Some Western philosophers—primarily Cornelius Castoriadis and Claude Lefort—unlike many East European thinkers, predisposed to the traditional reformist illusions, understood that, in order to gain credibility, the discourse of the opposition had to be de-Marxisized.61 Dialectical (ideological) trump cards had to be debunked and taken for what they indeed were: convoluted justifications for the humiliation of the human being. From the revisionism of the late 1950s and early 1960s to the dissidents' skeptical treatment of Marxism or even outward anti-Marxism, there was a whole odyssey of ruined hopes and failed illusions. Instead of indulging in what Hegel called a “litany of lamentations,” dissident thinkers have tried to clarify the causes of this abortive end of the romance between Marxism and intellectuals. One cause was a growing awareness of the inherent ambivalence of the Marxian message, a discontentment with pragmatic utopianism. The mentor of the dissidents associated with Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia, philosopher Jan Patočka, simply rejected Marxism's claim to a revolutionary prerogative over history: “Humans do not invent morality arbitrarily, to suit their needs, wishes, inclinations, and aspirations. Quite the contrary, it is morality that defines what being human means.”62
In the aftermath of 1956, but especially after 1968, the post-totalitarian phase of state socialism brought about a system of power based on conformity, co-optation, cynicism, and inclusive, privilege-based regimentation. Reflecting on the hollow-ritualistic nature of the ideological reproduction of state socialism, Václav Havel provides an excellent description of the internalization mechanisms that replaced the terrorist methods:
Part of the essence of the post-totalitarian system is that it draws everyone into its sphere of power, not so that they may realize themselves as human beings, but so that they may surrender their human identity in favor of the identity of the system, that is, so that they may become agents of the system's general automatism and servants of its self-determined goals, so they may participate in the common responsibility for it, so they may be pulled into and ensnared by it, like Faust into Mephistopheles…. What we understand by the [post-totalitarian] system is not a social order imposed by one group upon another, but rather something which permeates the entire society and is a factor in shaping it.63
Mental co-optation was a crucial systemic goal; its achievement meant the perpetuation of endless ideological symbolic performances. The main purpose of this policy was to cauterize any sense of historical transcendence, to preclude any independent nuclei of thought and action. The very concept of truth had long since been distorted (and negated) by Lenin with his Manichean view of philosophical partisanship: for the Leninists, truth is what serves the interests of the proletariat, themselves defined by a self-appointed elite made up of revolutionary zealots. After 1956, however, the dogmatic core started to crumble. Full-fledged totalitarianism never reached perfection, but it was the main ambition during the revolutionary stages of both Nazism and Stalinism. In the Soviet case, the Secret Speech led to disillusionment and ushered in detotalitarianization.64 Ideological lip-service was all-pervasive, but true believers had long since vanished. In fact, with very few exceptions, nobody believed in the bombastic rhetoric of the existing socialism. Still, although everybody knew that it was the incarnation of a huge lie, the system continued to operate, pathetically stifling (or stiflingly pathetic). The Solidarity movement was a major breakthrough, but the real beginning of the end came, as I have shown, when Gorbachev decided in 1987-88 to jettison ideology in favor of frankness and truth.
The ideological camouflage of serfdom was the main underpinning of the post-totalitarian order. In this sense one can argue for the continuous totalitarian ethos of these regimes, despite their reformist vagaries: “When we speak of totalitarian regimes we have in mind not systems that have reached perfection, but rather those which are driven by a never-ending effort to reach it, to swallow all channels of human communication, and to eradicate all spontaneous social life forms [emphasis in the original].”65 The profile of the regimes in former Eastern Europe was determined by the specificities of the ideological content (one might even say hubris) filling the gap between their self-representation and their practice.66 Therefore, following Lefort, their nature was determined by their “self-understanding as a ‘distinctive’ project,”67 in the context of a neotraditionalist degeneration of the socialist system, where “the party's combat ethos was ritualized,” its agents were transformed into “Party principals,” and the issue of political equality was consistently sidestepped and displaced.68 In Arendtian terms, Communism as a regime was permanently beset by a resilient conflict between power and reality.
Generally speaking, Leninism attempted to encompass and filter through its ideological matrix all that had potential for public discourse, to mediate any self-defining narrative. It created a “new type of cultural hegemony” that aimed to carry out “an ‘anthropological revolution’ through the use of an essentially ritualistic and transformative politics.”69 The demise of Communism generated the space for alternative “semiotic sacralizations” (Roger Griffin), which determined a proliferation of what I previously called fantasies of salvation: ideological surrogates whose principal function was to unify the public discourse and provide citizens with an easily recognizable source of identity as a part of a vaguely defined ethnic (or political) community. These mythologies minimized individual rights and emphasized instead the need to maintain an organic supra-individual ethos, which in turn determined the boundaries between good and evil, true and false. Indeed, they were not ideologies, but they shared with ideology the appearance of a coherent narrative.
The evolution of democracy in post-Leninist Eastern Europe has shown that large social strata resented Communist ideology but not the state socialist guarantees of security and stability. Existing inventories of historical heritage and culture brought forth from under the Leninist debris provided the reservoir for the justification of the new/old political actors' intentions. In the past, for denizens of the Communist world, the myth of the classless society could serve such a purpose. In the post-Communist present, Communist nostalgia idealized “heroic mobilization,” seen as both the expression of a lost unity and disappeared community, and as disaffection with democratic pluralism and the market economy.70 In a period characterized by weakness of social capital, loss of solidarity among members of the political community, the disorientation, decline, or inertia of civil society, and rampant erosion of traditional authority, the checks and balances for myth-making inflation were seriously weakened. The history of the region's first two post-Communist decades is a story of the quest for cohesive citizenry in the face of the grievous fragmentation typical of the Leninist legacy (in Jowitt's sense).71
In the context of the routinization (and sometimes deradicalization) of Communist regimes and of the exhaustion of the Marxist revisionist alternative, a new type of political thought developed in East and Central Europe. It was both a reaction to the collectivistic, pseudo-egalitarian logic of Communist regimes and an inspiration for both moral reform and social change in this region from the 1970s on. The dissidents' writings, the stances of critical intellectuals, provided a composite oppositional complex that emphasized morals, tolerance, civility, and self-scrutiny. This body of thought reasserted the centrality of the individual. To paraphrase Jan Patočka, the locus of change was the soul of the individual—“the spiritual person.” Dissidence represented the return to what sociologist Alvin Gouldner called the “culture of critical discourse,” while also introducing the criterion of normative truth as the only valid one in a praxis meant to resist new forms of oppression. For example, for the signatories of Charter 77, the “hope for politics was that citizens could learn to act as free and responsible persons, and that government would recognize this orientation by respecting the moral dimension of political life.”72
As the regimes declined under the burden of their economic ineffectiveness and moral numbness, as the elites lost their sense of historical p
redestination and showed signs of incurable disarray, it became possible for the long-silent civil society to reorganize itself and to launch a battle for reconstitution of the public sphere. Moreover, critical intellectuals not only rejected regimentation but also signaled their disenchantment with Marxist theory and proclaimed the revolutionary nature of truth-telling. Leszek Kołakowski gave full expression to the newly acquired understanding of the intimate connection between the Marxist worldview and the practice of Communism in the twentieth century: “It would be absurd to maintain that Marxism was, so to speak, the efficient cause of the present-day communism; on the other hand, communism is not a mere “degeneration” of Marxism but a possible interpretation of it and even a well-founded one, though primitive and partial in some respects…. The self-deification of mankind, to which Marxism gave philosophical expression, had ended in the same way as all such attempts: it has revealed itself as the farcical aspect of human bondage.”73 In 1968, as the Czechoslovak experiment of “socialism with a human face” was in its last days, Russian dissident and eminent scientist Andrei Sakharov published in samizdat his memorandum Reflections on Progress, Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom. In this document, the author abandoned and condemned the ideological Manicheanism that functioned as a cardinal principle to both Marxism and Leninism: “‘The division of mankind threatens it with disaster,’ he began, and ‘in the face of these perils, any action increasing the division of mankind, any preaching of the incompatibility of world ideologies and nations is madness and a crime.’”74
REINVENTING POLITICS
The creation of civil society in East and Central Europe, or what I call the reinvention of politics in a non-Machiavellian way, was centrally premised upon a rebellion against the mortifying role of ideology: “Because the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything. It falsifies the past. It falsifies the present, and it falsifies the future. It falsifies statistics. It pretends not to possess an omnipotent and unprincipled police apparatus. It pretends to respect human rights. It pretends to fear nothing. It pretends to pretend nothing.”75 The moral anesthesia of the population was the most important ally of post-totalitarian Communist power, and one should hasten to add, it is the ally of any bureaucratic-alienating structure. The system worked as long as the prevailing lie was accepted and tolerated by the individual, as long as the average citizen—the greengrocer posting in the shop's window the meaningless sign “Workers of the World, Unite!”—continued to endorse the ideological nonsense, even though he was aware that all this verbiage was nothing but a collection of lies. When Solzhenitsyn asked his fellow Soviet writers to cease lying, that is, to abandon ideology, his point was that moral life starts at the moment we refuse to lie. The world may be full of injustice, but let me not add to it. The problem, therefore, was not simply to identify the source of oppression in the government but also to realize how each individual was tied to the power structure and that it was in his power to emancipate himself. Upon reading Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, Russian intellectuals heard “a trumpet calling to the terrible court of history.”76 The pain of millions recounted in the book shook off the cynicism and the hypocrisy perpetuated by the post-totalitarian order in the East or by ideological folly in West.77 At the same time, Soviet leaders realized the potentially irreversible caesura generated by The Gulag Archipelago. In 1974, at a Politburo meeting, none other than Leonid Brezhnev straightforwardly asserted that “we have every basis to imprison Solzhenitsyn, for he has encroached on what is most sacred—on Lenin, on our Soviet system, on Soviet power, on everything that is dear to us.”78 Indeed, the revelations spelled doom; as one letter to the Soviet Politburo stated, “The Gulag Archipelago is the indictment with which your trial at the hands of the human race begins.”79 Solzhenitsyn, along with those who followed his example, undermined, as one party hack put it in 1988, “the foundations on which our present life rests.”80
According to Havel, the system's ability to turn its victims into accomplices made post-totalitarianism different from classical dictatorships. The very idea of change had vanished, and the individuals were faced with the imperative of coming to terms with what appeared to them as the only possible form of life. Emancipation, the birth of an alternative to the all-pervasive lie, came not as an exogenous benefit bestowed by others, but at the moment when some individuals decided to put an end to grotesque forms of self-denial. His or her decision to break the enchanted circle of complicity with the power-that-be and to utter his or her own truth was the premise for the civil society to resurrect itself. Therefore, Havel (along with George Konrád, János Kis, Jacek Kuroń, Adam Michnik, Martin Palouš, Miklós Haraszti, and others) advanced an alternative discourse on individuality that created the potential for a reconstruction of community and a redefinition of subjectivity. It was to become the embryonic state of a willingness to assume responsibility for one's own actions, to take risks, and to question institutions on the basis of a necessary accountability. Echoing the teaching of his mentor Jan Patočka, Havel asserted that “an act is right not because it is likely to lead to favorable results (utilitarianism) nor because it is the universal duty of the agent to behave thus under the circumstances (deontology), but because it is the essentially human thing to do, a genuine aim of life.”81 The Central European dissidents provided an identity conceptualization opposed both to the manipulative inclusion of “really existing socialism” and to the “chiliastic trope of the New Man” at the core of Leninism.82 Moreover, in post-Communism, the legacy of their writings provided a durable check on “pseudo-chiliastic” fantasies of salvation, based upon the exclusion and marginalization of the very category of otherness; it provided a safety-net against such destructive and stigmatizing collective vanities. It was a critique of those “cows that proclaimed themselves for decades as holy,” thus rejecting “any divine principles” buttressing their sacredness.83
Havel emphasized one fundamental aspect of this notion of individuality: “[The notion of human responsibility] has begun to appear as the fundamental point from which all identity grows and by which it stands or falls; it is the foundation, the root, the center of gravity, the constructional principle or axis of identity, something like the ‘idea’ that determines its degree and type. It is the mortar binding it together, and when the mortar dies out, identity too begins irreversibly to crumble and fall apart.”84 He proposed an “existential revolution” that aimed to “expose the totalitarian colonization of post-traditional identity at the level of its very formation.” It was based upon a vertical interpretation of identity, which was shaped ethically, “constituted in responsibility to the other.” This vertical ethics, inspired by French philosopher Emanuel Levinas, was, according to Martin Matustik, “suspicious towards totalitarian ambitions of ecological freedom; towards historical projection of the ego on revolutionary identity; towards conservative nostalgia for the ego of the nation, party, totem, or the church.”85 The revolt of the powerless did not have an explicit political dimension. The politics of antipolitics consisted of a discreet, unobtrusive, almost Mozartian attempt to restore the dignity of the individual. It confronted totality from within, preparing the ground for the actual revolution: “Given the complex system of manipulation on which the post-totalitarian system is founded and on which it is also dependent, every free human act or expression, every attempt to live within the truth, must necessarily appear as a threat to the system and, thus, as something which is political by excellence.”86 This ethical insurrection took place “in the real sphere of potential politics in the post-totalitarian system,” outside the perverse and perverting circle of power. The touchstone of a countersociety was the individual's decision to proclaim his or her inner independence. Commitment to those “eternal values” derided and subverted by Communist (or Fascist) ideocratic dictatorships did become the main strategy for reasserting freedom as a constitutive human and social possibility.
Ultimately, the crucial problem with the projects of th
e New Man and of Marxian freedom and with post-Communist fantasies of salvation “was not that they were centered on Faith, but that they were centered on Faith pretending to be knowledge.”87 In the light of the analysis of Havel's “existential revolution,” Marxism (-Leninism) and post-1989 political mythologies share the quality of “moral blindness” (S. Lukes). They promised to free humankind from specific conditions of morality: from scarcity, from the selfishness or partiality of conflicting individuals and groups, from nonconvergent and incompatible values, and from the anarchy and opacity of a world not subject to collective human control. In pursuing the accomplishment of their promises, they discarded the already existent principles that protect human beings from one another.88 Any source of failure was externalized, responsibility existing only at an intergroup level, as the ur-community (e.g., proletariat or nation) pursued its historical mission in counterdistinction to the other-categories (e.g. bourgeoisie, peasantry, Jews, enemy-nation).
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