Reappraisals
Page 18
Today, however, things are changing once again. What Marx’s nineteenth-century contemporaries called the “Social Question”—how to address and overcome huge disparities of wealth and poverty and shameful inequalities of health, education, and opportunity—may have been answered in the West (though the gulf between poor and rich, which seemed once to be steadily closing, has for some years been opening again, in Britain and above all in the U.S.). But the Social Question is back on the international agenda with a vengeance. What appears to its prosperous beneficiaries as worldwide economic growth and the opening of national and international markets to investment and trade is increasingly perceived and resented by millions of others as the redistribution of global wealth for the benefit of a handful of corporations and holders of capital.
In recent years respectable critics have been dusting off nineteenth-century radical language and applying it with disturbing success to twenty-first-century social relations. One hardly needs to be a Marxist to recognize that what Marx and others called a “reserve army of labor” is now resurfacing, not in the back streets of European industrial towns but worldwide. By holding down the cost of labor—thanks to the threat of outsourcing, factory relocation, or disinvestment18—this global pool of cheap workers helps maintain profits and promote growth: just as it did in nineteenth-century industrial Europe, at least until organized trade unions and mass labor parties were powerful enough to bring about improved wages, redistributive taxation, and a decisive twentieth-century shift in the balance of political power—thereby confounding the revolutionary predictions of their own leaders.
In short, the world appears to be entering upon a new cycle, one with which our nineteenth-century forebears were familiar but of which we in the West have no recent experience. In the coming years, as visible disparities of wealth increase and struggles over the terms of trade, the location of employment, and the control of scarce natural resources all become more acute, we are likely to hear more, not less, about inequality, injustice, unfairness, and exploitation—at home but especially abroad. And thus, as we lose sight of Communism (already in Eastern Europe you have to be thirty-five years old to have any adult memory of a Communist regime), the moral appeal of some refurbished version of Marxism is likely to grow.
If that sounds crazy, remember this: The attraction of one or another version of Marxism to intellectuals and radical politicians in Latin America, for example, or in the Middle East, never really faded; as a plausible account of local experience Marxism in such places retains much of its appeal, just as it does to contemporary antiglobalizers everywhere. The latter see in the tensions and shortcomings of today’s international capitalist economy precisely the same injustices and opportunities that led observers of the first economic “globalization” of the 1890s to apply Marx’s critique of capitalism to new theories of “imperialism.”
And since no one else seems to have anything very convincing to offer by way of a strategy for rectifying the inequities of modern capitalism, the field is once again left to those with the tidiest story to tell and the angriest prescription to offer. Recall Heine’s prophetic observations about Marx and his friends at the midpoint of the nineteenth century, in the high years of Victorian growth and prosperity: “These revolutionary doctors and their pitilessly determined disciples are the only men in Germany who have any life; and it is to them, I fear, that the future belongs.”19
I don’t know whether the future of radical politics belongs to a new generation of Marxists, unmoved by (and perhaps unaware of ) the crimes and failures of their Communist predecessors. I hope not, but I wouldn’t bet against it. Jacques Attali, onetime political adviser to President Mitterrand, last year published a large, hastily penned book on Karl Marx. In it he argues that the fall of the Soviet Union has liberated Marx from his heirs and freed us to see in him the insightful prophet of capitalism who anticipated contemporary dilemmas, notably the global inequalities generated by unrestrained competition. Attali’s book has sold well. His thesis has been widely discussed: in France, but also in Britain (where in a 2005 BBC Radio poll listeners voted Karl Marx “the greatest philosopher of all time”20).
Of course one could respond to Attali as Kołakowski responded to Thompson’s analogous claim that the good ideas of Communism might be saved from its embarrassing actuality: “For many years I have not expected anything from attempts to mend, to renovate, to clean up or to correct the Communist idea. Alas, poor idea. I knew it, Edward. This skull will never smile again.” But Jacques Attali, unlike Edward Thompson and the recently resurfaced Antonio Negri, is a man with sharp political antennae, finely tuned to changes in the mood of the hour. If he thinks that the skull might smile again, that moribund, system-building explanations of the Left may indeed be due for revival—if only as a counterpoint to the irritating overconfidence of contemporary free-marketeers of the Right—then he is probably not wholly mistaken. He is certainly not alone.
In the early years of this new century we thus find ourselves facing two opposite and yet curiously similar fantasies. The first fantasy, most familiar to Americans but on offer in every advanced country, is the smug, irenic insistence by commentators, politicians, and experts that today’s policy consensus—lacking any clear alternative—is the condition of every well-managed modern democracy and will last indefinitely; that those who oppose it are either misinformed or else malevolent and in either case doomed to irrelevance. The second fantasy is the belief that Marxism has an intellectual and political future: not merely in spite of Communism’s collapse but because of it. Hitherto found only at the international “periphery” and in the marginsof academia, this renewed faith in Marxism—at least as an analytical tool if not as a political prognostication—is now once again, largely for want of competition, the common currency of international protest movements.
The similarity, of course, consists in a common failure to learn from the past—and a symbiotic interdependence, since it is the myopia of the first that lends spurious credibility to the arguments of the second. Those who cheer the triumph of the market and the retreat of the state, who would have us celebrate the unregulated scope for economic initiative in today’s “flat” world, have forgotten what happened the last time we passed this way. They are in for a rude shock (though, if the past is a reliable guide, probably at someone else’s expense). As for those who dream of rerunning the Marxist tape, digitally remastered and free of irritating Communist scratches, they would be well advised to ask sooner rather than later just what it is about all-embracing “systems” of thought that leads inexorably to all-embracing “systems” of rule. On this, as we have seen, Leszek Kołakowski can be read with much profit. But history records that there is nothing so powerful as a fantasy whose time has come.
This essay, published on the occasion of Norton’s praiseworthy decision to republish in one volume Leszek Kołakowski’s Main Currents of Marxism, first appeared in the New York Review of Books in September 2006. My brief allusion to E. P. Thompson provoked a spirited retort from Mr. Edward Countryman. His letter and my reply were published in the New York Review of Books, vol. 54, no. ii, February 2007.
NOTES TO CHAPTER VIII
1 “On Exile, Philosophy & Tottering Insecurely on the Edge of an Unknown Abyss,” dialogue between Leszek Kołakowski and Danny Postel, Daedalus (Summer 2005): 82.
2 Glowne Nurty Marksizmu (Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1976); Main Currents of Marxism (Oxford: Clarendon Press/Oxford University Press, 1978; New York: Norton, 2006).
3 See, e.g., his Chrétiens sans église: la conscience réligieuse et le lien confessional au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 1969); God Owes Us Nothing: A Brief Remark on Pascal’s Religion and on the Spirit of Jansenism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); and the essays collected in My Correct Views on Everything, notably “The Devil in History” and “Concern with God in an Apparently Godless Era.”
4 Andrzej Walicki, Marxism and the Leap to the Kingdom of Freedom: The Rise a
nd Fall of the Communist Utopia (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), vii. Of his own journey from confident orthodoxy to skeptical opposition, Kołakowski has just this to say: “True, I was almost omniscient (yet not entirely) when I was twenty years old, but, as you know, people grow stupid when they grow older. I was much less omniscient when I was twenty-eight, and still less now.” See “My Correct Views on Everything: A Rejoinder to E. P. Thompson,” originally published in The Socialist Register, 1974; reprinted in My Correct Views on Everything, p. 19.
5 Kelles-Krauz, at least, has been retrieved from neglect by Timothy Snyder, whose Nationalism, Marxism and Modern Central Europe: A Biography of Kazimierz Kelles-Krauz, 1872-1905 was published by Harvard University Press in 1997.
6 Elsewhere Kołakowski writes of Lukács—who served briefly as cultural commissar in Béla Kun’s Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919 and later, at Stalin’s behest, abjured every interesting word he ever penned—that he was a great talent who “put his intellect at the service of a tyrant.” As a result, “his books inspire no interesting thought and are considered ‘things of the past’ even in Hungary, his native country.” See “Communism as a Cultural Formation,” Survey 29, no. 2 (Summer 1985); reprinted in My Correct Views on Everything as “Communism as a Cultural Force,” p. 81.
7 See “What Is Left of Socialism,” first published as “Po co nam pojecie sprawiedliwosci spolecznej?” in Gazeta Wyborcza, May 6-8, 1995; republished in My Correct Views on Everything.
8 In Main Currents Marx is firmly placed in the German philosophical world that dominated his mental landscape. Marx the social theorist receives short shrift. As for Marx’s contributions to economics—whether the labor theory of value or the predicted fall in the rate of profit under advanced capitalism—these get little sustained attention. Considering that Marx himself was unhappy with the outcome of his economic investigations (one reason why Das Kapital remained unfinished), this should perhaps be thought a mercy: The predictive powers of Marxian economics have long been discounted even by the Left, at least since Joseph A. Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York, London: Harper and Brothers, 1942). Twenty years later, Paul Samuelson condescended to allow that Karl Marx was at best “a minor post-Ricardian.”
Even for some of his own disciples, Marxist economics were rendered moot by history within a few years of their first appearance. In Evolutionary Socialism (first published in 1899), Engels’s friend Eduard Bernstein decisively dismantled the prediction that the contradictions of capitalist competition must lead to worsening conditions for workers and a crisis that could only be resolved by revolution. The best English-language discussion of this subject is still Carl E. Schorske, German Social Democracy, 1905-1917: The Development of the Great Schism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1955).
9 Kołakowski, “The Devil in History,” Encounter, January 1981; reprinted in My Correct Views on Everything, p. 125.
10 The best single-volume study of Marxism, brilliantly compressed but embracing politics and social history as well as men and ideas, remains George Lichtheim’s Marxism: An Historical and Critical Study, first published in London in 1961. Of Marx himself, two very different biographies from the seventies, by David McLellan (Karl Marx: His Life and Thought, New York: Harper and Row, 1974) and Jerrold Seigel (Marx’s Fate: The Shape of a Life, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), remain the best modern accounts, but should be supplemented with Isaiah Berlin’s remarkable essay Karl Marx: His Life and Environment, which first appeared in 1939.
11 “The Devil in History,” in My Correct Views, p. 133. A little later in the same interview Kołakowski emphasizes again the eschatological structure of political messianism: descent into hell, absolute break with past sins, the arrival of a New Time. But in the absence of God, such undertakings are condemned to incoherence; faith pretending to be knowledge doesn’t work. See pp. 136-137.
12 The unreliability of such witnesses was a long-standing theme of Western progressive apologetics for Stalinism. In much the same way, American Sovietologists used to discount evidence or testimony from Soviet bloc exiles or émigrés—too much personal experience, it was widely agreed, can distort a person’s perspective and inhibit objective analysis.
13 Kołakowski’s scorn for bien-pensant Western progressives was widely shared by fellow Poles and other “Easterners.” In 1976 the poet Antonin Słonimski recalled Jean-Paul Sartre’s encouragement to Soviet bloc writers twenty years earlier not to abandon Socialist Realism lest this weaken the “Socialist Camp” vis-à-vis the Americans: “Freedom for him, every limitation for us!” See “L’Ordre règne à Varsovie,” Kultura 3 (1976): 26- 27, quoted in Marci Shore, Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation’s Life and Death in Marxism, 1918-1968 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 362.
14 See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanisme et terreur: essai sur le problème communiste (Paris: Gallimard, 1947). The quotation is from the 1969 American edition, Humanism and Terror (Boston: Beacon), p. 153. For an exemplary account of the founding generation of Polish Communist intellectuals (a startlingly gifted group of artists and writers born around 1900, the last to be educated in the old polyglot empires and the first to come of age in independent Poland), see Marci Shore’s recently published Caviar and Ashes, a scholarly elegy to a lost world.
15 Raymond Aron, “Un philosophe libéral dans l’histoire” (1973), in Essais sur la condition juive contemporaine (Paris: Éditions de la Fallois, 1989), 222. See also Aron, D’une sainte famille à l’autre: essais sur les marxismes imaginaries (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 11: “Like the friends of my youth I never separated philosophy from politics, nor thought from commitment; but I devoted rather more time than them to the study of economics and social mechanisms. In this sense I believe I was more faithful to Marx than they were.” A full quarter century after his death, Aron’s lectures on Marx at the Collège de France were reconstituted and published by his former students and colleagues under the revealing title Le Marxisme de Marx (Paris: Éditions de Fallois, 2002).
16 György Konrád and Ivan Szelényi, The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1979). Waclaw Machajski, an early-twentieth-century Polish anarchist, anticipated just this aspect of Marxism in his criticism of the implicit privileges that Marxist social democracy would accord the intelligentsia. See Marshal Shatz, Jan Waclaw Machajski: A Radical Critic of the Russian Intelligentsia and Socialism (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989). Kołakowski discusses Machajski briefly in Main Currents (pp. 493, 917) and in “The Myth of Human Self-Identity,” in The Socialist Idea: A Reappraisal, edited by Leszek Kołakowski and Stuart Hampshire (New York: Basic Books, 1974), reprinted in My Correct Views on Everything.
17 Seigel, Marx‘s Fate, p. x.
18 Intelligent proponents of globalization, like Jagdish Bhagwati, insist that free trade and international competition have not directly reduced the real wages of workers in advanced countries. But it is the threat of outsourcing, job loss, or factory relocation that restrains pressure for higher wages, not the fact of competition per se—and it applies with equal effect in unionized, “Rhineland” economies like Germany and more competitive societies like the U.S. But even Bhagwati concedes that there has been a steady depression of real wages in advanced countries, though in his optimistic account globalization has at least helped slow the process somewhat. See Jagdish Bhagwati, In Defense of Globalization (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 123-124. See also the remarks by Paul Donovan, an economist at UBS, quoted in the Financial Times, June 5, 2006, p. 1: “The US labour market may be tightening but there is still an ample supply of workers worldwide, and this may be capping what domestic workers can demand.”
19 Quoted in S. S. Prawer’s Karl Marx and World Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press/ Clarendon Press, 1976), 151.
20 Marx received 28 percent of the votes cast, more than Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, and Kant
combined. David Hume came second with 13 percent. For Attali see Jacques Attali, Karl Marx ou l’esprit du monde (Paris: Fayard, 2005).
CHAPTER IX
A “Pope of Ideas”? John Paul II and the Modern World
The glossy publicity material for His Holiness, a book published simultaneously in eight countries and in excerpted form by Reader’s Digest, contains a list of nineteen “Possible Questions” for the authors.9 Designed for anticipated press conferences and interviews, these questions are anything but probing and do not suggest that the authors, both investigative journalists, hold their colleagues in high esteem. Nevertheless, such “puff” questions are revealing in their way: More than half of them are invitations to the authors to boast of their discoveries, and they show that Bernstein and Politi (who writes for the Italian daily La Repubblica) mean their subtitle to be taken seriously. They do believe that they have brought to light the hidden history of our time.
Their book is written in a style appropriate to such a claim, rhetorically inflated and awash in hints of secret conversations, confidential informants, and unrevealable sources. In their chatty descriptions of people, places, and events, the authors miss few opportunities to reproduce a cliché. A Jewish attorney in the pope’s birthplace is said to have been held “in the highest esteem both by his co-religionists and by most of the Gentile movers and shakers of Wadowice.” As a substitute for an account of Karol Wojtyła’s debt to Polish literature, we are told that “Adam Mickiewicz, the Romantic bard, in particular set strings resonating in Karol.” At audiences with the new pope, we learn, “nuns went crazy.” His Holiness is simultaneously urgent and soggy, with gobbets of interesting information adrift in a tumbling onrush of breathless, “colorful” prose.1