Christopher Phelps is one of the editors of Against the Current.

THIS YEAR MARKS AN ANNIVERSARY OF NO MINOR SIGNIFICANCE for radicals. Not the media splash of the summer: the 25 years that have passed since the rock and revelry in the mud of Woodstock, New York. Nor even the 100th anniversary of the 1894 strike by workers at George Pullman's sleeping car factory in Chicago and their allies on the nation's rails -- though that strike was extraordinarily important, for it was led by one of the first successful industrial unions, the American Railway Union, crushed by the federal government with the aid of Samuel Gompers and the American Federation of Labor, and resulted in the conversion to revolutionary socialism of Eugene V. Debs.

What I have in mind is a less-recognized occurence of 150 years ago, when in August 1844 the young German exile Karl Marx ceased setting pen to notebook in Paris, breaking off his work on the book-length document now known as The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts. Though Marx never completed the musings to his satisfaction, though he left the later sections in fragmentary form, though the several-part document was not published in German until nearly 90 years later, and though it did not appear in full English translation until 1959, 115 years later, the Paris manuscripts of Marx have come to constitute a vital piece of the theoretical heritage of the socialist movement.

The dominant theme of the manuscripts of 1844 was their explanation of how labor in capitalist society becomes estranged: how the product, or congealed labor, of the producer comes to stand over the laborer and dominate him or her in the form of privately held capital. The manuscripts are sometimes dismissed as the mere musings of an immature mind. Yet at that early date -- before Capital, before the Communist Manifesto, even before The German Ideology -- Marx already had many elements of his mature thought in place. He had found his way from Hegel to Feuerbach, and though he had not fully fought his way free from Feuerbach to his own unique approach, he had arrived at his unequivocal critique of bourgeois society, his projection of a communist future, his assertion that proletarian revolution was the road to human emancipation, and his philosophical method of active naturalism, the germ of historical materialism. The theme of alienation of labor, moreover, was carried forward in The Grundrisse, the unpublished economic notebooks of the late 1850s, and in Capital, both incontrovertible products of the mature Marx. Thus Marx's writings of 1844 should not be seen as the mere dalliance of an unformed, "pre-scientific" mind wholly separate from his later work.

But do Marx's ideas matter anymore? Is this an anniversary worth marking? To judge by the failure of practically anyone to recall that the anniversary even exists, apparently not. No special issues of journals, no symposia, no conferences are to be found on the concept of alienation or in commemoration of the Paris manuscripts. Why? Is it because, as one might infer, labor is no longer alienated? Quite the opposite: the absence of any serious consideration of the document paradoxically speaks to its enduring power, for labor's alienation is today so ubiquitous and unchallenged that it is taken by most social thinkers to be a natural, inescapable condition. Corporate managers might seek to sugarcoat the degradation of labor through the institution of programs for better relations between management and workers. But abolish wage labor? End class rule? Return to earth! Talk of eliminating that sort of alienation is beyond the pale.

HENCE IT IS THAT THE RULING IDEAS OF OUR MOMENT have erased the most brilliant ideas of our epoch. The reigning assumption today is that socialism and the method of social analysis inaugurated by Marx are obsolete. This is a notion distinct to our time. In Marx's day, socialism was ridiculed and pilloried as impractical, unrealistic dreaming -- as unattainable. When the Paris Commune of 1871 and the Soviet revolution of 1917 shattered that traditional hobby-horse of reaction, another argument rose to preeminence: the danger of socialism. Any impulse toward human equality or social levelling was saddled with the burden of Stalin's great detour. Socialism, it was said, terminated necessarily in barbarism and totalitarianism. Since 1989, socialism has faced a different, though no less insidious, problem: not so much an argument or idea as an ideological presumption that has sunk deep into the popular unconscious. Socialism today is simply presumed to be defunct, failed and irretrievable. The great historical alternative to capitalism, it is thought, is gone forever.

At the same time, socialism has lost much of its former pride of place within the left itself. Self-identified radicals, especially of the postmodernist variety, frequently see Marxism as an antiquated worldview subject to any number of grave, damning errors. American academics inspired by French theorists like Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida (both of whom, it must be said, evince far more respect for Marx in their writings than their American epigones) attack any "universalizing" aim, socialism included, as an ambition innately totalitarian and repressive. They speak of the world as irreducibly contingent, fluctuating, malleable and textual. They talk themselves blue about "race, gender and class," but they get excited only about the first two and have hardly anything to say about the third. When they do discuss class, it is to reduce the concept to an "ism," classism, apparently without recognizing that class consciousness, unlike racism or sexism, is reflective of a keen understanding of social reality and ought to be encouraged rather than denigrated.

Most such theorists operate exclusively from the seminar room, lacking any practical connection to the world beyond the campus. But the social movements, too, such as they are, have been overtaken by a related trend: identity politics. This style of activism treats politics as connected in an immediate and unreflective way to self-interest, so that, for example, Asian students, black students, women students and gay students all are encouraged to engage in militant expression of their own separate identities, victimization and rage, irrespective of whether they complement or contradict the strategic and programmatic aims of comparable organizations or make any political sense given the particular conditions of a campus or locality.

Socialist criticism of these new currents of social thought and activism differs markedly from the fire they are receiving from the right. Socialists affirm the reality of oppression and degradation that identity politics purports to address, for socialists are acutely aware that the anger and bitterness of oppressed groups are not self-indulgent. Injustice and exploitation are not, as conservatives think, invented fabrications of the self-pitying. But socialists simultaneously assert the need to aspire to a common politics on a democratic basis. By declining to counterpose the common politics of social class to the self-organization of the oppressed, socialists can remain open to self-expression and self-organization by oppressed people while at the same time declaring the following blunt truth: solidarity is requisite. A disorganized, disaggregated, uncoordinated politics will never succeed in achieving radical social transformation. Indeed, by failing to establish a basis for a commonality that overarches diversity without suppressing it, identity politics creates divisions and resentments that ultimately undermine its moral claims, contributing strategically to its own defeat.

SOME CRITICISMS OF PAST LEFT PRACTICE made by the new theoretical currents are worthy of embrace. Sectarian party-building at the expense of autonomous movement development is a tragic mistake, for without broad independent movement activity, socialism will never regain momentum. Any attempt to compress other oppressions into the category of class fails to grasp that capitalism is the rule of a social layer that employs multiple forms of domination, not just exploitation, to maintain its position. Dogmatic recitations from sacred texts are insufficient ground for social theory. But where postmodernism goes awry is in supposing that radicals can do without a common politics -- a universalizing project, as postmodernists disdainfully call it. Since social reality is neither exclusively nor primarily linguistic or textual, changing it requires more than cleverly adding slash marks between words or putting parentheses around syllables. Rather than indulge in abstruse convolutions or pose at an ironic remove, a responsible radical social theory should be immersed in the social world and in political practice.

Only at their peril, therefore, can radicals relinquish the hard-won conceptual centerpiece of class. Class struggle will remain central so long as society remains capitalist. That analytic and strategic judgment should not be confused with a moral ranking of class exploitation above the various forms of oppression. Nor need it regress into the old tendency to see labor battles as the only important social struggles. The point is simply that in a deeply class-divided society, social theory and political activism must pay proper attention to class.

The line of thought descended from Marx is in this sense far from obsolete. It expresses the real and present needs of social movements that are in a protracted crisis, in good part because most activists have adopted a politics and theory which, beneath their radical shell, replicate liberal interest-group politics -- the most feeble and obsolete form of political engagement around. Combined action is needed to make disparate struggles for human liberation effective. Socialists seek to move movements beyond a radicalism limited to the celebration of unrefined, immediate identity and expressed in the metaphor of "deconstruction." Marxism affirms the capacity of ordinary people to reason and draws upon a far-reaching heritage of social thought to illuminate the vital issues of the day: economic stagnation, underdevelopment, imperialism and the crisis of American democracy. It helps to explain how capitalism engenders cynicism, mockery and irony and why those poses are therefore far from radical. Unlike deconstruction, socialism is oriented fundamentally toward a politics of hope, toward the construction of a better world: an imagined future of human cooperation, equality and justice whose seeds are already planted in the soil of the present.

The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 are an exemplary case in point. Marx's conviction that human labor should be a realm of creativity, freedom and community is a powerful starting place for cultural criticism today. His assessment of the alienation of labor under capitalism, though written 150 years ago, reads like a vivid description of contemporary work life: "The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He is at home when he is not working, and when he is working he is not at home." Who has not had these sensations? Who hasn't felt required to take leave of their real activities to go to work? Because people still work for others, not themselves, work remains a realm of necessity rather than freedom, a means to life rather than life itself.

But there are different ways of drawing upon the classical texts of a tradition, different ways of advocating the liberation of humankind through a revolution of working people, different ways, in short, of being Marxists. These competing varieties of socialist behavior, without any sacrifice of materialist outlook, can best be understood as competing psychologies -- dispositions, mental outlooks, ways of seeing and acting. Too often in this century, revolutionaries have cultivated a remnant psychology. They have looked backward at great achievements, seen themselves as the last true believers in a world of the ignorant and the renegade, and clung to ideas that were appropriate at a given conjuncture but have been long outmoded by changing circumstances. Conceiving of the revolutionary movement as a righteous remnant has contributed to dogmatism and a sense of embattlement and marginality, aggravating among socialists themselves the estrangement and alienation endemic to human relations under capitalism, often resulting in bitterness and disenchantment.

Socialists have done better when they have managed to foster an outlook appreciative of innovation and experiment: a psychology of reconstruction that recognizes the significance of past struggles, theoretical legacies and heroic figures but is not afraid to treat them critically and does not attempt to deduce lessons from them without careful regard to the experience and social world of the present. Admiration for Lenin, for instance, need not entail mechanical applications to the contemporary United States of organizational norms developed for a militant industrial proletariat under conditions of Czarist repression in a predominantly peasant society. Lenin himself would have disdained such ahistorical schemas.

THE CRITIQUE OF ALIENATION HAS AN IMPORTANT ROLE TO PLAY in a psychology of reconstruction that seeks to recover the emancipatory core of Marxism and revive international socialism. Stalinism and social democracy, in addition to other profound failings, never addressed themselves to the transformation of everyday work life imagined by Marx. If the abolition of alienation in labor were consistently upheld by socialists as a revolutionary aim, it would require them to commit themselves to a profoundly democratic program for the labor process, the primary sphere of human activity. What is most needed now is not a rehearsal of past slogans but a moral renewal of socialism. The capacity of socialists to reason and express their aims clearly, not the recounting of past glories or invocation of founding figures as scriptural prophets, will be the rub in any attempt to widen the narrow boundaries of their movement. Thus socialists will have to recognize that the abolition of private property -- that condition which Marx stressed repeatedly in 1844 -- is not sufficient to eliminate alienation. The failure of the bureaucratic states to permit collective self-management on a democratic basis, to achieve the rule of the direct producers, resulted in the persistence of alienation in labor despite the replacement of private property by state ownership.

A socialist program to combat alienation would require a profoundly different society from capitalism, not a mere changing of the governmental guard of the kind that has been typical of social democracy in Europe. It would require the decisive removal of capital from social power, the running of offices, farms and factories by the workers themselves, and a correlative program of radical social measures: the extension of formal education to all ages and spheres of life, combined with a rotation of all odious duties, so as to overcome the separation of brain and hand by occupation; the guidance of production by ecological values so as to reconcile humankind to nature; the expansion of cultural freedom and resources for art, music and writing, thus encouraging creativity in all who wish to pursue it; the deepest possible political and workplace democracy, including freedom of expression and association as well as regular elections and recall, so to ensure workers' control; and thoroughgoing campaigns against racism and sexism so that men and women and whites and people of color will stand as true equals for the first time in human history.

Socialism today runs against the grain of received wisdom, but in its vision of a vastly improved and freer arrangement of social relations lies its enduring power and potential for redemption. Examination of the manuscripts that Marx wrote in Paris 150 years ago, like any study of Marx's writings, can only serve as a starting place. Socialists today cannot derive their course of action from the documents of the past. But it is worth noting that as early as the 1844 manuscripts -- too often relegated to a sheerly Feuerbachian stage in Marx's intellectual development, since they fall just prior to the famous "Theses on Feuerbach" -- Marx stressed the need for practical action and organization, as distinguished from mere criticism, in order to achieve communism. In that final lesson, the need for deliberate revolutionary action, lies another pertinent message for a time when many radicals think that "subversion" is accomplished by turning a text on its head.

Contents of No. 18