New Left, Local Control, and Fascism

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kind and their social realization, a gulf which it is the revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the
revolutionary's task to bridge by finding the creative spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them
use for these ideas demanded by present historical names, battle cries and costumes in order to present
needs. Most creative discoveries have led an aborted the new scene of world history in this time-honored
existence, in the realm of potentiality rather than disguise and this borrowed language." But Marx difrealization.
It must be realized that no creative contri- ferentiates between the conjuring up of the dead in
bution is ever complete but remains a process. It is order to perform one's task of the present, giving as an
therefore impossible to locate creativity in any one example the heroes of the French Revolution who
place, including in a specific work which at best can performed the task of setting up modern bourgeois
represent an artist's understanding of the process at a society in Roman costume and phrases, from the congiven
moment. The creative process always remains to juring up of the glories of the dead in order to serve the
be completed through the development of society in forces of reaction, as Louis-Bonaparte did behind the
whose development lies its only real existence. The death mask of Napoleon. In the former the ghosts
relativity of a creative contribution is also its greatness, served to glorify the required task at hand, as Marx
points out in the example of the English Revolution that
clothed itself in the phrases and illusions of power
PARTIII found in the Old Testament. He humorously remarks
TOWARD A DIALECTICS OF ART that as soon as the revolution was an accomplished fact,
Locke was permitted to supplant Habakkuk. In the
references to the French Revolution that occurred after
Counterculture today appears on the horizon as a 1848, the parody of the old was clearly an escape from
phenomenon of deja vu. In fact, it is the ghost of a the task of real revolution confronting the society.
ghost, the first ghost, of the French Revolution, having
appeared in the guise of the rhetorical hero of decadent Today counterculture, terrified by the perils of an
Romanticism in the period of reaction following the impending revolution, like the mad Englishman cited
failure of the 1848 revolution. Unlike the Promethean by Marx yearns to return to the "fleshpots of Egypt."
hero that had inspired the leaders of the French Revolu- In New York City, heart of the world-capitalist system
tion, these new anti-heroes passively mocked the bour- and headquarters for world financial interests, the
geois way of life. Goethe called them the "sentimental communitarian wakes up in the morning and prepares
people" who when put to the test always fail and show for another day on the farm. "And all this is expected of
themselves to be petty and bad. The task of carrying on me," he sighs, "me, a free-enterprising American --
the revolutionary tradition was beyond the incoherent to make my own candles and soap, sew my sandals and
ravings of these "heroes" who, lacking the real force and weave my own clothes." Out of this ambiance
that comes from a trained mind, stimulated in them- emerges the languid babbling of Bob Dylan and the
selves instead doubts and problems that they were not other folk charlatans who reassure the communitarians
able to master, and who flung themselves headlong into that indeed they do not live in an industrial society but
dangers in which they perished. Many youth of this are still back cutting firewood safe and sound in New
kind were eventually drawn into politics at the end of Harmony (Example: Dylan's recent song "Copper Ketthe
nineteenth century in the service of the most tle").
reactionary nationalism, and their contribution to the
fascist youth movement in the twentieth century has The delusions appealed to in the folk cult also appear
already been documented. The widespread anti-intel- as part of the ecology movement, in the form of a deep
lectuality even among intellectuals, which has its suspicion of all artificial improvements made upon
counterpart in student layers of our own society today, nature through technology. In reality it is the capitalist
manifested itself then most acutely in the swamp of system that loots nature without making any provision
cultural eclecticism that was so characteristic of the for the reinvestment necessary to avoid the destruction
Second Empire in France. Then, as now, serious art of man's basis of existence and to provide for the needs
met with little approval, and a concern among artists of an expanded reproduction. This is because the
with ideas that might have universal significance was motive for capitalist production is not the satisfaction of
regarded as pretentious, as today it is regarded as a social consumption needs, but rather the production of
sign of elitism, profit. In fact, in order to produce a more productive
humanity today a society would continually lower the
Marx in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte social costs of production by increasing productivity
qualifies Hegel's observation that cultural phenomena through the immediate application of developing techin
history repeat themselves by adding that such phe- nology. That is the reality of the situation. In those
nomena occur the first time as tragedy, and the second terms, the return-to-nature cult that is so much a part of
as farce. He writes that "the tradition of all the dead the folk revival and manifests itself in that form in the
generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the backward peace movement and the hunting-and-gathliving.
And just when they seem engaged in revolution- ering existence of the Yippies must be clearly underizing
themselves and things, in creating something that stood at this point to mean a return to a state that is less
has never yet existed, precisely in such periods of than human. Thus this particular manifestation of