children repress their innate hostility while becoming passive/ aggressive, which produces serious mental disorders such as sadomasochism. By contrast, the families of mentally healthy children were more matriarchal, less conventional, less status-conscious, and less demanding. In such families the parents were loving and affectionate, but the mother, who was nurturing but also strong and independent, was clearly dominant.
Originally, he borrowed Fromm’s term to identify the antithesis of the authoritarian fascist – i.e., the principled and mentally-healthy “revolutionary.” However, by the time he finally published his study he referred to this alternative character type as a “liberal” or a “democrat” – terms that were considerably less controversial. According to Adorno, the prototypical liberal was an independent thinker who was committed to “progressive social change” and who, coincidentally, held the same values and bore the same characteristics as Adorno and his Neo-Marxist colleagues.
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