Requiem for Utopia: Socialist Reflections on Czechoslovakia
Kohák, Erazim V.
TWO DAYS BEFORE the Soviet army entered Czechoslovakia, I received a letter from a student friend in Prague. The writer is an intelligent young man who received his entire formal education under...
...the social structures that emerge from it, though their ideology reflects the revolution, still articulate the old social orientation...
...In his "Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right" in the Deutsch-Franzdsische Jahrbiicher, Marx announced that precisely because the German working class was completely depraved, precisely because its condition was beneath critique, it would establish a genuinely humane society...
...Utopia is dead...
...Human and civil rights, the right of every man to personal identity and social participation, all remain valid...
...When this relation breaks down, for whatever reason, we can speak of alienation— public life becomes formal, empty, lifeless, while private identity becomes involuted, explosive, and distorted...
...His reflections on socialism East and West are worth quoting: Western socialism, especially in its radical form, took me completely by surprise...
...The rhetorical Utopians convinced themselves that they had found the recipe for perfection...
...You have completely dissociated theory and practice...
...At the same time, it was hopelessly backward...
...It was the ageless vision of a millennium, a fairytale kingdom in which men would still live together, but all the frictions of social existence—and, by implication, all the frustrations of individual life—would disappear...
...A revolution is necessarily a poor instrument for such basic change...
...A theoretical revolutionary can speak of "protecting the freedom of the people to develop along a socialist path unhampered by reactionary propaganda"—the ruling revolutionary has to censor the press and liquidate offending writers, and that is what the Czech Communists did...
...According to Utopian rhetoric from Lenin on, new institutions, social relations, and new men, free, unalienated, should have sprung from socialist praxis...
...Socialism is first of all realistic, tackling the concrete problems of making human existence possible in an industrial age...
...So does the surrealistic brothel scene, with its gas-chamber showers and Weiumacht uniforms...
...The detour on which too many socialists embarked in 1917 is over, finished, discredited, revealed as an exhilarating, aristocratic and ultimately reactionary social sport, not the radical social progress it claimed to be...
...While in practice imperfect progress was won in patient, tedious, determined work, in millennial rhetoric the law of negation of negation was to produce Utopia in an exhilarating cataclysm, with the necessity of a law of nature...
...Its urgent need was presocialist, practical—the need to build a modem society...
...Not only the Soviet regime, but any government in the world can exercise power effectively only as long as the governed recognize, tacitly at least, its right to rule—as long as they recognize it as a legitimate government...
...Czechoslovakia is an advanced industrial country, in which democracy necessarily means economic democracy as well...
...He speaks German and French fluently, reads English, and has made extensive contacts with his Western colleagues...
...In temper, they were intellectual aristocrats interested in changing the ideological facade but having little patience for the unspectacular, ambiguous work of concrete, deep-reaching ("radical") change...
...Soviet elections in the past have invariably been elaborate, ostentatious affairs...
...The point of the film is clear: for the man who must live in Utopia, there is no difference between Right and Left Hegelians...
...III THE SIGNIFICANCE of the Czechoslovak experience is that with us the millenium did come, under conditions as ideal as an imperfect world can offer...
...The alienation which the Utopian experiment produced in Czechoslovakia is an entirely different phenomenon...
...But when their crusade succeeded and men still failed to conform to their true faith, they found themselves forced to resort to coercion...
...It was this logic which led to the startling conclusion that a Tukhachevsky or a Beria, a Slansky or a Clementis, since they obviously were not fools, must have been imperialist agents...
...Coercion produces not enthusiasm and agreement, but alienation and apathy, which in turn can be dislodged only REQUIEM FOR UTOPIA by greater coercion, leading to still greater apathy...
...Its industries had been socialized several years earlier, and there was no hard-core political opposition...
...They might criticize it at every turn and resolve to replace its personnel or policies at the earliest opportunity...
...Quite logically, the basic reality of life in Utopia was apathy—and terror...
...Czechs and Slovaks, including Dubcek, were too familiar with the logic of terror to opt for the latter alternative...
...At the height of the Stalin period, a Czech friend told me, "At home they expect us to have sex orgies with socialism...
...There is nothing particularly socialistic about this apocalyptic Utopianism...
...Now we are building piecemeal, building a ERAZIM V. KOHAIC democratic society that will be as imperfect as the people who live in it...
...The Czechoslovak regime was Utopian, committed to remolding men in its image, and so, quite independently of the content of its ideology, it was also committed to paternalistic authoritarianism and its practical enforcement...
...Like all Utopians, they were convinced they were coercing men for their own good, and that in time the coercion would become unnecessary...
...The men I met are all properly repelled by the realities of authoritarian rule, but they keep on preaching the same weary Utopian ideologies that can lead to nothing else...
...The resistance worker, his acts, even his clothes and his apartment, clearly belong to the war years...
...Touched by the magic wand, the princess loves the peasant lad precisely because he is crude (unaffected) and boorish (spontaneous) . In revolutionary mythology, the magic wand was Hegelian dialectic...
...Czechs and Slovaks might be able to mitigate the impact of Russian rule through passive resistance, but the Russians are in effective control of the country, and able to impose absolute limits on its development...
...Pathological alienation is the dissociation of public acts and private identity brought about by a defect in the latter...
...Quite the contrary...
...In Czechoslovakia in 1920, the socialists Iost their considerable parliamentary majority and the chance to build a social democracy because the ideological, Communist-led wing of the party chose to withdraw from Parliament and wait for an apocalyptic revolution...
...From the beginning, they applied the theory of a radical break in all aspects of personal and social life...
...I met a few hard-headed colleagues, but most of the men who clamored for attention were three-semester intellectuals, pampered children of your permissive, affluent society, throwing tantrums because Father gave them only education, security, and freedom—but not Utopia...
...This is no abstract consideration...
...Pathological alienation is only symptomatically relevant to social theory...
...They were willing to be socialists, and they were willing to be enthusiastic, but they were not willing to be enthusiastic about socialism...
...Soviet rule is predicated on the premise that it is legitimate because it is "socialist"— while Czechoslovak democracy admitted that socialism itself requires legitimation by popular consent...
...Marx himself damned Utopianism in his controversy with Schapper-Willich, citing the undeveloped condition of the German workers as reason for 50 years of preparation required for political power (Mehring, Die Geschichte der deutschen Sozialdemokratie, vol...
...They might, and usually do, consider it a very bad government indeed...
...No matter how spectacular and exhilarating it may be, it leaves basic attitudes, habits, and relations among men unchanged...
...The Fifth Horseman is only one of the countless testimonies, produced both in the last months of gunpoint "socialism" and in the seven months of freedom, that the basic common fact of life in any Utopia is alienation...
...The writer is an intelligent young man who received his entire formal education under the Communist regime...
...Perhaps the most eloquent testimony is the recent Czech film, The Fifth Horseman Is Fear...
...Do they really think their Utopias could be benign if their revolutions were not comic-opera coups on indulgent campuses but real ventures in the exercise of power...
...But do they really think they could apply their radical Utopia in a real world and still respect their libertarian commitments...
...The forties and the fifties, Hitler years and Stalin years merge...
...Socialists might have been able to contribute to the process, but the only way some of them knew to profit from it was to emphasize the Hegelian ideological superstructure of socialism, the revolutionary fairytale of the peasant lad becoming a shining prince at the touch of a magic cataclysm...
...Creatures of theory, they remained theoretical—alien, lifeless, apathetic...
...Utopian regimes invariably pay lip service to freedom and participation, but the logic of Utopia forces them to deny their subjects the materials from which a satisfactory private identity is built—privacy, personal security, and especially freedom...
...Western reviewers interpreted it as just another wartime melodrama with bad Germans pitted against good Czechs and/or suffering Jews...
...It seemed so completely unreal, something from a different planet or a different era...
...This is to be expected— coercion produces apathy, and has to be relaxed periodically to allow for some life and spontaneity...
...In the West it seems possible to grow quite old without having to grow up—you have so much slack, so much room, so much padding between yourselves and reality...
...It was Lenin who characterized Czarist Russia as "a state which is a cross between Asiatic despotism and European absolutism . . . not an organ of any class of Russian society but a military-administrative machinery whose task is to resist the pressure of a higher Western civilization" (Iskra, March 5, 1904...
...A truly basic change requires work, the detailed, tedious, patient, persistent work of rebuilding basic attitudes and relations...
...VII As A CZECH, I FIND little consolation in the fact that tanks can exercise power but cannot make it legitimate or restore the shattered Hegelian illusions of Utopian revolutionism...
...Life had been liberated from all impediments, it should have blossomed, free and abundant...
...The Czech protesters were generally adults...
...Liberalism was a threat precisely because it supported socialism and the Soviet alli ance, and so brought into question the very legitimacy of the Utopian claim to power...
...With the upheaval of World War I and the collapse of the Russian empire, the situation changed radically...
...Russia in 1917 was a society virtually devoid of overt structure, radically open to experiment...
...It is more closely analogous to the alienation of American blacks, to whom the structure of society denies opportunity for participation, than to the alienation of disaffected students...
...In their seven months in power they discovered that the idea of a humane authoritarianism, the standard illusion of well-intentioned rhetorical revolutionists, is an illusion, a contradictio in adiecto...
...The men who carried out the Communist revolution finally did just that...
...Faced with opposition, the humane authoritarian faces the choice of ceasing to be authoritarian— or ceasing to be humane...
...That description fitted the new Communist regime all too well...
...Social alienation is as characteristic of Utopian societies as pathological alienation is of affluent, permissive ones...
...The democratic model interpreted acts in the public interest as acts receiving popular support: the legitimacy of a democratic government derives at least theoretically from the ability of the governed to confirm or reject their rulers...
...The reform was democratic—and it was also fundamentally and emphatically socialist...
...The internal dynamics of Utopianism make such mellowing most unlikely...
...On the other hand, its orators dismissed all such effort as irrelevant and proclaimed the coming of a Hegelian cataclysm from which a perfect society would arise as if by magic, in which depraved workers would suddenly become capable of establishing and administering a perfectly humane society, and in which new, just institutions would spontaneously spring up precisely from the depth of deprivation...
...But as Masaryk pointed out about Marx in The Foundations of Marxism in 1898, the Utopians are shoddy psychologists...
...Neither the Soviet alliance nor socialism were ever issues in the Czechoslovak reform— both were taken entirely for granted by the whole spectrum of national opinion...
...For instance, can you imagine reading Sartre's Les communistes et la paix here in 1952...
...V CZECHOSLOVAK REFORM under Alexander Dubcek signified essentially a rejection of the Utopia that sacrifices men to the demands of a prescription...
...The experiment in democratic socialism was succeeding beyond the fondest hopes of its leaders and supporters...
...We've had our fill of Utopia...
...The task that remains is the work of social progress—not the aristocratic sport of revolution, but the solid work of radical, deep-rooted transformation of society...
...Not that the Czechoslovak Communists were any more crude or repressive than their rhetorical colleagues in the West—they weren't...
...Socialism, the ideal of social justice and social responsibility in industrial society, remains valid...
...But the change was too radical to be spectacular...
...It is social alienation, brought about by the structure of society rather than by that of private identity...
...The Communist party had won, in 1946, some 38 per cent of the vote in a reasonably free election, yet had subsequently seized power in an armed coup, and so was unhindered by any constitutional guarantees of personal or social freedom...
...They were not practical men...
...Organizations and men, whether Communist or non-Communist, who had any pretensions to autonomy disappeared...
...By August only the first steps had been taken...
...But nothing of the sort happened...
...They dismiss them as "bourgeois"—in Czechoslovakia we are struggling for just a fraction of what they dismiss...
...But men who desperately wanted to believe could always find excuses as to why the magic failed to work...
...VI THE END CAME on August 21, when the Hegelian Left repeated the pattern set by the Hegelian Right 30 years earlier...
...Czechoslovak security on the crossroads of superpowers is necessarily tied to a Soviet alliance, and the Czechs proved themselves fully aware, in both word and deed, of this fact...
...They have also been invariably uncontested —a Utopian revolutionary regime, finally, cannot equate public interest with public support...
...But it is an ambiguous tool because it blurs two phenomena which, though never altogether dissociated, are still basically distinct and require different strategies...
...Still, the direction of change was clear, and received the full support of the whole nation...
...The reformers worked in detail, steadily, on a hundred concrete programs, from rehabilitation of political prisoners to economic reform and social restructuring...
...The workers of the Skoda Works, who painted swastikas on Russian tanks, made it clear that they failed to appreciate the difference...
...Or reading Marcuse on repressive tolerance, in Prague at the time of the Writers' Union Congress...
...This second dimension stands out most clearly in the official notices which appear in prominent close-ups throughout the film...
...The model has achieved such prestige that even totalitarian regimes have felt the need to stage plebiscites and elections to give themselves an aura of legitimacy...
...By alienation we shall mean a dissociation of an individual's public identity from his private one...
...Anyone who dissents must be either a knave or a fool...
...This is the logic which led to the condemnation of Dubcek as a traitor, and which makes the Russians insist that the Czechs produce acceptable scapegoats to explain their recent dissent...
...Public life would serve to act out private identity...
...The new institutions expressed nothing but the new masters' conception of Utopia...
...workers, students, writers, men from every social stratum, ready and able to sustain the responsibility of being adults in a society...
...With the Russian Revolution, the Hegelian ideological myth became respectable...
...The human, social, and economic cost was tremendous, but the break was complete—everything and everyone even vaguely associated with the past was wiped out...
...Ever since, the pattern they set has been repeated throughout ERAZIM V. KOHAK the West, down to the young ideologues of today whose conception of becoming involved is to abstain from elections...
...But they were determined to be humane authoritarians, respecting the rights of their subjects...
...This is a phenomenon characteristic, for instance, of both the extreme "Left" and the extreme "Right," and one reason why the far "Left" rejects all concrete social progress as capitulation to "the system" If the cause of alienation is a pathological inability of the subject to function in any social system, only the fairytale land of revolutionary apocalypse ERAZIM V. KOHAK will do—and even that only as long as it does not become reality—witness the regular disenchantment of the far "Left" with its successive Robin Hood heroes whenever they actually succeed in bringing their experiment into practice...
...Unfortunately socialists, long accustomed to their revolutionary mythology, are easily dazzled by ideological trappings...
...The problems it faced were not those of an industrial society, and Western socialist programs were wildly inapplicable to it...
...Czechoslovakia has been a graveyard of illusions...
...In all its aspects, the heady Czechoslovak spring of 1968 was an experiment moving toward postmillennial socialism or, in traditional terms, toward social democracy...
...Men may still demand their daily dose of illusion, the exhilaration of revolution or "confrontation" rather than the down-toearth facts and figures of a Freedom Budget...
...But the Utopian myths of selfproclaimed rhetorical radicals do not advance these ideals...
...Yet as long as they consider it a legitimate bad government, society will continue to function...
...What surprises me most is not that they take themselves seriously—students always do, and we are no exception—but that their elders take them seriously...
...The Hegelian myth that had lured socialists for half a century was finally being acted out exactly as three generations of visionaries had imagined...
...They need their illusions, and as long as actual power with its limitations and responsibilities was not a real consideration, the revolutionary mythology could seem harmless enough...
...The pattern here is that of the familiar romantic myth in which the very handicaps of the underprivileged become an asset...
...To be sure, even the dazzling facade of Russian Parteistaatssozialismus could not quite conceal the persistent Czarist mentality...
...Czechoslovakia is an industrial country in which socialism is a necessary consequence of democracy, and again the Czechs and Slovaks were obviously aware of this...
...They built consciously on Czechoslovakia's tradition of freedom and social progress...
...Can you imagine one of them in Czechoslovakia...
...Hammer and sickle on the flag of a sovereign state, the whispered names in an official hagiography, red stars on soldiers' caps, all the trappings of power and success easily outshone both the sordid realities of Russian life and the tangible social progress of unspectacular Western socialism...
...As a Czech social democrat, I can only hope that it will also prove the cradle of a new social progress...
...Freedom inevitably includes the possibility of error, and Utopia in principle demands perfection...
...That was just at the time of the Slansky trials...
...Czechoslovakia was an advanced industrial country, far more so than the England or Germany of Marx's time...
...Tight internal and external censorship sealed off the country from the outside world and from its own past...
...The basic proposition of Soviet political philosophy, so basic that it is taken for granted in most rhetoric, is that the Soviet regime—or any regime—is legitimate because it is "socialist," orthodox, and so in the true interest of the people, whether they realize it or not...
...The people proved apathetic rather than zealous, preferring their lost freedom, even their folly, to perfection...
...Not surprisingly, Russian society, its paternalism, its stratification, its police apparatus, its provincialism, its primitivism— even the foreign policy of its government, in both goals and techniques—remained relatively constant in spite of the revolutionary change of facade...
...When their fellow men failed to share their enthusiasm, they embarked on a crusade to eliminate whatever was blinding them to their superior insight—Jews, capitalists, sinners...
...It won't be a Utopia, but it will be a human kind of society, fit for people to live in...
...The ideals of human freedom and social justice remain valid...
...I suppose their histrionics do have some individual cathartic value, like the old duelling fraternities, but socially they seem infinitely irrelevant...
...The grotesque insistence on Byzantine adulation of all things Russian, paralleled by men as disparate as Hitler, Franco, Trujillo, or Mao, is not simply a psychological quirk—it is a necessary corollary of the claim that Utopian revolutionism legitimizes its own acts...
...Soviet Communism, both at home and abroad, has always claimed the legitimacy of ERAZIM V. KOHAR superior insight...
...Ideological labeling has changed—for Orthodox Church read Communist party, for Czar read First Secretary, for Okhranka read MVD...
...You can afford a great deal: we can't...
...IV WHAT IS IT LIKE, living in Utopia...
...They are too accustomed to their old self and the old order...
...T. G. Masaryk's sociological study The Spirit of Russia published in 1913, may have appeared momentarily out of date in 1920, but it is quite accurate in 1968...
...You simply haven't faced up to the fact that you can't build a Utopia without terror, and that before long, terror is all that's left...
...I read this letter while listening to the Soviet Ambassador explain that the armed might of his country had descended upon the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic in order to protect socialism...
...They might look forward to its fall and feel unhappy and alienated under its rule...
...After seven months, the program which started out REQUIEM FOR UTOPIA as a program of humane communism became a program of social democracy...
...Czechs and Slovaks have learned that once freedom and security are violated, any ideology becomes simply a rationale for self-perpetuating terror...
...It was at this point that the hidden logic of all social messianism came to the fore...
...Democracy—democracy for blacks as well as whites, in economics as well as politics, at home as well as in remote reaches of Latin America or Eastern Europe, remains valid...
...It was not until I started visiting the West that I began to understand that a Sartre or a Marcuse can simply afford a great deal of illusion...
...But what drew workers and still moves intellectuals to the party had little to do with concrete social progress...
...The occupation of Czechoslovakia cost them much and won them little...
...Worse, it became "socialism...
...They bitterly resent society because it does not treat them as the fulcrum of the universe: though from what they told me about themselves it seemed that their families did treat them that way...
...The subject is unable to relate his private identity to (any) sustained public role, regardless of social conditions, because his definition of personal identity is in principle solipsistic, incompatible with the strains and stresses of social existence...
...But, as Marx himself noted, men can REQUIEM FOR UTOPIA stand only limited doses of reality...
...But why did the Russians move in...
...In Czechoslovakia there could be no question of whether personal freedom and security can be violated for the sake of a social ideal...
...To be sure, Czechoslovakia did not and could not become a social democracy overnight...
...History was rewritten and rebuilt...
...private identity would in turn be enriched, reinforced, and challenged by the demands of praxis...
...11 NOT THAT I THINK my friend right in everything— there is much he does not know and understand...
...They weren't...
...But Czech audiences could not fail to recognize another dimension —Prague landmarks erected long after the war, late-model cars in the streets, contemporary clothes, all-Czech posters pasted over wartime bilingual ones...
...They seem to have no idea of the cost or the value of the privileges they receive abundantly and gratis...
...but basic attitudes and relations, those which socialists recognize as the real fabric of society, have remained unchanged...
...Culturally it was part of the West, with a mature democratic tradition...
...First of all democratic, it was determined to safeguard personal freedom and personal security, because 20 years of gunpoint "socialism" had taught the Czechs and Slovaks, Communists included, that the logic of terror is self-defeating...
...They live in a romantic dreamworld in which their dear radical rhetoric is perfectly consistent with their apparently sincere faith in freedom and justice...
...pathological alienation and social alienation...
...The word has become so fashionable that to restore it as a tool of social analysis we need to give it a more precise meaning...
...But they were engaged in rule, not rhetoric--and in practice...
...but those who cater to this demand can no longer do so in the name of social progress —or in the name of socialism...
...No more...
...Still, his grasp of the dynamics of socialism is uncomfortably accurate...
...Under ideal conditions, the two would be integrally related...
...The only difference is that this time both the oppressors and the victims are Czech...
...That much is commonplace...
...It was the Utopian ideology of the regime which made successful integration of (any) private identity with social existence effectively impossible...
...Since the last echoes of "divine right" or "right of conquest" died out in the nineteenth century, legitimation in Europe has invariably meant legitimation by public interest...
...For the tedious, frustrating work of social progress the party needed a vision and the myth of apocalyptic revolution or, later, of the Massenstreik, the apocalyptic General Strike which would usher in the millenium, filled that need...
...The recognition of the legitimacy of power in the making and enforcing of social decisions is the constituting factor in society, and failure to acquire legitimacy in the eyes of the governed reduces even the most benign attempt at government to arbitrary tyranny...
...Social Democratic parties in the nineteenth century were transforming society through a persistent, unspectacular effort to build a place in the social structure for the underprivileged, and to assure them the means and ability to assume that place...
...A humane authoritarianism would respect the rights and freedom of its subjects, and so inevitably create the possibility of dissent and opposition...
...There will in all likelihood be periods of relative relaxation...
...But the cycles are not progressive or cumulative— today's neo-Stalinism is no more benign than Lenin's War Communism half a century ago, and it would be naive to pin one's hopes on a gradual mellowing of Communism...
...Repression, whatever its overt aim, can be humane only in rhetoric—in practice it necessarily means breaking men...
...they were Communists who still shared the aristocratic assumption of all Utopians that a monopoly of power must remain in the hands of the enlightened elect, the Party...
...That story is there, and the film does include some rather obvious period pieces...
...In the film, the parallel columns are retained, but both sides are set in Czech...
...But such relaxation creates the possibility of dissent, and the harsher the earlier coercion, the more radical the dissent will be...
...He had participated vigorously in the Czechoslovak reform in the spring of 1968, and had spent his vacation the following summer visiting first Nanterre, then Berlin...
...Russia was backward, it was encircled by hostile states, etc., etc., and of course all of that was true...
...The escalating spiral of apathy and terror is the real mors immortalis of social messianism...
...For 50 years the energies of socialists have been drawn away from the urgent tasks of social progress to a cataclysmic Utopian fantasy...
...Not that Dubcek and his colleagues were in any sense social democrats when they came to power...
...The story, in a nutshell, of Czechoslovakia's Utopian experiment is that Czechs and Slovaks continued to prefer women...
...Nor was Czech liberalism a threat to socialism...
...On the one hand, the party worked to give the workers the wherewithal of social progress, to help them gain self-respect, economic and social security, education, legal protection, and to transform social structures in depth, "radically," making them responsive to the needs of all men...
...It was no threat to Russian national interest...
...Unless the Soviet leadership is prepared to abdicate its authoritarian position, it must follow each period of relaxation with another freeze, as the purges of the thirties, postwar Stalinism, or the present hardening of internal and external policy...
...I, p. 430...
...But you like your radical illusions too well...
...It will be socialist because it is an industrial and a democratic society—it just doesn't work the other way around...
...The millennial rhetoric was always grossly inconsistent with the evolutionary, progressive practice of socialism...
...The men who guided the experiment were true believers...
...The Czechoslovak reform did not threaten the Soviet Union or socialism, but by supporting them challenged the basic premise of their rule...
...The new Czechoslovakia was a completely "liberated" country, free of anything that might have repressed its development...
...Their format (though not their color—German notices were dark-red) is that of the wartime bilingual notices, a German eagle in the center, with parallel German and Czech columns below...
...But the appeal of socialism has been something different, something much less tangible—the promise of the millennium...
...You have little stomach for terror—after 20 years, we have even less...
...yet it was surrounded by friendly "socialist" countries...
...The Czechoslovak experiment proved that the temptation to prod progress with a bayonet, so attractive to powerless radical rhetoreticians, leads not to progress but to apathy and terror, regardless of the ideology in whose name it is exercised...
...I can't take them seriously...
...The reason why alienation can today serve as a revohitionary slogan, and not simply as a tool in the perennial attempt to rescue Karl Marx from irrelevance, is that it can be used as a bridge between private problems and public issues, mobilizing the energy of individual failure and frustration for the purposes of social action...
...The governed, being unregenerate, cannot be expected to realize that the particular Utopia, whether nationalist or socialist, is in their true interest...
...The strength of socialism has always been its steady effort to build the prerequisites of democracy and social justice in an industrial society...
...You all live in a different era—you still believe in Utopia...
...The usual explanations about the threat posed by Czech liberalism side-step the crucial question— why should liberalism be a threat...
Vol. 16 • January 1969 • No. 1
