The Devil in History

by Vladimir Tismaneanu

  The post-totalitarian system touches people at every step, but it does so with its ideological gloves on. This is why the life in the system is so thoroughly permeated with hypocrisy and lies: government by bureaucracy is called popular government; the working class is enslaved in the name of the working class; the complete degradation of the individual is presented as his ultimate liberation; depriving people of information is called making it available; the use of power to manipulate is called the public control of power, and the arbitrary abuse of power is called observing the legal code; the repression of culture is called its development; the expansion of imperial influence is presented as support for the oppressed; the lack of free expression becomes the highest form of freedom; farcical elections become the highest form of democracy; banning independent thought becomes the most scientific of world views; military occupation becomes fraternal assistance.28

  THE SHIPWRECK OF UTOPIA

  The revolutions of 1989-91 dealt a mortal blow to the ideological pretense according to which human life can be structured in accordance with scientific designs proposed by a general staff of revolutionary doctrinaires. These movements countered the apotheosis of bureaucratic domination with the centrality of human rights. “Seeing like a state” (to use James C. Scott's formula) turned out to be a strategy with catastrophic consequences.29 Some acclaimed these revolutions precisely because they were non-Jacobin, nonteleological, and nonideological. They were anti-utopian precisely because they refused to pursue any foreordained blueprint. In emphasizing the non-utopian character of Charter 77, Havel tellingly described the foundation upon which the resistance that fueled the 1989 upheaval was built: “An essential part of the ‘dissident’ attitude is that it comes out of the reality of the human here and now. It places more importance on often repeated and consistent concrete action—even though it may be inadequate and though it may ease only insignificantly the suffering of a single insignificant citizen—than it does in some abstract fundamental solution in an uncertain future.”30 The answer to the pervasiveness of a spuriously revolutionary ideology was to fill the gap between the public and the private existence by way of reestablishing “authentic human relations, which would preserve the direct and genuine communication of the private life, being at the same time politically influential as a counterweight to the oppressive, bureaucratic state.”31

  With the exception of some vaguely defined concepts like civil society, return to Europe, and popular sovereignty, these revolutions occurred in the absence of and in opposition to ideology. Precisely because ideology had become the justification of state-sponsored lies, coercion, terror, and violence, dissidents, from Solzhenitsyn to Havel, insisted on the need to overcome the schizophrenic ideological chimeras and rediscover the galvanizing power of concepts such as dignity, identity, civility, truth, transparence, trust, and tolerance. For example, Czech philosopher Jan Patočka, himself a victim of Communism because of his central role in the creation of Charter 77, considered that Russian dissidents Andrei Sakharov and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn shared “a sense of the truth of their own humanity that outweighed any material advantage or dogmatic slogan that could be offered to them” [my emphasis].32 In response to the totalist pretension of a totalitarian movement, dissidents reaffirmed what Patočka conceptualized as “care for the soul”—that “which makes whatever is properly human in us possible: morality, thought, culture, history. It is the most sacred thing in us, something through which we become connected to that which is eternal, yet without having to leave this world.”33 Or, “the attempt to embody what is eternal within time, and within one's own being, and at the same time, an effort to stand firm in the storm of time, stand firm in all dangers carried with it.”34 Communism was therefore faced with individuals who rejected both living a lie and messianic posturing. One author even remarked that this could also be an explanation for the aftermath of 1989: “Václav Havel's idea of living in truth, as well as Adam Michnik's new evolutionism, George Konrád's antipolitics and other dissident conceptions, are actually long-term strategies of resistance—not instructions to civil societies after the reestablishment of liberal democracies.”35

  In the aftermath of the demise of the Leninist order, the moral landscape of post-Communism was marred with confusion, venomous hatreds, unsatisfied desires, and endless bickering. This is the bewildering, often terrifying territory in which political mythologies make a return. In Václav Havel's words: “The fall of communism destroyed this shroud of sameness, and the world was caught napping by an outburst of the many unanticipated differences concealed beneath it, each of which—after such a long time in the shadows—felt a natural need to draw attention to itself, to emphasize its uniqueness, and its difference from others.”36 The ideological extinction of Leninist formations left behind a vacuum that has been filled by syncretic constructs drawing from the region's pre-Communist and Communist heritage (nationalism, liberalism, democratic socialism, conservatism, populism, neo-Leninism, and an even more or less refurbished Fascism). Ethnocentric ideology, as mendacious as the Communist one, has become a new salvationist creed, a quasi-mystical source of identification: “When the nationality conflict obliterates all else and the high priests of the intelligentsia support their nation's obsession with romantic platitudes, we have what can be called political hysteria.”37 Moreover, Patočka argued that during the twentieth century, and especially under Communism, individuals had to be “shaken” into “an awareness of their own historical nature, their own possibilities for freedom via the assumption of a self-reflective stance and the rejection of ideology.”38 Dissidents themselves were “a community of the shaken,” but they were hardly the majority of the population. The persistence of ideological ruins within post-Leninist societies and the echoes of the last century's totalitarian temptations made East Europeans vulnerable to resurgent specters of alternative or derivative salvationisms (e.g., clericalism, ethnocentric conservatism, and populism). Havel warned that ideology was “a specious way of relating the world. It offers human beings the illusion of identity, of dignity, and of morality while making it easier for them to part with them.”39

  At the very core of Marxism one finds a millenialist myth about justice, fraternity, and equality, a social dream about a perfect world where the ancient conflict between man and society, between essence and existence, would be transcended. More than anything else, Marxism represented a grandiose invitation to human beings to engage in a passionate search for the City of God and to construct it here and now. Leninism relied on its utopian aspect, as it proposed what Eric Weitz describes as a “capacious vision” of historical development: “By clearing the rubble of the past, they believed they would open the path to the creation of the new society that would permit the ultimate efflorescence of the human spirit.”40 This human adventure has failed, but the deep needs that Marxism tried to satisfy have not come to an end. According to Leszek Kołakowski, “Marxism has been the greatest fantasy of the twentieth century.” The professed unity between theory and praxis that Marxism found was its historical cul-de-sac: its practical failure was the confirmation of its theoretical fallacies. In other words, a philosophy that proclaimed praxis as the criterion of truth and maintained that concrete reality is the test of validity was dramatically belied by the practical impossibility of its implementation as originally designed and by the human costs linked to its Leninist and post-Leninist revisions and experiments. As Leszek Kołakowski concluded in his unsurpassed trilogy, “The self-deification of mankind, to which Marxism gave philosophical expression, has ended in the same way as all such attempts, whether individual or collective: it has revealed itself as the farcical aspect of human bondage [my emphasis].”41

  In Andzej Walicki's view, Marx's double-faceted concept of freedom was the conceptual grounding for Stalinism. One the one hand, there was freedom as “conscious, rational control over economic and social forces”; on the other, the notion of that individual freedom is to be replaced by “species freedom�
�—the liberation of mankind's communal nature.42 Subsequently, the fundamental utopian element of this totalizing polity was the drive toward fulfilling such a free society. Leninism argued for a telos of “democratic dictatorship” (allegedly the only real democracy) and for communism, with the party as the magical entity injecting the necessary consciousness and offering the type of leadership for the completion of this journey.43 Neil Robinson argues:

  This telos was transcendental because, although communism could be described, it was separate from experience and was immutable. It performed an ontological function because it acted to make sense of general experience for all: all real phenomena could be judged against it and were ascribed value, form and essence in its light. It therefore acted, as a kind of “super” or “main” discursive convention: it determined what could be claimed as being good (that which was conducive to communist construction) and what had to be rejected as bad (that which was harmful to the process of communist construction). In performing this ontological function, the telos therefore provided the party with an idea of the meaning of the material world. This idea was unchallengeable and kept the discourse from fragmenting…. there could be no commentary on the way in which the system was structured for such commentary would be a denial of the truth of the telos, a denial of the idea that the actions taken to secure historical development were appropriate and legitimate.44

  Such a conceptual framework for ideological discourse, combined with what Rachel Walker labels “the invariate conventions governing it” (that is, dogmatism as opposed to defending the purity of Marxism-Leninism),45 provided a continuous but variable narrative of emancipation, a source of incessant re-enchantments with state socialism as utopia in action. It comes as no surprise, then, that the revolutions of 1989 brought about for the Western Left what Jan-Werner Müller identified in the German case as “the loss of utopia.”46 Writing shortly before his death in 1983, Raymond Aron concluded his lifelong endeavor to analyze Marxism by pointing to its colossal theological and practical failure: “The prophecy, contradicted by both the evolution of capitalism and by the experience of so-called socialist regimes, remains as empty as it was at the beginning: How would the proletariat become the ruling class? Why would the proletariat become the ruling class? Why would collective ownership suddenly produce unprecedented efficiency? What magic wand would accommodate authoritarianism and centralized planning to personal freedom and democracy? What was to replace the market economy other than bureaucratic planning? The mystification began with Marx himself when he called his prophecy scientific.”47

  This is indeed the way Marxism appears in the aftermath of the convulsive twentieth century: a hidebound and often abstruse millennialism, having little to do with the reality and challenges of industrial civilization and unable to offer as remedies for human suffering anything other than empty slogans and ossified dogmas. As the “opium for the intellectuals,” it is almost extinct. This twilight is, at least in its implications, a grandiose fin de partie: we see the final agony of a hopeless attempt to overcome the limits of human nature by imagining a total break in the chain of those often strange and inexplicable occurrences that for want of a better term we have come to call “history.” The waning of utopian radicalism does not mean, however, the demise of an enduring yearning for social engineering. Historical hubris has not vanished; anguishes and malaise are here and can lead to new follies: “The communist ideology seems to be in a state of rigor mortis, and the regimes that still use it are so repulsive that its resurrection may seem to be impossible. But let us not rush into such a prophecy (or anti-prophecy). The social conditions that nourished and made use of this ideology can still revive; perhaps—who knows?—the virus is dormant, waiting for the next opportunity. Dreams about the perfect society belong to the enduring stock of our civilization.”48

  The question of Marxism's culpability has not receded in importance in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Indeed, it is an essential question of modern historical self-understanding, especially in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, because at the present moment—over twenty years after the revolutions of 1989—Leninist legacies endure, and there are forces in both East and West that maintain that the Communist catastrophe was essentially exogenous to the generous pledges of Marxist humanism. This is true, for instance, of the prominent Romanian Marxist philosopher Ion Ianoși, for whom the text of the Manifesto and its historical consequences should not be amalgamated for “partisan reasons.”49 Comparing Marx to Nietzsche, Ianoși wrote about “culpables without culpability.” In the same vein, Hungarian former dissident (and briefly Straussian) thinker G. M. Tamás has lately (after 2000) become increasingly vocal in criticizing liberal values (not only liberalism) and championing the need to resurrect working-class political radicalism. Former Romanian dissident thinker Andrei Pleșu responded bitterly to this idealized view of the Marxist legacies in the region, insisting that for the denizens of the former Soviet Bloc, these are not abstract speculations but tragic facts of life.50 Recently, I engaged in a polemical exchange over G. M. Tamás's espousal of French philosopher Alain Badiou's irresponsible exaltation of revolution as the ultimate évènement, a cataclysmic moment in which an anarchic, inchoate version of liberty allegedly triumphs over the mediocrity (or, in Žižek's neo-Leninist terms, the cretinism) of liberalism.51 Another interesting case is Lukács's former disciple, István Meszáros, a student of the Hegelian-Marxist concept of alienation, whose enduring anticapitalist convictions have been enthusiastically acclaimed as a paradigm of pensamiento critico by Venezuela's “Bolivarian socialist” Hugo Chávez.52 In all the former Communist countries, the Far Left and the Far Right tend to share animosities, idiosyncrasies, neuroses, and phobias. What unites these two trends is that they are both “far”: they resent the “grayness” of liberal democracy and abhor the “philistine mediocrity” of bourgeois existence.53 The neoromantic hostility to the challenges of a globalized economy generates new salvationist mythologies, including utopian flights into agrarian reveries and the cult of the unadulterated, pristine, archaic völkisch community. Disciples of Marx and Lenin close ranks in the company of frantic admirers of Carl Schmitt and Julius Evola, the Italian Fascist mystical philosopher.54

  One of the main effects of Marxist deradicalization in East-Central Europe was a need to redefine the relations between the Western intelligentsia and the liberal tradition, including the legacies of Western humanism. The post-Marxist, that is, postideological, age allowed for reconsideration of the political and moral responsibilities of intellectuals, including a refusal to indulge in long-cherished fantasies of repudiating the liberal democratic status quo.55 The fate of Marxism in Eastern Europe highlights the role of awakening, apostasy, and metanoia: it was precisely disenchanted Marxists who decisively contributed to the erosion of the ideocratic-partocratic systems. As I emphasized in the previous chapter, Marxist revisionism represented a major corrosive force in dissolving the Leninist ideological hubris. By contrasting the official pretense to the abysmal realities and offering the concept of alienation as an interpretive key for understanding bureaucratic authoritarianism, the revisionists offered alternative discourses of emancipation. The very fact that they had belonged to the Communist “family” made their critique poignantly explosive and exasperatingly annoying for the nomenklaturas. The destiny of East European revisionism56 illustrates a noble tradition of moral dignity, the reclaiming of the concept of alienation from the totalitarian Moloch, and a phenomenology of honor and resistance that played a crucial role in the constitution of dissident movements and the demise of state socialist systems. Their approaches have converged with Western anti-authoritarian post-Marxism,57 illustrated by attempts to rediscover the social imagination and new horizons for emancipatory practice beyond the ossified and rigid ideologies of the past. Post-Marxism therefore meant renunciation of the apocalyptical visions of revolutionary catharsis, acceptance of the new challenges in the era of global communications, i
nternet networks, and new social movements, and widespread concern regarding growing inequalities. Post-Marxism recognized the persistence of the traditional socialist agenda but admitted the waning of redemptive forms of political radicalism. Post-Marxism confronted the need to acknowledge the incontrovertible fact that “Marxism as a doctrine cannot be separated from the history of the political movements and systems to which it led.”58

  THE FATE OF A POLITICAL RELIGION

  More than other political theologies, Marxism was able to deter for many decades the emergence of critical questioning, and to nourish an ardent, even fanatical attachment on the part of the normally skeptical Western intellectuals. The disintegration of the Stalinist gnosis as a self-sufficient system of authoritarian norms and quasi-mystical precepts impelled revisionist intellectuals toward the construction of what Kołakowski called an agnostic Marxism, actually a quixotic attempt to salvage the humanistic kernel of the doctrine lest the whole Marxist utopia fall apart. Critical Marxism was therefore an attempt to regenerate the moral dimension of political praxis. Revisionism pondered the relation between means and ends and arrived at the conclusion that no goal could justify the manipulation and degradation of the individual.59 Ethical relativism was exposed as a most harmful deception, and moral values were again postulated as transcendent values, independent of contingent circumstances and selfish interests. Less idealistic than their unorthodox adversaries, the ideological supervisors knew better. Committed to a cynical realpolitik, they saw no reason to let the genie out of the bottle. Reified in the figure of ideological power, Marxism was doomed to survive as a disembodied symbolic ceremonial. Trying to revive and to secularize it, as the revisionist thinkers did, amounted eventually to intellectual narcissism. The point was not to recapture a presumed original libertarian thrust, but to formulate the conditions for the invention of a liberated social space. Milovan Djilas presciently identified in the early 1980s the bureaucratic degeneration of Marxism as one of the main causes of the ultimate debacle: “With the extinction of this utopian faith, communism has lost its soul, its raison d'être. Maintained largely by a relatively well-paid apparatus of officialdom and the imperialist ambitions of the Soviet oligarchy, it has metamorphosed into an ever more banal lust for power, thereby losing its revolutionary strength and, to a large degree, its volcanic force as well. In doing so, communism has been reduced to its power-hungry, monopolistic essence and thereby condemned itself to destruction.”60