REVIEW The Responsibility of Intellectuals. Selected Essays on Marxist Traditions in Cultural Commitment by Alan Wald, Humanities Press, New Jersey 1992. "Revolutionary Studies" series edited by Paul Le Blanc.
Alan Wald is widely regarded as one of the foremost Marxist cultural historians of the United States. But he is not only an outstanding scholar: as a militant of the social/feminist organization Solidarity, he is committed to the struggle for revolutionary change. While so many former radicals of the 1960s take refuge in academic abstractions or post-modern language games, Wald remains an unrepentant leftist: "I'm convinced more than ever that socialism remains the only rational choice for an informed humanity."
The Responsibility of Intellectuals (an expression borrowed by Wald from a famous essay by Noam Chomsky during the Vietnam War) is a brilliant collection of essays dealing with a wide range of topics, going from Victor Serge's New York connections to the history of Chicano radicalization, and from the legacy of Howard Fast to the achievements of George Breitman.
In spite of this diversity, this is a quite coherent book, unified by several common features which give it its particular style and quality. First of all the author's rich interdisciplinary method, blending factual research with cultural theory, literary criticism with biography, cultural history with politics; then the common purpose that runs through most of the essays: the struggle to rescue from the "academic memory hole" the legacy of neglected socialist cultural traditions— as well as of the US internal colonies; finally the
134 International Marxist Review author's compelling personal voice, bringing into the picture his own experience of social and political commitment (as a New Left, Trotskyist and antiracist activist).
Alan Wald is clearly and unambiguously a Marxist scholar, and he does not conceal his debt to authors such as Georg Lukacs and Raymond Williams (as well as to the contributors to New Left Review and Socialist Register). But he is interested in a fruitful interaction of various leftist traditions, in opposition both to dogmatism and to uncommitted eclecticism: "I am revolted by 'orthodoxy' on the left whether invoked in the name of 'Leninism', 'Trotskyism' or 'Marxism' '. But I am also aware of how frequently categorical rejections of classical Marxist tradition, especially on the part of intellectuals sitting on the sidelines, have merely led their proponents back to the repetition of earlier misconceptions."
The essays collected in this volume are divided into four sections:
1. "Trotskyism and anti-Stalinism" ', which deals with such different figures as the sculptor Duncan Ferguson (author of a well-known head of Leon Trotsky), Victor Serge, C.L.R. James and the New York literary left. The author does not conceal the personal and/or political limitations of these writers and artists but he shows the unique value of this "heterodox" cultural tradition.
2. "Communism and Culture": while his first essays focus mainly on the shortcomings of the official Communist Party cultural policies, the later pieces reflect a rich assessment of the diverse cultural practice of individual Communist writers, as well as a feeling for the need to work out an integrated conception of leftist culture in the United States.
3. "Race and Culture" combines critiques of Eurocentrism in literary studies with a discussion of several alternative theories ("internal colonialism", "ethnicity" ;, "race) — as well as a survey of anti-racist movements in various US campuses.
4. "Commitment" deals with the achievements and ambiguities of intellectuals who took the side of the cause of social emancipation. This sections includes a most insightful (and influential) review of Nadine Gordimer's anti-apartheid novel Burger's Daughter, focusing on the dilemmas and tensions between the "personal" and the "political"
From the theoretical viewpoint, one can feel a fruitful tension between two aspects of Alan Wald's approach to the complex relation of culture to politics. On one side, following the tradition initiated by Trotsky's Literature and Revolution, he criticises the Communist Party's doctrine of "proletarian culture", which resulted in the dismissal ("with vile invective") of noncommunist writers "who had produced universally recognized masterpieces,
Review 135 such as Joyce, Proust, Eliot and Pound". On the other side, his sympathy for the struggle of the oppressed cultures ("the internal colonies") against the white Euro-American patriarchal hegemony, brings him to the conclusion that the literary canon should be abolished, and that all pretensions to derive "aesthetic merit" from "illusory universal qualities" should be rejected.
The author's active interest for Black, Chicano and Native American cultures is one of the most provocative and lively features of the book. Particularly interesting is his analysis of the novel Ceremony, published in 1978 by Leslie Silko (a woman writer who grew up in the Laguna Pueblo Reservation). Three is however one question that I would like to raise in this connection. According to Alan Wald, the novel offers a refutation of "one of the more popular misconceptions about Native American Indian literature" namely, that it is "a variant of romanticism, advocating an impossible return to an idealized, pre-technological existence"; however, at the same time, he acknowledges that the ceremony referred to in the book's title had aimed "to restore a sense of collectivity among all people and a harmonious existence in nature"
Now, while traditionalist romanticism dreams of an impossible return to the pre-modern world, is not the utopian or revolutionary variant (from William Morris to Leslie Silko) inspired by the hope to restore, in an emancipated future, some human achievements of the past destroyed by capitalism?
Alan Wald's most important methodological contribution is his proposition for cultural studies, combining class, gender and race. "Class" means redirecting the study of US cultural formation away from myths and symbols and focusing on conquest and invasion, capital accumulation, colonial and imperial expansion, and late capitalism, as the context in which active agents create culture. "Gender" means the perception of sex roles as ideological creations, producing different cultural consequences. And "race" of course has nothing to do with race in the biological sense, but refers to the social construction of racial types centring on a mythology of colour — and the concomitant attempt to diminish, trivialize and distort the culture of those dominated groups. The author's persuasive conclusion is that a Marxism that would be able to integrate "race" and "gender" as major categories, together with "class" — without attempting to reduce non-class social divisions to some form of class division — would have a superior explanatory potential in the study of US culture.
Michael Löwy
£5/$10
No.14
Winter 1992
• Market ideology - Jesús Albarracin
• Socialism and "complex society" - Phil Hearse
• Post-modernism and feminism - Jane Kelly
• Sexual difference - Josette Trat
• Crisis of French Marxism - Daniel Bensaïd
• Legacy and prospects for US left - Alan Wald
• Partybuilding among women and positive action - Fl resolution
• Book review - Michael Löwy
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International Marxist Review
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