The Odd Renaissance of Karl Marx

They paraded down West Berlin's Karl Marx Strasse, some 24,000 strong, under banners that defiantly announced their allegiance to Communism and the "class struggle." Yet few of the marchers were workers, and a good many had not even been born when Soviet troops tried to starve out West Berlin in the infamous blockade of 1948-49. Some of the youthful demonstrators melted into the beer halls along the way. Here and there, braless girls with sweaters tied around their hips joined in the march with a shrug and trudged along with shoulders back.

From the sidewalk, an unkempt man taunted the demonstrators. "I escaped from the East to see you?" he kept repeating, with some astonishment. Another bystander jeered: "Why don't you all just go over to the other side?" The young people laughed.

SIMILAR May Day scenes were played out on the streets of other Western European cities. In Paris, young leftists paraded through a pelting rain. "Down with the army!" they chanted, until they joined up with some inhospitable union members at the Place de l'Hotel-de-Ville. A window broke, fists flew, and the chant quickly changed to "Oh, les nouveaux flics [Oh, the new cops]!" In Milan, young people marched under banners that spelled out what they regard as Italy's current evils: IMPERIALISM, FASCISM, CAPITALIST OPPRESSORS.

Thus, last week, a host of young European left-wing activists paid tribute to the ideas and ideals of a bearded German philosopher who died a pauper and was buried in London's Highgate Cemetery 90 years ago. Today, the powerful, shaggy visage of Karl Marx peers out of a bookstore window in Rome. It glowers over a meeting of young German Socialists at Hannover-Linden and a student gathering at Vincennes University on the outskirts of Paris. The name is scrawled on buildings and walls from Norway to Sicily, sometimes in elaborate quotations but most often only in simple graffiti. "Viva Marx!" says a slogan scribbled on a building near the University of Barcelona. More than a thousand miles away on a gray stucco wall in West Berlin, a splash of whitewash exults: "Marx lebt [Marx lives]!"

The Marxist renaissance is a peculiar phenomenon. By any empirical standard, Marx's major prophecies--such as Communism's triumph over capitalism or the outbreak in industrialized societies of the workers' revolution--have proved false. No economy based on his teachings has approached the efficiency of a free-market system, and governments that tried to enforce his Utopian views have been compelled to rely on totalitarian methods. Nonetheless, Europe's expanding middle class is discovering to its horror that its sons and daughters are increasingly hostile to industry, "the System" and even to the established left of organized Communist parties. Says Francesco Forte, president of Italy's state-owned ENI oil colossus: "Marx has suddenly emerged as the official philosopher for the younger generation in Western Europe."

Although there is no sign that Western Europe is on the verge of a leftist revolution, businessmen are noticeably worried by the new style of militant Marxism. Siemens Executive Anton Peisl fears that "the mentality and vocabulary of the class struggle is gaining ground," that professors, journalists, union bosses and even church leaders now "find it chic to be as far left as possible." Members of French President Georges Pompidou's capitalist-minded Cabinet speak somewhat defensively of pursuing a "third way" between capitalism and Communism. "A Communist was once an anti-Christ," notes Le Monde Reporter Andre Laurens. "Now he has become a man to have a dialogue with. What a drama for French conservatives. Their bishops talk kindly about socialism, and their priests favorably about Marxism!"

Patron Saint. Students pack lectures on Marxist philosophy, political science, sociology and economics--not only at such well-known leftist strongholds as West Berlin's Free University and the "Red" French universities of Nanterre and Vincennes but also at Catholic institutions like Belgium's Louvain or Nijmegen in Holland. Publishers have found a vigorous market for works by and about a variety of Marxists: not only such dogmatic mainstream interpreters as Lenin and Mao, but a host of differing theoreticians, ranging from Leon Trotsky to former Czechoslovak Communist Party Leader Alexander Dubcek, who was toppled in 1968 for championing a liberalized Marxism. But "when in ideological trouble," says Manfred Gotthard, a West Berlin student, "we turn to Marx. The answer is always there."

Marx has become the oft-invoked patron saint of a new style of far-left political activism. There are at least 800 left-wing organizations in Western Europe, operating outside--and often directly against--the established Communist and Socialist parties. Although these organizations vary widely in strength and strategy, they are clearly different from the ad hoc fronts that united the rebellious students who took to the barricades in Paris, Rome and Berlin in the spring of 1968. Essentially romantics, those earlier revolutionaries took their inspiration from Berkeley and Columbia. If they carried the red flag of Marxism, they seemed to pledge their allegiance to the black flag of mindless upheaval and anarchy.

Since then, the far left has changed considerably. The newest radical has metamorphosed from a rock-tossing student into what one West German legislator describes as "a shorthaired, white-collared, law-and-order Communist." He sometimes takes his inspiration (and in some cases his financing) from the East bloc. He regards himself as a professional, engaged in a long-term and not necessarily spectacular effort to collapse the System, or at least force radical change in it.

Rock tossing is not completely out; many left-wing organizations, particularly in Italy and West Germany, are still committed to disrupting society in the hope that police repression will create martyrs who will win public sympathy. But the new radicals have generally chosen what "Red Rudi" Dutschke, who led West Berlin's student rebellion in 1968 and is still active in the Movement, calls "the long march through the institutions." The archetype of the new, sober, methodical and coolly professional radical is Wolfgang Roth, 32, the ambitious, mod-haired leader of the openly Marxist Jusos (Young Socialists), who have virtually seized from within the left wing of Chancellor Willy Brandt's Social Democratic Party (TIME, April 23). Instead of only taking to the streets, French Maoists are now working on assembly lines, the better to be able to recruit workers for the revolution.

By now, in fact, the radical superstars of the 1960s are passe, along with their Marxist models: Castro, Che and increasingly, Mao Tse-tung. The new radicals, says Parisian Journalist Robert Pledge, who was a student activist in 1968, "have abandoned the idea of the political hero." Instead, they are promoting a more pragmatic, down-to-earth "Marxism with a human face."

That face has not come across everywhere, of course. Scandinavia, with its costly welfarism, seems to have pulled out of the market for radical solutions, at least temporarily. Britain, for its part, still seems content to be the country in which Marx is buried. Cambridge University's debating society next fall will discuss "Is Marxism Dead?" The Marxist resurrection seems to be confined mainly to Western Europe's three most populous states:

WEST GERMANY. With no large established Communist Party, West Germany seems to be the target of the most concerted new radical assault. The country crawls with left-wing organizations. In addition to Roth's Jusos, there is the small West German Communist Party, which with funds channeled from East Germany has spawned 130 other orthodox Marxist groups across the country. Out on the extreme-left edge of the West German political scene are another 260 assorted groups, including such outfits as Red Dawn and Red Flag, which specialize in tearing up German institutions with troublemakers known as chaoten.

Marxists control student councils and sometimes even the administrations in all but a handful of the country's 67 universities and technical institutes, which have a combined enrollment of 670,000. Says a West Berlin professor: "If you are not a Marxist professor, you don't get the students. The organizations see to that."

Some Germans dismiss the Communist youth movement, perhaps too lightly, as "middle class." Says one Social Democrat: "They talk revolution and spend their vacations in Spain and Greece, rather than their beloved East Germany. It is all sheer nonsense." But the radicals' demands are serious enough: the ouster of U.S. forces and a drastic reduction of West Germany's defense budget. Beyond these goals, the left seems to be aiming for an eventual reunification of the two Germanys in which socialism would be triumphant.

ITALY. The new Italian Marxists draw their strength from a group of some 200 far-left organizations known collectively as "the extraparliamentary left," from the 14 universities (out of a total of 43) in which they wield major influence, and such cultural crannies as the Italian artistic community, which is almost totally Marxist. Still, they have not made much headway against the Italian Communist Party, which has a membership of 1,500,000 and won 27% of the vote in last year's election. The party has chosen to march to real power by proving itself effective and responsible. Communist mayors preside over a number of cities, including Bologna (pop. 500,000), Italy's best-run metropolis. Party Leader Enrico Berlinguer has denounced the far-leftists as "objective fascists"--just about the worst insult one follower of Marx can hurl at another.

FRANCE. Like their West German cousins, France's young Marxists have decided that they were "too ideological, intellectual and elitist" back in 1968. The French far left--ten main groups, with a total membership of no more than 30,000--is much smaller than the German movement. But it has achieved striking success in mining pockets of discontent that have been neglected by both the Gaullist regime and the establishment left. A variety of Marxist fronts--Trotskyites, Jean-Claude Navatte's Marxist-evangelist Christian Student Youth organization--helped transform hundreds of France's often-bored secondary-school students into a politically conscious, slogan-chanting pressure group powerful enough to put the government on the defensive and to force it to resubmit a controversial new draft law to the legislature (TIME, April 16). Radicals have also been marketing their "Marxist humanism" up and down factory assembly lines in Paris and other cities. As a result, France's floating population of 3,000,000 unskilled workers from Spain, Portugal and Africa have become a new minority with demands of its own.

Navatte, a Paris law student, talks hopefully of forging many alliances with "the masses of dissatisfied people in the country and obliging the government to listen to us." The Socialist and Communist politicians and union leaders of France's big left-wing establishment let the nimbler New-Left radicals get ahead of them in 1968--a mistake they are determined not to make again.

The Marxist renaissance defies current European realities at several points. One is the spiritual drabness of life in East bloc nations, where Communist dogmatism simply will not tolerate what one Polish theoretician dismisses as "Marxist dead talk." By and large, students in Poland and Hungary are baffled by the enthusiasm of their counterparts in the West for Marxism. In fact, to some young East Europeans Marx and Lenin are not exactly household words. Asked to identify them, a girl in Belgrade pondered for a moment and then guessed: "Two brothers?"

Another reality is the evolutionary character of capitalism in Western Europe, where state control of private enterprise is already well advanced, far more so than in the U.S. For all of its considerable vigor, European capitalism has tolerated both shocking social inequalities and some startling economic anomalies. France's vaunted prosperity, for example, has simply bypassed millions of Frenchmen living on incomes of under $250 a month.

Alienation. One aspect of Marx's intellectual legacy has proved especially durable. As French Sociologist Raymond Aron puts it: "If Marx is as strong today as he has ever been, it is because of his questions, not his answers." The young Hegelian Marx asked many of the same questions about society that trouble youthful European leftists today. One of his most lasting themes dealt with man's Entfremdung, literally his "estrangement" or "alienation" in industrial societies--a disease that, as Marxist humanists trenchantly argue, has not yet withered away.

The long-term impact of the Marxist revival is far from clear. The "march through the institutions" that the radicals talk about could be short indeed if, as West Germany's Jusos have already begun to do, they only antagonize workers and frighten away moderate voters. A leftist scare could severely reduce the expectations of France's unique Socialist-Communist coalition, which won 46.5% of the first-round vote in the March legislative elections and has a plausible shot at the presidency in 1976.

However uncertain the prospects for unity on the left, the new radicals argue plausibly that the Marxist revival is not a passing phenomenon. If Marx lives again, it is because Western Europe's still uneven prosperity has not yet put to rest many of the questions he raised a century ago.

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