LIONEL ABEL
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the way, today largely spent) . But what is interesting here is that the
motive given by Derrida for sparing Marxism is a purely political
one: had he taken up intellectually the challenge to him he would
have to have said
it is much too easy to deconstruct Marxismfor the task to be
worth doing.
Marxism is a composite whose elements can only be
made to cohere by a philosophical act of force, such as was provided
by Hegel's dialectic, Hook's scientific method, Sartre's existential
phenomenology, Althusser's structuralism.
If
one does not force its
elements to cohere in a philosophically oriented synthesis, Marxism
deconstructs by itself without the effort of hostile critics .
And as deconstructed, Marxism tends to become the kind of
oppressive ideological debris, which, falling on friend and foe alike,
tends to make all objectives vague, indefinite, hazy, and unglamor–
ous in the extreme. In general, groups which have issued from the
Marxism of the thirties and wanted to maintain a coherent philoso–
phy may be said to fall on the one side or the other of two political
extremes: an unreflective and unreckoning activism which never asks
itself what aspect of Marxist doctrine it still accepts, or an indefinite
reflection on Marxism which never leads to a politically active line.
For example, the old Marxist groups we knew in the thirties might
well have tried to connect themselves with the feminist groups which
formed in the sixties, and this without any opportunism on their
part, for male dominance did go with unfairness to the other sex . But
the old Marxist groups, while they might have supported feminist
groups and sought their support, would not have substituted the
feminist goals for their own; only in the name of their own goals
could they have justified common action with the feminists. But now
we see the former Marxists still on the scene and still calling them–
selves radicals , making the goals of the feminists their very
raison
d'etre;
the former Marxists take up with dissenting groups of all sorts
- the feminists are only one of such groups - not to win converts to
their cause, but to yield some evidence that they have a cause of
some kind; they seek conversion to the goals of others in order to
have a goal they can still think "radical."
It is to be noted that it was only in the name of a Marxism that
was, or was taken to be, a total system, that is to say, a whole, that
masses of men could be recruited to the enterprise of a revolution
against capitalism. The careful selections of elements of Marx's sys–
tem, whatever value this might have for thought, involves the rejec–
tion of action or indifference to action .
It
is only Marxism taken as a
whole that has been capable of motivating what Hook once called
