The following is a passage from Aleksander Solzhenitsyn’s epic August 1914, about which I cannot speak highly enough. I’m putting it here as a reminder of the wisdom of Ecclesiastes ? “that which has been done is that which will be done / So there is nothing new under the sun” ? and also to buttress a point in Dar?o Fern?ndez-Morera’s American Academia and the Survival of Marxist Ideas, that American socialists are “[s]eemingly unaware that what they say has already been said many times, and possibly said better, by socialist professors in Europe and elsewhere” and therefore “continue to reiterate materialist teaching dating back to Marx and taught for generations in the socialists countries.”

Read over the following exchange between the characters in this novel, set in Russia three years before the communist revolution and all the misery that was to follow. See if the ideas presented by the student Kotya don’t sound familiar ? as if Varsonofiev were talking with a 21st-century American socialist:

========================

… “Look at our waiter over there ? a pretty unpleasant-looking face, don’t you think? Upstairs in the Union Cinema there’s a pianist thumping away in the dark: what sort of ugly mug does he have, and what lurks in his soul? Why should one perpetually be obliged to sacrifice oneself for his sake?”

“A cinema pianist and a waiter,” Kotya objected, “hardly constitutes ‘the people.'”

“Then who does?” Varsonofiev turned his gray, bristling head toward Kotya. “How much longer must we continue to identify ‘the people’ with the peasantry? Millions of peasants have left the land ? what has become of them?”

“In that case, we need a strictly scientific definition of what we mean by ‘the people.'”

“Yes, we all like being scientific, but the fact remains that, so far, no one has ever defined precisely who ‘the people’ are. At all events, it isn’t just the illiterate peasantry. Nor can you treat the intelligentsia as separate from ‘the people.'”

“So you must define the intelligentsia too!” Kotya said, forcibly as ever.

“No one can do that either. The clergy, for instance ? you don’t regard them as part of the intelligentsia, do you?” He caught a momentary snort of agreement on Kotya’s part. “And no one who holds ‘reactionary’ views counts as one of the intelligentsia either, though he may be the most eminent philosopher. But students, of course, are automatically members of the intelligentsia, including failures and second-year blockheads who need a trot to pass their exams …”