Howard L. Parsons 1965
Source: Praxis, No. 2, 1967, pp. 264-275.
Transcribed: by Zdravko Saveski, 2025.
When I was living in Europe in 1963-64, I talked with a Marxist philosopher who, having been in the U.S., wished to compare notes with me about his impressions there. "Do you know Professor X?" he said. "He is a progressive man, a scholar of Marxism, and a friend of socialism. I talked with him at length, and he showed me his large library of Marxist classics." I did know Professor X, but I knew nothing about his scholarly interests in Marxism or his progressive activity. It turned out, on further conversation, that Professor Y and Professor Z were in the same category: they were men and scholars whose Marxist ideas and progressive habits had been active before and during the war against fascism but had been put into deep freeze during the cold war against communism.
How many such quiet Marxists or semi-Marxists are there today? It is hard to say. But this generation of men, who had reached their youth by the beginning of World War II, still remember the hopes and dreams of that era: the exciting experiment of Soviet communism, the Depression, the labor movement, the revolutionary unrest on the part of the unemployed in the face of abundance, the New Deal, the rise of fascism, the United Front, the alliance of western democracies and Soviet socialism against the fascist dictatorships, the formation of the United Nations Organization, and the great post-war hopes. Such memories do not die; they are only submerged, like an iceberg in a cold sea.
The American dream, moreover, is a social and national one, and antedates the 1930's. The doctrines of the sovereignty of the people, and the right of revolution against tyranny otherwise irremediable, are old and European. But they were tried out in an unprecedented social experiment on the North American continent -- the first experiment of its kind in a world that was "new" both physically and culturally to the emigrating European. To be sure, the experiment was far from perfect: it imported the ancestral class structures and exploitations; it employed African slave labor on a large scale: it slaughtered the Indians and laid waste to the land; it was pluralistic and diverted the revolutionary fervor of poor, immigrant classes and workers by the lure of the dollar and the dream of universal freedom, equality, and opportunity. The continent was vast; many things might be tried. In the 19th century hundreds of religious and secular "Communal" societies were organized to experiment with various kinds and degrees of socialism, with varying success. A progressive literature developed (Emerson, Thoreau, Channing, Garrison, Parker, Lloyd, Whitman, Bellamy, Howells, Twain, Dreiser, Sinclair, and others) which was in part a reflex of that movement and of the enthusiasm and optimism that underlay and surrounded it. In the last part of the 19th and the early part of the 20th century, the development of industry brought forth an enlarged working class. The result was intensified class struggle in the mills and the mines, and the emergence of labor unions, labor leaders, politicians, and intellectuals who in one way or another were influenced by the doctrine of socialism as they had developed in Europe in response to the ideas of Marx and Engels and their followers. Such were, for example, Joe Hill, Daniel De Leon, Big Bill Haywood, Eugene Debs, Clarence Darrow, Thorstein Veblen, John Commons, Albion Small, W. E. B. Du Bois, and many others.
In 1912 Debs ran for the presidency on the ticket of the American Socialist Party and received almost a million votes. Twenty years later, in the midst of the Depression, Norman Thomas, the socialist, polled a like number of votes. But although the sufferings of the Depression had imubed most Americans with a restless and even revolutionary spirit, they were not, and had not even been, ideologically oriented, having left ideology behind them with the ruling classes of Church and State of Europe, and having set about to become "self-made men" as pioneers on the receding American frontier or in the business enterprises of the expanding cities. Thus during the 1930's they were prepared to accept the humanitarian goals and pragmatic, ad hoc methods of the New Deal. And on the other side, the Keynesian economists in government, aware of the need to save capitalism, temporarily solved the unemployment problem. And they themselves were saved from further troubles as the U. S. entered World War II, millions of soldiers were sent overseas, and jobs in war industries were opened up for all who desired them.
In the middle of the 19th century in Europe Marx did not see nationalism as a powerful force. But it became a factor in the creation of Soviet socialism; and in World War I, moreover, most workers rallied behind their own governments and fought as soldiers under the flags of their own nations. Patriotism ran high among Americans, who were idealistic, naive about the world "over there", and adventurous. In April, 1917 the war was declared; later that year, the first Espionage Act became law. These demands for loyalty to the warring nation split the socialists, who for some decades had been persecuted and killed in their efforts to organize unions and run political candidates. The government prosecuted some 1500 persons. The International Workers of the World was destroyed. Immediately after the war a wave of hysteria about the "Reds" swept the country. Five elected socialist representatives to the New York State legislature were denied their seats. A socialist representative from Wisconsin, elected to the House of Representatives, was twice excluded from Congress. The U. S. Attorney General, A. Mitchell Palmer, had arrested and caused to be deported 249 radical aliens; the ship in which they sailed was derisively called the "Soviet Ark". Sacco and Vanzetti, two poor workers with anarchist ideas, were, without conclusive evidence, executed for their alleged murder of a paymaster. The new and rampant American nationalism, which drew men together in their anxiety and danger, demanded an enemy. That enemy, the ruling groups realized, was not German imperialism or militarism but socialism. Thus the Palmer raids set the ideological tone and direction of American life for the next half-century. Although many socialists and communists in the 1930's helped to form the Congress of Industrial Organizations and occupied influential positions in universities and government, it was never easy to be open about one's radicalism. The anti-Red feeling remained, but it was rendered less effective by the acceleration of progressive movements and ideas.
As we all know, the cold war was a deliberate attempt to revive the anti-communist theme in American feeling and thought. Beginning with the first bomb dropped on Hiroshima (as P. M. S. Blackett's book, Fear, War and the Bomb shows), American foreign policy has sought to "contain" communism -- and at the same time to maximize the profits of monopoly capitalism (see Baran and Sweazy, Monopoly Capital) by control of the world market; to dominate the other colonial powers; to suppress national liberation movements by economic and military power; to dampen ideological dissent at home; and to spread the "affluence" accruing from such a policy among the great middle stratum of U. S. workers and so dull their dissent. This policy in its varied facets has had varied success. The cold war, through its general atmosphere of fear and through specific statutes, succeeded in retarding or freezing much independent and critical thought. Socialism and Marxism, along with other kinds of criticism and dissent, according suffered. And insofar as they have continued to live, they have lived below the surface -- in the books, memories, and fragmentary dreams of scholars. Of course a Communist Party existed. But after the war it was not strong (its most effective action was its participation in the coalition of the Progressive Party). By the 1950's many youth had dropped away, and in 1956 the Soviet revelations of Stalinism produced further disaffection. Moreover, a barrage of legislation was directed at all who appeared to be communists, socialists, or "fellow travellers". The Smith Act (1940) made it a crime to "teach the duty, necessity, desirability or propriety of overthrowing any Government in the United States by force and violence" or to be a member of any society teaching or advocating the same. (The membership clause has now been declared unconstitutional.) The Labor and Management Relations Act (1947) required the signing of non-communist affidavits by labor union officials. The Internal Security Act or McGarran Act (1950) established a board and required "communist-action" and "communist-front" organizations to register with it; it made it unlawful for a communist to apply for, renew, or use a passport. (Three "communist-front" organizations and the Communist Party have been upheld in their resistance to registration; and individual registration and the passport provision have been declared unconstitutional.) The Communist Control Act (1954) required "communist-infiltrated" organizations to register with the government. The Immigration and Nationality Law (1952) made an immigrant's membership in an organization required to register under the International Security Act a ground for deportation.
These federal laws, greatly aided by the public media and the national hysteria called McCarthyism, generated a very deep antipathy against Marxism, socialism, communism, and all else associated with them. (President Eisenhower was accused by a member of the John Birch Society of serving the cause of communism; and a university professor, when he denied that he had read certain books or believed certain things, was told by his inquisitor: "Don't you know that you can be a communist without knowing that you are one?") The McCarran Act gave rise to similar laws in 20 states and to laws outlawing the Communist Party in four states. It set the model for laws restricting voting rights, the right to hold public office, to teach, and practice law in numerous states. Loyalty oaths (where one must disclaim that he is communist, subversive, etc.) have been required of employees and teachers in at least 30 states, and many private academic institutions have followed suit. Such restrictions on Marxist thought have become so widespread during the cold war that normally it would be -- and still is -- occupational and professional suicide publicly to declare oneself a Marxist, let alone a communist. Even more insidious than the laws have been the repressive effects of what John Stuart Mill called "the tyranny of the majority" -- the intimidation of millions of public leaders and teachers who censored themselves on controversial questions for fear of criticism and loss of their jobs.
What is the situation in the U. S. today? In the 1960's the civil rights and the peace movements have made dissent more acceptable. Their actions -- in sit-in's, in street demonstrations and marches, in teach-in's -- have spoken more loudly than words. And they have helped to created a national atmosphere in which dissenting words might more easily be expressed and listened to. For various reasons many of the youth, who are quite active in such movements, are not ideological or philosophical and hence not Marxist; at the same time they are not opposed to Marxism. It simply does not interest them, and many are ready to cooperate with Marxists on practical issues. The Du Bois Club, perhaps the most effective of the youth groups (and hence early in 1966 cited for a hearing by the Attorney General to be placed on a "subversive" list), is in part Marxist, stressing coalition and the radicalization of various mass movements. The Young People's Socialist Leagues stresses a coalitionist approach within the Democratic Party, and is anti-communist. The "far new left" includes Trotskyites and the pro-Chinese Progressive Labor Party. In sum, Marxism or the thought of Marx as a guiding outlook and method is not a powerful movement among the politically aware and active American youth today. American youth tend to be pragmatic, pluralistic, eclectic, and non-philosophical. They shun "isms", even humanism. The explanation for this attitude would require considerable space; but it should include a discussion of American history and of the reaction of contemporary American youth against their parents and the "old left", the Bomb, and Stalinism.
Among the teachers and research scholars in the universities there is spreading interest in the thought of Marx. This interest has been slowly rising to the surface with the relaxation of the tensions of the cold war and the development of dissent within the nation. The Vietnam War has not throttled this interest but has on the contrary released it. Unlike the reaction during the Korean War, many men are ready to perceive and describe the Vietnam War for what it is, namely, effort of a powerful ruling class to arrest a peasant's revolution. Since 1962 the Society for the Philosophical Study of Dialectical Materialism has sponsored at least two symposia per year in conjunction with the meetings of the American Philosophical Association. These meetings, which have featured papers by American and foreign philosophers of diverse persuasions, have attracted audiences of more than 200 philosophers. In September, 1966, 2000 people attended the two-day Socialist Scholars' Conference in New York City -- twice the number attending the first meeting in 1965. The Conference described itself as "an independent association -- to provide opportunities for the scholarly discussion of subjects of interest to socialists". It stated: "No one's ideological credentials will be scrutinized nor will partisan purposes be entertained." The American Institute for Marxist Studies, founded in 1964 as "a non-profit educational, research and bibliographical institute to help foster Marxist scholarship in the United State", to "produce a dialogue among Marxist and non-Marxist scholars", and to "shun sectarian thinking and rigidity", has elicited the support of 250 associates in 26 states. It publishes books, monographs, and bibliographies, and conducts symposia; and its frequent newsletter gives evidence of considerable research in Marxist thought in the U.S. The openness of the academic public to the thought of Marx is indicated by the conference at the University of Notre Dame in April, 1966, "Marx and the Western World", to which a number of scholars of Marxist thought were invited from around the world. In December, 1966 Roger Garaudy lectured at a dozen universities (though not without some protest by chauvinistic persons and groups) on various topics, perhaps the chief one being the Marxist-Christian dialogue. The comment of Time Magazine, which throughout the cold war was one of its most ardent proponents, is significant: "If so astute a theoretician as Garaudy is willing to admit Marxism's errors and its imperative need for radical updating, Christianity and Communism may have far more to talk about than either belief would have admitted a decade ago." (December 30, 1966)
This remark indicates that probably a large number of persons and groups are prepared to support the policy of peaceful coexistence and are ready for the dialogue between communists and non-communists which is so far advanced, relatively speaking, in Europe. Slowly the facts of the nuclear age have come home to many Americans; they have begun to realize the dangers in confrontations like the Cuban crisis and in wars like the one in Vietnam. They do not want war, and unlike the Americans of 50 years ago they accept the fact that socialism is on the earth to stay. Just as the post-war national revolutions of colored peoples in Asia and Africa have inspired the Negro protests in the U. S., so the movement of world events since 1917 has changed American thinking toward Marx and Marxism. Nothing is more convincing about a doctrine than its established practice. The emergence of the U. S. S. R. in 1917 and of a whole cluster of socialist nations since World War II -- comprising altogether some one billion people -- is the most formidable fact of this 50-vear period. Americans as a nation have had a divided attitude toward socialism, socialists, Marxism, and Marxists during this period, ranging from chauvinistic hostility during and following World War I, then alliance and friendliness during World War II, the post-war hostility, and again cautious openness and qualified friendliness during the 1960's. This divided attitude reflects a division within American life at large, which we may define as cooperativeness vs. competitiveness. But it also reflects the new contradictions on the world stage. As the U. S. government has become separated from its own allies in Europe and Asia and has faced the threat of socialist China, it has tended to draw close to the socialist nations of eastern Europe; and President Johnson's policy of "building bridges" is an expression of a desired detente with those nations, which since the death of Stalin seem to have become more flexible, polycentric, and democratic.
A hundred years ago in 1867 Marx published the first volume of Das Kapital. But even before that time his followers in Germany, like Weitling, had brought his ideas to the U. S., and the very founders of the nation had placed the doctrines of popular sovereignty and the right of revolution at its base. Lincoln strongly reiterated these doctrines. "Labor is prior to, and independent of capital", he said in his annual message to Congress in 1861. And in a letter to the Workingmen's Association of New York in 1864 he declared: "The strongest bond of human sympathy, outside of the family relation, should be the one uniting all working people, of all nations, and tongues, and kindreds." Whitman, with his profound appreciation of the working man, the farmer, the despised and rejected, and the common man, had similar notions, as did many another progressive thinker. These men and women were not Marxists in the usual European sense; they were democrats, humanists, materialists of a kind, perhaps dialectical, believers in the earth and in man's labor and in the values of man's spirit, both individual and collective. They had a sense of classes and class struggle; but their thought had not been forged in the closed cities and shops of crowded Europe, and they ever imagined and hoped that man might escape those old-world oppressions and struggles. But they did have been much in common with Marx's thought from their revolutionary, democratic beginnings. Thus, to that degree, they did not feel the need for this thought -- at least not until the industrial situation in America began to parallel that in Europe. Then it was -- in the last part of the 19th century -- that Marx's thought became more and more relevant, and men either fiercely opposed it or championed it. Even among its champions and among the laboring classes generally, the peculiar character of American history could not be escaped. Men tended to be pragmatic and short-term in their approach to their problems; "theory" was suspect; the important thing was to "get the job done". Even today the rank-and-file worker in the steel mill, when asked to take an interest in the Vietnam War, will reply, "What's it to me?" Thus, in the 50 years from 1867 to 1917, the thought of Marx became only a minor ingredient among many in shaping the outlook of Americans. In 1917 that thought came as a shock to the country. Some labor leaders and intellectuals greeted it with great hope; the ruling groups regarded it with deep antagonism; and most became caught up in the "Red scare" fomented by the newspapers, or else became indifferent. Al Capone, one of the leading gangsters and free enterprisers in the 1920's, stated the view of many leading politicians and free enterprisers when he said: "Bolshevism is knocking at out gates . . . We must keep America whole and safe and unspoiled. We must keep the worker away from red literature and red ruses; we must see that his mind remains healthy." Since during the period following World War II the once militant labor movement has been pacified and most labor leaders have accepted the premises of capitalism and the cold war, the Red-hunters have not made labor their primary target. Instead, investigators like the House Un-American Activities Committee and the Senate Internal Security Committee have attacked those persons and groups who were most active in their criticism of government policy -- civil rights leaders, peace workers, Negroes, women, students, professors. And these people often held no systematic philosophy but were simply moved by strong convictions perhaps best summarized in their country's own Declaration of Independence:
We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness -- That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
These critical people were not in fact engaged in altering or abolishing the existing form of government. They were simply speaking, writing, assembling, and acting to see that their government did its duty, i. e., secured the rights of its citizens who by the millions were being deprived of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. Are such convictions and such actions, then, subversive? If so, then we shall be compelled to say in all logic that everyone who believes in the foundation and constitution of the United States must be subversive: and we shall be compelled to add that who persecute those striving to uphold these rights are subverters of their country. And is it not true that Karl Marx himself, with his own concepts and language, considered Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness as indispensable values for man, and rested his political teaching on the doctrine that government derives their just powers from the consent of the governed? To this extent Americans who have learned in school and in adult experience to appreciate the Declaration of Independence already share a portion of Marx's thought without having read a line of Marx's writings. To be sure, most know little if anything about class struggle, the dialectical movement of history, Marx's theory of capitalism, base and superstructure, etc. But the humanistic, melioristic, radically democratic vision -- which both Marx and the American founding fathers learned from the Enlightenment -- has remained as a dim but deep conviction in the minds and hearts of most Americans. And in periods of national crisis -- such as the Civil War, the Depression, and World War II -- when conditions demanded that men unite in a common cause, then this vision found its clearest and most radical expression and elicited the best impulses of men. In ordinary life, however, this vision is blurred and crushed by the anxiety, individualism, and competitiveness of prevailing way of life in America.
In addition, throughout our history there have been strong anti-intellectual and anti-philosophical trends in American culture. We may mention some of the factors that have produced such trends: the de nouveau and pluralistic character of American culture; our lack of a widely established tradition of philosophical thought; our passing allegiance to imported thought forms, such as those of Christianity, capitalism, and democracy; our belief in the "invisible hand" of God, the market, and the democratic process; the tentativeness, mobility, and continuous opportunism of our culture; the strong influence of English empiricism and the philosophy of enlightened self-interest; the notion that work is virtue; the belief in automatic progress; the conviction that there would always be enough material goods for everyone and enough spiritual space for all kinds of ideas and classes of men (Creve Coeur's dream); the existential reliance on a policy of expansionism at home and abroad; the paramount importance of practice and success in business, on the frontier, on the farm, and in the race for rapid upward social mobility; the relatively secure position of the ruling class; the undaunted hopes of the common people to rise, if not from log cabin to the White House then from tenement to suburb; experimentalism, ad hoc inventions, rough-and-ready solutions, gadgets, and suspicion of theory; the value of money and reputation; the homogeneity of convention; the spread and dominance of business morals; the influence of science, chiefly applied and technological; the reaction against all things European, including its grand philosophical visions, such as (in equal degree) those of the idealist Hegel and the materialist Marx; the repudiation of government planning, i. e., of general ideas, from on high; the puritan stress on particular individual self-assertiveness supported by a pervasive and guiding providence: until recent times, the absence of a fixed hierarchy and of special intellectual castes, and the power of the common people in shaping outlook at local levels; the absence of a protracted clash between the propertied class and the class of men concerned with human rights and values; the bigness of the country, its abundance, and its expansion, all of which prevented such a clash; the contempt for contemplation, which is associated with the uselessness of the inept man, the leisure class, and the European; the identification of radical thought, dissent, and broad social alternatives with foreign and hence "subversive" influences; the distrust of law -- as well as of universal ideas and relations -- except as law is thought of as made by men or, in Justice Holmes' words, as an "experiment"; the preoccupation with possessing physical goods and assets and the general unconcern with planning for the higher humanistic values. In general, neither the ruling groups nor the masses of common men have wanted or felt the need for a philosophical outlook. From time to time waves of anti-intellectual hysteria swept the country; but for the most part Americans simply dismissed the larger ideas as irrelevant and "impractical". If Edison and Ford and Coolidge and Babe Ruth had little theoretical background in their fields -- who else needed it? The fad for college education on the part of the middle class is not so much a thirst for broad and deep knowledge as an anxious quest for status by the parents of the students.
Besides these conditions, other forces have been at work to militate against a consideration (let alone adoption) of Marx's thought among intellectuals and laboring people. All Americans are immigrants or descendants of immigrants. Not yet established and secure in his new land and economy and culture (which by its competitive nature increased his insecurity), nearly every American has felt a need for a national identity. To the extent that he wished to be patriotic and sever his ties with the Old World, he directed his hostility toward newly arrived or smaller immigrant groups and toward foreign groups and ideologies from which he felt particularly alienated -- the Slavs, the Africans, the Chinese. Most Americans, by reason of language, history, and ancestry, were tied to western Europe and its traditions and values. An insular people, they were, moreover, ignorant of other traditions. Hence when not only socialism but Russian socialism appeared on the international scene in 1917, they were emotionally ready to accept, and intellectually unprepared to resist, the anti-communist propaganda that has permeated the culture for the past 50 years. Further, as stated, American intellectuals and labor leaders had developed their own indigenous brands of radicalism. These had the stamp of individualism on them, and still secretly nourished the agrarian dream that suspected all business, industry, and urban life, and longed to live a peaceful life in the suburbs. Finally, with the exception of the 1930's, the labor movement has not been a potent force in shaping national policy or social values, nor, concomitantly, did intellectuals arise in large number to champion and lead its cause by means of a Marxist analysis. The evident prosperity and widely shared hope of Americans to better themselves helped to blunt the militancy of the European laborer who had immigrated. Status -- i. e., improved material and cultural living -- became a powerful motivation. (Warner with some appropriateness defines "class" in America in terms of wealth and social groupings and style of living and spending.) In their turn, intellectuals could not discern in America the sharp class conflicts that were so obvious in Europe; and when they did, as in the northern industrial cities or on the southern plantations, they tended to address themselves to particular problems rather than to the whole economy, and to be meliorative in their proposals. In any case, revolutionary leaders were "warriors without a battlefield".
Finally, U. S. Marxists, like Marxists elsewhere, have tended to emphasize the economic foundation of Marxism and to neglect its social and humanistic meanings and values. As Professor Lukacs has pointed out, this has been a world-wide tendency for some 80 years. There have, of course, been understandable causes for this -- the encirclement of the Soviet Union, the economic backwardness of countries where socialism was adopted, the cold war, etc. But to say that it has been necessitated in just that way would be contrary to the spirit of Marx's thought, for he believed that within the limits of his specific circumstances man creates his own self and society. In the United States Marxism found its most effective hold among the workers and their leaders whose explicit demands have always been immediate economic gains. But at this point Marxism was mitigated by a contradiction that did not appear in those backward economies where socialism has taken root throughout the world. The economic demands of the workers have been demands produced and conditioned by the capitalistic system and directed to satisfaction within the system. Workers, in short, want the food, clothes, houses, automobiles, etc. that the affluent groups, managers and owners, have. Hence their demands have been highly individualistic, taking little account of their fellow workers, their society, or the world; and, as the ruling groups have recognized, they have been easily accommodated to the prevailing system by enough rewards to pacify discontent and prevent strikes. Thus the expressed demands of the workers are contained. But worse, their deeper and real demands are so distorted as to contradict their human and long-range fulfillment.
Even during the war, when the esprit de corps of workers was high (see The Dynamic of Industrial Democracy by Golden and Rutenberg), work was motivated by economic gain and patriotic feeling. And when the war ended, men lost the patriotic feeling and reverted to working for their own material gain. Thus the efforts of Marxists to reach the workers foundered on the underlying reef of the workers' "materialism". Or rather, the Marxists of the 1930's and 1940's who were labor leaders were effective because they were materialists and the workers' demands were material ones. But their materialism was absorber and conquered by the prevailing materialism of capitalism, which proved itself able to pacify the workers' demands. It is true that Marxists were subordinated and, in the early post-war period, purged from the labor movement. At the same time, if we ask why the workers were not more militant in fighting for their independence and in defending the radical leaders in their midst during this period -- why, in short, the "educational" program of the C. I. O. failed to develop in the workers a sound philosophy and commitment -- the responsibility must fall back in part on the Marxists themselves. One may say, truthfully, that the workers were not ready to be educated, being unconscious captives of a capitalist economy and ideology. But the educators themselves needed to be educated. "The Americans", wrote Engels", "are worlds behind in all theoretical questions", and this has applied to many intellectuals and Marxists, who have only theoretically (and hence not really) learned the principle of the unity of theory and practice. The would-be educators of the workers needed to re-think, as some are now doing, the humanistic goals of Marxism, including the economic ones, in an integrating way, as well as the means and conditions thereto. Lacking this integrated guidance, divided workers will continue to seek material values through job, paycheck, and shopping center, and to derive ersatz spiritual satisfaction from the contrived fantasy life of television, radio, magazine, drugs, and religion.
Marx described philosophy as the "head" of the emancipation of man and the proletariat as its "heart". But these have not yet matured in America, whose capitalism is old. Someone has yet to explain definitively why this is so, and the explanation might take the form of The American Mode of Production, in which all relevant factors in the American ecology and history are taken into account.
What of the future of Marx's thought in the United States? That will be determined more by the conditions of our life than by our consciousness, more by the ways in which practice develops than by abstract theory or speculation. "All mysteries which mislead theory to mysticism", wrote Marx in Theses on Feuerbach, "find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice". In their personal, family, and even national affairs, Americans have displayed a certain degree of "practicality". This practicality has often been immediate and short-run -- e. g., the erection of efficient building but the neglect of city planning. It has been trivial -- e. g., the multiplication of gadgets. It has failed to direct itself to important problems like poverty, unemployment, and sickness. It has been turned to destructive ends; one-half of our scientists and engineers are employed in war industries. But conditions will force this practicality to seek new ideas, new theories, new answers. A rising population, falling purchasing power, increasing automation and unemployment, the deepening distress and anger of the 40% of the people who are poor or deprived - as well as changing conditions abroad, such as the break-up of the Free World Alliance, the increasing independence of Europe, the national liberation movements and revolutionary forces in Asia, Africa, and South America, the consolidation and further democratizing of socialist nations -- all these will necessarily produce changes in thought and action among the American people. In my view, fascist forces will make themselves manifest, as they do now; and although the American power elite has power unmatched in the history of the world, and the Pentagon is a multi-billion dollar corporation, the imposition of an effective and widespread totalitarian system in a country of the size and political tradition of the U. S. would be very difficult. Moreover, the power of socialism and of revolutionary movements in the world will have a moderating effect on what happens in the U. S.; the Negro movement and the peace movement are already evidence of this, and American foreign investments ($ 11.8 billion in 1950, $ 40.6 billion in 1963) may lead business men in the direction of greater realism on political questions.
The dominant movement of history in the last 100 years has been the movement of socialism. Nothing foreseeable can stop this movement -- except large-scale nuclear war. Americans do not understand the intricacies of Marxist theory, but, they do understand the value of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. And they are rapidly coming to understand that war in Vietnam or elsewhere is likely to wipe out those things they cherish. Once those things are saved, a big step will have been taken on the road to socialism, which is the road to man's fulfillment.