Eugene Wolfenstein
        Political Science

In the words of Ricky Ricardo, Professor Eugene Victor Wolfenstein has got some ‘splainin’ to do.  On one hand, he’s a self-declared academic Marxist; nothing unusual there, especially for the UCLA faculty.  But for someone who still breathes (and believes) the hoary rhetoric of Malcolm X, Bob Dylan and Bob Marley, you might figure Wolfenstein would practice what he preaches politically and live somewhere appropriately “among the people,” say, like Compton, 90220.  However, Wolfenstein makes his home in the beautiful, crime-free environs of Beverly Hills, 90210.  Apparently, the good professor has decided that while he waits for the revolution to pull in, he may as well have the nicest seat in the station.
 
            If Wolfenstein’s choice of living situation doesn’t necessarily rise to the level of outright hypocrisy, it’s at least more than a little morally muddled.  This, after all, is the man who has signed on to a number of radical political petitions:  Not In Our Name’s “Statement of Conscience,” Professors of Conscience’s alert against supposed Israeli plans for ethnic cleansing, and even a “Human Rights Action Statement” demanding even more lenient treatment for Guantanamo Bay detention camp inmates. 

 These radical causes are mirrored in Wolfenstein’s scholarship.  His personal webpage reports that he “works in the Critical Theory Tradition, with a focus on African-American culture and social movements.”  Wolfenstein is also a practicing psychoanalyst, having earned a 1984 Ph.D. from the Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute, then joining its faculty.  Drawing from this odd specialization, Wolfenstein is best known for two of his books: “The Victims of Democracy: Malcolm X and the Black Revolution,” and “Psychoanalytic Marxism: Groundwork.”  

A review of the “Psychoanalysis” title states:

 “In this important work, Eugene Victor Wolfenstein rejects the reduction of psychoanalysis to conformist psychology and Marxism to Stalinist orthodoxy. Instead, he illuminates the critical and emancipatory force of both traditions; persuasively arguing for a view that integrates economic production with desires based in emotional life.” 

 The thesis of the book is more of the old argument that communism or socialism can’t be condemned because they’ve never been enacted according to proper theory.  Radicals like Wolfenstein insist that Marxism can’t be reduced to Stalinism, as if Stalinism is the only totalitarian manifestation of communist theory.  As the old saying goes, fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.  That old-line radicals continue to deny that Marxism inevitably leads to statist terror is solid proof that they are fools as well.

 Even a favorable review of Wolfenstein’s other title, Victims of Democracy admits that it is “very ‘wordy’…[and] not an easy book to read.” 

 And little wonder.  The book opens in fine psychobabble fashion, asking on the first page:  “How does racism falsify the consciousness of the racially oppressed; and how do racially oppressed individuals free themselves from both the falsification of their consciousness and the racist domination of their practical activity?”  (italics Wolfenstein’s)  False consciousness?  Now there’s a Marxist blast from the past!

But UCLA doesn’t just get hoary old rhetoric from Wolfenstein.  They get the whole tie-dyed package, down to the with-it posturing of the Grateful Dead jackets he wears, and his in-class, a capella guitar renditions of “Redemption Song.”  No, that’s not a joke, and yes, it’s just as bad as it sounds.  Yet there’s no let-up with Wolfenstein; he’s a committed radical who keeps up on all the latest causes.  The petitions noted above?  They’re just the tip of the iceberg. 

Wolfenstein was a leading light in the fight against the passage of University of California Regent Ward Connerly’s SP-1 and SP-2, which ended affirmative action in the UC system.  After the policies passed,  Wolfenstein became a member of the UCLA Faculty Affirmative Action Network Steering Committee, and took to writing broadsides against the Regents’ decision, damning it as a failure to properly share institutional power. 

 But more than SP-1/2, it was the successful passage of Proposition 209 in 1996 (ending affirmative action in all state business), which truly lit a fire under Wolfenstein.  Due to a two-year legal delay, it wasn’t until the freshman class of 1998 that students were accepted to UCLA under a meritocracy.  The results spurred Wolfenstein to lead his October 21, 1998 lecture outdoors into Royce Quad as part of a faculty “walkout” protest.  Heedless of the debatable political symbolism in an outdoor class session, Wolfenstein declared to the Daily Bruin, “We’re going to try to communicate to both the (university) administration and to the students that the faculty continues to support affirmative action goals.” 

 Then in a futile attempt at putting an intellectual gloss on a profoundly coercive and anti-intellectual action, Wolfenstein stated, “My students and I are reading Plato’s ‘Republic’ and talking about social justice right now.  If I can teach them about social justice during Plato’s time, why shouldn’t I ask them to think about justice today?”  That’s fair enough.  But it’s unlikely that Wolfenstein played Devil’s Advocate on the issue by asking his students to ponder affirmative action’s documented discriminatory effect on white, and especially Asian, UC applicants.  For a man who considers himself a deep thinker, Wolfenstein wears a thick set of political blinkers.

            Wolfenstein is if nothing else consistent in his politics.  On February 20, 2003, in the midst of a wave of anti-France sentiment, Wolfenstein accompanied an ad-hoc group of about one dozen like-minded adults to a meeting with the French vice-consul and delivered his personal support for that country’s anti-war obstructionism.  Wolfenstein told the Daily Bruin, “It is deeply painful to see the American president using (a commitment to freedom and human rights) to camouflage a policy of ‘might makes right.’” 

            A little over two years later on April 5, 2005, Wolfenstein was back again on the anti-war train.  Wolfenstein spoke at a public anti-war rally with Ralph Nader, accompanied by radicals Matt Gonzalez, Pablo Paredes, and the musical group Conspiracy of Thought.  Now, Gonzalez, a San Francisco Green Party office-holder, and Paredes, who was discharged from the Navy for failure to fight, are wild figures in their own right.  But the mind reels at the possibilities of Wolfenstein appearing on the same stage with a real musical group.  Did they jam on “Redemption Song” or favor the crowd with a rendition of the Niggaz With Attitude classic “Fuck Tha Police” for old time’s sake?  One can only dream of the synergistic possibilities.  In fact, the only real bummer of the day was that the Nader rally gave into the temptations of fascist capitalism and charged admission ($10 for adults, $5 for students).

            Besides appearances at speeches and rallies, Wolfenstein has in recent years contributed two odious pieces of free-form political madness to the Daily Bruin.  In his laughable 1996 hagiography for black radicalism, Wolfenstein noted, “Thanks to [UC Regent Ward] Connerly and his political allies, affirmative action has come to an end at the University of California.  Anti-immigrant hysteria continues to be legislatively enacted while, at the national level, the fragile welfare net put in place during the 1930s has been systematically torn apart.” 

            This sort of baldly untrue political rhetoric might fly from a Sociology or a Film and Television professor, since we’ve grown accustomed to their ignorant rubbish.  But political science is rooted in great part in history.  Accuracy, which is utterly absent from Wolfenstein’s narrative, still matters.  Like Kent Wong and others, Wolfenstein deliberately conflates immigrants with illegal immigrants; the two of course, are quite different.  Even understanding Wolfenstein’s dark allusions to be of an anti-illegal immigrant backlash, he doth protest too much.  The backlash, as it was, led to nothing.  Illegal immigration continued unabated, Proposition 187 was struck down, and both the Republican and Democratic parties continue to accept or encourage the wink-and-nod acceptance of millions of illegal immigrants.  If there was any “hysteria” as Wolfenstein claims, it was remarkably ineffective, leaving Hispanic irredentists like UCLA alum Gil Cedillo free to advance the quasi-legalization of illegal immigrants. 

As for Wolfenstein’s keening for a welfare safety net torn asunder?  History again is no friend to Wolfenstein.  Before, during, and after 1996, Congress oversaw a continual expansion of welfare benefits, with a continually greater portion of the federal budget committed to entitlement programs.  The charges, in short, ring most hollow.  Moreover, if California politics over the last ten years is Wolfenstein’s idea of losing, you don’t want to see his version of winning.

            Wolfenstein’s Daily Bruin article from 2000 was little better.  The piece, titled “An unfinished revolution,” was Wolfenstein’s paean to the grandeur of the black power movement, putting forward the breathtaking thesis that the violent, separatist black power movement of the later ‘60s was a natural and even positive outgrowth of the non-violence movement it followed.  Hearkening back to his salad days as a young Marxist, when destroying the whole world seemed possible, Wolfenstein speaks of the “terrible glory” of the 1965 Watts “uprising.”  That kind of shameless praise for a bloody, pointless riot makes my stomach want to uprise a little.

            Wolfenstein closes the article with the ominous warning that “the revolution is unfinished, and in some instances, its accomplishments are under fire (I have in mind the attacks on affirmative action and a woman’s right to choose.”  For a self-declared Marxist, it’s a long fall from cheering on the terrible glory of urban uprisings to nervous head shaking about the end of preferential college admissions or the right of a doctor to vacuum babies from a woman’s uterus.

            Wolfenstein was included in a December 6, 1989 Los Angeles Times article that profiled Marxist reaction to the fall of the Berlin Wall.  Shaken and more than a little off-message, Wolfenstein confessed, “My guess is that in politics of the 21^st century we are not going to be uniting under the banner of Marxism.  We Marxists will have to be part of broader movements.”  His voice barely audible from his position deep within the dustbin of history, Wolfenstein also wondered, “Are the days of class struggle over?  And if so, who is to carry on the struggle for human freedom and how?  Or to put that same question in a different way, is it politically meaningful to be a Marxist?” 

Short answer no, long answer no.  But that didn’t mean you could keep a good Marxist like Wolfenstein down for long.  As student reviewers in recent years note, Wolfenstein has remained unrepentant in his political beliefs and teaching.  Most reviews are blatant praise from the professor’s true believers or recent converts.  However, several students have pulled away the curtain.  Describing Wolfenstein, the UCLA Alumni Association’s 1994 Teacher of the Year, one notes that his class “barely covered the course material and course reading.  When Wolfenstein did input information, he often spoke about unrelated, discussion-based material, or about Marxism and psychoanalysis.  Our class was about 1960s and 70s African American politics!”  Another student echoed these views, noting “Subject matter consisted of psychobabble and Marxist jargon, with little to no relevance to earthly application…lectures are apparently unscripted, and are largely incoherent for minutes on end.” 

But it is a third student who offers the definite analysis of Wolfenstein’s political commitments and his academic career by accusing the professor of “clinging to the dead corpse of Marxism.”