Campus Marxists See Silver Lining : Death of Soviet-style communism hailed by some academics as break for socialism.

The collapse of communism around the world may have discredited the Leninist philosophy, but there is one group that is still convinced that communism holds at least some of the answers: the cadre of Marxist professors in U.S. universities.

Elsewhere, the most die-hard communists are abandoning the movement as a bust.

“We are Marxist no longer,” Angolan President Jose Eduardo dos Santos declared in announcing his recent conversion. Even Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev agrees that Moscow must move toward a free-market-style economy. The previous system has failed, Gorbachev concedes.

But Robin Hahnel, a Marxist professor of economics at American University in Washington, is unfazed by Soviet communism’s apparent demise. If anything, Hahnel contends, the death of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union could give genuine Marxism its first real break in decades.

“The Soviet system never resembled true socialist ideals,” Hahnel contends. Now that that distorted form of Marxism has been done away with, he says, the true ideals of socialism can stand on their own merits.

Hisham Sharabi, a Marxist professor of history at Georgetown University, agrees. The communist dictatorships of recent decades “were like millstones hanging around our necks,” Sharabi says. “Now that the fear of communism has vanished, we can enter into a more constructive debate.”

There are approximately 500,000 professors in all U.S. colleges and universities. Ann Rosenhaft, secretary of the Socialist Party U.S.A. in New York, estimates that 10,000 of them are Marxists. Surfacing initially during the 1930s, they gained some prominence again during the 1970s, when economic gyrations in the capitalist system spawned increased interest in the welfare state.

Intellectuals such as Herbert Marcuse and Noam Chomsky attracted notice with their scathing critiques of capitalism’s excesses, lambasting the wide disparity in incomes between rich and poor and the evils of materialism in America. Now, the tables have been turned, but the Marxists are holding their ground.

To be sure, even the Marxist professors have made at least some alterations in their ideology. Sharabi, for example, concedes that Marx’s dictum that a revolution of the proletariat is inevitable probably has been cast into doubt by communism’s collapse.

And Mieke Meurs, a Marxist economics professor at American University, concedes that market reforms were necessary in East European countries “because clearly they needed to move forward.” Still, Meurs insists that central planning in these countries under Marxism had some value--in bringing them into the industrial age.

But while some Marxist professors concede a few caveats, many are unreconstructed in their support of the communist ideology--and their predictions that disaster will befall the new moves toward capitalism.

David Gross, a Marxist professor of English at the University of Oklahoma, sees the recent attacks on foreign minorities and the rise of other nationalist forces in the newly democratized countries as evidence that another old evil is returning: the rebirth of the elite in the former East Bloc countries.

“The old elite has been lurking for some time now, frustrated by the limitations that socialism incurred on their fortunes,” Gross contends. “They’re attempting to take back the means of production that they had lost under the communist regimes. It’s no doubt they’ll rush toward a market economy.”

Sharabi predicts there will be a dissatisfaction with free market capitalism if current trends lead to fewer restraints on its free reign. “We’ll see things unfold in the next few months, years, and decades,” he says.

But while radical professors are united in expressing skepticism about the free-market economic system, they differ widely over what should take place. Some advocate a “guild culture,” where workers’ councils would formulate economic production at the local level. Others argue that workers should define major economic options at the national level, but that the decisions should be made by democratic vote.

Ironically, although hordes of Marxist professors in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe are being thrown out of work as a result of the collapse of communism, radical professors in America are protected by tenure.