PARTISAN REVIEW
101
Having pointed to the severe deficiencies in the political vision of
the new terrorists (not to mention the more obvious ones sufficiently
spelled out elsewhere), one ought not
to
ignore the ironies implicit in
their actions. For alI their anti-American pretensions, they have not
really succeeded to the degree they believe
in
liberating themselves from
our society's thrall. For example, one of the justifications they offer for
the destruction of buildings - Hyland's piece in the
Crimson
makes
much of this point - is that it wiIl serve to undermine the sacred spell
of property over our lives. In a society of comparative scarcity in which
capital accumulation was a vital necessity, this might have some validity.
But in contemporary America, where consumption and programmed
waste keep the economy going, the periodic destruction of property is al–
ready a commonplace. (Destruction and consumption are of course
not precisely the same, but both are opposed to the obsessive accumula–
tion of an earlier capitalist era.) The traditional bourgeois inviolability
of property, although certainly still existant in some sections of the
population, has been robbed of much of its power.
If
we suffer from
a fetishism of commodities, to use Marx's term, it is no longer that of
the hoarder, but rather that of the compulsive consumer. As one of the
graffiti in Harvard Square pointed out after the riot of last April, the
major beneficiaries of "trashing" the local businesses were the glass
companies.
Ironically, the terrorists' rejection of theory has a startling resem–
blance to the "end of ideology" proclaimed by the fifties liberals they
so despise. It would be quite a feat to unearth a common bond between
Sidney Hook and the militants he so often excoriates, but when Hook
wrote on Marxism in
From Hegel to Marx)
he devoted some thirty pages
to the
Theses on Feuerbach
and only a few paragraphs to the
Economic
and Philosophic Manuscripts.
Although written in 1936, well before
Hook became one of the classical fifties liberals, his general treatment
of Marxism
cum
Pragmatism anticipated the direction of his later
thought. His attempt to make Marx into a kind of proto-Dewey and
the terrorists' denigration of theory have something in common. Both
are excessively concerned with means and tend to reflect less on the
ends they are supposed to serve.
What is more disturbing about the new terrorism is that it signals
a return to the antitheoretical bias of American political life. Marcuse's
statement of 1967 about the heartening growth of speculative, critical,
theory on the left seems sadly outdated just three years later. To base
one's hopes for serious social change, as some revolutionaries seem to,
on a global revolution in which the advanced industrial societies of the
West will be overwhelmed by the Third World, is to exchange the in–
sights of Marx for the vacuities of Spengler. Moreover, to believe that
