دانلود کتاب The Philosophy of Revolt (Criticism of Left Radical Ideology)

PREFACE

The sixties are bound to go down in the history of this century‘s anti-capitalist struggle as a period of wide-scale protest movements against existing socio-political institutions and relations, a period in which many illusions were shattered which seemed to have taken firm root in the minds of the "average European" and the "average American". Last but not least,for many people in the West the sixties were remarkable for the beginning of a search for the purpose and meaning of life, a search for the right paths to follow in the struggle to uphold man‘s rights and freedom.

The protest movements of the sixties which swept across the majority of the advanced capitalist countries (including the United States, West Germany, France, Italy and Japan) made it clear that the struggle against bourgeois civilisation is taken up today by representatives of non-proletarian strata, who only yesterday used to stand aloof from politics or take no active part in the march against capitalism led by the working class. This development came to the fore above all in the course of the "May events" of 1968 in France, when a serious confrontation took place between the protest movement and the existing regime, the power of the monopolies. Though the participants of the anti-capitalist protest movement belonged to different ideological and political groups, in most of the countries concerned the nucleus of the movement consisted of representatives of the New Left, who for themost part were students or academics specialising in the humanities.

The New Left openly challenged bourgeois society, the all-powerful military-industrial complex, the aggressive foreign policy pursued by the imperialists, the economic pressures and political repression to which the working people were exposed, together with bourgeois "mass culture" and all-pervasive ideology. Yet at the same time the New Left rejected the ideological and political leadership of the working class and Marxist-Leninist parties as "insufficiently revolutionary". Claiming to have its own social and political alternative the New Left adopted a radical, rebellious stand which to a large extent moulded the general character of the non-proletarian protest movements of the sixties. The New Left stand found its ideological and theoretical expression and moral justification in radical ideology which was to become one of the all-important factors shaping social consciousness in the West of the day.

It should be pointed out that the ideology of the New Left, that can be traced back to traditional petty-bourgeois left doctrines and has been clearly influenced by modern bourgeois philosophy and sociology, constitutes a somewhat ill-defined and contradictory whole. Moreover, this ideology is interpreted very differently by all the national detachments of the New Left, each of which has specific national problems to solve. Nevertheless the practical experience of the protest movements at all the various stages of their development has produced more or less uniform and stable trends and principles to be found (in some kind of combination) in the conceptions of the ideologists of the New Left and shared by most of the radical Left‘s rank and file.

This applies to critical attitudes to "modern society"; the rejection of the working class of the advanced capitalist countries as the main driving force of the modern revolutionary process; a critical approach to Marxist-Leninist parties as integrated in the system of state-monopoly capitalism and thus ―bereft‖ of their former revolutionary functions; concentration on the Third World as the sphere in which a "genuinely socialist society" is supposedly growing up; criticism of the Marxist-Leninist theory of revolution and attempts to create an ―up-to-date revolutionary theory; emphasis on spontaneous action based on a release of unconscious forces and aimed at shaping a "new culture" and a "new man"; refusal to make use of the democratic institutions of bourgeois society as a mechanism of repression and manipulation, and the boosting of utopianism as a principle of revolutionary critical action.

The New Left movement, which appears as a means of linking a non-proletarian mass to the world revolutionary movements (a process which is progressing along controversial, tortuous paths and which often assumes an anti–proletarian complexion claiming, as it does, to put forward a "third path" in politics and ideology) is at the same time a manifestation of the all too familiar "disorder of Leftism", which today has spread well beyond the confines of the communist movement and moreover on a much wider scale than before. The reactionary bourgeoisie attempts to exploit this disorder to further its own ends in its struggle against the working class, Marxism and socialism, and in its efforts to direct the radical Left‘s philosophy of revolt against revolutionary forces. How serious are such attempts? How serious are the claims of the New Left? Finally how serious is the "philosophy of revolt" as such?