HERBERT MARCUSE
will undermine
this
base, but it can become a potentially socialist
base only in the process of political education - otherwise, the po–
tential may well be a fascist one.
In the activation of the leftist potential, the student movement
has played, and
will
continue to play, a decisive role.
If
this is
"elitism," I gladly confess to it. Of
all
the dangers threatening the
movement from within, perhaps the greatest is the widespread anti–
intellectualism, the inferiority complex of not being "a worker" (an–
other aspect of the stifling ritualization of Marxian theory!), the
guilt feeling of being "privileged."
This
masochistic antiintellectualism
is not only a gift to the establishment (which fosters and practices
antiintellectualism) but also an insult to all these students who were
assassinated or who risked their life and liberty in the militant protest,
in this country and abroad. Today, students are in the forefront of
the struggle: from Japan to Vietnam to Bengal; to the African coun–
tries which liquidate "communists" by the thousands; to Brazil, Bo–
livia, Mexico, the Philippines. Where students are not massacred,
they are bombed, poisoned, jailed. The powers that be know who
the enemy is, and where to strike. . . .
3. Goldmann says that in my writings there is CIa sharp but
not dialectical opposition between oppression and liberty, the exist–
ing and the ideal, the empirical and the rational, the given and the
utopian...." I admit the opposition between oppression and liberty,
but I believe it is a dialectical one. Between the established and the
free society, there is a rupture, and the revolution
is
a qualitative
leap: the leap into essentially new ways of life, with new needs and
values. The only historical continuity which is more than a quantita–
tive (technical) one
is
in
the chance that the men and women with
the new intelligence and sensibility, the men and women who will
make the revolution, grow up
within the old
society.
