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Marx's exaggeration—or simplification—is often especially appealing to university students in the advanced countries, who are cruelly confronted with the modern problem of "identity." Never was a society so opaque to its young. Unlike the peasant's son, or even the merchant's son, today's young may be unable to grasp precisely what their fathers do. What is it like to be a corporation executive, an advertising copywriter, a designer of computers?
The Opaque Future
The inscrutable face that a complex society presents to its young makes them vulnerable to simplistic explanations of it. To them, as to 19th century anarchists, individual man appears good and society appears corrupt. "I am a human being. Do not bend, fold or mutilate," was the slogan raised on the Berkeley campus in 1964 and repeated many times since. The computer, symbol of advancing technology, has resurrected all the old Luddite animosity toward the machine. The French student rioters of a year ago burned with the old anarchist passion against "society"—the passion that Marxism is designed to harness.
So far, rebellious youth in the advanced countries shows little sign of swallowing Marxism whole, but the Marxist vision does have its strong appeal to the alienated young. An Italian observer, the critic Nicola Chiaramonte, believes that Marxist influence has grown among Italian youth, even though the Communist Party has been losing young members. "Marx isn't very highly regarded as a thinker," Chiaramonte says, "but as a father image he is very much present. The older generation of Marxists remains influenced by Marxist thought, the last philosophy with a consistent system. But youth is moved by Marx's call to action. Castro's Cuba and Che Guevara conjure up a romantic image."
In a rapidly changing world, men apparently need a clear image of the "enemy" responsible for their anxiety and frustration. Hence the recent discovery of something called "the Establishment." A more recent American variant is "the military-industrial complex," familiarly known as MIC. The idea descends from Marx's "ruling class" of capitalists, with their grip on government and the cultural "superstructure." Neither "the Establishment" nor "the MIC" was coined by a Marxist, but the eager way in which these names, twisted from their original meaning, were embraced indicates the desperate psychological need of many Americans for "a class enemy" in a society that has gone a long way toward abolishing class.
Will the Vision Go Away?
Marxism today is more effective as a source of symbols directed against society's defects than as a guide to political action or serious thought. In countries dominated by Marxist parties, the faith is largely cant, the conventional wisdom, though it would be wrong to assume that such a role has no significance.