Ideology and Terror
Kohák, Erazim V.
THE UNPERFECT SOCIETY: BEYOND THE NEW CLASS, by Milovan Djilas. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World. 267 pp. $5.00. COMMUNISM, Djilas tells us, is not a religion. It is a movement concerned with...
...The trademark of all Hegelianism is precisely that it transforms the perennial ideal into a concrete, attainable future state...
...Or, more exactly, the promise of a perfect society which justified the party monopoly on truth and power has become irrelevant...
...Yes, reality is awkward...
...If, however, it claims to be perfect, it will become tyrannous: imperfection in a perfect society becomes not only a problem but a sin, to be expiated at the stake...
...Djilas is obviously still convinced of the truth of Marx's insight—and so am I. But the truth of a vision does not guarantee the truth of the ideology in which it is embodied, and in the case of Marxism, it did not even survive it...
...Djilas, fresh out of a Communist jail, speaking of bread, freedom and dignity while his hosts exchanged interminable dialectical abstractions about "repressive toleration" and a "higher stage of liberation...
...I am told that Djilas's hosts at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs found him a bit awkward...
...Its monopoly is tottering not because its ideology is "impure" or its practice harsh, but because it can no longer be justified as necessary for the satisfaction of concrete human needs...
...There is a simple alternative: the Emperor can proclaim he is naked, and ban all clothes altogether...
...The Kingdom of God ceases to be the ageless ideal by which we measure the ways of men, and becomes something quite definite to be built in history...
...In the real world of every man at his work, freedom can replace guns only if we dissociate the ideal from the ideology, even from the ideology that claims it as its justification for vio lence and intolerance...
...In the much more likely event that Americans outside the privileged university enclaves respond in kind to confrontationist violence, the victims will be not only ideologies but also ideals...
...I can understand why—Djilas, the Montenegrin peasant with his coarse, heavy hands among the immaculate soft hands of American liberals and uncouth soft hands of the Kathederrevolutiondre...
...Proposals for a perfect society are beside the point...
...Yet what can we offer to substantiate the claim beside quotations from Marx...
...But while the identification of the ideal and the ideology may be flattering, it is also deadly...
...All that seemed required was to destroy the old and give all power to the elect...
...But it does not matter, for the present becomes but a transition to the future, and the ideal can be sacrificed in the present to the ideology guaranteed to realize the ideal, not now, but surely soon...
...Marx made a crucial discovery, that economy affects society...
...Man remains human only as long as he can dream dreams and see visions...
...What is needed is not the right ideology or the right elite, but a democratic framework, the freedom in which ideals can be used to judge practice and to correct ideology...
...Because society is infinitely complex and multifaceted, it will always require a leadership, a "system," if you will...
...But since Marxism never was a science and derived its strength not from scientific accuracy but from the impact of its vision, in the clash between Marxist ideology and science, science had to yield...
...Objectively, the crisis of communism today is not simply the crisis of one ideology, but a crisis of ideology as such...
...Not only was mention of the discrepancy forbidden, but even the ideal of bread, freedom, and dignity had to be banned from the present...
...Did the ideology embody the ideal...
...Yet we cannot claim that it has safeguarded freedom and justice...
...This way madness lies, the psychotic politics of the Emperor who has to behead more and more of his subjects who fail to see his new clothes—or who fail to see that Parteistaatssozialismus enforced by secret police is really the ideal society...
...The point of "nonnegotiable demands," after all, is that progress is possible only if it is progress on our terms, under our control, that the socialist ideal of bread, freedom, and justice is inseparable from revolutionary ideology and revolutionary elite...
...Djilas knows that men must dream dreams, but he also realizes that any one perfect society will inevitably be subject to the same strains and failings as the society it replaces...
...This is why Djilas speaks of an unperfect society beyond the new class, not of a revised ideology, after the manner of orthodox revisionists East and West...
...Then what evidence can we offer for the vaunted historical "superiority" of "socialist" ideology...
...In our time, Feuerbach dethroned god from his heaven and put Man in his place, but in the process he reaffirmed the principle of religious movements—though, as he recognized, in a "political" form...
...If they succeed in convincing the Czechs, they may prolong the life of ideology and bureaucracy by a few years, but when they fall—as they will—the ideal might well fall with them...
...The American "radical" Left has hesitated to follow the Rustins and Harringtons in separating the ideal from the ideology...
...Proposals to cure its ills by destroying the whole social structure leave tyranny as the only alternative, while what is needed is a responsive, corrigible system...
...After 50 years of ideological crusades and countercrusades, the cost is staggeringly high, but the achievement meager...
...Religious leaders were invariably convinced they were living at the end of an eon, that the old world would soon pass away and a new world take its place...
...Any ideology that sanctifiesitself with the aura of the ideal and suppresses dissent in the name of perfection becomes increasingly rigid, tyrannical, and can be sustained only at increasing cost in freedom, bread, and justice...
...But Marxist ideology canonized this truth as the whole and only truth...
...But whatever the reason, in the process the ideal became an ideology and claimed not only the perennial validity of a philosophy but the authority of a science...
...The Unperfect Society would never do as a doctoral dissertation—it is as coarse and rough, as multifaceted and unperfect as reality itself...
...This is why Djilas speaks of the future as an unperfect society, a society which recognizes that perfection is neither a goal nor a fact, and strives instead for bread, freedom, and dignity—in his terms, "freer personalities, greater rights for social groups, and more equitable distribution of goods...
...We have always assumed that it did...
...This authoritarian claim brought Marxism increasingly into conflict with actual sciences...
...Heretics must burn, not because they oppose the ideal, but because they oppose the movement's monopoly of power...
...Lenin "refuted" Einstein with platitudes from Engels, Stalin with firing squads...
...To this day, we take the superiority of "socialist forms of own -ership" and other ideological trimmings for granted...
...All that remained was the dogma that the ideal can become real eventually as long as ideology and its official guardians retain unlimited sway over the present...
...But this is also why it failed to advance the ideals which its movements embodied...
...In the name of the ideal, it has supported ideologues in the assault on freedom, whitewashed Stalin's purges in the thirties, Soviet imperialism in the forties, dogmatism in the fifties, and waved Viet Cong flags and little red books in the sixties...
...Czechoslovak workers sought to respond by affirming the socialist ideal while stripping ideology and bureaucracy of its arbitrary power monopoly...
...Quite the contrary, freedom and justice were consistently sacrificed, to a degree we still find hard to imagine or admit, for the sake of building a "socialist" economy...
...This is Realpolitik, which abandons ideals together with ideologies...
...Milovan Djilas writes badly...
...The ideal, however, is not only concretized but also transformed...
...Mutatis mutandis, the same is true of Tito's reaction to Djilas's attempt to affirm the ideal and reject the ideology and the bureaucracy...
...The ideal has outlived the ideology...
...Instead, they have sought some contorted "dialectical" way of claiming esoteric success in spite of evident failure...
...What is needed is reality, weaning men from ideological illusions and measuring the present in terms of the perennial ideals of bread, freedom, and justice...
...There is no return to perfection...
...Yet he is too honest not to realize that its authoritarianism and violence are the only tangible, realizable aspects of its ideology...
...Yet the society based on the dogma, an ideological economy ruled by an ideological elite and governed by ideological considerations alone, is precisely what failed...
...Ironically, "scientific socialism" proved rather less adaptable...
...Since technology develops, Marxist ideologues postulated a "law" of progress for society, and sought to predict not only that society and economy will develop, but to determine the specific forms in which it must do so, as well as the men who must govern it...
...But for the same reason, the "system" will always be imperfect, and cannot claim a monopoly on truth and power...
...Ideology is much more sophisticated, and much more flattering to ideologues and bureaucrats alike...
...Yet the inescapable moral of Djilas's book BOOKS is that this is a dangerous strategy...
...But Marx was not only a prophet...
...The emptiness and cruelty of ideologies is increasingly evident and insupportable...
...The ideal will be as distant as ever, but the possibilities of realizing it will be far more remote...
...The great prophetic role of Karl Marx is precisely that he expressed the perennial dream of brotherhood and equality in a way that spoke to his time...
...But it is a book that ought to be read, read urgently, and read hard...
...After generations of sacrificing for a millennium, men today want bread, freedom, justice, and the ideological surrogates, party supremacy and ideological monopoly, have become irrelevant...
...There has been technological progress in "socialist" countries, but, as Djilas points out, it has been slower and less effective, both in immediate production and in providing an infrastructure for future production than in the West...
...He does not even provide a bibliography or an index...
...It is a movement concerned with ideology and power...
...The result is the ideological never-never land in which toleration is repression, freedom is bourgeois, and Byzantine despotisms—including semifeudal military oligarchies in the Near East— are "objectively socialist," historically "higher" social forms...
...The Russians sent tanks to make the point that the ideal and the ideology are inseparable...
...And, we might add, not only science but all reality fared the same way...
...When the facts of economics, of agriculture, or of internal dynamics of society contradicted the ideology, reality had to yield...
...It is a useful distinction...
...The task before us is to free the ideal from the ideology, to restore it as the perennial norm, but not the monopoly of any one elite...
...The great difference between the revolutionaries of the SDS and the students of Prague is that the New Left in the West still lives under the illusion that ideology, if it is only the "right" one administered by the "right" people, can realize the ideal, the perfect society, in history...
...Only in the never-never land of Hegelian ideologies does a dialectical conflict of guns produce a synthesis of freedom...
...He may have done so willy-nilly—Djilas points out that even the first systematization of the Marxist vision, Engels's Anti-Duhring, was occasioned not by internal needs of the vision but by external needs of the movement...
...Djilas obviously feels strong kinship to the ideals of the New Left, and finds it difficult to criticize it...
...Socialist ownership and party supremacy as a dogma became the tangible expression of the Marxist vision...
...Yet as Djilas points out, the crisis of communism is basically a "subjective" crisis...
...It will make little difference that the guns at Cornell were an echo of guns in Alabama...
...All start with that perennial vision of a cosmic right and wrong and then transpose it from eternity to time...
...And, finally, the same is true of the United States...
...Though its content may still be humanitarian, its impact is not, for the aim is no longer simply the love of God, but the love of God according to, say, the Council of Trent, administered by the ecclesiastical hierarchy...
...His book is rambling and disorganized, his sections are mistitled and his chapters misdivided...
...In the unlikely event that the ideologues will prevail in the United States, the ideals and the idealists will be their first victims--as in East Europe and marginally in enclaves like San Francisco State...
...But by the same token, early Christianity, the militant protestantism of the Reformation, or Jesuit Catholicism were not religions either...
...The millennium in time is an illusion...
...Parteistaatssozialismus became a mirror image of classical capitalism, but since it claimed to embody "science," it has resisted change far more stringently...
...Djilas knows it cannot...
...BOOKS But that way lies death...
...Ideological revolutions have not given their subjects bread, freedom, and dignity, but only holy causes to which to sacrifice them...
...Ideological economy has reached a dead end...
...Capitalism, in its bungling, unscientific way, remained sufficiently flexible to develop to the point at which it no longer exists BOOKS in its classicalform...
...Religion is something more basic, the perennial, stubborn faith in "an insubstantial and ageless justice" that keeps man from becoming a determinate link in a nature-continuum and enables him not only to know reality but to judge it—and find it wanting...
...THIS IS ESSENTIALLY Djilas's thesis in The Unperfect Society...
...This is why Hegelianism, right and left alike, was able to inspire intense emotions and powerful movements—the reward it offered was no less than the millennium...
...Yet since the ideal the movements embodied and failed to advance remains perennially valid, their adherents have not been willing to disown them...
...They too were movements concerned with ideology and power, though in their case the connection with religion is clearly visible...
...He concretized his vision by tying it in with a particular historical movement and a particular political program...
Vol. 16 • July 1969 • No. 4
