Workers World Vol. 18, No. 51
December 30 – In its protracted struggle to win hegemony and bring about a victorious socialist revolution, the proletariat has of necessity sought to win over the so-called middle strata of society. This was done successfully both preceding and during the October Revolution in Russia and later in China. Also, in pre-revolutionary times and particularly when the proletarian cause is in the ascendency, the success of the proletariat has been marked by winning over wide strata of the intellectuals, including some of the most brilliant of the period.
“The bourgeoisie can howl all it wants against intellectuals,” said Rosa Luxemburg on the occasion of a dinner in honor of the 50th birthday of Franz Mehring, the biographer of Marx and celebrated literary critic. “But we have won over the best from their class,” she said, pointing to Mehring.
It has not always been easy, even for the greatest Marxists, including Marx himself. He had his difficulties with the intellectuals. Certainly this was the case with his friend Ferdinand Freiligrath, the famed German poet.
Lenin too spent a great deal of time and energy cultivating Maxim Gorki but during the crisis of October 1917 Gorki veered away.
The intellectuals as a social grouping tend, on occasion, to veer back and forth depending upon the tide of battle. It is small wonder, in a society split into warring, antagonistic classes, that intellectuals often find themselves, especially during periods of great crisis, seeking shelter in the camp of the stronger.
Much more often than not their sympathies are with the poor, the exploited, and the persecuted. The freedom which they seek and need is only rarely available to them in a society based on private ownership of the means of production and class privilege. Only socialism and the abolition of classes will afford complete freedom because, among other things, it will abolish or certainly narrow the great differences between physical and intellectual labor.
Intellectuals have been particularly under fire in the past two decades in the United States. In fact, the entire academic community has lived in fear not only during the McCarthy period, but during the Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon eras as well. Nor has this period come to an end.
There has been, however, one segment of the academic communist which has been almost totally immune from any attack or abuse. It is completely sheltered and secure in its privileged position. It maintains a low profile in public and only on rare occasion does an individual from the group seek public visibility.
This segment of the academic community is in reality a new breed altogether. It is made up of the military intellectuals; more precisely, the nuclear military intellectuals. The engineers, designers, and architects of the gas ovens in Buchenwald are gentlefolk compared to this new phenomenon.
Their profession is nuclear war. They vie with each other in presenting variations of nuclear war games as though they were playing with toys. It is impossible to take them seriously – and yet it is impossible not to.
To call them intellectuals is to debase the human intellect. They are a product of the latest phase of imperialist militarism and represent a new low in the degeneration of bourgeois elitism. Unfortunately, they are not an endangered species as are many scholars, students and teachers in times of depression. The truth is that they play a most significant role in the American military establishment.
James Schlesinger is the outstanding public figure of this new breed.
In early 1974, when Kissinger’s prestige was at its height with the ruling class, he permitted himself to repeat the admonition attributed to Eisenhower in his farewell to the White House in which the latter warned against the dangers of the military-industrial complex. But Kissinger broadened the phrase “military-industrial complex” to read “military-industrial-intellectual complex.”
He thereby brought into the open a long-smoldering conflict over nuclear strategy and exposed Schlesinger as the proponent of the so-called “first use” in nuclear war. Since then Schlesinger has become the symbol as well as the major proponent of the first-strike theory, or what was previously known as the “preemptive” nuclear attack.
Schlesinger has steadily modified his formulations, but in essence his line remains the same – the use of tactical nuclear weapons first by the U.S. in a conflict. He is not, however, its only proponent in the military establishment. Indeed, there are no opponents there; no one has voiced opposition.
Schlesinger’s dismissal by Ford from his post as Secretary of Defense in November 1975 was based upon Schlesinger’s tactical errors and had more to do with his handling of Congress than with his “first-use” nuclear strategy. He had openly berated millionaire Senators over budgetary matters at a time when Ford could ill afford to antagonize them, especially in light of the impending struggle with Reagan.
For all his high standing with the Pentagon and with the hawks in the civilian establishment, Schlesinger is in the final analysis merely an employee of the capitalist establishment. He is unlike, for instance, Secretary of State-designate Cyrus Vance, who is part of the establishment, of the very core of Wall Street insiders, and speaks for that so-called “constituency.”
For a while it seemed that Schlesinger, having served as head of the Atomic Energy Commission, later as head of the CIA, and then as Secretary of Defense, exercised power independently of any groupings in the ruling class or the military. This certainly seemed the case in the days immediately following the Nixon resignation, when a flood of publicity built Schlesinger up as the man who kept watch on the military itself in the days preceding Nixon’s downfall and thereby prevented a military coup.
But this was groundless speculation. The so-called Seven Days in August, when a military coup seemed to be possibly imminent but did not come off, was due to vacillation in the military itself and not the authority or alleged power of Schlesinger as Defense Secretary.
No civilian Defense Secretary has wielded that sort of authority over the military in this century, with the possible exception of during the First World War. In the final analysis, Schlesinger is a mere professional advisor, not a power wielder. His dismissal by Ford proved this.
Schlesinger’s inclusion in Carter’s cabinet is another matter altogether. It has much more to do with Machiavellian diplomacy vis-à-vis China and the USSR than with his role as a power wielder.
Carter can use Schlesinger as a connecting link with the People’s Republic of China and as a symbol of anti-Soviet resolve by the Carter administration. Should the new cold war between the U.S. and the USSR grow colder, it is very possible that the Carter administration will shift Schlesinger from his post as Energy Advisor to one more intimately linked with foreign policy, which would, of course, have the effect of signaling the USSR that the Carter administration has become more belligerent in its struggle with the Soviet Union.
In any case, Schlesinger’s inclusion in the administration serves multipurpose military ends. Certainly his function in the administration will not be confined to energy matters. His job will unquestionably exceed the job description given by Carter.
Finally, there is the matter of the affinity that Carter has to Schlesinger. Carter claims credentials as a nuclear engineer. In his recent interview over the Public Television Network with Bill Moyers, he was asked what he would do if he were faced with a situation similar to Truman in 1945. Would he use the atomic bomb?
His answer was an unqualified yes.
It is not that the American working class has, in the person of Schlesinger, a Dr. Strangelove with whom it has to reckon. Rather, it may very well be the case that the American people have unwittingly elected to the White House a Dr. Strangelove in the person of Jimmy Carter.
The problem does not lie with a single individual carried away by addiction to a military Armageddon. It lies with the organic tendencies of the ruling class, to whom war is congenital and imperialist disasters a periodic recurrence.
Last updated: 11 May 2026