100
MARTIN JAY
The Narodniki used terror in order to awaken the consciousness of the
Russian masses. Our terrorists, on the other hand, seem to have accepted
Marcuse's notion of one-dimensionality in American society as an ir–
reversible reality. Having written off the working class, they base their
hopes on the consummation of a global class struggle. According to their
vulgarized Leninist theory of imperialism, the essential task of the
"metropolitan " revolutionary is to act as a fifth columnist, disrupting
capitalism from within. Because chaos rather than a change in conscious–
ness is the goal, problems with the relationship between means and ends
practically disappear. Blowing up buildings or making a cult hero of
Charles Manson are permissable, even though they serve to discredit the
movement in the eyes of those who, at least at one time, were to be
its benefactors. But this doesn't really matter, the argument goes, be–
cause the advanced industrial nations of the West are doomed in the
long run. So, what Marxists once saw as an international working class
transcending national boundaries has been replaced by a simplisitic equa–
tion of nations with classes, uncomfortably similar to the old fascist
notion of "young" and "old" nations.
The result, of course, is that by accepting so lofty a responsibility,
the terrorists have justified their indifference to the development of a
strategy for change before the apocalypse. And ironically, they have also
ceased to engage in the revolutionary
praxis
which they so fervently
espouse. As far back as Aristotle, the concept of
praxis
contained an
inherent ambiguity, referring both to the process of politics and to
its results.
Praxis
meant both "doing" and "making." Although the dual
character of the term was retained by Marx, he was careful to stress its
second sense. To Marx, the associations workers formed meant that they
created new institutions and relationships opposed to those forced on
them by capitalist society. These were to be adumbrations of the post–
capitalist society he so fervently desired. To Marx, man was first and
foremost a laborer, a creator of objects and institutions in the world
t
which expressed his true self. Under capitalism, however, the fruits of
his objectification were alien to him, no longer recognized as the product
of his creation. Instead, they were perceived as a reified other. This
was especially true of social relations which were mistakenly assumed
to be eternal because man had forgotten his role in their genesis. The
function of revolutionary
praxis
was precisely the reversal of this condi-
tion. The political action of the revolutionary was designed both to
destroy the old world of alien objects or commodities and social rela-
tions and to create a new one in which man could recognize himself.
What the new terrorists seem to have forgotten
is
the necessity of creat-
ing a universe of nonalienated objectifications amid the old .one
~f c.o~:
modities and reified social relations. They have reduced
praxtS
to domg
rather
than
"making," stressing only its destructive side.
