Marx was wrong.

            As we can see, the prophesied classless society ends in the bourgeois and not the proletariat. Granted that the bourgeoisie now hold many of the peculiar traits of the proletariat – and mainly negative traits – it is the bourgeoisie nonetheless. One wonders at Marx, given the obviousness of the conclusion. But, of course, Marx’s error begins with his erroneous definition of monetary value primarily in terms of labor. Money is credit, and credit is commercial or exchange value. The exchange value of goods has to exceed the cost of production in order for the goods to become commercial goods: but the value is a function of commerce and not production.

            Granted that in Marx’s time the peculiarities of the birth of modern industrialism placed centralized industrial production in the hands of one of the most imperialistic nations of the era; and therefore the industrial revolution not only became an imperialistic tool, but also produced an overbearing industrial concentration in the England of Marx’s day. Nevertheless, the actualities of production versus trade in a ‘post-industrial’ world – that is, in a world of fully distributed production in which industry loses much of its imperialistic potency – will show, as it is already showing, that far more credit value will be invested in the commercial aspects of the economy – distribution and marketing – than in production itself.

            That is to say, the society will become bourgeois – a society of commerce rather than industry.

            There are a number of reasons why Marxism retained its potency for more than a century. If one were to inquire of its latter day proponents or historians, the answer would always be substantive. Marx’s descriptions and predications concerning imperialism resonate to this day. His descriptive analysis of contemporary history in terms of economic forces will undoubtedly eventually be recovered for what it is: not only a basic document in the history of history scholarship, but the basic incursion of the economic premise into historical analysis – an historical analysis that now becomes an access tool for the ‘scientific’ reconstruction of the socio-economic framework of a given culture in a given era. The unfortunate extension of this premise into a foundational principle for historiography itself nevertheless cannot obviate its value in the founding of contemporary historical scholarship.

            But I would argue that none of this is the final cause or final potency for the enduring cultural survival of Marxism at least into the third quarter of the twentieth century.

            What Marxism embodied, more centrally than any of the other cultural effects, was the core process of dialectic.

            Dialectic, of course, has a history, itself. The word enters its philosophical life with Zeno, apparently. Therefore I presume that ‘dialectic’ becomes associated with his ‘paradoxes’, his answer to the detractors of his teacher.

            The dialectic of Marx traditionally traces directly back to Hegel. But the politically historical focus on the ‘young Hegelians’ parallels an equal, if unspoken, philosophically historical focus on Hegel alone – a bottleneck unjustified by the actual conditions at the time. That is, we have concentrated all of the force of German Idealism, by default, on Hegel alone – a profound solecism. Hegel’s act of integrating Idealism under the aegis of the One or Unity alienates a core principle of dialectic as understood by the Idealists themselves. No doubt, ‘Idealism’ is a wide net. But ‘dialectic’ is an eel of a fish. It is perhaps the single term under which all of the Idealists, ‘rational’ and ‘irrational’, can be gathered.

            In fact, we could say that the core of Idealism itself – whether as culture, metaphysics or psychology – depends on and revolves around this core principle of ‘dialectic’.

            The problem, then, of course, is that dialectic – this peculiar and specific ‘dialectic’ – remains undefined to this day.

            But, of course, we have two things. First, there is the word itself, suggesting doubleness. Then, there is that element that Hegel had clearly experienced as the binding force, but could not legitimately integrate into his relatively closed system, namely, the abyss.

            Hegel’s One behaves as if it hovers over the abyss. But every assertion of the One closes the abyss out. In other words, Hegel rested in the abyss, intellectually. But his mirroring construct foreshortened the actuality of his experience. His definition of dialectic falls now on ‘this side’ now on ‘that side’ of the dialectical duplicity which is the functional actuality of the ‘abyss’. In ‘each case’, one hears the subterranean resonance of the abyss. But all encompassing definitions fail.

            It was this living practice, then, that the young Hegelians inherited.

            Our argument, of course, is that the philosophy of self-awareness which we have been propounding here in fact dovetails with dialectic, since ‘dialectic’ is the abstractive mirroring of the ‘two sides’ of the reflective moment as inference and analysis: the synthesizing instance of awareness that assembles the value based presentation which is experience and the reflective consequence which mirrors it as analysis.

            I cite the potency of the Marxist outlook because it is the final marker for the direct transmission, historically, of this pragmatic, if initiatory, form of dialectic.

            Midcentury twentieth century held a number of basic strains of consequential dialectic, culturally. From a personal perspective, the Emersonian / pragmatist linking of dialectic had persisted up into our intellectual household. Einsteinian physics was still a viable cultural force. And, in fact, Freudianism involved a dialectical view; oddly seconded by the Jungian. Undoubtedly, there were many more residual strains – as varied as viewpoints.

            But Marxism persisted as the more or less directly pragmatic, its ‘materialism’ apparently acting psychologically as a kind of antithesis to the political or ideological, a peculiar grounding in the solidity of the darkness, so to speak, the release conditioned by the recognition of ‘material reality’, a concept, which in Marxism arrives with the force of a body blow.

            This is the nature of dialectic, since we think with our bodies. The mind is a solitary light without the body of experience, and the body is the only instrumentality for experience, being both the sensory instrument and the presenting experience for volition. Moreover, the body is the only ‘wholeness’, a sense of totality necessary for the pivot which is reflection or the awareness of the self.

            So the more recent history of Marxism becomes of interest, since, as we shall see, its intellectual dialectical self-implosion preceded the political.

            I would date that implosion to the living year of magical realism, nineteen hundred and sixty eight.

            If history is simultaneity of values, it is because simultaneity of values is the condition for perception and experience. Where Hegel had it correctly, the unitive expands to the conditions of view. If we view the moment as history, the oneness expands to the dimensions of history. The fact that I can separate my consciousness to become aware of myself finally stands outside history, not only as an empirical fact, but also as a condition of my perception and action: There is creativity. But however large the moment becomes, it is always governed by the dominant valence – the subsuming as well as dominating value which is the moment – its conditioning nature.

            Therefore that the seed moment of reflective understanding should open out, as a possibility, at the time that that single vital thread of dialectic was about to self-destruct, this too is dialectic.

            Since my teachers include Pound and Cézanne, I subscribe to the petit sensation and the luminous detail.

            The moment is 1968 and the situation is the confrontation between ‘revisionist’ Adorno and his radical students.

            I continue to be surprised, in my encounters with my peers, at how many still hold modified Marxism in one form or another. It is no longer a living function in their lives, except insofar as they identify dimensions of their intellectual life in terms of it. But the views are language, primarily, whatever the substantive issues may evoke in terms of direct feelings. Responding to injustice is not necessarily ideological.

            In other words, Marxism has become a persistent nostalgia – not so much of a view once held as of a set of feelings once felt in their strength.

            1968 was the year of that strength, felt on both sides, because it was the year a kind of sudden fad radical Marxism went to war with revisionist Marxism, destroying both, effectively, in the process.

            Needless to say, the students who attacked Adorno in the classroom and succeeded in having him ousted from his professorship presumably viewed themselves as intellectual spearheads for the Red Brigades. Their brand of Marxism died with their rage, a kind of emotional implosion that leaves their less violent adherents filled with nostalgia.

            The other side is Adorno’s final work, the Aesthetic Theory, a pure dialectical presentation in which he effectively if unintentionally catalogues the internal self-destruction of dialectic under the Marxian aegis.