EUROCOMMUNISM-MYTH, HOPE, DELUSION?:THE JESTER TURNED PROSECUTOR
Coser, Lewis
I yield to no one in my admiration for Leszek Kolakowski's past contributions to Marxist "revisionism" and his moving attempt to build a theory of libertarian socialism on the ruins of Soviet...
...When Satan is allowed to infiltrate the ranks of the godly, Kolakowski appears to believe, he will inevitably corrupt and destroy them...
...Even though it still paraded its simon-pure revolutionary Marxism on ceremonial occasions, it was in fact already largely integrated into Wilhelminian society, through its unions, its auxiliary organizations, its parliamentary apparatus, and its electoral machinery...
...Does Kolakowski not realize that the present inquisitorial stance toward the Italian revisionists, which he has helped to make articulate, can only stunt the seeds of dissidence that have begun to sprout beneath the Soviet snow...
...But, above all, it is a huge electoral apparatus, a highly organized machinery geared to bring in the votes...
...It has deep roots in most Italian localities...
...He seems to me to argue in a manner that betrays a lack of sociological imagination...
...Kolakowski, who in his revisionist period wrote in praise of jesters and gadflies to the powers to be, here reverts to a schoolmasterly, even inquisitorial style that he must have acquired in the orthodox days of his youth...
...They have, of this I am convinced, made a commitment to a democratic road to socialism, yet the authoritarian modes of their earlier political orientation have by no means been shed...
...When men and women face a deep crisis in their personal or their political life, one argues with them, one attempts to counsel, but one surely shouldn't bully...
...He addresses three questions to the leaders of the Italian Communist party: (1) "Is there such a thing as an international Communist movement of which the PCI is a segment and the CPSU another...
...They are for the most part men and women who are appalled by the corruption, the anarchy, the waste and disorder of contemporary Italian society, who wish for change, and vaguely believe in the possibility of a more humanitarian and equalitarian society free from corruption and inefficient waste...
...When former Stalinists, albeit with many caveats and doubts, come out for parliamentary roads to socialism, there should be rejoicing rather than gnashing of teeth among Western democratic socialists...
...Though it had officially rejected Bernstein's reformist heresy, it in fact lived according to its tenets...
...THE STRUCTURE of the Italian Communist party, as it has come to develop in the last few decades, resembles a Social Democratic party much more than it does a Leninist vanguard party...
...By waving the big inquisitorial stick, one can only antagonize them...
...It does not occur to him that when former worshippers of the devil join the ranks of the children of light, this is a major victory for the latter...
...Such a party could not, even if it wished to do so, institute, as Kolakowski puts it, "Soviet-type despotism...
...It runs the country's major cities, and many of its provinces...
...I yield to no one in my admiration for Leszek Kolakowski's past contributions to Marxist "revisionism" and his moving attempt to build a theory of libertarian socialism on the ruins of Soviet orthodoxy...
...Political parties of whatever stripe can never be understood solely in terms of the ideological message they happen to convey...
...To expect yes or no answers from anybody to such questions seems to me a mark of demagoguery, not of a quest for truth...
...To rebuff them, and to throw them back into the political wilderness, would be a historical disaster...
...They are complicated social organisms whose character is at least as much shaped by their composition, their structure, the relations to the environment in which they function...
...3) "Are the Leninist principles of Party life valid...
...I submit, that does not benefit libertarian socialists...
...Kolakowski avers that one cannot believe what their leaders say...
...Men and women who are so enmeshed in the routines of piecemeal reform on the local, the regional, the national level are not likely to revert from one day to the next to the politics of revolution...
...This is a type of argumentation...
...they see them as their allies in the struggle against Soviet oppression...
...This may turn out, in effect, to be one of the most significant turning points in the tortuous history of Western democracy...
...Italy has been for many years a stagnant and stalemated society...
...While Kolakowski should hail this awakening from doctrinaire and dogmatic slumbers among Italian Communists as the encouraging phenomenon that it in fact is, he instead seems to wish to end their quest by posing a stark, "Leninist" alternative: "Are you for us or against us...
...They are caught in the winds of many doctrines, attempting to sail precariously in an uncharted political sea...
...One last point: Kolakowski, like all of us, has much sympathy with the various dissenting and revisionist voices in the Eastern bloc...
...They cling, to be sure, to shreds and pieces of their previous beliefs...
...It is a huge mass protest party, rooted in both urban and rural areas of Italy...
...For better or worse, the large numbers of Communist militants and rank and file constitute a huge reserve army of men and women inspired by reformist zeal and an ardent desire to help rejuvenate the Italian political arena...
...Most of those who vote for it, and many of the party members, have only the most rudimentary knowledge of its political doctrine...
...Its ruling Christian Democratic elite has been incapable of projecting the country into the full world of modernity...
...What I find objectionable, indeed grating, is not only the content of the essay but the mode of argumentation...
...They are, at the same time, full of respect and admiration for Kolakowski, whom they have rightly considered the most articulate voice of libertarian revisionism...
...Are you, or have you ever been, a tool of capitalism, a Communist spy, an agent of imperialism," so the various inquisitors, be 37 they Stalinist, fascist, McCarthyist, or whatever, phrase their questions...
...Many leaders and rank-and-file members of the Italian CP are now susceptible to the voice of democratic socialists, to their lessons and examples...
...Thus he trembles at the thought that the Italian CF will subvert democracy once it enters into some of the seats of power...
...But his recent paper on "The Euro-Communist Schism" (Encounter, August 1977), written at Oxford, where he now teaches as an exile from his native Poland, seems to me quite mistaken...
...These men and women in their turn look with a great deal of hope to the Italian Communists and their co-thinkers in other European countries...
...Italian Communist-party militants—at least many of them—are at present involved in a painful, complicated, and often tortuous attempt to shed some of their former ideological baggage, and to find their bearings in the terra incognita of Western democratic politics without the aid of their previous ideological compass...
...Anyone who would have assessed the pre-World War I German Social Democratic party in terms of its official ideology (a mistake, incidentally, that Lenin made) would have misjudged it completely...
...would not tend toward the Soviettype despotism...
...Very well, then, just look at what they do...
...Let me now move to the substance of Kolakowski's brief...
...If the answer of Italy's Communist leaders is indeed affirmative," he then argues, "there is no reason to expect that Communist rule in Italy...
...But when Kolakowski's article reached Poland, so a Polish friend just arrived from that country told me, it elicited consternation and a measure of despair...
...Only at show trials and revival meetings are people moved to disavow the totality of their past in one full sweep...
...2) "Is the Soviet Union, despite some 'errors' and mistaken moves, a 'higher' form of social organization when compared to Western democracies, and does it deserve support in any conflict with the West...
...This just won't do...
...As one of Bernstein's "orthodox" adversaries once told him, "These are things one doesn't speak about, one just does them...
...Instead of using the rhetoric of persuasion, Kolakowski speaks in the voice of the prosecutor...
...His painstaking dissection of the lies and mendacities of Stalinist and post-Stalinist practice and ideology performed a major therapeutic service in the Eastern bloc and among Western radical intellectuals...
...it relies on an extended network of unions, cooperatives, credit unions, and the like...
...they do not intend to disown all of their past, even though they are now attempting slowly to evolve a vision of socialism with a human face...
...It has for quite a while become part of the fabric of Italian society so that to expect it to return to a 38 Leninist vanguard politics is pure fantasy...
...Kolakowski, having freed himself of the shackles of Stalinist and post-Stalinist doctrine, still seems to suffer from an unwarranted belief in its efficacy...
Vol. 25 • January 1978 • No. 1
