Reappraisals

by Tony Judt

  It is quite impossible to convey in a short review the astonishing range of Kołakowski’s history of Marxist doctrine. It will surely not be superseded: Who will ever again know—or care—enough to go back over this ground in such detail and with such analytical sophistication? Main Currents of Marxism is not a history of socialism; its author pays only passing attention to political contexts or social organizations. It is unashamedly a narrative of ideas, a sort of bildungsroman of the rise and fall of a once-mighty family of theory and theorists, related in skeptical, disabused old age by one of its last surviving children.

  Kołakowski’s thesis, driven through 1,200 pages of exposition, is straightforward and unambiguous. Marxism, in his view, should be taken seriously: not for its propositions about class struggle (which were sometimes true but never news); nor for its promise of the inevitable collapse of capitalism and a proletarian-led transition to socialism (which failed entirely as prediction); but because Marxism delivered a unique—and truly original—blend of Promethean Romantic illusion and uncompromising historical determinism.

  The attraction of Marxism thus understood is obvious. It offered an explanation of how the world works—the economic analysis of capitalism and of social class relations. It proposed a way in which the world ought to work—an ethics of human relations as suggested in Marx’s youthful, idealistic speculations (and in György Lukács’s interpretation of him, with which Kołakowski, for all his disdain for Lukács’s own compromised career, largely concurs6). And it announced incontrovertible grounds for believing that things will work that way in the future, thanks to a set of assertions about historical necessity derived by Marx’s Russian disciples from his (and Engels’s) own writings. This combination of economic description, moral prescription, and political prediction proved intensely seductive—and serviceable. As Kołakowski has observed, Marx is still worth reading—if only to help us understand the sheer versatility of his theories when invoked by others to justify the political systems to which they gave rise.7

  On the link between Marxism and Communism—which three generations of Western Marxists tried valiantly to minimize, “saving” Marx from his “distortion” at the hands of Stalin (and Lenin)—Kołakowski is explicit. To be sure, Karl Marx was a German writer living in mid-Victorian London.8 He can hardly be held responsible in any intelligible sense for twentieth-century Russian or Chinese history and there is thus something redundant as well as futile about the decades-long efforts of Marxist purists to establish the founders’ true intent, to ascertain what Marx and Engels would have thought about future sins committed in their name—though this reiterated emphasis on getting back to the truth of the sacred texts illustrates the sectarian dimension of Marxism to which Kołakowski pays special attention.

  Nevertheless, Marxism as a doctrine cannot be separated from the history of the political movements and systems to which it led. There really is a core of determinism in the reasoning of Marx and Engels: their claim that “in the last analysis” things are as they have to be, for reasons over which men have no final control. This insistence was born of Marx’s desire to turn old Hegel “on his head” and insert incontrovertibly materialcauses (the class struggle, the laws of capitalist development) at the heart of historical explanation. It was against this convenient epistemological backstop that Plekhanov, Lenin, and their heirs were to lean the whole edifice of historical “necessity” and its accompanying machinery of enforcement.

  Moreover, Marx’s other youthful intuition—that the proletariat has a privileged insight into the final purposes of history thanks to its special role as an exploited class whose own liberation will signal the liberation of all humankind—is intimately attached to the ultimate Communist outcome, thanks to the subordination of proletarian interests to a dictatorial party claiming to incarnate them. The strength of these logical chains binding Marxist analysis to Communist tyranny may be judged from the many observers and critics—from Mikhail Bakunin to Rosa Luxemburg—who anticipated Communism’s totalitarian outcome, and warned against it, long before Lenin got anywhere near the Finland Station. Of course Marxism might have gone in other directions: It might also have gone nowhere. But “the Leninist version of Marxism, though not the only possible one, was quite plausible.”9

  To be sure, neither Marx nor the theorists who followed him intended or anticipated that a doctrine that preached the overthrow of capitalism by an industrial proletariat would seize power in a backward and largely rural society. But for Kołakowski this paradox merely underscores the power of Marxism as a system of belief: If Lenin and his followers had not insisted upon (and retroactively justified in theory) the ineluctable necessity of their own success, their voluntaristic endeavors would never have succeeded. Nor would they have been so convincing a prototype to millions of outside admirers. To turn an opportunistic coup, facilitated by the German government’s transport of Lenin to Russia in a sealed train, into an “inevitable” revolution required not just tactical genius but also an extended exercise of ideological faith. Kołakowski is surely right: Political Marxism was above all a secular religion.

  Main Currents of Marxism is not the only first-rate account of Marxism, though it is by far the most ambitious.10 What distinguishes it is Kołakowski’s Polish perspective. This probably explains the emphasis in his account on Marxism as an eschatology—“a modern variant of apocalyptic expectations which have been continuous in European history.” And it licenses an uncompromisingly moral, even religious reading of twentieth-century history: “The Devil is part of our experience. Our generation has seen enough of it for the message to be taken extremely seriously. Evil, I contend, is not contingent, it is not the absence, or deformation, or the subversion of virtue (or whatever else we may think of as its opposite), but a stubborn and unredeemable fact.”11 No Western commentator on Marxism, however critical, ever wrote like that.

  But then Kołakowski writes as someone who has lived not just inside Marxism but under Communism. He was witness to Marxism’s transformation from an intellectual theorem to a political way of life. Thus observed and experienced from within, Marxism becomes difficult to distinguish from Communism—which was, after all, not only its most important practical outcome but its only one. And the daily deployment of Marxist categories for the vulgar purpose of suppressing freedom— which was their primary use value to Communists in power—detracts over time from the charms of the theorem itself.

  This cynical application of dialectics to the twisting of minds and the breaking of bodies was usually lost on Western scholars of Marxism, absorbed in the contemplation of past ideals or future prospects and unmoved by inconvenient news from the Soviet present, particularly when relayed by victims or witnesses.12 His encounters with such people doubtless explain Kołakowski’s caustic disdain for much of “Western” Marxism and its progressive acolytes: “One of the causes of the popularity of Marxism among educated people was the fact that in its simple form it was very easy; even [sic] Sartre noticed that Marxists are lazy. . . . [Marxism was] an instrument that made it possible to master all of history and economics without actually having to study either.”13

  It was just one such encounter that gave rise to the sardonic title essay in the newly published collection of Kołakowski’s writings.8 In 1973, in The Socialist Register, the English historian E. P. Thompson published “An Open Letter to Leszek Kołakowski” in which he took the erstwhile Marxist to task for having let down his Western admirers by abjuring the revisionist Communism of his youth. The “Open Letter” was Thompson at his priggish, Little-Englander worst: garrulous (the letter runs to one hundred pages of printed text), patronizing, and sanctimonious. In a pompous, demagogic tone, with more than half an eye to his worshipful progressive audience, Thompson shook his rhetorical finger at the exiled Kołakowski, admonishing him for apostasy: “We were both voices of the Communist revisionism of 1956. . . . We both passed from a frontal critique of Stalinism to a stance of Marxist revisionism. . . . There was
a time when you, and the causes for which you stood, were present in our innermost thoughts.” How dare you, Thompson suggested from the safety of his leafy perch in middle England, betray us by letting your inconvenient experiences in Communist Poland obstruct the view of our common Marxist ideal?

  Kołakowski’s response, “My Correct Views on Everything,” may be the most perfectly executed intellectual demolition in the history of political argument: No one who reads it will ever take E. P. Thompson seriously again. The essay explicates (and symptomatically illustrates) the huge moral gulf that was opened up between “Eastern” and “Western” intellectuals by the history and experience of Communism, and which remains with us today. Kołakowski mercilessly dissects Thompson’s strenuous, self-serving efforts to save socialism from the shortcomings of Marxism, to save Marxism from the failures of Communism, and to save Communism from its own crimes: all in the name of an ideal ostensibly grounded in “materialist” reality—but whose credibility depended on remaining untainted by real-world experience or human shortcomings. “You say,” Kołakowski writes to Thompson, “that to think in terms of a ‘system’ yields excellent results. I am quite sure it does, not only excellent, but miraculous; it simply solves all the problems of mankind in one stroke.”

  Solving the problems of mankind in one stroke; seeking out an all-embracing theory that can simultaneously explain the present and guarantee the future; resorting to the crutch of intellectual or historical “systems” to navigate the irritating complexity and contradictions of real experience; saving the “pure” seed of an idea or an ideal from its rotten fruit: Such shortcuts have a timeless allure and are certainly not the monopoly of Marxists (or indeed the Left). But it is understandably temptingto dismiss at least the Marxist variant of such human follies: Between the disabused insights of former Communists like Kołakowski and the self-righteous provincialism of “Western” Marxists like Thompson, not to speak of the verdict of history itself, the subject would appear to have self-destructed.

  Maybe so. But before consigning the curious story of the rise and fall of Marxism to a fast-receding and no-longer-relevant past, we would do well to recall the remarkable strength of Marxism’s grip upon the twentieth-century imagination. Karl Marx may have been a failed prophet and his most successful disciples a clique of tyrants, but Marxist thought and the Socialist project exercised an unparalleled hold on some of the best minds of the last century. Even in those countries that were to fall victim to Communist rule, the intellectual and cultural history of the age is inseparable from the magnetic attraction of Marxist ideas and their revolutionary promise. At one time or another many of the twentieth century’s most interesting thinkers would unhesitatingly have endorsed Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s encomium: “Marxism is not a philosophy of history, it is the philosophy of history and to renounce it is to dig the grave of Reason in history. After that there can be only dreams or adventures.”14

  Marxism is thus inextricably intertwined with the intellectual history of the modern world. To ignore or dismiss it is willfully to misinterpret the recent past. Ex-Communists and former Marxists—François Furet, Sidney Hook, Arthur Koestler, Leszek Kołakowski, Wolfgang Leonhard, Jorge Semprún, Victor Serge, Ignazio Silone, Boris Souvarine, Manès Sperber, Alexander Wat, and dozens of others—have written some of the best accounts of twentieth-century intellectual and political life. Even a lifelong anti-Communist like Raymond Aron was not embarrassed to acknowledge his undiminished interest in the “secular religion” of Marxism (to the point of recognizing that his obsession with combating it amounted to a sort of transposed anticlericalism). And it is indicative that a liberal like Aron took particular pride in being far better read in Marx and Marxism than many of his self-styled “Marxist” contemporaries.15

  As the example of the fiercely independent Aron suggests, the attraction of Marxism goes well beyond the familiar story, from ancient Rome to contemporary Washington, of scribblers and flatterers drawn to despots. There are three reasons why Marxism lasted so long and exerted such magnetism upon the best and the brightest. In the first place, Marxism is a very big idea. Its sheer epistemological cheek—its Promethean commitment to understanding and explaining everything— appeals to those who deal in ideas, just as it appealed for that reason to Marx himself. Moreover, once you substitute for the proletariat a party that promises to think in its name, you have created a collective organic intellectual (in the sense coined by Gramsci) which aspires not just to speak for the revolutionary class but to replace the old ruling class as well. In such a universe, ideas are not merely instrumental: They exercise a kind of institutional control. They are deployed for the purpose of re-scripting reality on approved lines. Ideas, in Kołakowski’s words, are Communism’s “respiratory system” (which, incidentally, is what distinguishes it from otherwise similar tyrannies of Fascist origin, which have no comparable need of intelligent-sounding dogmatic fictions). In such circumstances, intellectuals—Communist intellectuals—are no longer confined to speaking truth to power. They have power—or at least, in the words of one Hungarian account of this process, they are on the road to power. This is an intoxicating notion.16

  The second source of Marxism’s appeal is that Marx and his Communist progeny were not a historical aberration, Clio’s genetic error. The Marxist project, like the older Socialist dream which it displaced and absorbed, was one strand in the great progressive narrative of our time: It shares with classical liberalism, its antithetical historical twin, that narrative’s optimistic, rationalistic account of modern society and its possibilities. Marxism’s distinctive twist—the assertion that the good society to come would be a classless, post-capitalist product of economic processes and social upheaval—was already hard to credit by 1920. But social movements deriving from the initial Marxian analytical impulse continued for many decades to talk and behave as though they still believed in the transformative project.

  Thus, to take an example: The German Social Democratic Party effectively abandoned “revolution” well before World War I; but only in 1959, at the Congress of Bad Godesberg, did it officially lift the mortgage of Marxist theory that lay upon its language and goals. In the interveningyears, and indeed for some time afterward, German Social Democrats—like British Labourites, Italian Socialists, and many others—continued to speak and write of class conflict, the struggle against capitalism, and so forth: as though, notwithstanding their mild and reformist daily practice, they were still living out the grand Romantic narrative of Marxism. As recently as May 1981, following François Mitterrand’s election to the presidency, eminently respectable French Socialist politicians—who would not have described themselves as “Marxist,” much less “Communist”—talked excitedly of a revolutionary “grand soir” and the coming transition to socialism, as though they were back in 1936, or even 1848.

  Marxism, in short, was the deep “structure” of much progressive politics. Marxist language, or a language parasitic upon Marxist categories, gave form and an implicit coherence to many kinds of modern political protest: from social democracy to radical feminism. In this sense Merleau-Ponty was correct: The loss of Marxism as a way of relating critically to the present really has left an empty space. With Marxism have gone not just dysfunctional Communist regimes and their deluded foreign apologists but also the whole schema of assumptions, categories, and explanations created over the past 150 years that we had come to think of as “the Left.” Anyone who has observed the confusion of the political Left in North America or Europe over the past twenty years and asked themselves “But what does it stand for? What does it want?” will appreciate the point.

  But there was a third reason why Marxism had appeal, and those who in recent years have been quick to pounce upon its corpse and proclaim the “end of History,” or the final victory of peace, democracy, and the free market, might be wise to reflect upon it. If generations of intelligent men and women of good faith were willing to throw in their lot with the Communist project, it was
not just because they were lulled into an ideological stupor by a seductive tale of revolution and redemption. It was because they were irresistibly drawn to the underlying ethical message: to the power of an idea and a movement uncompromisingly attached to representing and defending the interests of the wretched of the earth. From first to last, Marxism’s strongest suit was what one of Marx’s biographers calls “the moral seriousness of Marx’s conviction that the destiny of our world as a whole is tied up with the condition of its poorest and most disadvantaged members.”17

  Marxism, as the Polish historian Andrzej Walicki—one of its more acerbic critics—openly acknowledges, was the most influential “reaction to the multiple shortcomings of capitalist societies and the liberal tradition.” If Marxism fell from favor in the last third of the twentieth century, it was in large measure because the worst shortcomings of capitalism appeared at last to have been overcome. The liberal tradition—thanks to its unexpected success in adapting to the challenge of depression and war and bestowing upon Western democracies the stabilizing institutions of the New Deal and the welfare state—had palpably triumphed over its antidemocratic critics of Left and Right alike. A political doctrine that had been perfectly positioned to explain and exploit the crises and injustices of another age now appeared beside the point.