Radicals/Radicalism

While a genuine socialist movement existed in France prior to the publication of the Communist Manifesto in 1848, the real founder of modern socialism is Karl Marx. Marx's contribution to economic-political theory—the theory of surplus labor—drew from French socialism and Hegelian philosophy and posited that profits were wages stolen from laborers by those who controlled the means of production. The solution to the problem of exploitation, Marx held, was a workers' revolution. A second concept in the Communist Manifesto was the idea of class struggle, which Marx maintained would end only when the proletariat united against the bourgeoisie. With this understanding, Marx penned the words that set socialism on a radical path: "Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working men of all countries, unite!" (p. 179).

During the Soviet period in Russia, Marx's social theory became the ideological basis of the radical Bolshevik party. Only the anarchists proved more radical. Lenin, a staunch defender of violent revolution, introduced a changed form of radical socialism to Russia in 1917, altering the basic Marxian formula by bringing revolutionary peasants into the proletariat fight against capitalism and by creating a one-party system of communism. While undeniably radical, some historians deny that the Lenin-Stalinist regime was actually Marxian.

After Lenin's death, Trotskyites in the West rejected the notion of gradual social change, preferring the older concept of permanent revolution. In 1960 followers of Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) reinvigorated the social ideals of the Communist Party while other neo-Marxists such as György Lukács (1885–1971) and Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) endeavored to revive the classical aspect of Hegelian Marxism. Gramsci's stress on the importance of intellectuals in the struggle against capitalist hegemony encouraged other intellectuals to take up the fight. One such scholar, Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979) of Frankfurt School fame, helped formulate popular political opinions using a Marxist interpretation of Freud—a theory of surplus repression and performance principle, which he used to criticize U.S. capitalism. Marcuse's preoccupation with the politics of emancipation made him an ideal spokesperson for the New Left during the politically explosive decade of the 1960s. Under his leadership, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the radicalized arm of the New Left, undertook a campaign of violence against American imperialism.

In London, meanwhile, the philosopher and political activist Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) linked forces with the New Left in 1960 after resigning as president of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). Russell then launched the Committee of 100, a confrontational political organization that instigated political activism in Europe and the United States. The political reach of leftist politics spread, surfacing again in Paris in 1964 where Jean-Paul Sartre's (1905–1980) combination of Marxism and existentialism captured the imagination of French students. By 1968 radical violence engulfed France, Germany, Mexico, and Spain. Even Japan experienced student riots. Ostensibly, the New Left acted in the name of workers, fighting to overthrow capitalism and introduce socialism. In the 1970s, however, antiestablishment political factions, the Weathermen in the United States, the Red Brigade in Italy, the Red Army Faction (Baader-Meinhof) in Germany, the Angry Brigade in Great Britain, and the Action Directe in France, began a campaign of terror. In 1974 the Red Army Faction killed twenty-six and injured seventy-one unsuspecting travelers in Israel's Lod airport. In 1967 London's Angry Brigade attacked the U.S. Embassy, and in 1971 they bombed the home of U.K. minister of employment. Both groups cited militant liberation as motivating factors for these attacks. Marxian socialism was not the goal.