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PARTISAN REVIEW
society led by Adenauer; that America is fascist; that its isolation as
a nuclear danger will assure Germany's peaceful future; or that free–
ing Europe of nuclear weapons "from Portugal to Poland" will assure
Soviet cooperation . One coqference participant's comment that "the
French can do everything right except keep peace," however, was
challenged briefly. But here , and at other moments , anxiety was han–
dled by a retreat to Marxist rhetoric. A new form of theory-1-practice,
for instance, was called for, although no one knew how to "get dut of
the old categories to avoid disaster." The taboo about mentioning the
Soviet threat appeared to be total, and positions about the Third
World as fixed as those about achieving disarmament . Just as in other
leftist gatherings American imperialist coups from Vietnam toNica–
ragua, San Salvador, and Grenada were recited everywhere, and
Afghanistan, Cambodia, Poland, or repression in the Soviet bloc re–
mained
hors du discours.
Even American suggestions of arms reduc–
tion have been called a "businessman's peace" dominated by "cold
warriors." What would happen, I kept asking myself, if a long-range
· intelligent American foreign policy were forged? (Given our internal
political differences and ignorance about the rest of the world, this
appears unlikely.) Might it budge world opinion, and bridge the po–
litical polarization already in place? After all, we know that people
listen to views that confirm what they already believe. True , the
German Left takes note of the French socialists' determination to de–
fend their country, but they write this off, as a rule, to an over–
developed French national identity .
Two conference participants, reporting on how they had in–
filtrated a number of neo-fascist groups, stated that they deliberately
told them that they were leftists (allegedly more acceptable to their
subjects than democrats-
Demokroten),
because they felt it necessary
to retain their own political identity. This need for political identity
-fostered by the Marxism innate to their Frankfurt School training,
and by their "updating" of Ernst Bloch, Gramsci , Lukacs, and, occa–
sionally, Althusser-is, I believe, the most important reason why
German leftist critiques are unable to function outside rigid Marxist
categories .
Given my own malaise at having to take lonely political posi–
tions, I am sympathetic to their plight. That may be why conference
participants did not pursue the more provocative questions: why a
certain Hungarian had suggested that the mode of domination rather
than capitalism might determine individuals' subjectivity; whether
similar psychological mechanisms function in neo-fascist and left-
