{"id":63,"date":"2006-01-01T19:10:38","date_gmt":"2006-01-01T23:10:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/marxisminternational\/2006\/01\/01\/yesterdays-man\/"},"modified":"2006-01-01T19:10:38","modified_gmt":"2006-01-01T23:10:38","slug":"yesterdays-man","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/marxisminternational\/2006\/01\/01\/yesterdays-man\/","title":{"rendered":"YESTERDAY’S MAN"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Harry Magdoff (1913-2006)  \"\"<\/FONT><\/P>
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Ideas, though nothing more than a reflection of the materiality of being, do matter.  And the most powerful idea of the twentieth century was Communism.  Harry Magdoff came into this world just as that idea was bursting on the international scene from the unlikeliest corner of Europe, full of spite and vinegar and credibly promising to transform humanity itself.   He death this morning in his ninety-third year saw off an exemplar of a much-reduced idea, that of “Western Marxism”, or a Marxism without the proletariat and retaining only its function as a sort of cultural criticism of bourgeois civilization.   <\/FONT><\/FONT><\/P>
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Mr Magdoff is best remembered both for his stewardship of the much-admired but little read Monthly Review<\/A> and a half-baked theory of imperialism<\/A> that was briefly in vogue shortly before North Vietnamese regulars drove into downtown Saigon in the wake of the most spectacular defeat ever suffered by an imperialist power.   Western Marxism at that moment was at its zenith, flattering itself by its imagined (but largely fictitious) role in the Communist victory before quickly degenerating into the phalanx of failed social-welfare economies and “identity” politics that was to follow hard on the heels of April, 1975.<\/FONT><\/P>
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The post- Vietnam denouement<\/EM> has in fact been so unkind to the generation of western marxists exemplified by Mr Magdoff that it is fitting to speak of his as a “failed generation” of thinkers on the Left.   Never quite sure of where they stood at any particular moment — at various times flirting with Maoism, Trotskyism, anarchism, syndicalism, or what-have-you — most finally settled into the vapidity of calling, forlornly, for a welfare state financed by taxing the market.   Largely gone was Lenin’s wager on class struggle and political will to reach the classless society.   As constituencies shrank, many quit the fight altogether, though Harry Magdoff remained steadfast in his belief in socialism, even if he could never cogently define quite what he meant by it.<\/FONT><\/P>
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So, Mr Magdoff is finally gone.   And with him are gone most of the illusions of the Western Left.  The social-welfare state is dead or dying;  strident nationalisms and noxious fundamentalisms vie to fill the vacuum left by socialism’s eclipse.   The Left itself is divided into a galaxy of minute, warring sects, united only in their inability to attract more than an insignificant fringe of the workers’ movement or, even, to present a tenable program of action.   All that is left, really,  of the Monthly Reviews of the world is the genre’s cultural critiqe of the bourgeoisie.   There is little to reckon such an asset will facilitate a renewal of the Marxian project.<\/FONT><\/P>
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What follows, then,  for the heirs of Marx here in the West?   Perhaps a rejuvenation of Leninism’s uncompromising prescriptions for class struggle.   More likely a nostalgic tailing after of Chinese “confucian collectivism” fueled by the dynamic of “authoritarian” Asian economies.  Marxism, after all, was once a canon of the inexorable, the unstoppable, the super-dynamic of inevitability.   Magdoff’s generation succumbed to the liberalism that everywhere surrounded them, whereupon the Marxist doctrine of the future descended into a catechism of the weak, the incompetent, the perennially unsuccessful, the raison d’etre<\/EM> of the welfare state.  <\/FONT><\/P>
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Marxism could not flourish within such strictures.  Perhaps the passing of the generation which best exemplified the degeneration of Marx into a garden-variety liberal will prove to be the necessary pre-requisite for the beginnings of a new and productive era in Marxism itself. <\/FONT><\/P><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Harry Magdoff (1913-2006)  Ideas, though nothing more than a reflection of the materiality of being, do matter.  And the most powerful idea of the twentieth century was Communism.  Harry Magdoff came into this world just as that idea was bursting on the international scene from the unlikeliest corner of Europe, full of spite and vinegar and credibly promising to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1120,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1428],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-63","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-marxisminternationstories"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/marxisminternational\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/marxisminternational\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/marxisminternational\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/marxisminternational\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1120"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/marxisminternational\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=63"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/marxisminternational\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/marxisminternational\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=63"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/marxisminternational\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=63"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/marxisminternational\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=63"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}