REVIEWS
Geltman, Emanuel & Pachter, Henry & Coser, Lewis & Spitz, Elaine
MAIN CURRENTS OF MARXISM, by Leszek Kolakowski. Translated from the Polish by P. S. Fall. Three volumes. Volume One: THE FOUNDERS, 434 pp. Volume Two: THE GOLDEN AGE, 542 pp. Volume Three: THE...
...The work of Max Weber, to name only the most striking case, clearly would not be thinkable without decisive suggestions that Weber received from Marx...
...This is why Jefferson carefully distinguished property rights from natural rights received directly from God...
...the German language has only one word for both terms...
...To be sure, Moore argues, there have been historical occasions when people "become very angry and try with passion and forcefulness to do something about their situation...
...Unlike unalienable rights, which are immutable moral powers no man ought to transfer to government or anyone else, property rights are justifiably changeable and transferable...
...If equality means "interchangeability," how can cultural distinctions promote equality...
...Worse still, Kolakowski's method leads to a reversal of the relationship between social history and ideology...
...the latter does not...
...We hear more about Otto Bauer's epistemology than we need to know, but nothing about the Linz Program of the Austrian Socialist party, which Bauer wrote...
...Again, Moore is skeptical of received Marxist wisdom...
...10003...
...Only during a fleeting moment, in 1920— when the workers of the Ruhr, the coal miners in particular, reacted to the reactionary Kapp Putsch by creating a Red Army that for a short while controlled the main Ruhr towns—was there a real revolutionary thrust among German workers...
...A subject such as Marxism should be taken up problem by problem...
...But these diverse facts scarcely warrant his conclusion that equality is no more than an infinitely complex, obscure, and contradictory idea...
...Especially in his last volume, the various philosophies of Korsch, Goldmann, Bloch, etc...
...The pre-Marxian literature of the early 1840s, socialist and conservative alike, is full of complaints about the dehumanization of labor and denunciations of capitalistic rationality...
...This is a tainted review...
...In these pages, Benson has exposed corruption, especially as it deprived union members of their rights, investigated the behavior and responsibilities of the Labor Department and the National Labor Relations Board, and generally irritated union autocrats...
...But why must Marxism be different from all other isms, remaining incapable of adaptation, and condemning itself to infertility as a totalitarian sect...
...But an attack of the kind that Kolakowski has delivered may have the opposite effect...
...As Hegel pointed out, it usually comes to grief whenever it goes out into the world, is turned into its opposite, and renewed in a different setting...
...If it is true, as Moore argues, that even in the heartland of Social Democracy the workers were never as strong, well-organized, and motivated by revolutionary ardor as was generally assumed, then it must be true a fortiori that the chances for revolution were even lower in other industrial nations...
...As a human being who possesses life and reason, one has a duty to preserve that life and perfect that reason lest one violate nature or obstruct God's will...
...III), is to confine Marxism into an apocalyptic vision of total revolution...
...346 DEMOCRATIC RIGHTS FOR UNION MEMBERS: A GUIDE TO INTERNAL UNION DEMOCRACY, by N.W...
...In one of the two prefaces (the other is written by Clyde W. Summers, professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania), Victor Reuther writes: One of the virtues of this book is its recognition of the great contribution of the labor movement toward social enlightenment and democracy...
...His humanism was not hyphenated but identical with free thought...
...Some 20 years ago, with a few meager contributions from friends, well-wishers, and some unionists who needed help, he launched a small periodical, Union Democracy in Action, which was later replaced by the Union Democracy Review...
...By leaving equality a vacuous concept, he opens the door to all sorts of spurious claims, while jeopardizing just claims and depriving them of their otherwise commanding moral appeal...
...He expounds this idea brilliantly...
...Most of all, he has explained what union members could do to organize for democratic reform, especially in forcing uncontaminated elections to choose leaders who are responsive to the rank and file...
...IV THE IDEOLOGICAL PURPOSE of the book also is responsible for its organization...
...The method is inadequate where the subject is a political movement with many elements shaped by history and reflecting various forces, some of which may still have a close link to the Founder's original idea while others have traveled far away from it...
...only if the Marxist methods of analysis are denied recognition in the applied sciences of history, sociology, economics, and anthropology...
...his disciples have developed Marxism by interpreting and reinterpreting the original texts, by amending and applying the doctrine to changing situations and to the progress of science, and by asking new questions in the master's spirit, often without the support of any text...
...And, amusing, many an apercu used by Marx to illustrate a point in the midst of a polemic has been stretched out into book-length dissertations...
...His argument was, characteristically in the spirit of "German socialism," that wage labor was as bad as slave labor...
...But even then, that "something" is far from what Marxists expect...
...Occasionally Pole seems to try to formulate such a principle, but he only succeeds in compounding his—and our— perplexities...
...Hence, the larger part of the labor movement drops out of the book, and with it such martyrs as Kurt Eisner and Matteotti, such significant writers as Malraux and Silone, such leaders as Daniel deLeon and Eugene Debs, such theorists as G. D. H. Cole...
...But in his second volume, Kolakowski reports on various attempts to marry Marx to Darwin, to Bergson, to the French Encyclopedists, to Kant, or to a particular version of Hegel...
...This became all too apparent at the outbreak of World War I when "German workers marched off to the carnival of slaughter in perfect order...
...17.50...
...Moore argues not that the Social Democrats betrayed the socialist revolution, but that their failure to intervene decisively in the affairs of the army and the bureaucracy and to control key sectors of the economy prevented the revolution against the Kaiser from attaining even radical-democratic objectives...
...On the other hand, the author calls attention to violations of democracy within the labor movement...
...The classical work of Sidney and Beatrice Webb, which Lenin translated, is not mentioned at all...
...INJUSTICE: THE SOCIAL BASES OF OBEDIENCE AND REVOLT, by Barrington Moore, Jr...
...This manual is based on the premise that unions are indispensable, and "if you want union democracy, first you need a union...
...As a philosopher, Morton White recognizes that to understand equality one must locate it within a general moral system that establishes the purpose equality ought to serve...
...White Plains, New York: M.E...
...All the evidence—including his letters and the reports of private conversations—suggests to me that in his later years Marx understood his achievement to be, as Engels said at his funeral, "the discovery of the law of capitalistic development," which he also exerted was pointing toward the overcoming of bourgeois society...
...No modern historian will disregard the economic background of the period he describes...
...Can he talk of equality, or must he deal with particular and diverse equalities...
...Whoever has read the paranoid phantasies of Fourier, Cabet's Icarian dreams of a utopian community, or Proudhon's prophecy that "the organization of work will be the demise of bosses and power," and whoever has the slightest notion of those "German Socialists" whom Marx trounced so ruthlessly in The German Ideology and in Part Three of The Communist Manifesto will wonder where Kolakowski found this startling information...
...II KOLAKOWSKI EXPOUNDS three different theories here, and they are not quite compatible with each other...
...Whether there will be some qualitative leap into a very different future is an issue that an empirical inquiry like this can safely set aside...
...As to Marx's responsibility for "despotic socialism," Kolakowski's first volume concludes: If...
...256 pp...
...All this set Kolakowski apart from those revisionists who strive for a better or purified Marxian orthodoxy...
...But when he deals with turn-ofthecentury Populists who invoked individualism to combat capitalist concentrations of power and succeeded in securing the enactment of antitrust legislation, he offers no explanation for this at least partial denial of his thesis...
...The second, however, states that it is a mistake to interpret Marx as an economist, or a sociologist, or the author of a theory called historical materialism...
...But while Bebel assumed that increasing class consciousness would in the long run overcome such impediments to radical politics, Moore remains much more tentative...
...14.95...
...no one is a subject or a ruler but all are equal...
...Illustrated...
...The moral and political world, one might suggest to him, is never a world of stark contrasts between black and white, between virtue and vice...
...Rather, they invite the reflective mind to seek the principle of unity that binds them together...
...Marx did have such a vision in those "early manuscripts," which he never published but which nevertheless are quoted ad nauseam to condemn those developments in Marxism that have opened democratic solutions...
...Despite the enormous interest that this latter strain in the genealogy of Marxism has aroused in the last 30 years, Kolakowski does not pursue this line and dismisses all open-ended, nontotalitarian interpretations of Marxism—from Rosa Luxemburg's theory of spontaneity to his own previous revisionism...
...In this work, he explains the despotism of Stalin as an outcome of MarxistLeninist ideology—rather than Leninism and Stalinism as a result of the special conditions prevailing in the Soviet Union during the 1920s and 1930s, or as a consequence of the Czarist system that preceded it...
...III IT IS ESSENTIAL for Kolakowski's rejection of Marxism that he interpret it as a metaphysical system in search of realization on earth...
...Equality of opportunity assures inequality of result...
...One may quarrel about the question of what Marx "really meant...
...The generalizations occupy no more than a few pages in an opening statement on "why you need unions and democracy," and another few pages at the close...
...He tells us bluntly that it would be better for those who do not wish to draw the totalitarian conclusions to abandon Marxism altogether...
...As his work progressed, the term "estrangement" (Entfremdung) tended to lose the anthropological connotations that neo-Marxists have attached to "alienation" (Entfremdung...
...Much of modern sociology is built on Marx the way Newton's physics is based on Galileo's, or as modern biology is based on Darwin: the moderns may be critical of the forerunners, but they must be thankful to them...
...But less fastidious writers in the natural-law tradition have sought to gain for property rights the unassailable position occupied by life and liberty...
...Sharpe...
...The spirit of his philosophy is reflected in the characteristic titles he gave to various essays: "Philosophy of the Striptease," "The Mortality of Reason," "In Praise of Inconsistency," and above all "The Priest and the Jester"—in which, of course, the philosopher appears as a perennial Nay-sayer and the Devil as perpetually doing God's work...
...MOORE CONTENDS, with considerable evidence, that the image of a solidly organized and classconscious German proletariat in the period before 1914 was largely a myth...
...Unalienable rights arise directly from God's constitution of man...
...his view of what constitutes Marxism follows the indoctrination courses of the Leninist school...
...He offers a plausible, though—as the diverse political implications of "self-evident" and property attest— not unproblematic way of looking at equality in American history...
...Such analysis seems mostly to have reinforced his skepticism about the possibility of beneficial changes in the human lot...
...While the first part of the book is given to deliberately ahistorical considerations about the sense of injustice and its frequent absence, the second, and central, part is a large-scale historical investigation of the German working class in the period from 1848 to 1920...
...Unity takes the form of abolishing all institutions of social mediation, including representative democracy and the rule of law...
...By placing equality in an appropriate philosophic framework and linking it to an established intellectual tradition, White provides a coherent understanding of the concept...
...But when he deals with the masses of immigrants who resisted homogenization and strengthened the practice of cultural pluralism instead, he terms their achievement a victory for egalitarianism...
...Government departments and agencies are lax, often hostile or inept, and union bureaucracies can be brutal to the point of murder...
...The only exception to this policy is his attack on Lukacs as an ideologist of Stalin, and it proves the rule: for it is Kolakowski's contention that the Lukacs-Stalin version is the only correct interpretation of Marx, and that Stalinist praxis flowed from Marxist ideology...
...These names are not even mentioned...
...Augustine behind the body of Marx as painted by Kolakowski...
...They fit into a traditional mode of thought where all things are governed by natural laws...
...May individual Marxists think about God, the conditions of human knowledge, or the nature of the universe whatever they like...
...The revolutionary rhetoric of these works has been replaced by a wry and disillusioned skepticism in regard to radical politics...
...This is not quite the same as the quasi-religious utopia of totalitarian technocracy...
...new ones have substituted quite effectively for those that have become historically obsolete...
...It is not an explanation of how the capitalist economy works but a critique of the dehumanization in a system where everything is for sale...
...The Erfurt Program, written by the very orthodox Kautsky, declared, "Religion is a private concern...
...we have long been colleagues in the same movements and causes...
...It refers to the uniqueness of individuals, not their sameness...
...This summary of Benson's bona fides has a bearing on the special value of this guide...
...property rights emerge instead from some human act or agreement...
...Such "scientistic" interpretations are due to the misunderstandings of Engels, Kautsky, Plekhanov, and their Bolshevik disciples...
...The jester still seems to condemn the priests, for he treats Marxism as a savior religion and the Marxist ideologists as churchmen...
...15.95...
...He argues, in a self-conscious analogy to the Marxian notion of the expropriation of the means of production, that in modern capitalist as well as in state-socialist societies, moral outrage has been expropriated and exploited by the men of power, by the Nazis, by the Stalinists, and by "leaders of the free world" as well...
...THE PURSUIT OF EQUALITY IN AMERICAN HISTORY, by J. R. Pole...
...Benson...
...he persists in describing Marxism-Leninism as the cause of Stalin's despotism...
...But what of the few cases of successful revolutions in the twentieth century...
...It is part of the romantic attack on a society enslaved by money power...
...Kolakowski takes very little note of this criterium of praxis...
...Every person, therefore, has a natural (self-evident) right to liberty, a right that cannot be alienated without denying one's God-given nature...
...Following Lukacs and J. L. Talmon, it is shown that the attempt at a "total" solution leads to the total annihilation of freedom...
...345 In this argument, equality entails independence...
...wage labor is frequently called "prostitution"—poets, philosophers, and pamphleteers alike found it "degrading" and "alienated...
...it germinated in the traditional disciplines of scholasticism...
...In the United States, too, Theodore Skidmore, leader of the American Workingmen's party in 1828-31, spoke of the degrading nature of labor in a pamphlet entitled "The Right of Men to Property: A Proposal to Make Them Equal...
...equality of condition restricts equality of opportunity...
...If so, one is permitted to hope, even expect, that as long as democratic processes prevail, there is still a chance for incremental changes in the direction of a more just society, even though complete justice will forever remain an asymptote, that is, a straight line that is always approached yet never reached by the curve of history...
...Obviously, Marx would not associate himself with these ideas...
...Before we can root out an evil, we must become aware of it...
...At the end of these 1,500 pages he declares: "The self-deification of mankind, to which Marxism gave philosophical expression, has ended in the same way as all such attempts, whether individual or collective: It has revealed itself as the farcical aspect of human bondage...
...For those who think that Stalin perverted Marxism it is difficult to follow Kolakowski's argument...
...His thought had never been shaped by Marxism as taught in the Communist universities...
...There follows a distillation of what Benson has learned about the Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act (LMRDA), about regulatory agencies, about union constitutions whose generous principles are all too often breached in practice...
...He avoids reliance on "inevitable" or "necessary" trends, preferring instead to analyze specific situations in their particularities...
...Thus we hear all about Lucien Goldman's esoteric "tragic world view," but nothing about Proletkult or Brecht's plays...
...More and more did it take on a very precise economic meaning: the estrangement of the worker from his tools, from his product, from his fellow workers, and from his own body...
...Kolakowski's professional interest as a philosopher coincides here with the polemical purpose of the book...
...All the rest is devoted to the business of facts, laws, and remedies...
...his success in this effort significantly clarifies our ideas...
...It nevertheless proves to be illuminating...
...Only one philosophy seems to resist amalgamation with Marxism: positivism...
...By contrast, Kolakowski asked what positivism had done to metaphysical rationalism, and he arrived at the "Manichean" answer that Reason is either a cancerous excrescence of a sick species or "an alien body originating in another world...
...Volume Three: THE BREAKDOWN, 548 pp...
...A subsequent chapter deals with situations in which oppression and suffering indeed led to 343 revolt...
...According to White, property rights cannot be put on the same pedestal as the selfevident unalienable rights of life and liberty...
...The upshot of Pole's theoretical confusions is the promotion of the mischievous idea that equality lacks defensible meaning and definable boundaries...
...Thus he faults Rosa Luxemburg for disagreeing with Lenin "on three major points each of which was a precondition for the success of the revolution...
...Moreover, where Marxism is still serving purposes of critical analysis, its techniques and results have so far transcended the framework of Marx's writings, and absorbed so many alien elements, that the claims of a closed system resting on its own philosophical foundations can no longer be maintained...
...but his philosophic deficiencies dangerously muddle our understanding of equality and its role in American life...
...Bertrand Russell once wrote: "To understand an age or a nation, we must understand its philosophy, and to understand its philosophy we must ourselves be in some degree philosophers...
...Even when Kolakowski was using the Marxist vocabulary or seemed to fit modern insights into traditional Marxism, sensitive readers could not I fail to discern the shadow of St...
...NB: If you cannot find this book in your bookstore, you can order from: The Association for Union Democracy, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, N.Y...
...Or, does Marxism leave certain questions open, confining itself to its own limited job, the theory of social change...
...What does this idea of equality tell us about the distribution of material goods, in particular about property...
...But while it is obvious that Newton, were he to rise today, would think in terms of Einsteinian physics, it is by no means certain whether Marx would approve of Lukics, Marcuse, or Gramsci...
...Moore continues to be passionately attached to the vision of decreasing the causes of human misery, but most of his old certainties are gone...
...In his most recent work, he has abandoned that position as futile and now is no longer writing to reform Marxism but to show its absurdity...
...The first states that Marx's specific doctrines do not stand up to scientific scrutiny...
...Reversing traditional wisdom, the Marxist Hilferding declared in the preface to his Finanzkapital that nothing could prevent capitalists from using his economic insights...
...In his third volume, Kolakowski shows how this 340 commitment can be manipulated, and thus Marxism becomes a mere ideology, state philosophy, or official religion, the instrument of a cruel despotism...
...To be sure, Kolakowski's concerns had always been different from those of the Zagreb school and other products of the crisis in Marxism...
...Nevertheless, he fairly and lucidly explains how natural-law principles have ineluctably accorded equality a major role in American thought...
...He is now even more tentative than most of us in taking generalized positions regarding the future course of history...
...He had never tried to replace the Leninist-Stalinist orthodoxy by a new one that might be furbished with a human face: his aim had been, even then, to make room for free discussion of basic philosophical problems that are older than Marxism and likely to outlast it...
...He notes that people have used the word in disparate ways, that particular equalities often come into conflict, and that equality seemingly varies with circumstances, so that, for example, we are required to be color-blind one moment and free to practice discrimination the next...
...A caveat is in order...
...Intertwined with all this is the nitty-gritty of how union members can protect and extend their rights, the "minutiae" that are the heartbeat of this manual—from how to get and use a mailing list to how to sue, how to organize, how to appeal, how to use the law, and where to look for information and guidance...
...what matters now is to change it...
...In 1918 and after, sensing the weariness and lack of revolutionary spirit among the great majority of workers, the Social Democratic leadership soon formed an alliance with the army to make doubly sure that law and order would be preserved...
...It is the state of the army, of competing armies, not of the working class, that has determined the fate of twentieth-century revolutions...
...There is, however, a brief survey of what reformers, union members, and "allies" have encountered (e.g., in the operation of the AFL-CIO Ethics Code, or how different unions have reacted to dissent in their ranks—miners, steel workers, carpenters, auto workers, painters...
...Barrington Moore has come a long way since he published his monumental study, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, over a decade ago and since he collaborated with Herbert Marcuse and Robert Paul Wolff in 1965 on an unfortunate book in praise of intolerance, A Critique of Pure Tolerance...
...If I have a complaint, it is that, in his austere concentration on its purpose, Benson has neglected to give an account of his own interventions in insurgent campaigns, say, in the bitter struggle of the New York painters against crooks who were running their union...
...Recognizing Stalin as the true heir of Marx and Lenin, Kolakowski comes close to vindicating his excommunication of Trotsky, and he registers with satisfaction that all attempts to make Marxism more scientific lead their authors away from true Marxism, which still knows its faithful by the criterion of "partisanship...
...His main attention is focused on philosophy...
...The revolution of 1918 never envisioned the overthrow of capitalism and remained purely reformist in its aims...
...Before coming to this conclusion, Kolakowski finds "Marx partly to blame for the oversimplified 338 and vulgarized notions that can be defended by quotations from his works," and he dismisses as "untenable" Marx's principal theories, notably the famous Preface that relates historical change to technological progress and explains all civilization in terms of class struggle: As a theory of interdependence between technology and property relations [Marxism] is trivial...
...only if Marxism is narrowed down to a philosophy of despair and salvation— only then can Kolakowski make the point that it must be realized in despotism...
...But he says next to nothing about how such heroic individuals can manage to infuse exceptional moral behavior into mass movements...
...Likewise, the protofascist George Fitzhugh argued in Cannibals All: Slaves Without Masters that free wage labor was so cruel it would be a humane act to provide every wretched worker with a master...
...are treated as purely academic exercises in theology, not in their relation to any movement, social situation, or intellectual development...
...Moore introduces some evidence that there are certain personality types who can display moral courage even under the most adverse circumstances and who combine the intellectual ability to recognize oppressive conditions with a capacity for moral inventiveness transcending the dictates of existing cultural restraints and traditions...
...60.00 Professor Kolakowski, originally of Warsaw University and now teaching at All Soul's, Oxford, first came to the West's attention in the 1960s as a philosophical spokesman of "revisionism"—the dissident movement of humanist intellectuals inside the Soviet orbit...
...As a means of] predicting the future [Marxism's] limitations are even more serious...
...As far as one can see, Moore's shift in perspective largely proceeded from two grounds...
...Separate facilities make black and white schoolchildren unequal, but only separate facilities provide equality for children in wheelchairs...
...Yet, Marxism is not the sum of a number of theorems discovered by Marx...
...Many of the great debates that have agitated Marxists over the years—such as the theory of imperialism, the theory of the business cycle, the debate with the Keynesians, that on the nature of facism, that on the nature of the Soviet state—all these do not interest Kolakowski...
...Paper, $4.75...
...The real Marx was a prophet whose messianic message stirred the totalitarian hopes of the irrational masses...
...Kolakowski, however, chooses to treat the development of Marxism by discussing authors...
...Although people "naturally" (i.e., without the benefit of civil society) develop "adventitious" arrangements such as the private ownership of material goods, these arrangements do not yield equal benefits or exact equal burdens...
...True, Marx too expected the revolution of the proletariat to overcome the alienation of capitalistic labor, and in early drafts of Das Kapital he still referred to this Young Hegelian category...
...Henry Thoreau, too, considered the need to earn money "degrading"—a notion, of course, befitting a gentleman...
...By contrast, he accredits the physicists Langevin and Joliot-Curie, the biologists H. M. Muller and Haldane, the painters Picasso and Leger, who were fellow travelers at some time but certainly did nothing to develop Marxist doctrine...
...New York: Oxford University Press...
...They never converted the bulk of German workers to a revolutionary perspective...
...Moore's Reflections on the Causes of Human Misery and Upon Certain Proposals to Eliminate Them (1972) already prepared us for a shift in perspective, but the present work completes the turn from a radicalrevolutionary outlook to a humane and tolerant liberal position and, at the same time, a general stance of near despair about the human condition...
...Add to this list the unfortunate Wilhelm Weitling, of whose first work Marx said admiringly: "If these are the toddlers' shoes of the proletariat, wait until it has grown to be a giant"—but whom he then expelled from the League of Communists...
...As Benson warns, laws and bylaws can be twisted this way and that, reinterpreted for better or worse, rewritten and, perhaps most damaging, simply not be enforced...
...Today we can see parties proudly 342 carrying Marxist banners while pursuing prudent, reformist policies, and others that never adhered to Marxist theories yet carry out a revolutionary policy...
...In time, this manual may have to be updated as to law and as further experience with reform movements and union leadership, good and bad, adds greater "know-how" and "how-to...
...Thus was created the ideological foundation of a new social democracy, the further development of which had very little to do with the history of Marxist doctrine...
...The problems arising from this ambivalence found charming expression in an ironical style that has endeared Kolakowski to Western audiences...
...This method is inappropriate for the history of any movement, and even more so when applied to analyze "philosophy of praxis," and here yields curious results...
...This longing for a savior religion is traced through 80 pages from the neo-Platonists through Christian theogony and mystic philosophy to Hegel...
...For now, it stands as a unique guide that ought to be in the hands of everyone who believes in a strong labor movement as an irreplaceable component of a free society...
...Democratic Rights for Union Members cannot be the last word...
...Only if the wide spectrum of possible Marxisms is narrowed...
...He was able to do that brilliantly and appropriately when he wrote the history of positivism, for in that case the subject was the idea itself, as it developed according to its inner logic from one generation of thinkers to the next...
...Oxford, England: Clarendon Press...
...Equality is an aspect of free action, of freedom from coercion— whether that coercion is exercised by England over its colonies, a church over its flock, or a master over his slaves...
...Whatever the priests of other cults may say, therefore, Marxism has arrived and has been absorbed by the academic community: one can pass for a sociologist these days by "discovering" that Moliere amused the traditional nobles at the expense of the service nobles...
...I think, however, that he is in error and, at the risk of appearing pedantic, I have to indulge here in a Marxological digression that will lead to the heart of the problem...
...On the other hand, Marxism has also served as a starting point for certain philosophers and sociologists who do not accept basic tenets of Marxism such as the concept of class war...
...The laws of nature, they thought, are grasped by all members of the human species (a democratic implication), unless a person's natural faculties are corrupted or peculiarly distorted (a possibly aristocratic qualification...
...It means equal freedom to choose in the light of one's own reason, in accord with one's essence, without truckling to others...
...Eventually, in the final version of Das Kapital, Marx abandoned the term altogether—a decision that Kolakowski dismisses as a mere "change of language...
...White has a sharp tongue and an even sharper mind, and his personal scorn for natural-law philosophy makes for lively reading...
...And so on, and on...
...347...
...The steps required to maintain independence obviously vary with circumstances, sometimes dictating identical treatment for all, at other times calling for policies that discriminate...
...What of the October Revolution in Russia...
...But he already had transposed his critique from the plane of philosophy to the plane of history: "The philosophers have only explained the world in different ways...
...Yet, in his third theory Kolakowski admits that Marx was "a romantic," a rebel who fought against the enslaving and degrading practices of capitalistic rationality...
...The truth accessible to everyone is that God or nature, in creating man, gave him a particular essence, which notably includes the qualities of life and reason...
...The contributions to the theory of law and democracy made by Renner, Kelsen, Cunow, JaurBs, Paul Levi, and 341 others—above all Kautsky, who is everybody's whipping boy—are either not mentioned or not discussed in relation to their practical importance...
...And in his third volume, he reviews and assesses similar attempts to combine Marxism with psychoanalysis, existentialism, and structuralism...
...Nowadays, visceral anger is more difficult to express on the public scene than was the case a few generations ago, partly because it seems so obviously futile...
...The revolution succeeded, he argues, not because of the organizational or ideological strength of the Bolsheviks, but because of the weakness of the Provisional Government...
...He accused the utopians and reactionary ideologists of mistaking a social, economic, and political evil for a moral evil...
...For one thing, I've known H. W. Benson for many years...
...If White is correct about the early American position, then a clear and obligatory natural-law distributive standard enters the picture only when, in Rousseau's words, some people have so much they can buy others, and some have so little they are forced to sell themselves...
...As a historian, Pole marshalls a huge array of data about American egalitarianism...
...Every attempt to apply equality in everyday life produces paradoxes...
...Berkeley: University of California Press...
...The one comes from Saint-Simon, the other from the Young Hegelian humanist movement...
...Must we consider Marxism—either in its original or in its more developed form—a closed system, self-contained, and embracing all questions and answers down to the most fundamental problems of human existence...
...Industrial democracy, on the other hand, cannot be placed where it belongs historically because the Webbs never said they were Marxists...
...Hence the "main currents" are not shown in their historical setting, as interplay between movement and idea, but in the fashion of Ideengeschichte (the history of ideas)—as the pure development of theories...
...On White's showing, however, natural-law philosophy can in principle accommodate both capitalist and socialist property arrangements...
...WHITE CONNECTS the concept of equality to fundamental beliefs about the nature of man and the nature of knowing...
...Hence, a survey like Kolakowski's raises some important questions...
...has been the greatest fantasy of this century...
...Social democracy and its unions, Moore concludes, never succeeded in penetrating most large centers of industrial activity, their main strength being in smaller localities and establishments...
...We can see individuals using Marxist tools of analysis and Marxist terminology in works of history, sociology, economics, and anthropology...
...it is the ideology of a movement that develops both materially and intellectually...
...Throughout his three volumes, Kolakowski reiterates that Leninism-Stalinism is, if not the only possible, certainly the only practical and plausible "way to preserve the integrity of Marxism...
...Though it is somewhat risky to characterize a huge treatise in terms of a single thread, I am nevertheless inclined to say that the overall theme of the book restates the old wonderment of August Bebel about "the damned wantlessness of the poor...
...Equality, he suggests, means identity or "interchangeability...
...The late George Lichtheim was a master of this art...
...And since liberty is an unalienable right, and the purpose of government (according to the Declaration) is the protection of unalienable rights, equality is always a major concern of any legitimate authority...
...it is for the most part composed of various shades of gray...
...Nor do the authors in Kolakowski's Main Currents ever debate with each other...
...The concept of market socialism is barely alluded to...
...Morton White, a philosopher at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, and J. R. Pole, a Cambridge University historian, think they can speak sensibly on the subject...
...Yet one feels that Moore is now seized by excessive despair...
...Equality is the necessary condition for liberty...
...Important concepts, such as industrial democracy and autogestion, which have a long history from The Communist Manifesto to Tito, are mentioned only as an afterthought to the New Left...
...As an interpretation of economic phenomena] the theory of value does not meet the normal requirements of a scientific hypothesis...
...In this sense all have the same nature, the same duties, and hence the same rights...
...Why can it not be pragmatic, upholding those of the founders' doctrines that are still useful, and abandoning others that either did not stand the test of time or no longer answer the questions of a new generation...
...Characteristic, for instance, was his treatment of the philosophy of Mach and Avenarius, whom Lenin had "refuted" in a volume heavier in weight than thought...
...If] the concept of negative freedom presupposes a society of conflict...
...In sum, Marxism...
...He also speaks of the "implicit" [?] unity of egalitarian theory" constantly breaking against the implacable needs of capitalist ideology, e.g., individualism...
...each person is autonomous...
...Thus Marxian insights are a common, though often unacknowledged property of all modern sociology, much the way Freudian psychology has become a premise even for its critics...
...Instead, opinion leaders of various stripes turn the moral current on and off as best they can...
...at least one reader has been provoked to defend Marxism against misrepresentation...
...Kolakowski consistently underplays these developments, or even reads them out of the company of genuine Marxism...
...If White's reconstruction of the argument is correct, then the phrase "all men are created equal" means that all have the same right to preserve life and liberty...
...The book ends on a note that could have been penned by Max Weber but surely not by Moore's previous guide, Karl Marx: "So far in human history, forms of authority have simply succeeded each other...
...This time, however, he attacks them not because they are theologians but because they preach the wrong theology...
...But if man's will, not God's, makes property rights, man's will can also unmake them...
...The German proletariat had been tamed long before...
...there can be a technique for establishing social unity, then despotism is the only solution...
...others will use this same language for purely manipulative purposes, as an ideology or religious doctrine...
...He surveys the literature on concentration camps, the Untouchables of India, and the experiments by Stanley Milgram on obedience to authority...
...The last part of the book centers on one arresting line of thought that Moore calls "the expropriation of moral outrage...
...An obscure writer, Stanislaw Brzozowski, whose passing flirtation with Marxism left his understanding of Marx "far off the mark" (Kolakowski), is given the same number of pages as is Karl Kautsky, who was a prolific writer, a remarkable historian, and the most influential interpreter of Marx during the period of the Second International...
...Nor does Kolakowski consider the possibility that Stalinism might have been the ideology of a counterrevolution that for historical reasons had to use the language of the revolution...
...Yet few among his admirers, who expect only irreverent and unorthodox sallies from this master jester, may have been prepared for the massive frontal assault on Marx and all his followers that fills these three heavy and quite humorless volumes...
...the only known technique for the purpose...
...Strangely, this observation does not alter his view that this perversion of Marx's intentions is orthodox Marxism...
...To help what Sorel called "the Decomposition of Marxism" a jester might have been more effective than a theologian...
...Weitling emigrated to the United States, and there he supported the cause of the South in the Civil War...
...Self-evident," White argues, meant for Jefferson and his contemporaries "intuitive reason...
...Most often it splits into many heresies and, like the ring in Lessing's parable, "the genuine one probably got lost" while the heirs are wearing cheap replicas...
...POLE'S BOOK merits attention here only because it underscores the dangers of misperceiving equality...
...New York: Association for Union Democracy...
...Each author is given a thorough examination as to his gnoseological assumptions, no matter how little he contributed to the development of Marxism, but we never are given an analysis of the philosophical situation to which Marxism had to respond at any particular time, nor of the situation within Marxism to which any particular Marxist author was responding...
...Kolakowski claims that Marx differed with his utopian forerunners in that they "wanted to abolish poverty" whereas he started out from "the working class's awareness of dehumanization, not poverty...
...This jester indeed betrays too much understanding for the priests...
...And, unless men and women appreciate the potential of unions for human freedom, they can hardly be inspired to undertake the risk of improving them...
...The Red Army was soon drowned in blood...
...THIS BOOK REPRESENTS a transparently honest attempt of a major scholar to rethink his previous 344 orientations and premises...
...THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION, by Morton White...
...380 pp...
...sociology of knowledge and sociology of the arts may use more refined instruments than were at Marx's disposal, but he was the first to open these fields of investigation...
...The Table of Contents runs to some 20 pages...
...Like idealistic philosophers, the orthodox Marxists have been unable to respond to it with anything but rancor: most of the positivists, it seems, are Social Democrats, dubbed "shallow" by grand Marxist and metaphysical thinkers, smiled upon because of their lack of dash, their sobriety, their refusal to base action on ideology...
...An idea cannot be taken as a static entity...
...then there is nothing reprehensible in the idea that the violence which abolishes private property at the same time does away with the need for negative freedom, or freedom tout court...
...Can a writer on equality make sense of all this...
...Although recent research has confirmed the theory of spontaneity precisely for the Russian Revolution, Kolakowski asserts that Marxism needs "an institutional body 339 with authority to distinguish truth from error...
...But the record here is primarily illustrative, yielding to the structure of this detailed handbook, which conveys a lesson: "You Can Win...
...xviii and 540 pp...
...And why not...
...299 pp...
...Can anyone construct an intelligible account of equality in American history...
...Kolakowski's perceptions of the Marxist world seem unduly influenced by the propaganda machine of the Communist party...
...In view of these developments and of the confusion that affects all talk about Marxism, it might be advisable, precisely for the more serious Marxists, to abandon the lingo of Marxism— although they may remain loyal to some movement that sprang from Marxism and still strives for the general aims of equality, dignity, and democracy...
...It is a moving book...
...People must be sufficiently equal in wealth to be able to maintain their moral independence...
...If you do not believe in unionism, you will have to look for an argument elsewhere...
...First, from a reconsideration of the appalling human costs of revolutionary uprisings in the 20th century and the uncontrovertible evidence that many if not most have, in fact, inaugurated regimes that were at least as unappealing as their predecessors...
...its influence, far from being the result of its scientific character, is almost entirely due to its fantastic, prophetic, and irrational elements...
...Second—and this volume deals mainly with this order of ideas— it proceeds from the realization that human beings are generally not moved spontaneously to revolt in the face of appalling human conditions but are disposed, most of the time, to accept their inferior status and continued exploitation...
...He takes them as conspicuous examples of situations where men and women whom one may have expected to revolt in fact did not and maintained obedience even in the face of most blatant injustice...
...Modern historians use quite sophisticated techniques to unravel such ideological quirks, but Kolakowski still writes Ideengeschichte in 19thcentury style...
...Benson is, to put it plainly, a "nut" about democracy who had the imagination and persistence to do something about it in a specific way...
...The Founders did not foresee the need to underpin their system with a psychology, an ontology, or ethics...
...Since it relies mainly on secondary sources and the writing of contemporary German historians, this treatment is not as innovative as corresponding parts of Moore's masterpiece, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy...
...nor are Hilferding's theory of "political wages," Jaurbs's concept of a popular army, or the modern concepts of Mitbestimmung and workers' control...
...But the evidence produced here seems to me, alas, rather weak...
...A skilled machinist and formerly an auto worker in Detroit, he now is executive director of the Association for Union Democracy...
...Thus duties give rise to rights: the faculty of reason implies a duty to use it, and the duty to use reason implies the right to make choices in conformity with that reason...
...Because one has a duty to perform, one necessarily has the right to do whatever that performance requires...
...He takes the famous phrases of the Declaration of Independence—"we hold these truths to be self-evident"—"all men are created equal"—"with certain unalienable Rights"—and lays bare their epistemological and ethical components, so that we can see them as part of a certain way of looking at the world...
...It casts a cold eye on much of the Marxist and revolutionary thought that had informed his previous thinking...
...The former does so, superbly...
...If the urban enemies of the revolution had been able to unite and organize themselves, they might have defeated or crushed the revolution in the cities," though they would still have had to deal with the peasant revolution...
...To deny that Marx tried to develop "a political economy of the working class," and hailed the ten-hour day as its first victory (Das Kapital, vol...
...Hence, any obligation stemming from them would follow only from some free (voluntary) action performed as part of the agreement...
...One-man, one-vote weighs individuals equally, yet counts minority groups unequally...
...Paradoxically, he now agrees with the orthodox Leninists who see the various revisionisms not as developments but as defections from Marxism: The reformists offered a program of laborious, gradual, and unspectacular improvement...
...But he does not say why he thinks Marx took the trouble of rewriting his work, spent years compiling statistics, and painfully described the production of surplus value, if all he meant to say was that wage labor is "dehumanizing...
Vol. 26 • July 1979 • No. 3
