To begin with, the New Left is not so very new and it is not genuinely left either. Its existence, however, cannot be understood without a knowledge of the leftish soil in which the new plant started to grow. Furthermore, this newcomer on our ideological scene must be viewed as a reaction against our present profoundly left-influenced culture and civilization. Here we also have to face the fact that much of the New Left’s critique of our way of life is—unknowingly rather than knowingly—copied from conservative sources. Finally, one can only fully comprehend the New Left if one realizes that it happens to be tied in with the student movement, the “academic unrest,”1 as well as with the worldwide disillusionment with the Classic Left, which by now is morally bankrupt. (Moral bankruptcy, unfortunately, causes physical decline only in the very long run.) In its refusal to yield to the right, the New Left, moreover, shows us its profile against the background of all the many gruesome failures of the leftist movements, the leftist establishments which have accumulated in the last 200 years. Yet it is equally certain that the New Left cannot take over the receivership, the inheritance of the Great Leftist Drive because it offers no real alternatives: Unlike genuine leftism it has produced neither a coherent ideology nor a concrete utopia. It offers criticisms but no real answers.
Let us first look at the geographic origins of the New Left. In 1918 we have grave political disorders at the University of Córdoba in Argentina. The year 1918 was bad and Córdoba has bad memories. The Córdoba massacres in the 1820s mark a low point in Argentine history, a low point not so easily overcome.2 After 1918 the disease spread in a northwestern direction, reaching the oldest university of the Americas, San Marcos in Peru eight years afterward. Under the leadership of young Victor Raúl Haya de la Torre (later to become the leader of the leftist APRA) the students succeeded in forcing the authorities to grant them comanagement (cogobernación).3 This thoroughly ruined the university which to this day has not overcome either ideologically or academically, this particular shock. After World War II the anarchical student unrest gripped Japan, where authority, all authority had been gravely shaken by utter defeat. The virus then crossed the Pacific again and affected the third seismic area, California. From there it was carried to the Eastern United States and then made its appearance in West Berlin, the European point of infection. This is not surprising because West Berlin has no conscription laws and thus became the haven for draft-dodgers from the Federal German Republic. The student rebellion then quickly spread to Frankfurt and from there to Paris, Rome, and Madrid.
There are good reasons for this development which, so far, has spared the Nordic countries from England to Finland. In Latin America we have not only the Catholic faith with all its anarchical implications4 but also the specific irrationalism of that part of the world which had been so cleverly described by Count Keyserling—the emphatically emotional way of life determined by gana, by “disposition” and “indisposition,” by “likes” and “dislikes” rather than by logic, reason, and planning.5 If we recall the terrible words of the deeply disappointed Simón Bolivar about his countrymen, we can well understand how the New Left came to have South American origins.6 The Japanese student troubles (started by the Zengakuren) followed upon a total breakdown while the American disorders had a rather different character. Certainly the steady decay of authority is a natural phenomenon in a gradually democratized society when parental authority7 (as the last stronghold) slowly vanishes, but there are also other and probably stronger factors which will be dealt with presently. The German “infection” is not at all surprising in view of the fact that Western Germany is the most “Americanized” country in Europe, the country where the experiment of (leftish) reeducation and indoctrination had been carried out with the greatest intensity. As a result the American imported New Left could quickly strike roots, and this all the more so as the three most important New Left ideologues had lived as German refugees in America: Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse who alone stayed on in the New World, whereas Adorno and Horkheimer returned to their native country.
Viewed from a biological angle, the New Left movement is carried largely by the young, but its original minds belong to men of an advanced age, to a European generation which has become successively disillusioned by Wilhelminian grand-bourgeois Germany, the Weimar Republic, Nazi totalitarianism, Stalinist communism, and the materialistic society of consumers. Having been formally on the left (and often still publicly professing to be so), they have seen all their gods fail, all their illusions destroyed.
None of the three could or would deny their original leftist outlook. Yet it was far more young Marx, the frustrated artist, the “libertarian,” the Herostratic visionary, than old Marx, the inverted commercialist, who inspired them in their thinking. At the same time their vision remained riveted on freedom and this, without their ever openly and directly admitting it, put them into the neighborhood of the anarchists rather than of the Communists. Their criticism of “bourgeois” society is perhaps even more savage than that of the deep Red Marxists—and it is more sincere, more to the point, because Sovietism is essentially petty bourgeois and bureaucratic, it has no affinity with the bohemian, the artist, the intellectual hungry for originality, the free peasant, the aristocrat.8
Marx’s lasting enthusiasm for the working class was due to his belief that within the framework of bourgeois society the factory hand would be condemned forever to a life of misery in eternal bondage. He never realized (as Marcuse, Adorno, and Horkheimer did very clearly) that modern technological society, with or without exploitation, could even provide the working man with a middle-class existence, with a great deal of security, a modicum of luxury, a minimum of work. Though revolutionary at heart, the New Left had to abandon its innermost hopes for a revolutionary rising of a no longer existing proletariat now integrated with all its material interests into the process of production.9 In addition, no modern industrialist wants merely to exploit his workers—they should be happy, well-paid consumers. The utter inanity of Marxian economics10 is now evident and thus the person who is first and foremost a revolutionary and merely seeks for a rational excuse—an intellectual overstructure—to preach the overturn of the existing order, has to look in other directions, toward other social layers to whom to preach the revolutionary gospel. In this case the ideologies of the New Left appeal to the outcasts of modern society, the eternal Lumpenproletariat, the term to be understood not only in the sociological sense.11 The call for destruction without any constructive or even utopian blueprint is also somehow in keeping with the spirit of our fastliving time which quickly forgets the past and shrinks from looking to the future—described no longer by the Bellamys, but by the Huxleys and Orwells (hence also the reluctance to have any or many children).12
The present order, no doubt, is iniquitous in many ways. However, life according to Christian precepts, is a vale of tears and the “pursuit of happiness” on this earth is more or less bound to fail. Christianity does not eliminate suffering, but gives sense to it. It does not make people “happy”; it offers joy and by giving a sense to suffering, prevents despair. We have to admit that the present state of our Western civilization (and of the rest of the world as well) is worse than has been in almost any period of history. In spite of good dentists, anesthetics, better health conditions, moon flights, television, birth control, and a greatly decreased mortality, it would be easy to prove that human unhappiness has reached a very high level. Fear, loneliness, alienation, aimlessness, anguish, and melancholia are more prevalent than ever. There is not the slightest reason to believe that “progress” has made people happier. It has (above all in its technological form) an inflationary character. Technology moreover means more regulation, the need for more controls; it increases responsibilities, makes us more dependent, more vulnerable.
All this is evident to the New Left which therefore assumes the antitechnological stand of young Marx. Not only in this respect, but in many other ways, the New Left repeats knowingly-unknowingly the nineteenth-century conservatives’ critique of modern society. When the latter felt that they were defeated, that the immediate future belonged to “progressive” industrial society, their prophecy as to the shape of things to come was roughly this: “You think that you can establish a social, political, economic order based merely on the profit motive, that you can achieve happiness for yourselves or for the masses with the aid of technology, medicine and the provider state. You think that your ‘system,’ your establishment, will guarantee liberty for everybody, that you will be able to eliminate a feeling of inner independence by destroying the old historic estates. You are wrong! You will actually lay the foundations of a society in which servitude will assume a more subtle, more ubiquitous, a more oppressive character than ever before. Life will cease to have color, to be spiced with adventure, and people will revolt against the inhuman boredom and the drabness you offer them. In the long run man will not be satisfied with a social system giving him nothing but security and a near anonymous government of laws and regulations—rotating, impersonal, lacking all glamor. Emperors, kings, princes, cardinals, bishops, and noblemen will be replaced by general directors, bureaucrats, manufacturers, bankers, trade union leaders, party bosses, and dictators: This will make rule not less burdensome, only duller and, in many ways, more oppressive. Young people especially will rebel against an order based on the counting of noses, an order giving them nothing to live or to die for. Once all great dreams are gone, this society of identical and equal people in their purposeless solitude will start to scream!”
Indeed, if we read Marcuse carefully, we shall discover just these accusations, just this lament. Theodor Adorno has actually intimated that “reactionary” arguments should be used for the Second Enlightenment, the New Left.13
Yet, as was to be expected, the masses, especially the working class, could not be won over to the New Left because—as its ideologues fully realize—the wage earners have at long last achieved middle-class living standards, and are not (and never will be) prepared to sacrifice them to some rather sophisticated doctrine without “practical” aims and material rewards. Marxism could be popularized, the New Left with its sophisticated intellectual somersaults cannot. The worker, as we said, has been totally assimilated by the industrial machine which might offer him extremely monotonous work but at least feeds him well. The financial interests of workers, management, and investors are, in fact, identical—a maximum of production, an optimum of sales.
The more moderate New Left had unforeseen experiences with the young generation. It was only a question of time until, thanks to the innate radicalism of the young, old sorcerer’s apprentices would find themselves first isolated and then ridiculed as timid innovators lacking the courage to draw the final deductions from their daring premises. No wonder Professor Marcuse was lambasted and shouted down at an international student congress in Rome by Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the French-German student leader, and that Theodor Adorno was indirectly murdered by his followers. In one of his last lectures at Frankfurt University a number of female students stripped to the waist and tried to kiss the dazed scholar who fled with tears in his eyes. To the press he declared that this, indeed, was not the evolution he had hoped for, that his aims and ideas had been completely misunderstood. A few weeks later he succumbed to a heart attack in Switzerland. The third founder of the New Left, Professor Max Horkheimer, a particularly close friend of Theodor Adorno, has since been moving in another direction. In an interview14 he declared that man can be properly understood only by taking his transcendent character into account, and that we have to return to theology, a declaration which caused shrieks of indignation from pious agnostics and atheists.
Yet, regardless of whether we look at the founders or at their undisciplined and even more confused disciples, the fact remains that the New Left no longer is basically left: It rather represents an inverted mental product of the Old Left plus a number of Rightist vistas, though not enough to make it a rightist movement. It is anticonservative inasmuch as it rejects and fights the existing order, the establishment. Yet rightism is not conservative either in a strict etymological sense, since, after all, the present is largely leftist inspired. In fact, as we shall see later, conservatives are not always bent on preserving whatever exists; they are, in a basic sense, far more evolutionary, far more nonconformist than either the Old or the New Left.15 What the New Left has in common with the rightist outlook is only a critique—the critique of the materialist, technological “identitarian” consumer society dominated by anonymous forces. Nevertheless, mere analogies do not determine the essence of a movement or a political-social philosophy. The Nazi Third Reich was a provider state: Sweden and New Zealand, too, are typical provider states. This obviously does not mean that the Third Reich with its biological identitarianism was basically similar to and animated by the same moral and political outlook as either Sweden or New Zealand.
If we now ask why the New Left has not developed a constructive program, a blueprint, a utopia all its own, we find several reasons. We already alluded to the fact that mankind today is not “futuristic” and that the typical New Lefter lacks all family sense, all generational vistas. Also, curiously enough, a certain rather anti-ideological substratum can be observed in the New Left and, consequently, a real aversion to produce a precise program. Any program already smacks of “prescription” in the Kirkian sense. Whenever I asked young New Lefters about their New Order the answer was that this problem is to be settled by discussion after “victory.” Debate and discussion—they are the delight of the ill-prepared, inexperienced, unread theoretician. Talking to a group of Catholic Bolivian students of the New Left persuasion about their vision of a “New Bolivia,” I found that their only immediate aim was the destruction of the entire old order. Unpleasantly winking, they told me that it would not be difficult to occupy the waterworks of the city of La Paz, as well as the electric plants, and thus force the surrender of the capital. And what if the government was not going to yield? What about the 400,000 inhabitants? Would they not have to leave the city? What would happen to the hospitals? The insane asylums? The homes for the aged? They could not have cared less. Liberation always has a high price. And the new order? That would be debated, discussed.
The whole student movement from Tierra del Fuego to Tokyo and Berlin is characterized by the shortsightedness and the cruelty of youth.16 To be sure, certain external reasons made this large-scale rebellion altogether possible. In many parts of the world a degree of prosperity reigns which most of us have not become used to. Before World War II students had to study very hard and frequently also to work. Today they have parents willing to shell it out for them. And this all the more so, as these have abdicated morally and intellectually. Whatever their conviction, they frequently see in the Left the “Wave of the Future” and thus are afraid, unprepared, and unwilling to criticize the views of their enthusiastic progeny. Not only have they, without any true religious convictions, parroted the precepts of Christian ethics, often paying mere lip service without living up to them, they have also failed politically. In America the generation of the parents and grandparents died on battlefields all over the world only to usher in an age of deadly fear of an atomic World War III. In Germany one grandfather has betrayed the Kaiser, the other the Weimar Republic, the father Adolf Hitler. The young men in Germany have become, in the words of Armin Mohler, die Richterknaben, the “boy-judges” who sit in judgment over their fathers.17 An analogous situation exists in Italy, Spain, France, Japan, and Austria. And now these rather despised but prosperous fathers tend to buy the affection of their offspring with permissiveness and hard cash. Thus the young generation of the middle and upper classes is given “freedom” when they are most in need of guidance and authority, and the means enabling them to loaf, demonstrate, and smoke pot rather than study and work. Without strong ideals (religious or other) young men and women of considerable vitality will almost automatically become “rebels without cause” and, if imbued with purely negative and critical ideas lacking a concrete aim, they will surrender to purely destructive instincts.18 Vandalism and nihilism of a physical or intellectual order will be the result. This goes hand in hand with a process of depersonalization. Eros is replaced by mere sex, and the debasement of sex assumes a cardinal role in the New Left “philosophy”; by destroying “taboos” it strikes at the very roots of life.19 The negation of all ties ends in promiscuity, in a flight from life through drugs, and in a consuming hatred for every form of organic existence.20 Nihilism is diabolism since everything created by God or man has a positive value. Satan thrives on nothingness, on not-being.21
Old classic leftism likes to destroy, but only in order to replace memories of the past with a vision of the future. It aims at the establishment of a cast-iron order, at symmetry, at monolithic sameness: The young New Left, on the contrary, delights in disorder and chaos. An “authoritarian person” might be neatly dressed and scrupulously clean,22 whereas the typical representative of the New Left loves sloppiness, informality, and the reflection of his mental disorderliness in his appearance, in his entire way of life. His parents worshiped the Golden Calf. He venerates the Golden Swine.23 The New Left represents the left’s suicidal conquest of the children of the so-called exploiters. It is suicidal because the young bourgeois who turns to the New Left is no more a genuine leftist than an albino in the Central Congo is a “white man.” The authentic left might occasionally use the destructivism of the New Left as an aid in the struggle against the forces of “reaction,” but it will always be highly suspicious of its “progeny” because it retains a live memory of anarchism, its old competitor from the days of Bakunin, Kropotkin, Ravachol, and Dieudonné.
The New Left has shown that it can successfully disrupt, that it can gravely upset, if not all but paralyze the public order. In May 1968 the revolutionary efforts of the New Left made a strong bid for the cooperation of the French working class, but failed—except in a few isolated cases. However, the fact remains that France, as in May 1958, was again within inches of a military dictatorship, the army having been ready to act if the near-revolutionary riots had not stopped.24 The Communist party was put on the spot. Neither daring to disavow “the young” completely nor to side with them openly since they subscribe to a law and order program of their own, the Communists found themselves between the devil and the deep sea. And, at the same time, there arose among the masses a feeling of silent but furious opposition against this new menace, and it was not long before the right triumphed at the elections.
The same reaction could be observed in other countries. During the grave Frankfurt riots wives of workers were seen hitting the demonstrating students with heavy umbrellas and shouting, “Go back to your university and study. After all, we’re paying for it!”25 They knew that almost none of these students were the sons and daughters of working men who, if they make the grade, study very hard, and do not want to endanger their scholastic progress. Alfred von Thadden, leader of Germany’s national-authoritarian NDP,26 declared that he knows how to deal with rioting students: he would send two brigades of hardworking, tax-paying factory hands to the respective universities to clean them up.27 A significant thing happened in Italy: Pier Paolo Pasolini, a leading Communist poet and movie director wrote a piece of poetry which might almost be called an “Ode to the Police” in which the author sides with the Forces of Order (sons of workers and peasants, after all) against the sons of the fat bourgeoisie who attacked and vilified them.28 In other words, the “Student Revolt” of dirty, bearded, well-heeled quarter-intellectuals29 might evoke—and is in the process of evoking—something very close to a Fascist reaction in the lower classes. Over in Vietnam, among the young men in the armed forces, one can already observe the steady rise of such sentiments. They feel literally betrayed by those young men and women whose parents can afford to send them to colleges, to graduate and postgraduate schools to escape conscription; but, instead of keeping mum and lying low, these draft-dodgers impudently try to play the role of real saviors of humaneness and humanity. Once they have seen the ghastly horrors of Vietcong atrocities,30 the American soldiers in Southeast Asia, certainly a rough sometimes even brutal crowd, know the political scores on this globe infinitely better than the screaming and shouting bearded spooks back home, who display their heroic virtues only in face of defenseless college administrators or nearly defenseless policemen. They may yet achieve their immediate aim, i.e., to bring down American (or European) universities to the level of the Latin American ones which started so much of the trouble.31 But, oddly enough, our “saviors” forget that man is a dialectic creature and that their actions provoke reactions. These reactions might be made much worse than whatever caused them. Many countries today are dangerously near to the same spot Germany was in 1932; in spite of a lack of well-organized nationalistic mass movements, the similarities are ominous, to say the least.32
It is touching to see how the New Left, a romantic movement not so unlike the one that “carried” young Marx, is engaged in a cult of heroes. These may only be lugubrious assassins or hairbrained intellectuals such as Castro, Guevara, Debray, Torres, Dutschke, Teufel, Cohn-Bendit, Mao, Ho Chi Minh or Thich Tri Quan,33 but they are literally worshiped. The New Leftists want leaders. Still, in summing up the situation, we must not forget that the New Left expresses certain truths and truisms and provides us with not a few straws in the wind. However immature, destructive, sterile, and confused, it is a cry of anguish and protest against a mechanized, profoundly leftish age. It is, in a sense, leftism to end all leftism.