LETTERS
Editors: Never-being-tired-with-being-always-duped: now this seems to me a fair, even though not very courteous summary of the long history of attitudes a significant part of the Western left...
...Of course, the allusion is only one of many in which Marx looks on all history as a partly deceptive performance of tragedy or farce...
...It strengthens it in a new and perhaps unexpected direction...
...Coser seriously believe that because the masses of voters do not know, and do not care about, the ideology of the party they support, they are better prepared to defend democratic institutions if threatened by this very party...
...Popular Front: now they really change...
...Coser cites in order to show the democratic nature of Italian Communism can be applied to virtually all the dynamic mass movements, including fascist ones...
...This, however, is not the matter of the discussion...
...One historical example, please, or one common-sense argument in favor of this strange belief...
...it was, since Lenin, its core, its essence, its spine, its basis and its crown, its spirit and its body, the true definition of what Communism was as opposed to Social Democratic traitors...
...All the revolutions of our century, leftist or rightist, occurred in conditions as described above and none of them produced impressive results in terms of democracy: this applies to Russia, Italy, Germany, China, and Cuba (in chronological order...
...Yet Mr...
...One meaning of the allusion is that history is a play in which all men have been forced to adopt illusory parts...
...Coser's summary: "Kolakowski avers that one cannot believe what their [viz...
...After the masque in Act IV, which has celebrated the bethrothal of Ferdinand and Miranda, Prospero, who is about to renounce his powers of enchantment, makes the speech that contains these lines: These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits, and Are melted into air, into thin air: And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind...
...Cambodia...
...This is impossible, he argues, because "it is a huge mass protest party, rooted in both 247 urban and rural areas of Italy," because "it is a huge electoral apparatus, a highly organized machinery geared to bring in the votes," and because the voters do not have much knowledge of the doctrine but they "wish for change," being disgusted with the corruption, the disorder, etc...
...All historical experience proves exactly the opposite of what Mr...
...Last November I participated in the Venice Biennale and had the opportunity to listen to an expose of Mr...
...How much it was intended to evoke of other elements in The Tempest—the "relations of production" between Prospero and his servants, Ariel and Caliban...
...The cornerstone of Communism was over night thrown into the dustbin and everybody was happy...
...No, to be fair, one does not see many enthusiasts of liberated Cambodia, where the liberators within a year or so managed to massacre approximately the same percentage of their own population as the German Nazis did in over five years in occupied Poland...
...And so, to have shed the Soviet yoke amounts by no means to having procured democratic credentials...
...I am not going to repeat what I said in the article, which aroused Mr...
...the age of discovery in which the play is set...
...Chinese Communism has always been, if anything, more totalitarian than the Russian one, and among Soviet dependencies in Eastern Europe Romania, with its modest "de-Sovietization," has probably the most oppressive internal regime...
...The Communist parties for decades identified themselves completely, clearly and without any restrictions whatever, with a social system based (admittedly, in fact, not in ideology) on slave labor, mass terror, supression of all representative institutions, and universal mendaciousness, a system that in terms of democratic liberties and human rights had for years a position second to none (from the bottom, that is...
...I do not say, suggest, or believe, that Italian Communists are fascists or that the situation in Italy is exactly what it was 55 years ago...
...It used to be their source of life and of wisdom...
...I perfectly agree with Mr...
...Now we see the French Communist party voting to abolish this idea...
...Is it possible that right now, in Italy (or elsewhere) comparable conditions will yield entirely different results...
...After having peremptorily stated that he would never slide into antiSovietism (in fact, it had occured to nobody to accuse him of such a monstrosity) he went on to explain some less pleasant sides of Communism in power...
...Coser's indignation, advisable though it might be given his manner of summing up my position (just an example: I wrote "There is little reason to deny that these people [viz...
...the latter was a tactical device at the service of Soviet foreign policy and Eurocommunism is certainly not a Moscow contrivance...
...of the Italian society...
...as to myself, I feel slightly too old to enjoy this prospect...
...Italian Communists'] leaders say...
...the sense of what is truly human, which only Ariel can teach Prospero—readers of Marx and Shakespeare can decide for themselves...
...why should one expect a new social system to be perfect from the very beginning...
...China: a new, truly popular Conmunism, freedom, a hundred flowers...
...Coser does not seem to notice that all these characteristics fit equally well both the Italian Fascist party and the Nazi party in the '20s...
...If I ask him for more explanation I am not only guilty of an utmost tactlessness but I prove, according to Mr...
...I am not sure about the age of Mr...
...Editors: Never-being-tired-with-being-always-duped: now this seems to me a fair, even though not very courteous summary of the long history of attitudes a significant part of the Western left kept displaying for several decades in face of Communism...
...To take an example: the idea of dictatorship of the proletariat was not just an element among others in the Communist credo...
...248...
...My point is rather unsophisticated...
...The general message I can gather from this sort of exculpations is: "Just wait in concentration camps for 300 years, ladies and gentlemen, and then you will see truly splendid things...
...None of this weakens Mr...
...To say that is, however, only the beginning of an assessment...
...And I am far from suggesting, as Mr...
...But to be within the Soviet political orbit means certainly not to have procured them...
...I charitably forbear from commenting...
...Or perhaps Vietnam—a new, national Communism...
...All that is holy is profaned, and men at last are forced to face the real conditions of the their lives and their relations with their fellow men...
...What the foregoing experience recommends is cautiousness in assessing the meaning of the new phenomenon and this hardly seems to me extravagant advice...
...Khrushchev: deStalinization, liberalization, at last...
...Brezhnev: technocrats come, they cannot afford to keep the old system...
...Ideological relaxation during the war: they cannot retreat...
...Cuba: a fresh, genuine form of Communist democracy...
...Berman's argument...
...Coser's opinion is that to demand the Eurocommunists be less elusive in explaining their attitudes toward Soviet Communism is to assume the position of a "Stalinist, fascist, McCarthyist inquisitor...
...Pachter who seems to deplore the fact that I know Communism from books...
...Now comes Mr...
...indeed, I said clearly [in my article in the Winter 1978 Symposium on Eurocommunism] that it might (admittedly, might, not necessarily will) develop into social-democratic form...
...Unanimously...
...I am far from saying that all these and many other events left Communism untouched or that Communism is exactly what it was 60 years ago (that is the objection of Mr...
...We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep...
...Every few years a new source of joyful expectations...
...Coser, unbelievably enough, seems to infer...
...I simply believe that all the characteristics Mr...
...To end, I should thank Mr...
...Coser has one argument to prove that it would be "pure fantasy" to expect that the Italian Communists could "return to a Leninist vanguard politics...
...neither did Togliatti or Thorez...
...Coser for having kindly referred to the parable of the Jester I once had produced...
...With due respect I think it proper to remember that—in my intention, at least—a Jester's main characteristic was skepticism, rather than uncritical wishful thinking...
...I should admit, though, that Mr...
...This is not at all the matter of ideological verbiage, which, after all, has always been in Communism full of democratic phrases (Lenin might have dismissed and derided the words "democracy," "freedom," and the like, but Stalin never did...
...One wonders what was wrong with Nazism, which was doubtless a new social system...
...What a joy, what a conversion...
...Kanapa (or another party functionary) to say to us (quoted from memory, yet, I trust, without distortion in content): We French Communists defend, of course, democracy, pluralism, and human rights, as we have always done...
...This is the matter of real political objectives and of reasons why we should think that these objectives have really changed...
...An argument (or better two) to support this hope would be useful...
...It is utterly incredible that a mass movement of people who press for change in a society with a high level of corruption and inefficiency is bound to be democratic, all the examples show that more of "pure fantasy" is on the side of those who cherish such hopes...
...It is obviously the case that a tendency to free oneself from Soviet control does not need to be associated with the desire to acquire libertarian habits...
...Indeed, once we have a new social system, it is entitled, by the very fact of being new, to do away with all the civil liberties and guarantees for human rights mankind (or rather a part of it) achieved after centuries of struggles and to establish a totalitarian reign of terror and lies...
...Coser, that I have turned into a fascist, Stalinist, McCarthyist inquisitor...
...Perhaps...
...With the coming of the bourgeoisie, and of the class war, they will see themselves for the first time as they really are...
...Coser...
...The vote is unanimous, no discussion, no opposition, no doubts...
...I quote this grotesque fallacy, because you can hear it quite frequently from Communists of various confessions...
...Coser that if we observe in Communism more respect for the democratic values we should welcome this change, rather than deplore it...
...That is what we call de-Stalinization of a Communist party...
...Italian Communist leaders] mean what they say...
...Editors: The phrase, "All that is solid melts into air," which Marshall Berman uses as a touchstone of Marx's modernity (Dissent, Winter 1978), is not original with Marx but an allusion to The Tempest, very close to being a quotation...
...Does Mr...
...I am happy to leave him with his Besserwisser's satisfaction...
...After all, he argued (again, I sum it up from memory: fairly, I believe), capitalism was developing for 300 years, and it had committed a number of appalling crimes before it built democratic institutions...
...Nor do I believe that because of so many failures and of so many pathetic disappointments of well-wishers this new phenomenon under scrutiny—"Eurocommunism"—is bound to be as disappointing as all the hopes of old...
...Ellenstein who enjoyed the reputation of being one of the leading ideologists of Eurocommunism...
...Pachter does, that "Eurocommunism" is to be considered a new version of Stalin's Popular Front in the late '30s...
...what matters is what we really observe...
...The description is perfectly accurate, but the conclusion is an astonishing non sequitur...
...The Soviet connection is not and has never been an accidental indisposition of Communist parties...
Vol. 25 • April 1978 • No. 2
