The surprise of this book is that it is a book. Most of what Progress Publishers issued against the Western left in these years was assembled from clippings and Party resolutions. The Philosophy of Revolt is a monograph. Eduard Batalov has read Marcuse in English and in German — One-Dimensional Man, Eros and Civilization, An Essay on Liberation, the Five Lectures, Reason and Revolution, and an article on the prospects for socialism in the Zagreb journal Praxis — read Sartre's Critique de la raison dialectique and L'imaginaire in French, read Debray, Mills's 1960 "Letter to the New Left" in New Left Review, both of Theodore Roszak's books on the counterculture, Brzezinski, and the Belgrade literary weekly Književne novine. He follows an argument across an author's career and notices when it changes. Set beside the export polemics of the period, this is a different kind of object, and the reader should be told so before anything else.
That is worth stating in a form that can be checked, because the standard finding about these volumes is the opposite one. Elsewhere in this series the test that settles the matter is the citation test: whether the opponents a book condemns are quoted from their own printed texts, or only characterised. Volume 3 of the Institute's International Working-Class Movement cites Luxemburg's Gesammelte Werke sixteen times, Kautsky nine, Die Neue Zeit twenty-four — and no work by Trotsky once. Batalov mostly passes that test, and the numbers are not close. Marcuse is footnoted to his own editions thirty-four times, against thirty-one references to Lenin: in a Progress monograph the man under attack is cited more often than the authority in whose name he is attacked. Debray is quoted at paragraph length from Bobbye Ortiz's 1967 translation, with page numbers. Mills is quoted from New Left Review no. 5.
Where the apparatus thins out, it thins out in an instructive pattern. Adorno is discussed for most of a chapter and named some sixty-seven times, and not one of those mentions is sourced to a work of Adorno's. Every Adorno footnote goes through an intermediary — Zoltai in Voprosy filosofii, Davydov in Sovietskaya muzyka, Zhitomirsky on music for the millions — so that the reader who wants to check the "logic of disintegration" against Adorno's own page cannot. Fanon's book is listed in a footnote, Paris 1961, but never quoted: what Fanon is made to have argued about revolutionary violence comes from Sartre's preface and from a German essay on him published in Munich in 1969. Cohn-Bendit appears once, at second hand, in another writer's paper on Marcuse, and is made to have become a student leader over the rules governing hostel visits. And Trotsky's name occurs exactly once in the book, in a clause with no source attached to it at all. The scholar and the functionary are visible in the same bibliography, and it is possible to say where each of them was working.
That mixture makes the book's central silence harder to explain away, and worth examining carefully, because it is the most instructive thing in the volume.
Begin with the date, and do not take it from the spine. The English edition is 1975, but the argument closed earlier. The latest substantive sources Batalov uses are Theodore Roszak's Where the Wasteland Ends, New York 1973, and a Pravda item of 24 June 1972; after those, nothing. The 1974 and 1975 dates in the footnotes all belong to Moscow editions of Marx and Engels, which is what a translator substitutes when preparing an English text. The internal evidence agrees: Chile does not appear, Allende does not appear, and neither Portugal nor Lisbon appears anywhere in eighty-nine thousand words. A book about the Western revolutionary left that went to press after September 1973 or April 1974 could not have been silent about both. So this is a manuscript of 1972–73 issued in English in 1975 — which matters, because 1975 was the high point of détente and of a Western European conjuncture the Soviet leadership watched closely, and Batalov was not writing into it. He was writing into the aftermath of 1968, and Progress was selling him into a later situation than the one he had analysed.
The commission, though, is stated plainly in his concluding pages. He warns the Western parties against "adopting a mentor's pose" towards the young; he says "the communists recognise militant youth as a force, whose sympathies are worth fighting for"; he concedes that the New Left "cast doubt on the ideals which official institutions claimed to be in step with the times" and that "it forced many people to stop and think about the fate of society in which they lived." The book is not an excommunication. It is a recruiting instrument, written to give a Western Communist cadre something intelligent to say to a student who has been reading Marcuse — which is why it had to engage Marcuse seriously, and does.
The engagement is real, and in places it is good. Batalov gives his opponents their strongest formulations before answering them, which is the elementary courtesy of intellectual history and is not common in this genre. He quotes Marcuse's 1969 statement that "the radical transformation of a social system still depends on the class which constitutes the human base of the process of production. In the advanced capitalist countries, this is the industrial working class." He records, accurately, that at the end of 1968 Marcuse denied that the students could substitute for the workers — that Marcuse said "he had never said or thought that the student movement could replace the proletariat or working class as a revolutionary force." He quotes Mills's own caveat: "Of course we can't 'write off the working class'." A polemicist looking for a soft target would have suppressed all three.
Having granted that, he presses where the argument is genuinely weak. Marcuse's case for the integration of the working class rested on the closing of the consumption gap; Batalov's reply is that this is an argument about needs masquerading as an argument about class position, and that it fails empirically in two ways. Marcuse, he writes, "carries over trends typical of society in present-day America to other capitalist countries" without regard for the very different situation of workers in Italy, France and Japan — a point that reads oddly for anyone who remembers that Marcuse published An Essay on Liberation the year after the Italian Hot Autumn and the French May. And Marcuse "ignores the unstable character of the situation in the capitalist world, assuming that high economic standards are to be a permanent feature in the life of the most developed capitalist countries." That sentence was written before the oil shock and printed in its wreckage. It has aged extremely well.
Behind it lies a serious piece of Marxist argument. Batalov denies that the revolutionary character of the working class was ever deduced from its impoverishment, and cites Engels's 1891 criticism of the draft Social-Democratic programme: "This is incorrect when put in such a categorical way. The organisation of the workers and their constantly growing resistance will possibly check the increase of misery to a certain extent. However, what certainly does increase is the insecurity of existence." If the revolutionary potential of the class rests on its position in production and on the insecurity of its existence, then a rise in living standards does not settle the question, and the whole architecture of the "one-dimensional" thesis loses its foundation. This is a real blow, honestly landed.
It was also being landed from the other side of the Cold War, by people the Soviet state would not print. Robert Langston's "Herbert Marcuse and Marxism," in the November–December 1968 International Socialist Review — the journal of the American Socialist Workers Party — made the same case first, and years earlier. Marcuse's conclusion about the working class, he wrote, "is not the result of any new theoretical discovery"; it "comes from the fact that by and large for the past 20 years the working class in the most advanced capitalist countries has shown few signs of any revolutionary activity," and by taking that quiescence "as the overriding reality to guide his analysis of social phenomena, Marcuse departs from the method of historical materialism." That is Batalov's objection, in Batalov's order, from a man Batalov could not cite.
The difference is in what surrounds it. Langston pauses to call Reason and Revolution (1941) "Marcuse's finest work and possibly the best book on Hegel yet written in English," and he tests the theory against the French May exactly as Batalov does — with the addition that Batalov could not make. Marcuse's second explanation of France, the living French revolutionary tradition, will not do, Langston argues, because that tradition "so far as it was carried by the Communist Party and the trade-union federations, was a zombie, not a living reality": the PCF "did everything it could to destroy the revolutionary movement and must be assigned major credit for derailing it." Same diagnosis of Marcuse; opposite operation. One critic is free to praise the book he is refuting and to name the party that demobilised the strike; the other is not. The review was noticed in Intercontinental Press, vol. 6 no. 39, 18 November 1968. A reader who wants to see how much of Batalov's critique of substitutionism is Marxism and how much is Soviet raison d'état can usefully read the two texts side by side.
Where the framework breaks is exactly where the Leibson volume in this series breaks, and for the same reason. Batalov can see bureaucracy perfectly well when it is somewhere else. On the Chinese Cultural Revolution he writes that it "was not a spontaneous movement but a specially staged grandiose happening," that "instead of bureaucracy being destroyed, one variety was replaced by another," and that the outcome was "the liquidation of socialist democracy and the establishment of a military-bureaucratic dictatorship." Those are categories with sharp edges. They are never once turned east of the Urals.
The scale of the omission is best shown by counting. In a book of eighty-nine thousand words about a movement whose formative political experiences were the Twentieth Congress, Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, the word Czechoslovakia does not appear at all — not under that spelling, not as Czecho-, not as Slovak, not as Dubček, and no scanner damage accounts for it. Hungary appears once, inside a quoted phrase about the revolution of 1919. There is no 1956, no Khrushchev, no Twentieth Congress, and no Prague except as a place where books were published. Trotsky's name occurs once, in a single clause asserting that the idea of war as the motive force of history "was actively propagated by the Trotskyites and in recent years (although with certain modifications) it has become an essential part of the Maoist ideological arsenal." Stalin's name occurs once. It occurs inside quotation marks, in the mouth of somebody else. And the Communist Party of the Soviet Union is not named at any point in the volume; the words Soviet Union occur twice. A Soviet philosopher explaining to Western Communists why the young have gone past them has written a book in which his own party does not appear.
That one appearance is the hinge of the book, and deserves quoting in full. Batalov reports that "the majority of the New Left expressed critical attitudes to real socialism since, from their point of view, 'Stalinist bureaucracy' had led Soviet society to deviate from the socialist 'ideal'." This is a fair statement of the charge — it is what Marcuse, and a great many others, actually thought. And the reply, in the very next sentence, is this: "It should be mentioned, that the vast majority of the radical Left is ill-acquainted with the real state of affairs in the socialist countries and the tone of their criticism is shaped to a large extent by general principles of the radical negative approach to existing societies."
That is the whole answer. The scholar who traced Marcuse's position on the working class across four books and a decade meets the central political accusation against his own state with the observation that the accusers are poorly informed. No evidence is offered for what the real state of affairs is. The theoretical supplement, a few lines later, is worse: the "so-called 'deviation' from socialism," Batalov writes, "emerges on closer examination to be none other than the influence of non-proletarian strata or Utopian illusions which their ideologists would impart to the revolution." Stalinism, on this account, was petty-bourgeois contamination — the same diagnosis the book applies to the students. The Terror is reclassified as a species of left radicalism and thereby disposed of. It is an ingenious move, and it is the point at which the intellectual historian stops working and the functionary takes over. Not one of the men and women who were shot is named. The phrase "socialist democracy" appears twice in the book, once about bourgeois legality and once about China.
The same asymmetry governs the treatment of France. Batalov's account of May 1968 is the French Communist Party's account, sourced to the July 1968 Central Committee plenum, to Waldeck Rochet, and to a long footnoted interview with René Andrieu in Le nouvel observateur of 22 November 1968 — "We did not think that there was a power vacuum." The students, Batalov concludes, "did not undermine even one of the institutions of power, they did not bring about the emergence of a revolutionary situation in Paris, let alone the provinces." What the ten million strikers were doing, and what the PCF and the CGT did with them, is not discussed. The contemporary reply is locatable: Pierre Frank, "Crisis of Revolutionary Leadership in France," and Ernest Mandel, "From Revolt Against the Bourgeois University to Revolt Against Capitalist Society," both in Intercontinental Press vol. 6 no. 22, 10 June 1968; and "First Lessons of the Revolutionary Upsurge in France," the statement of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International, vol. 6 no. 24, 24 June 1968. Whether or not one accepts their verdict, they are arguing about the strike, and Batalov is not.
The deepest reply to this volume, however, is a text Batalov could not have answered in print: the resolution "The New Rise of the World Revolution," adopted by the Ninth World Congress of the Fourth International and published in Intercontinental Press vol. 7 no. 26, 14 July 1969. It offers precisely the explanation of the youth radicalisation that Batalov's framework forbids. The prestige of the Communist parties among the young, it argues, had been undermined by de-Stalinisation, the Sino-Soviet conflict and the inadequate defence of Vietnam; the crisis in the workers' states was a crisis of bureaucratic economic management, in which a technocratic wing and a conservative apparatus quarrelled over market reforms while neither would "take a stand for workers' self-management, even in principle"; and the young intellectuals of Eastern Europe were moving first because the demand for freedom of creation and of debate "is a vital need without which they threaten to stifle." The same journal, in the same issue that carried the Marcuse review, printed a discussion document from Czechoslovakia on the party statutes and socialist democracy. Two traditions were reading the same generation. One of them could name what that generation was reacting against.
Fairness requires more than one concession in the other direction, and the same document supplies the first. Batalov's central charge against the New Left theorists — that a skepticism about the revolutionary capacity of the Western working class is a petty-bourgeois reflex dressed as theory — is in substance the Ninth Congress's own. Among the dangers facing the new youth vanguard the resolution lists "third-worldism; adventurism of an anarchistic nature; refusal to take into consideration the need of drawing ever broader masses into anti-imperialist and anticapitalist action," and adds: "The ideologies of Fanon, Marcuse, and Sweezy are only adaptations to this kind of mentality, which is objectively petty bourgeois even if it is inspired by the sincerest revolutionary motives." Its answer to Marcuse is Batalov's answer: "The experience of May 1968 in France dramatically confirmed this and refuted the pessimistic analyses of Sweezy, Marcuse, and others." Batalov was right about substitutionism, and he was not right alone or first.
His jab about the Trotskyists and revolutionary war is unargued and unsourced, but it too is not aimed at nothing: the Ninth World Congress had in fact adopted an orientation to rural guerrilla warfare in Latin America, and that orientation was contested inside the Fourth International for years afterwards at considerable cost. Batalov does not know this, or does not say it; he reaches for a stock phrase where an argument was available to him. But a reader should not conclude that the charge was invented.
Which leads to the test worth applying to a book like this one, and it is not a matter of counting militant words. Batalov uses the whole family of deviation labels — opportunism, revisionism, dogmatism, sectarian — twice each in eighty-nine thousand words, far below the average for these volumes, and nobody should convict him on vocabulary. The two questions that do discriminate are these. Is the charge cashed out into a specified act that could be shown not to have happened? And could the category, as the book defines it, ever apply to the author's own side?
On the first, Batalov's record is mixed and mostly creditable: his case against Debray is attached to a named book, a quoted passage and a named critic, and is refutable. His single sentence on the Trotskyists is attached to nothing at all. On the second the answer is uniform, and it is no. Compare the documents of the Fourth International's Tenth World Congress, printed in Intercontinental Press vol. 12 no. 46 of 23 December 1974 — that is, within weeks of Batalov's English publication — which attack ultraleftism at length and then turn the charge inward, by name and with dates. The adopted General Political Resolution records flatly, among the reasons the International has not grown, that "many of the organizations of the Fourth International continue to manifest a sectarian attitude on the question of recruitment." The congress document "Balance-sheet and Orientation for the Bolivian Revolution" calls the Teoponte guerrilla action of 1970 the "bitterest fruits of focoist adventurism," resting on "a basically petty-bourgeois concept" — the very charge Batalov levels at the New Left, turned on an operation carried out in the International's own political orbit — and dates its own Bolivian section's error to a specific signature: "The POR accepted that criticism in its self-criticism of April 1, 1972." Batalov's petty-bourgeois category is never once available for use on the party that commissioned the book. It is, on the contrary, the device by which that party is protected — Stalinism itself reclassified as contamination arriving from outside. A charge that cannot travel in both directions is not a finding about the world; it is a boundary marker.
Read the book, then, for its subject rather than its verdict. On Marcuse it remains a serviceable guide, and on the substitutionist temptation — the search for a new revolutionary subject that begins by writing off the old one — it makes an argument that the anti-Stalinist left also made, and that has not been superseded. Batalov's later career as a specialist in American political thought and in the history of utopia is already legible in the fourth chapter, which is the best writing in the volume. The translation is uneven, and a scholar who knew the Frankfurt School well is made to call its home the "Institute of Social Sciences" more than once.
And then note where the argument stops. In the chapter on violence, Batalov quotes Marcuse's claim that "precisely this coexistence explains to a large extent the distortion of socialism in relation to its original idea" — quoting it, characteristically, from the original German article in the Zagreb journal Praxis — and answers it by reciting what "communists, as is well known, have stated quite clearly" about peaceful coexistence, and by reminding the Western parties that in weighing any risk "they have to weigh up the gains scored by the whole international communist movement." The charge is that Soviet foreign policy had deformed Soviet socialism. The reply is Soviet foreign policy.
It is worth noting how that reply is sourced, because the pattern recurs across this series. The word coexistence appears thirteen times in the book and not once inside a quotation from Lenin. The only authority actually quoted for the doctrine is the International Meeting of Communist and Workers' Parties held in Moscow in 1969 — a conference resolution. A man who could produce Marcuse's German, Sartre's French and Engels's 1891 criticism of the draft Social-Democratic programme, and who cites Lenin thirty-one times on everything else, does not quote Lenin here, and the reason is that the passage he would need does not exist. Batalov was capable of better, and almost certainly knew it.