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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 André 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.