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p In which direction has the New Left let its unfettered imagination surge forth? As pointed out earlier, two interconnected trends have served to shape the movement’s activity— its preoccupation on the one hand with the formation of new consciousness, a new culture and a new man as a condition for changing society, and on the other preoccupation with the direct changing of this world by engaging in violence₅ a preoccupation particularly prominent during the second half of the sixties.

p The theme of violence permeates the main works of Marcuse, Fanon, Sartre, Cohn-Bendit and many documents put out by insurgent student organisations. It is in connection with violence that the views of various representatives of the radical Left with respect to contemporary society, the formation of the new man and new environment and nonrepressive society start to coincide. The motif of violence is the point at which the views of radical ideologues representing different world outlooks and political platforms overlap.

p There is nothing illogical about this: the “totalitarian” world subjected to negation appears in the mirror of the radical Left’s ideology as a world of total violence—- flagrant and sophisticated, open and disguised. This violence is programmed and incorporated into all those mechanisms which ensure the functioning of various parts of the social organism—from the corporative state to the individual—and in the first instance those mechanisms which link the individual to the state. Violence is incorporated into the very 170 needs of that society, into their content, structure and the means of their satisfaction. Violence is propagated by "mass culture". Not only does this “culture” propagate it but literature, films and music, as they inculcate in man a taste for violence, themselves directly promote it, as is the case for example with music that “violates” the ear and makes it incapable of independent discrimination and appreciation of sound.  [170•*  However as far as the overwhelming majority of people are concerned (as ideologists of the radical Left find themselves dismayed to have to admit) they are inclined to be tolerant with relation to violence. Sophisticated violence they simply fail to notice, it being so familiar. As for its more brutal forms apprehended by the individual, at this level reflection is reduced to indifferent ascertainment of the fact of violence.  [170•**  Incidentally from the point of view of the radical ideologists this is not even a matter of indifference or habit. In "developed industrial society" violence has become 171 a regular part of life, an element of culture; violence has become a mode of existence compatible with the nature of the society in which men live, something which has taken firm root in man’s psychological make-up, in the patterns of his needs and instincts, in his "biological nature”.  [171•* 

p As they set out to tear away all the masks that conceal the levers of power used by the ruling classes, to point to the necessity of struggle against even such forms of manipulation which at first glance have nothing in common with repression, the ideologists of the radical Left draw a distinction between two types of interacting mechanisms: mechanisms of open violence and masked repression. Making no bones about the rough way it deals with the opposition defying the law as set down by the ruling classes, the totalitarian state at the same time permits (tolerates) the activity of opposition forces that do not overstep the limits of legality sanctified by bourgeois democracy. But, as the "radical critics" stress, this tolerance in relation to the opposition is essentially repressive which in principle renders it identical with intolerance. In the first place this extends not only (indeed not as much) to democratic forces of the Left as to anti-democratic fascist forces. In the second place, this tolerance vis-a-vis left democratic forces is of a highly limited character and only makes itself felt for as long as the opposition does not create a real threat to the establishment.  [171•**  Thus democracy, law 172 parliament and elections are all concrete manifestations of tolerance pure and simple bereft of any practical value for the opposition and which cannot be regarded as levers for the implementation of an anti-totalitarian alternative. Moreover, this ideologist of the radical Left maintains, they should be regarded as levers for the concealed suppression of those forces.

p When levers of democracy are used, there results, according to Marcuse, the involvement of opposition forces in the “game”, whose rules these forces have to abide by; this eventually promotes their "integration into the system" and robs them of the capacity to adopt a devastatingly critical stand with regard to the latter. At the same time democratic freedoms and institutions founded on a basis of such freedoms give rise to illusions and ill-founded hopes among the opposition forces to the effect that qualitative changes will be achieved without the application of violence. This demoralises and demobilises the opposition, disperses its ranks robbing them of revolutionary strength. Finally since they have nothing to lose as a result of manifestations of such tolerance, the ruling classes win another advantage in that they receive in exchange the people’s tolerance in respect of the prevailing totalitarianism: ".. .It is the people who tolerate the government, which in turn tolerates opposition within the framework determined by the constituted authorities.”  [172•*  This means that the legally sanctioned “tolerance” ceases to perform the function of a democratic mechanism and becomes a tool for neutralising the opposition, as a political force. The means of implementing this “tolerance” contradicts its initial aims and makes of it a converted form of suppression.

p Marcuse arrives at the conclusion that there exists only one method for restoring to the opposition the political force which it has lost: to turn upside down the existing system of mechanisms, i.e., manifesting intolerance with regard to everything which is sanctioned by the ruling classes, to reactionary, anti-democratic forces, in relation to which the totalitarian regime pursues a policy of tolerance (and at one 173 and the same time in relation to those who are tolerant with regard to "repressive tolerance"). This "revolutionary intolerance" must go hand in hand with tolerance in relation to those who have been "placed outside the law" and who base their behaviour on violence as an illegal path of struggle to defend their rights.  [173•* 

p Marcuse is ready to substantiate the moral rights of those in revolt to resort to violence, as Sartre was ready to undertake to explain the reasons for the students’ revolt. Sartre urged his young followers to act rather than justify themselves, which was unnecessary as the elder generation would take care of that.  [173•** 

p The conception of violence formulated by the ideologists of the radical Left met with enthusiastic approval on the part of the New Left, (particularly its extremist wing) since it was in tune with its rebellious mood and pessimistic assessment of the mechanisms of legal struggle. It is worth pointing out in this connection that Marcuse owed his popularity among the ranks of the European, particularly West German, New Left not so much to One-Dimensional Man as to his essay Repressive Tolerance and two lectures centred round the problem of violence which he delivered in West Berlin in the summer of 1967.

p Yet on the other hand it is precisely this conception of violence which incurred understandable criticism of the radical ideologists on the part of the democratic forces, for this conception brought out all the theoretical vulnerability of radical theories and the harm these theories do to the revolutionary movement.

p Justification for this criticism is provided by the radical Left’s dogmatic and one-sided interpretation of the problem of violence, its ignorance of the real correlation of class forces and the political irresponsibility which comes clearly to the fore in this concept. The dramatic contradictoriness of 174 the modern epoch which confronts many of the adherents of radical negation as a personal tragedy consists precisely in the fact that the epoch of the transition from capitalism to communism on a world scale is of necessity linked with revolutionary negation of capitalist society, and this negation is effected by means of revolutionary violence. Yet at the same time this is an epoch when incompetent utilisation of the mechanisms of revolutionary negation, and abandonment of restraint in violence, called for by concrete conditions of time and place, hold out a menace for this very revolutionary negation.

p In 1918 after the triumph of socialist revolution in Russia Lenin turned to the question of the future and referred to it as an epoch of revolutionary violence. "Marxists have never forgotten that violence must inevitably accompany the collapse of capitalism in its entirety and the birth of socialist society. That violence will constitute a period of world history, a whole era of various kinds of wars, imperialist wars, civil wars inside countries, the intermingling of the two, national wars liberating the nationalities oppressed by the imperialists and by various combinations of imperialist powers that will inevitably enter into various alliances in the epoch of tremendous state-capitalist and military trusts and syndicates. This epoch, an epoch of gigantic cataclysms, of mass decisions forcibly imposed by war, of crises, has begun—that we can see clearly—and it is only the beginning.”  [174•* 

p This emphasis of the role of revolutionary violence and of revolutionary negation is most important today, when within the developed capitalist countries there exist the essential material prerequisites for revolutionary socialist transformations, and when organised violence constitutes that historical form of violence which Lenin defined as “necessary”.

p On account of several circumstances (manipulation of man’s needs, the influence of the ideology of “integration”, etc.) reformist moods have affected certain sectors of the working people in the developed capitalist countries. The real chances of a peaceful transition to socialism have at times been absolutised giving rise to a false idea that a “peaceful” and a “parliamentary” transition to socialism 175 are one and the same thing. Moreover, the peaceful road to socialism is sometimes interpreted as a non-violent road, that is essentially one that is not associated with revolutionary negation. And indeed the bourgeoisie has of course gone out of its way to make the working people forget about revolution or "drive out of their minds", as Lenin phrased it, the very idea of revolutionary violence more or less identifying it with betraying one’s country.

p The bourgeoisie is now taking numerous steps to consolidate the power apparatus of the state and also non-state organisations which perform repressive functions. This apparatus is becoming more and more closely linked to the military-industrial complex, and to strip the military-industrial complex of the enormous power which it possesses, let alone any transition of power to the working class, is impossible other than by means of revolutionary violence.

p However that is not yet sufficient reason for concluding that the bouregois democracy of today, as a historically evolving institution, has developed into an all-pervading mechanism of repression and that the time has already come for it to be cast aside by revolutionary forces as no more than a mere obstacle on the path to social progress.

p The category "repressive to‘lerance” is undoubtedly rooted in social and political reality. It pinpoints objective tendencies intrinsic to the conditions pertaining in the developed capitalist countries: the degeneration of bourgeois democracy, the transformation of the law into no more than a screen behind which the real sharing out of power and its practical exercise proceed; the narrowing down of the possibilities for effective action of opposition forces; exaggeration of those values which in the past served as a genuine embodiment of the opposition’s right to take an active part in political life; manipulation of the working people’s minds.

p However when pinpointing these processes the ideologists of the radical Left are guilty of similar one-sidedness and categoric arguments, which in the final analysis rob their criticism of theoretical or practical value and undeniably make it further goals which obstruct the achievement of revolution.

p Just as Adorno in the field of music, so Marcuse in the field of politics resolutely refuses to acknowledge that the democratic institutions in bourgeois society and the “needs”, 176 with the help of which the ruling class manipulates the minds of the masses are not “one-dimensional”. The absolutism typical of the radical Left comes particularly clearly to the fore in Marcuse’s assessment of law and in general of all legal mechanisms as nothing but levers of "repressive tolerance", which should be resolutely rejected by the revolutionary.

p This point of view is not new. It has in the past been upheld by anarchists, maintaining that revolutionary activity only begins where the law ends.  [176•* 

p Bourgeois laws are of course the expression of the will of the ruling class, they represent a specific dividing line marking the limits of action for opposition forces. But at the same time bourgeois-democratic norms also pinpoint the limits for suppression of the opposition -forces by the ruling class, those limits which the bourgeoisie was obliged to set down under pressure from the struggle waged by the proletariat and other strata of the working people.  [176•**  In this sense democracy in bourgeois society can be regarded both as an important gain of the working people, and first and foremost as a gain of the working class. There is no doubt that Marcuse overestimates the strength of the bourgeoisie in the developed capitalist countries when he maintains that it “tolerates” the existence of only those forms and forces of the opposition which represent an advantage and no danger for it.

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p The bourgeoisie of course endeavours to reduce opposition forces to an ineffective nonentity, yet independently of this endeavour it is obliged to “tolerate” not only professorial speeches but such forms of pressure in which it is clearly aware of a real threat to its existence but which it is not in a position to eliminate. In a word, the bourgeoisie “tolerates” that which it is not in a position to cope with effectively at the given stage of development in the class struggle.

p The “scope”, provided by bourgeois democracy for activities of opposition forces is admittedly not great enough to provide the latter with a chance of implementing socialism “legally”, and when a revolutionary situation develops power has to be taken by violent means. Yet the utilisation of legal mechanisms by opposition forces represents an important prerequisite for the preparation of socialist revolution and the emergence of socialist democracy.

p Until conditions favouring revolutionary negation of capitalism have taken shape, bourgeois democracy can be used by the proletariat for the preparation of such negation— above all for the cohesion of those strata of the working people who express discontent with the existing regime and, together with the working class, are able to come forward as an anti-monopolist, anti-imperialist force. In this sense the struggle to extend democracy within the context of bourgeois society constitutes one of the forms of the struggle for socialism. When stressing this fact, Lenin wrote: ".. .socialism is impossible without democracy because: (1) the proletariat cannot perform the socialist revolution unless it prepares for it by the struggle for democracy; (2) victorious socialism cannot consolidate its victory and bring humanity to the withering away of the state without implementing full democracy.”  [177•* 

p In the development of democracy as one of the elements of culture there is an internal continuity to be observed. The new type of democracy grows up on the basis of the dialectically “sublatable” democracy of the old type. And the level of development, of actual implementation, and rates of the emergence of the democracy of the new type often depend directly on the level of democratic development of 178 the society historically preceding the current one, on democratic traditions.

p In the process of revolution the mass revolutionary movement of the working people engenders new organisational forms of power and administration (as has been the case in countries that have embarked on the socialist path) which do not stem directly from traditions of bourgeois democracy. In this sense, however, there is every reason to accept the tenet put forward by certain ideologists of the radical Left, to the effect that the process of negation of the old society engenders forms of organisation for the society which later replaces it. However, the radical ideologists lay emphasis on the distance which separates them from bourgeois democracy and in general from the whole culture of bourgeois society (the Great Refusal), and pay too little attention to the fact that new, socialist society is not born in the ruins of the old world but grows up out of it. Given this situation, there inevitably arises the question as to the legal forms new projects for the organisation of society will eventually take, born as they are in the process of the mass revolutionary movement; what forms the concept of revolutionary justice, that spontaneously took shape in the period of revolution, will assume. Whether, during the building of a new society they will come to represent a function or stable regulators of social life—this to no small extent depends upon the degree of democratic maturity of the destroyed society; on the degree to which the working people and above all the working class have been educated in a spirit of struggle for democracy; on whether bourgeois democracy in the course of the revolution was simply trampled underfoot or whether it was dialectically “sublated”. In any case events in modern China have shown that masses that have not been educated (as a result of specific historical conditions) in the spirit of the struggle for democracy and the utilisation of democratic institutions to promote revolutionary ends are easier to deceive and subject to manipulation at the hands of internal forces which have embarked on the liquidation of socialist democracy and the establishment of a military-bureaucratic dictatorship.

p It follows that the dual nature of democracy in bourgeois society predetermines the dual attitude to it manifested by 179 the proletariat: the latter’s ultimate aim is the revolutionary “sublation” of bourgeois democracy, but the achievement of this aim should be prepared for by the whole course of the struggle for democracy to ensure the validity of old rights and freedoms, and the securing of new ones.

p Democracy therefore was and remains an arena for unceasing struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.

p It goes without saying that the proletariat and all revolutionary forces are unable in their struggle against the bourgeoisie to start out from anything other than the real conditions which have taken shape in the relevant country. In those places where democratic norms and institutions have no real power or where the scope guaranteed by law for opposition action is too narrow greater emphasis is laid on violence than in countries where democratic mechanisms are more effective. But even in those countries violence cannot be regarded as an absolute form of struggle. In history, there has most likely not been a single revolutionary act which was not connected in some way—and, unmistakably so—with violence, law-breaking and destruction. At the beginning of the 1890s Plekhanov wrote in his article Power and Violence, directed against the anarchists’ absolutisation of violent action: "If we take as an example any revolution of the 18th century, such as that of 1830 or 1848, on each occasion we come across a long bloody series of violent acts, revolts, barricades, armed confrontation and butchery. These instances of violence mislead the anarchists and their delusions can best be summed up as follows: ’Since violence is perpetrated in every revolution it is sufficient to resort to violent means to unleash or accelerate revolution’.”  [179•* 

p The error leading to this type of confusion is to be found in the fact that violence as a factor that promotes the destruction of the old order is absolutised and presented as a factor leading up to revolution or at least as one which creates revolutionary situations. As wittily noted by Plekhanov, "the anarchists reason like a man who might say: ’Since every time when rain falls it is necessary to open an umbrella it is therefore sufficient to open this useful tool, for rain to fall’ ”.  [179•**  Since revolutions, they say, have proved victorious thanks 180 to violence it is thus essential to encourage violence—and then revolution will inevitably triumph in the jungles of Asia, Africa and Latin America, and in the "concrete jungles" of the developed capitalist countries of Western Europe and the USA. This logic put forward by present-day ideologists of the radical Left who see violence (in the form of spontaneous revolt) as the creative force of history—is to a large extent determined by its own socio-political experience and the experience of those in whom many members of the new Left saw models "of the revolutionary spirit". In the works of Marcuse and Adorno admittedly there was no influence of a background shaped by the experience of guerilla wars or wars of national liberation. Yet Fanon who had fought in Algeria’s FLN had gained such experience and the same was true of Regis Debray and Guevara and even Sartre, who participated in the French Resistance.

p They were obliged to work in conditions where legal levers for the formation of social reality were either entirely lacking, or more or less ineffective, or where their utilisation proved particularly difficult. Most important of all, with their own hands they built a social world—building it through violence. At the same time, after the victory of the movements in which they had actively participated, some of them came to power and again found that it was necessary to use violence against counter-revolution and mobilise the “will” of the masses in order to implement the projects for social change they had put forward.

p It is not difficult to imagine that these people are greatly tempted to draw the conclusion that social reality is something plastic and that violence is all-powerful; that they are tempted to elaborate general theories on the basis of socially limited experience, extending it to cover such situations, countries and regions where and when it was not applicable and where mechanical following of this experience could lead to results quite different from those to which the radical might aspire in all sincerity.

p The personal experience of certain ideologists of the radical Left also makes itself felt in connection with their preoccupation with violence as an important condition for forming the "new man" immune to the vices of consumerism, careerism and other fruits of bourgeois culture.

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p The formation of the free personality in "revolutionary violence" is one of the fundamental points elaborated by the ideologists of the radical Left in the Third World and above all by Frantz Fanon in whom Sartre saw a theoretician who had singled out the true significance of violence in the modern world.  [181•* 

p Fanon, being a representative of the “colonised” peoples was prone to morbid reflection as he searched painfully for an answer to the question as to how those who had been robbed of their sense of dignity, that had been trodden under foot by colonialists, could win it back. For him there was only one answer—"revolutionary violence" or " revolutionary cruelty" in relation to those who stifled and stifle the man in men, cruelty as compensation for humiliation suffered. For Fanon as the French publicist Jean Amery noted in his essay The Birth of Man from the Spirit of Violence revolutionary violence is the violence of revenge, which is not merely the midwife of history, but also the midwife of man who in the historical respect is only just starting to discover himself and evolve.  [181•** 

p Moreover, for Fanon the act of "revolutionary cruelty" or "revolutionary violence" has a general, humanistic, “ cathartic” significance: it not only restores to oppressed man his sense of dignity; it renders equal in suffering the former oppressor and the former victim, when the two change places; the former oppressor, as he puts himself in the other’s place, discovers himself the significance of "repressive cruelty" negating man, and acquires human traits which he previously lacked.

p In his description of the emotional state of “colonised” man, Fanon picks out and records in his scheme of things certain traits characteristic of the psychological make-up and consciousness of the individual long subject to suppression who subsequently defies the confines of an earlier existence as he endeavours to assert himself in his own 182 consciousness as the subject of history through the rejection of his former objective status. “Rejection”, which psychologically cannot be effected otherwise than through an abrupt adjustment of man’s previous oppressed status, through the inversion of previous subject-object relations, that is through violence: in relation to the former oppressor, the “situation”, and his own self as it was “created”.

p It is evidently in this psychological need that it is possible to find an explanation of the artificial fanning of hate towards former oppressors (and unfortunately not only towards oppressors), which for certain politicians and ideologists in the Third World comes to represent the all- important factor in national (and individual) self-awareness of formerly oppressed peoples.

p In this need, it would appear, we find one of the reasons for the popularity which the idea of violence acquired among a considerable section of New Left members, one of the reasons for intolerance shown by ideologists of the radical Left in relation to "repressive tolerance" which, as they suppose, blurs the silhouette of the object of animosity whose violent removal is necessary to enable the individual to feel himself a man.

p However, Fanon, without any justification, elevates a socio-psychological phenomenon to the level of a general sociological law for the formation of the personality, extending the framework of the existentially interpreted situation, thus turning it into history. He identifies (or at any rate gives his readers reason to believe that he identifies) the process of the individual’s direct break-away from the continuum of repression with the process of man’s formation, in which this break-away merely provides the initial step.

p The very act of revolutionary violence (counter-violence), is not in itself an adequate condition for the formation of the free individual; at best it is a prerequisite for that formation, for the removal of a preliminary obstacle on the path to self-liberation. For if the essential material basis for man’s development is lacking, then the initial liberating impulse would either rapidly be exhausted or it would demand new sacrifices, new acts of violence (counter-violence), while man shaped in the continuum of violence would emerge not as a free individual but as an "eternal guerilla", who in the 183 ordinary conditions of every-day routine could turn into a pessimist.

p Particularly dangerous—both for the individual and society—is the unconditional preoccupation with violence after the victory of revolution. This preoccupation inevitably demands the presence of a real, apprehended object of violence in the struggle with which the advocate of violent methods sees the mainspring of social advancement to lie. When there is a real class enemy to hand, violence against him is inevitable, although ignorance of the historically conditioned measure can even here do man a disservice by placing a brake on the development of revolution and alienating from the “Jacobins” many of those who would have been able to eventually make their contribution to the cause of revolutionary change. But this is not yet a tragedy. Tragedy begins where the real object of violence disappears while the orientation towards violence remains. Then it is directed either outwards, finding expression in a course of foreign policy, or inwards crashing down on the victors. The object and subject of violence merge together as one as they give rise to bloody terror, and the course of "revolutionary violence" degenerates into political masochism. Although history does eventually rectify those mistakes which later are erased from historical memory or which sink to its very depths. Yet for the concrete history, let alone the existential memory of concrete generations and individuals, they remain an eternal trauma that can only be “sublated” by optimistic awareness of the invincibility of the new and faith in social progress.

Means, as mentioned earlier, cannot be identified with ends, nor can they differ too much from ends and become ends in themselves—otherwise those social ideals which provide the mainspring for man’s actions will emerge as unattainable for the rank-and-file participants^in protest movements.