Marxism's Disoriented Despotism

...Kolakowski has chosen one-basically that of the young George Lukacs-but he uses it more as a "working hypothesis" than as a means to convey a deep-rooted personal conviction...

...Like Kolakowski, I do not believe that Marxism has been the "efficient cause" of Communism or, for that matter, of any historical development that has used or abused the banner of Marxism...

...In adopting a Lukacsian perspective on Marx (a perspective which, among other things, stresses the sharp differences between Marx and Engels' theory of the "dialectic of nature," between the Marxian epistemology of praxis and Engels' "technical interpretation of knowledge," and between the revolutionary eschatology of Marx and Engels' belief in "infinite progression"), Kolakowski does not adhere to it any more than is necessary to establish a plausible frame of reference for expository-historical purposes...

...Was Marx a Marxist after all-and in what sense...

...Although a "fantasy," "a caricature and a bogus form of religion," Marxism was not devoid of a certain "rational content...

...My reading of Marx," Kolakowski writes in the "Preface" to the first volume, was influenced more by Lukacs than by other commentators, though I am far from sharing his attitude toward the doctrine...

...The Marxist response to that criticism is known: The state would eventually ' 'wither away," and even before that final "withering away," the new proletarian-dominated society would see the transformation of the political character of older forms of authority into "the simple administrative functions of watching over the true interests of society" (Engels...

...hence, the "absurd" notion of "scientific socialism"- "absurd because the means of attaining an end may be scientific but not the choice of the end itself," as Kolakowski puts it...

...And this is so because, "Wherever Communism is in power, the ruling class transforms it into an ideology whose real sources are nationalism, racism, or imperialism...

...Once this is done, it becomes possible to "recognize, within limits, the validity of historical materialism," without conceding that to do so is "tantamount to acknowledging the truth of Marxism...

...The "people's state" (or, more precisely, the "dictatorship of the proletariat"), advanced by the Marxists as the necessary form of transition from capitalism to socialism, was to Bakunin a contradiction in terms-a "fiction," and "for the proletariat a dangerous pitfall...

...The intellectual flexibility of Marxism, verging quite often on sheer incoherence (but we all know that dogmatism and incoherence are not incompatible), is thus given a sort of "narrative" cohesion and continuity, with that particular mixture of predictable and unpredictable developments indispensable to any narrative worth telling...

...It is for this reason that the question of whether the Soviet Union is essentially Marxist or a nationalist perversion of Marxism, bent on the de-stuction of capitalism or simply world domination, poses unnecessary dichotomies...

...Once the capitalist relations of production are changed-by violent or, under certain circumstances, peaceful revolution-a Communist society will eventually result...

...Socially, it is as riddled by power relationships as the Oriental despotism of 2,000 years ago...

...Leaving aside the built-in mystical self-assurance of the doctrine, its dogmatic refusal to admit of scientific "fallibilism," its inability to make any room for "possibilistic" thinking (which has been, since Aristotle, the hallmark of all serious political philosophy), Marx turns out to have been plainly wrong in the central ideological assumption of his system, namely, that the collective ownership of the means of production would naturally lead to a non-exploitative, classless society...

...And, if Marx's work lends itself to several interpretations, all of them equally valid even when they are mutually exclusive (a point of view apparently espoused by Kolakowski), the question still lingers: Which interpretations are invalid, clearly inadequate, or unwarranted...

...The modern twist is provided by the clearly recognizable and increasingly numerous elements of fascism (if we define fascism as the overt cult of naked power, of a power that neither seeks nor claims to seek "legitimacy" outside or beyond itself) evident in Communist systems...

...The answer is, I believe, that it enables the modern mind, tortured by moral self-doubt, to indulge its moral passions in terms which also satisfy its passion for ruthless objectivity...

...And morally, Marxism's vaunted demystifica-tion of all values has given way to a rigid formula of social prescriptions which, because they are amoral of their own design, possess none of the ambiguity and therefore versatility of Western moral codes...

...The real characters are, obviously, ideas (ideas of great consequence, sometimes positive but more often, especially as we approach the period of "The Breakdown" of Marxism, immensely tragic) and the special quality of intellectual "suspense" that sustains the reading of the study comes from the ever-frustrated expectation of "getting a handle" on these ideas, by way of reliable, clear-cut definitions...

...Marxism, through its philosophy of 'dialectical materialism', conjures away the contradiction between the high moral dynamism of our age and our stern critical passion which demands that we see human affairs objectively...

...Peirce saw as its fully self-aware "fallibilism...

...Thus, "Marxism as an interpretation of past history must be distinguished from Marxism as a political ideology...

...Whether or not one wishes to pronounce Marxism dead, the fact remains that as praxis it has been remarkably stagnant since the Russian Revolution...

...These antinomies, which make the liberal mind stagger and fumble, are the joy and strength of Marxism: for the more inordinate our moral aspirations and the more completely amoral our objectivist outlook, the more powerful is a combination in which these contradictory principles mutually reinforce each other...

...For how can one be an anti-Marxist when Marxism, both philosophically and ideologically (as Kolakowski's book clearly suggests), is dead...

...And Kolakowski's impressively learned book convinces us that the "story" of Marxism is not only worth telling, but is one of the major "stories" of modern intellectual and political history...

...The fantasy, Kolakowski explains in the "Epilogue," grew out of a combination of philosophical beliefs (the doctrine of progress in its dialectical Hegelian version) with apocalyptic and Messianic prophecies, on the basis of a mythology of "science" and "scientific truth" which was, paradoxically, "responsible for the anti-scientific and anti-intellectual features of Marxism in its particular guise as the ideology of Communism...

...Lord Acton's famous dictum, "power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely," is as valid as ever in today's Communist world...

...The historian of ideas is clearly entitled to deplore such ideological betrayals or gross misunderstandings, whatever their practical purposes and self-rationalizations...

...A few years ago, echoing the famous Nietzscheah pronouncement of the "death of God," a former French gauch-iste intellectual published a book entitled, aptly but at the same time somewhat ridiculously, Marx est mort...

...From this point of view, even the absurdly exaggerated form in which Marxism was expounded may have been justified, at least as a rhetorical strategy...

...But to speak consistently of "ideological betrayals" of an original doctrine the historian must perhaps make a stronger commitment to his own interpretation of the matters about which he is writing than is implied by the largely "narrative" commitment that Kolakowski has been willing to make...

...The strong appeal of Marxism in the not-too-distant past finds at least a partial explanation in the notion of "moral inversion," advanced by Michael Polanyi in his 1958 book, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post- Critical Philosophy...

...In bringing up the question of "moral inversion" I do not want to imply that Kolakowski's more serene attempt to assess the legacy'of Marxism is historically unjustified...

...Moral inversion" is a process by which people can satisfy their fundamental moral passions not only through immoral means (which, when used for the "good cause," become suddenly "moral") but also through the more sophisticated critical . debunking of all the traditional moral values ("goodness," "compassion," "humanism" are mere "ideological" tools of manipulation in the hands of the bourgeoisie, fundaments of the basic "moral hypocrisy" of capitalism...

...Certainly, from such a point of view Lenin, who appears as the "ideologist of totalitarianism," and later on Stalin, with his rigid codification of "Marxism-Leninism," represent a "radical departure" from Marx, and in many respects from Engels as well...

...at other times, while noting that "it would be absurd to maintain that Marxism was, so to speak, the efficient cause of present-day Communism," he determinedly states that "Communism is not a mere 'degeneration' of Marxism but a possible interpretation and even a well-founded one, though primitive and partial in some respects...

...only that which has no history is definable...

...As it was, and as often happens with humanistic theories, the element of absurdity was effective in transmitting their rational content...

...in extreme, dogmatic, and unacceptable forms...

...Instead of socialism, what has been achieved in the name of Marxism is a modern version of what Marx identified as the "Asiatic mode of production," or simply "Oriental despotism...

...Born in 1927, Kolakowski was one of the most active Marxist intellectuals in postwar Poland where, after a brief period of participation in the Stalinist ideological campaigns of the late 1940s and early 1950s, he became an outspoken advocate of radical de-Stalinization and democratic socialism...

...The entire Marxist'"fantasy"-theory, morality, and vision-has been steadily dissolving throughout the last several decades, in spite of the Stalinist attempt to "freeze" it...

...The dangerously naive Marxian view of power was criticized as long ago as the 1870s by Marx's anarchist opponent, Michael Bakunin, who foresaw with uncanny lucidity the unavoidable emergence of a "new class" of rulers within a Marxian socialist society...

...One need only look to recent events in Kolakowski's native Poland for evidence that a Communist regime that bases its power exclusively on mendacity and corruption, and is unable to generate any positive beliefs within its own ranks, let alone the ranks of the people, will eventually be met with a "revolution of -common sense...

...Yet they consistently elude definition: In fact their "story" is in large part the story of such elusiveness...

...But in light of the enormous subsequent influence of Marxism, his striking statement raises the intriguing, and for a movement of contending orthodoxies, the crucial, question of "the Marxism of Marx" (the very title, incidentally, of a book published in 1972 by the British Marxist John Lewis...

...Kolakowski discusses the question at length in his remarkable analysis of Trotsky's contribution to Marxism and usefully reminds the reader that Trotsky, even during his exile, failed to see Stalinistic dictatorship as the advent of a "new class" in a "classless society" and thus was blind to the central flaw of Marxism...

...Communism has done much to strengthen nationalist ideologies by using them to seize power or hold on to it, and in this way has produced its own gravediggers...

...With the intellectual detachment of a post-Marxist, Kolakowski is willing to look for the valid strands of a theory "enunciated...

...The death of Marxism-the explicit theme of the third volume of Kolakowski's study-is illustrated by the fact that, "At present," as the author points out, "Marxism neither interprets the world nor changes it: it is merely a repetition of slogans...

...From his broad post-Marxist perspective, Kolakowski has been led to adopt in his account of Marxism the age-old and well-tested rise/fall or growth/decline structuring device...

...political conflicts, which are only economic conflicts in disguise, will totally disappear...

...Nietzsche once observed that "all concepts in which ah entire process is semiotically concentrated elude definition...

...Both Marx and Engels, and then the Bolsheviks-from Lenin to Stalin to Trotsky-have simply ignored or refused to consider the possibility of the formation of a "new class" within a society in which the means of production are collectively owned...

...Both philosophically and politically, Marxism is considered, as the subtitle of the book indicates, in "Its Rise, Growth, and Dissolution...

...Insofar as Marxism has a history it is or has become undefinable...

...And does not the mere power to define these interests (a power that remains both unchecked and uncheckable within the Marxist scheme) confer certain obvious advantages upon those who wield it...

...Today Kolakowski is no longer a Marxist, but unlike the ex-Communists of an earlier generation (whose disillusionment is recorded in Richard Cr.ossman's famous book The God That Failed), he is not an anti-Marxist either...

...What kinds of guidelines or criteria of interpretation does Marx himself provide for his reader...

...Kolakowski writes: "If [Marx's] views had been hedged around with all the restrictions and reservations that are usual in rational thought, they would have had less influence...

...Earlier in his life, the author himself was no stranger to that fantasy...

...according to the Trotsky-ite euphemism, the Russian Revolution is just an "unfinished revolution" and by no means a failed or, worse, a false one...

...When Polanyi wrote his book, many people (including Kolakowski himself) still believed in some form of Marxism (whether "humanist" or "antihumanist," whether "revisionist" or "orthodox...

...Polanyi writes: Why should so contradictory a doctrine [i.e...

...But who defines the "true interests" of society...

...This of course does not mean that a historian of Marxism is forbidden to choose a preferred "interpretation" of Marx...

...Unlike the thought of a Freud or a Watson, the theoretical and political sides of Marxism were not always as easily separated as Kolakowski seems to believe from his post-Marxist vantage point...

...What today we perceive as its essentially contradictory nature was perhaps not so much its initial condition as the outcome of a history widespread in influence and rich in controversy...

...Instead, Trotsky preferred to speak of the appearance of a "political bureaucracy," a bureaucracy which had "arrested" the Russian Revolution halfway, and which one day would be destroyed as the Revolution completed its inexorable course...

...Main Currents of Marxism, then, is the history of both a great fantasy and a painful awakening...

...Is there such a thing as a correct interpretation of Marx and how are we to decide about its correctness...

...If misinterpretation or misapplication do not make any difference, then Marx himself must be held (symbolically) responsible for the failure of his "scientific" prophecy and for the consequences of that failure...

...It is thus understandable that Marxist regimes feel compelled to seek surreptitiously their nourishment in more vibrant ideologies-nationalism, imperialism, and racism...

...But they are no less Marxist for doing so, because it is the glaring failure of Marxism itself which compels them to do it...

...Unfortunately, Kolakowski only partially acknowleges that this theoretical (as opposed to rhetorical) "strength of Marxism" was not without its (practical, moral, political) dangers...

...The Marxist interpretation of past history was at the same time a sharply polemical attempt at demystification, with potentially immediate consequences for the understanding of the present: If all the values of the past were mere "ideological" illusions, so were their contemporaneous forms...

...An increasingly prominent and controversial "revisionist" Marxist, Kolakowski saw the unorthodox periodical Po Prostu (of which he was one of the editors) suppressed as early as 1957, just one year after Gomulka came to power...

...As Kolakowski observes with greater sobriety, "Contemporary Marxist literature, although plentiful in quantity, has a depressing air of sterility and helplessness, insofar as it is not purely historical...

...Even the sharpest critique of Marxism must reflect an awareness of the plain fact that what is being criticized has become a historical phenomenon, a thing of the past, in spite of any claims to the contrary (all such claims ringing increasingly hollow...

...But how can a "radical departure" from the basic tenets of a doctrine constitute at the same time not merely a possible but even a "well-founded" interpretation of it...

...But maybe such questions are ultimately futile, since Marx himself did not seem to worry too much about the dangers of misinterpretation...

...Thus, although, the basic precepts of Marxism were not all that "undefined" or "undefinable" in the beginning, since then whatever clarity of meaning they might have had has been lost in the course of their history, and irretrievably so...

...Something, though, must have been wrong in the thought of Marx...

...Essentially, he was convinced that the misunderstanding or exaggeration of his ideas could not do them any significant damage, since the collapse of capitalism and its replacement by socialism were matters of historical necessity, as unavoidable as the effects of any natural law...

...When, toward the end of his life, Marx declared half-jestingly, half-arrogantly, "I, at least, am not a Marxist," his intention might have been simply to dismiss what he perceived as gross misinterpretations of his doctrine by some of his followers...

...Marx saw political power and social power relations within society as mere expressions of economic power and "relations of production" (among which property relations occupy a major place...

...And Bakunin went on to write in his Statism and Anarchism (1873) that the "people's state" would be nothing but "the rule of great masses of people by a small privileged minority...

...The plain fact is that Marx, with his economically reductionist view of power, was unable to see power as a separate problem, and was therefore unable to foresee that in his collectivist system power would become an end in itself...

...In the last five years, as a consequence of new currents of European intellectual life, Marxism has ceased to function not only as an "explanatory system" but also as a system of Utopian beliefs and hopes...

...Marxism has been the greatest fantasy of our century," writes Leszek Kolakowski in the concluding part of his long, absorbing, and highly provocative history of Marxist thought...

...Hence, a certain wavering in the author's attitude toward the Marxist legacy: At times he speaks, as I have pointed out, of the "radical departure" of Leninist-Stalinist ideology from original Marxism...

...The possibility that socialism might fail, or remain an empty word, apparently never troubled Marx...

...Would it not be rather quixotic to be an anti-Marxist today...

...Through the 1960s, while the Gomulka regime was breaking one after the other the promises that it had originally made, Kolakowski came under repeated official attack and in 1968 was expelled from the Communist Party and dismissed from his professorship at Warsaw University...

...The dogmatically inclined philosophy of Marx misconstrued the scientism of the nineteenth century as a road to a new kind of infallibility (when, on the contrary, the genuine distinguishing feature of the scientific mind is what C.S...

...Marxism] carry such supreme convincing power...

...After having written the first volume of Main Currents of Marxism in Poland, during the "leisure time" between 1968-1970, Kolakowski emigrated to England where, as a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, he completed the second and third volumes between 1970-1976...

...That is why I prefer to characterize Kolakowski's general perspective as "post-Marxist," as a perspective in which the polemical "anti," remaining as sharp as ever, is definitely subsumed by the self-consciously historical " post...