Marx Druthers

“Whoever is not a socialist at 20 has no heart; whoever is still a socialist at 40 has no head.” So (apocryphally?) spoke the “Iron Chancellor” Otto von Bismarck, a man with witticisms and grandfatherly maxims in no short supply. Harvard’s class of 1967 appropriated the first half of this particular idiom last December when warning of the “careerist, vocational orientation” to which many colleges today subscribe, and lamenting the “widespread apathy and political indifference” on display in post-millennial Harvard undergraduates.

This letter, now nearly forgotten, always seemed to be born from Sixties sanctimony, but it was correct in its observation that socialism and political Marxism are more or less gone from the hearts and minds of Cambridge’s collegiate population. Why? The letter recommends a task force to locate the source of political lethargy, but on this, the anniversary of the Army-McCarthy hearings’ first day, I’ve got my own blaming to do.

Frankly, Harvard seems destined to a lofty place in the bourgeois cosmos, today re-established after decades of deviation from the path of the Boston Brahmin, all of us again participating in just the “naked self-interest” Marx inveighs against in his manifesto. No one expresses more than a tinge of voiceless, ‘moral’ disgust at the flagrant, moustache-twirling greed of those attending info session after Goldman Sachs info session; these shock troops of the global market get a free pass (except of course from the aging vigilantes in the Class of 1967).

Our shepherds, the professors, cannot be let off the hook. After all, their dabbling with the dialectic seems to have dropped off entirely in recent decades. We laugh, but the communist clique at the Faculty Club was once a menace all its own; in 1949 Professor John Edsail ’23 fumed: “Communists are shifty, and treacherous colleagues, and I do not wish to collaborate with them in any program of political or social action.” No such treachery these days; at very most, our faculty features a handful of zany libertarians and communitarians—all no doubt collegial, cooperative folks.

Professor of government Harvey C. Mansfield ’53 might explain a bit of collective hesitancy amongst the faculty to rejoin the revolutionary party after a period of sad separation; 1991 found him saying he was “glad to see [Marxism] dead and gone” and planning “to keep a careful watch to stomp on it” should it reawaken. What exactly this ‘stomping’ might constitute remains unclear, but we can only assume that hundreds of Mansfield’s colleagues have ‘disappeared’ when they wouldn’t keep their mouth shut about the proletariat.

At any rate, current students seem to have forfeited Marx and Engels to an even greater degree than their instructors. When, in 1953, Crimson editors got hold of the Ibis that sits atop a certain semi-secret Sorrento Square organization that used to occasionally publish a humor magazine, the natural decision was to send it to the Soviet Union. Who knows what nemesis state would even have it today, or whether we’d have the cajones to send it to them? Kim Jong-Il would probably like it, but he seems like small (crazy) potatoes after Stalin’s enormous (crazy) feast.

Now, when Harvard undergraduates invoke the father of communism, it’s not as a political herald but as a conversation piece for social studies concentrators. Even then, Marx is a little too mainstream; when trying to communicate one’s extraordinary acquaintance with great thinkers, his monosyllabic moniker gets lost amid the sea of Walter Benjamins and Jürgen Habermases (the more strange accents, the more intellectual firepower).

Today, striving for revolution seems a bit anachronistic: one student called Marxist ideology ‘retro’ in 1994, likening it to “Easy-Rider biker gear.” Nowadays, it’s downright antique, the antithesis of hip. Imagine a communist partygoer, desperately trying to turn the conversation to surplus value over the strains of Soulja Boy’s new single, “Yahhh!” Unlucky fellow.

What was once a fiery outlet for leftist political fervor has been spoilt by a suite of suppressive bourgeois mechanisms; in its place slips the anesthetic comfort of supporting Barack Obama, perhaps ‘preferring’ Dennis Kucinich. Students themselves aren’t to blame for this zeallessness, though, but the confluence of events utterly beyond our control.

Not least of which is one merely logistical in nature. Revolution Books, once a remarkable communist bookshop, has fallen from grace. It limps along aside the capitalist sneer of its neighbor, the overpriced crêperie, open only a few hours a week. How are we ‘careerists’ supposed to get our class struggle going if we can only pick up pamphlets from two to six on a Friday?



James M. Larkin ’10, a Crimson editorial executive, is a social studies concentrator in Quincy House.