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MARTIN JAY
tivation of the new terrorists appears more psychological than political:
as in the assertion of revolutionary
machismo
on the part of guilt-ridden
whites who need to prove to the Blacks and Vietnamese that they too
have risked, struggled and suffered. Martyrdom is a possibility they seem
willing, even eager, to court. "The revolution's victory," the Weatherman
quoted above wrote, "is certain, but the overwhelming majority of the
cadres in this room, unless we punk out, will not live that long." In
short, the goal seem less to make revolution than to make revolutionaries.
For these reasons, the new terrorism can be understood as almost
as much an aestheticization of politics as the old. As a result, it is a
departure not only from mundane political practice, but from anything
which can legitimately be called revolutionary
praxis
as well. This is es–
pecially ironic because in a sense the actions of the terrorists are an
outgrowth of what might be called the idolatry of
praxis. Praxis
found
its way into the vocabulary of the left after a long career beginning
in
Aristotle's
Metaphysics
(and excellently traced in Nicholas Lobkowicz's
Theory and Practice: History of a Concept from Aristotle to Marx).
Loosely defined,
it
has come to signify a kind of self-creating action
different in its origin and
function
from externally motivated
be–
havior.
Praxis
also means man's conscious shaping of the historical
world which he recognizes as the product of his labors. As an activity,
it therefore differs from the alienated creation of a world of reified
objects and institutions whose human origins have been forgotten.
Significantly, in the sixties
praxis
replaced alienation as the catch–
phrase in Marx's writing which the left found most immediately relevant.
In place of
The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts,
whose explora–
tion
of alienation had made them especially popular in the quietistic
fifties, Marx's
Theses on Feuerbach
was elevated to the position of cen–
tral text. It is of course
in
his eleventh thesis that Marx made his fam–
ous plea to change rather than merely interpret the world. The New
Left's turn to the centrality of
praxis
in Marx's thought was extremely
valuable. First, it served to overcome the academic isolation of radical
theory as something totally discontinuous from contemporary political
reality. In the fifties at the height of the Cold War, the possibility that
a critically oriented theoretical analysis of society might have any im–
plications for action was dismissed by all but a sanguine few. Almost
all fifties radicals were "parlor pinks." Second, the rediscovery of
praxis
reaffirmed the importance of the revolutionary experience, of self-re–
newal along with social change, and of the partial autonomy of the
individual in the face of objective social forces. Here
it
served to con–
nect radical politics and the counterculture with its cult of experience.
In the middle sixties, the New Left thrived on the elan which always
accompanies the realization that the world can indeed
be
changed.
