Analysis of film Arguing The World

Below is something I've been working on at school. Since McMaster has essentially eaten up all my time for the past few months, I thought it might be good to post some of my work to prove I am still alive (don't people usually go bungee jumping for that same reason?). So here is my analysis of the film Arguing the World.

Arguing the World: A Marxist Analysis of the New York Intellectuals

Wesley Kellar

The film Arguing the World follows the lives of four New York intellectuals from their modest childhoods, through their early experiences with academia and their subsequent careers as influential thinkers and social commentators. This paper will begin with a summary of the film, paying special attention to the early school days of Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, Irving Howe and Irving Kristol, and the subsequent changes in their respective theoretical subscriptions. Following this, the film will be analyzed with reference to material relevant to the study of sociological theory, with particular focus paid to parallels with the life of Marx and connections to the Marxist paradigm. In so doing, this essay will prove the utility of the Marxist theoretical framework in the study of sociology and the world.

This section summarizing the experiences of the four New York intellectuals draws entirely from the film Arguing the World (Dorman 1998). The film begins with a discussion of the childhood of each of the four characters profiled. Each was a Jewish child growing up in New York, experiencing the burdens of poverty and discrimination. Bell came from the lower east side, Glazer was raised in the Bronx to a working-class family, Howe recalls a difficult move to the East Bronx and a resulting drop in socioeconomic status, and Kristol relates that he barely noticed his poverty in Brooklyn, because everyone he knew was also poor. These trying economic circumstances helped lay the foundation for the brilliant careers that followed. The result of their lack of money was that all four young men attended the City University of New York (CUNY), a relative dumping ground for the “smart poor” (Dorman 1998).
[continued after the jump, or click on title to view full article]

It was at CUNY that the four youth began to solidify their intellectualism. They would gather daily in the school’s ‘alcove one’, discussing revolution, their anti-Stalinist brand of Marxist ideology, the need for revolution, and the ideas of Leon Trotsky. In accordance with Trotsky, they felt that Stalin's behaviour was in line with a dictatorship, and that the Moscow trials which saw many pleading guilty to espionage were in fact little more than blatant propaganda exercises. One of the toughest arguments among the four was whether the autocratic oppression of Stalinism was in some way related in an a priori manner to Marxism. Despite the influence of the Marxist, anti-Stalinist journal Partisan Review (PR), Kristol took the contrary view that there was in fact an organic connection leading from Marxist/Leninist movements to the hated Stalinist-style rule, and he was expelled by Howe for these views. This battle began a lifetime of disagreements and internal division which would plague the group.

During the war years, Howe and Kristol were soldiers in Alaska and France, respectively. Belle finished his time at CUNY, and Glazer worked as an editor. Immediately post-war, Kristol and Glazer both worked on a journal with several PR writers, arguing back and forth about existentialism, the role of Marxist ideas in society, and anti-Stalinist views. Although this discussion predated the rise of anti-communist sentiment among the wider United States public, that subsequent rise was not a validation of their beliefs. Instead, it was a blanket 'anti-red' doctrine which did not encapsulate the distinctions between Marxist, Leninist, and Stalinist forms of communism. This led Bell, Glazer and Kristol to take the unlikely action of joining the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, which was opposed to the US communist party, which they felt muddied the waters regarding what the Soviets stood for and were responsible for in Europe.

The anti-communist movement in the United States reached a frenzied zenith under Senator McCarthy, who began a series of trials against celebrities and citizens suspected of having communist sympathies. Many were accused of being Soviet spies, a charge which intensified after the Rosenberg couple were arrested for selling atomic secrets to the cold-war enemy. Kristol responded to the outrage of Liberals toward McCarthy's trials by attacking them. Although he knew that McCarthy's methods were questionable and thuggish, he felt that by defending the persecuted communists, critics were serving to excuse their behaviours and beliefs. Howe, on the other hand, felt that McCarthy's attacks on civil liberties were playing into the hands of communists by weakening American libertarian values. This was another example of the split between Kristol and the others.

In the 1950s, there was a tendency among academics toward conformity, one which Howe was critical of. Although disparaging of the maintenance of the capitalist status quo, he was no longer the radical he had been in his youth, founding the magazine Dissent to explore his socialist ideas in a democratic context. However, despite the connection each of the New York intellectuals felt with critical analysis, Howe’s three peers felt his new magazine went too far, and falsely labelled those who had given up on socialism as sell-outs. This coincided with the fact that, as universities expanded after the war and began accepting Jews as professors, Bell, Glazer, and Howe found jobs in academia. For the first time they began to see the universities as a place for free and critical inquiry.

Things began to change in the 1960s as radicalism grew on campuses. This was epitomized by the group Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). At first, this young group had positive relations with Howe and his fellow Dissent staffers, but this quickly degenerated as he came to see the SDS as rash, naive, and romantic idealists. In turn, they viewed him as rigid and paternalistic, an academic in an ivory tower unwilling to actively seek social change. Similarly, students at Berkley who once looked up to Glazer, a professor there, soon came to see him as part of the establishment that they were fighting against during a series of occupations and protests, many of which ended with violent clashes with police. These protest sought to restore students` rights to protest, to end the war in Vietnam, and to end the universities’ association with the military, among other things.

In response to the radicalism of the 1960s, Bell, Glazer and Howe began to associate themselves with liberalism, even as they saw Democrats moving further left on the political spectrum, many voting for Richard Nixon. This leftist Democrat ideology became the groundwork for the neo-Conservative movement, taken up by Kristol. He has championed the neo-Conservative ideology, claiming that his former friends, in their liberalism, are the new enemies of an ongoing cold-war. This brings the film to its close, with a brief retrospective of their lives together, and the acknowledgement by all that, despite their differences, they have great respect for the critical intellectualism of their former CUNY schoolmates.

This second section of the essay will link the film detailed above with the theoretical tradition of Marxism. To begin with, Marx can be linked to the story within Arguing the World through a contrast between the lives of the New York intellectuals and Marx himself. To begin with, Marx was born into a wealthy Jewish family in Germany, but struggled much of his life with poverty owing to his inability to manage a budget or live within his means (Pampel 2007). He wanted to enter academia but his dreams were crushed when a mentor of his criticized the church and was discredited, and finally he was forced to flee Germany because of his outspoken views on the oppression in German political life (McLaughlin 2009a). On the other hand, each of the intellectuals discussed in the film were born into working class Jewish families, but have since distinguished themselves and achieved success through their popular publications (Dorman 1998). Further, although they were initially sceptical of academia, they eventually found positions working within the university system, and were subsequently criticized for being too complacent with the oppressive nature of the university administrations (ibid. 1998). These differences, although evocative, merely help to highlight the ideological congruencies between Marx and the New York four.

Marx had a strong impact on the lives and ideas of the New York intellectuals. From their early arguments about whether or not Marxism contained within it imperatives leading to the abuses seen under Stalin, to their careers as writers and policy critics, Marx was ever present in their ideologies, as a reference point, inspiration, and often as an ideological opponent. The early split that occurred among the group was due to Kristol taking the position that Marxism led to Stalin-style authoritarianism. This split was never fully reconciled, and can be credited with increasing the ideological differences between Kristol and the others. This was just one way that Marx was to play a pivotal role in their lives.

During the radical campus movements of the 1960s, Glazer became a target of discontent for students fed up with the establishment, especially the Berkley staff's resistance to change and direct action (Dorman 1998). This can be analyzed in terms of Marx's tendency to view sociology in terms of a discipline of action. He felt that the role of a sociologist was not just to describe or understand the world, but to actively change and improve it (McLaughlin 2009b). This contrasts with Glazer's view that the students were attempting too much change, too fast (Dorman 1998). It is, however, consistent with the later actions of Kristol, who became a figurehead for the neo-Conservative movement (ibid. 1998). Although his views are no longer close to those he held as a young Marxist at CUNY, he is emblematic of Marx's notions that sociologists should take an active role in changing society in order to better it. In this way, Kristol is more similar to Marx than his former school-mates, although ideologically he is the most distant. These examples show the applicability of Marxist ideas to the lives of the New York intellectuals.

It is also interesting to note the prevalence of class conflict in the story of the four former CUNY school mates. As noted by McLaughlin, central to Marxism are the ideas of historical materialism and class conflict (2009a). As lower class Jews in New York, the New York intellectuals had no hope for an education but to attend CUNY (Dorman 1998). Ironically, this was crucial to their development, as they were exposed to the radical campus, as well as to each other, and thus helped to define their theoretical worldviews. A further twist on the concept of class conflict occurred when Glazer, now part of the dominant intellectual elite, was criticized for maintaining the status quo of his university (ibid. 1998). This exemplifies Marx`s notion that the state is but a tool of the capitalist class (McLaughlin 2009b), in that the university was but a tool of the intellectual elite to defend the status quo. In this instance it was the students, as their rights were being taken away, who were the underclass (both in strictly Marxist terms, and also in Weberian notions of power and party) (Pampel 2007). These instances further exemplify the utility of Marxism in shaping and explaining the lives of the New York intellectuals.

In summation, it has been shown that the film Arguing the World, and the lives of Bell, Glazer, Howe and Kristol which it describes, exemplify the strong ideological relevance of the Marxist theoretical framework. This has been presented by summarizing the lives of the New York intellectuals and tracing the influence of Marx on their actions and ideas, as well as through a comparison of their lives to that of Marx. Finally, this essay analyzed the stories of these influential academics according to Marxist notions of the role of social scientists as agents of change, and in relation to the Marxist concept of class conflict. Through this brief critical analysis, it has been shown that Marxism is a relevant tradition and a valid interpretative tool.

References

Dorman, Joseph. 1998. Arguing the World. First Run Features.

McLaughlin, Neil. 2009a. “2S06e – Lecture 3.” Presented at McMaster University, September 28, Hamilton, ON Canada.

------. 2009b. “2S06e – Lecture 4.” Presented at McMaster University, October 19, Hamilton, ON Canada.

Pampel, Fred C. 2007. Sociological Lives and Ideas: An Introduction to the Classical Theorists. 2nd ed. New York: Worth Publishers.