What Does the Left Have to Offer?
Surdykowski, Jerzy
The old disputes between right and left still stir emotions. In one of the first European parliaments, His Majesty's opponents sat on his left (clearly, the worse side), while the supporters of...
...No one has ever succeeded in constructing a system that would both deserve this name and give people at least a little more spiritual satisfaction and material prosperity than any other system...
...Following the imposition of martial law by the Jaruzelski regime, he wrote for the underground press and for the Catholic weekly Tygodnik Powszechny...
...Moreover, the plight of the working class, deprived of political and union rights as well as the most basic human rights, was of no concern to anyone—churches, governments, the propertied classes, even the middle classes...
...This system can be found in a number of versions, some more benign and some even more cruelly repressive than Stalinism...
...Because the major disputes between right and left about the shape of the world and the ideal state have become transformed over the years into arguments over political programs competing within the same system, which neither side intends to change, what is there left to argue about...
...This concept of the state and the individual's place within it—as Churchill aptly noted—is simply the best of the bad possibilities open to us...
...The clear division of the socialist movement into reformist social democrats and revolutionary communists at the end of the nineteenth century was based on differing perceptions of the political reality of the time...
...The division of the world along these lines is by no means identical to the division between East and West, between communism and the rest...
...The social teaching of the church has departed markedly from that of the cautious Leo XIII...
...The only problem is that "seasonal socialists" do not realize this, since they do not understand any political process that takes longer than a year...
...Socialists have had their greatest success in counteracting the excesses of capitalism...
...Unfortunately, we have to leave gnosticism, like our dirty shoes, in the antechamber of democracy...
...At the end of the nineteenth century the already powerful socialist movement faced a dilemma: to achieve what it could through reform or to aim irrevocably for revolution...
...Moreover, the movement emerged during the pontificate of Gregory XVI, the most reactionary pope in modern history, an enemy not only of the "socialist heresy" but also of any kind of free thinking and an ally of the despotic rulers who had partitioned Poland...
...Only socialism offered solidarity and hope and—like every hope—utopia...
...Every political utopia has to create "the new man...
...currents usually regarded as leftist...
...Marx's predictions turned out to be wrong— precisely because they were effective...
...Can one still be a socialist, knowing what we know now...
...and on the far right, the Polish United Workers' party [Communist...
...Yet it was under precisely these slogans that this trade union was attacked in December 1981 by a party claiming to be "socialist...
...Their understandable anticlericalism was directed against the very essence of the "opium for the people," which held out the prospect of justice in the next world, ceding this world to the power of money and autocracy...
...Where the economy was weak and workers were few in number—as in Russia and the Third World—a group of intellectuals spouting revolutionary phrases alienated themselves from the society in whose name they claimed to act...
...Thus was bolshevism formed...
...The question is, then: does some kind of left still exist, or have we become trapped into thinking in stereotypes...
...In their effort to impose equally pragmatic solutions based on their own values, they will argue with socialists in the parliament of a democratic state and in the pages of a free press...
...it does less well when belt-tightening measures are required...
...TRANSLATED BY JANE CAVE 206 • DISSENT...
...Humans are either of value as free individuals or simply atoms in a crowd...
...Nevertheless, the world is turning to the right...
...Hence the gradual but inevitable swings in public opinion and electoral choices...
...Poland needs common sense and pragmatic decisions that have been tested elsewhere in the world, not a new utopia...
...They have caused too much harm to all of us...
...If we were to take seriously the traditional parliamentary division, before the formation of the Mazowiecki government, the political landscape would have looked as follows: on the left, the Democratic Revolution wing of the Polish Socialist party, Fighting Solidarity, and the Liberal-Democratic party, "Independence...
...If the citizens of a democratic state vote into office a conservative-liberal political party (in the European sense), taxes go down, state expenditure is reduced, and limits are placed on the growth of the state apparatus...
...If capitalism had turned out to be unreformable, if social relations had remained more or less as described by Marx, if the situation of the working class had remained much as it was portrayed by Dickens and Zola, then Marx's predictions would have proved correct...
...This is why the numerous semilegal parties and groupings now emerging compete to see how far they can distance themselves from the "reds...
...It is, I repeat, a fundamental and far from finished dispute between the "open society" and its enemies...
...aren't these the classic slogans of the authoritarian right...
...What about the beautiful visions of the distant future, in both their social-democratic and Bolshevik versions, with which socialists always liked to dazzle us...
...Economic growth accelerates...
...The bourgeoisie undertook reforms not out of enlightenment but under pressure from a powerful socialist movement and from widespread workers' protests...
...But it is worth being a socialist for a most prosaic, down-to-earth reason: because socialists are needed to maintain a balance within the boundaries of pluralism...
...In the fascist utopia, the master race...
...After all, it was the socialists, the enemies of God and capital, who, as both reformists and revolutionaries, turned out to be the agents of change that gave birth to the West as it is today...
...They have a right to their opinions...
...This political and personal decisions of this kind of socialist are going to be based on pragmatism...
...The isolation of the socialists must inevitably have shaped the ethos of this movement and its activists, who were possessed of the sole truth and absorbed in sectarian struggles...
...If persuasion is insufficient, then use force...
...in solving some problems, they aggravate others...
...In the same way, liberals and conservatives are needed as a counterweight to people like me...
...At the same time, the miserable political and economic reality of "actually existing socialism" [communist rule] means that the ordinary citizen endorses everything that is rightist and anticommunist...
...They cut a truly pathetic figure...
...and, of course, a belief in the value of solidarity, the kind that is the most important and most difficult, solidarity with a small "s...
...It is not surprising that the only explanations such people can offer are incantations about the work of the devil, "the Hegelian plague," or a "Jewish conspiracy...
...This process is reinforced by what is taking place in the "normal world," where the last few years have brought a loss of impetus among the political Jerzy Surdykowski is a well-known Polish journalist and former vice-president of the Polish Journalists' Union...
...Note the pronounced geography of this division...
...Perhaps the West of today—with all its dependencies, like Poland—is simply an episode...
...After more than a hundred years, in a country that called itself "socialist," these were also the demands of a trade union [Solidarity] that scrupulously deleted "socialism" from its program...
...The road leading from the stockyards of Chicago, the textile mills of Manchester, the wretched workers' suburbs of Paris, and the slums of London to the "affluent society" of today has been long and winding...
...Perhaps they are enchanted by a noble dream and perhaps SPRING • 1990 • 203 What Can The Left Offer...
...It has become, in the version proclaimed by John Paul II in Laborem exercens, so essentially socialist (in placing the individual above economic structures, labor above capital) that it goes further than many a socialist...
...Humanity would have made the leap from the "kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom," though it is hard to say how this 202 • DISSENT' What Can The haft Offer...
...This party no longer has a monopoly in the left, however: in late 1987, despite still severe repression on the part of the Security Service, the Polish Socialist party re-formed (although it soon split as a result of a dispute...
...It was, then, inevitable that socialists would be anticlerical...
...Among those who feel threatened are old-age pensioners, students and academics, and those who depend on welfare to make ends meet...
...In one of the first European parliaments, His Majesty's opponents sat on his left (clearly, the worse side), while the supporters of Dynasty, Law, and Order were seated to his right...
...The really basic dispute—at least in our part of the world—is between the latter-day descendants of Plato, trying to impose on others their vision of the only correct social order, and those who reject such a vision, regardless of which end of the spectrum it comes from...
...Perhaps it is simply a twentieth-century illusion that we are free SPRING • 1990 205 What can The Left Otter...
...Because perfection is not an earthly attribute, neither left nor right possesses the ideal recipe for managing the affairs of state...
...It is their business...
...The left isn't getting a good press these days...
...Political power and the legitimacy of the state derive either from an all-encompassing idea, whether secular or religious, or from the will of free citizens...
...After all this, does the left have anything to offer...
...Undoubtedly, tomorrow's world will become more socialist, if only because of the need to solve so many social and international problems—but that is just my personal belief...
...Stalinism did not arise because of the character defects of the Great Linguist and his entourage in the Kremlin: it was the inevitable consequence of the Bolshevik state and the monopolistic party that Lenin created...
...Even if they made a mess of everything else, they deserve a monument for this...
...There is very little left, but what there is certainly includes several basic values, in which one simply does or does not believe...
...The bourgeoisie in France, Germany, and England was in no hurry to make a pact with the rabble, to recognize the trade unions as a partner, or even to accept the principle of one man, one vote...
...we are quite happy to note simply that West European and American workers all own a car and support Reagan, Bush, or Thatcher...
...But they will not argue about ideology, because one has to keep one's distance from the latter-day descendants of Plato— whether left or right...
...At one time it was envisaged that such a state would come about with the primacy of religion and would be ruled by priests or by an aristocracy "singled out by God...
...Now, however, all place themselves in the center or, at most, slightly left of center...
...It was Plato who came up with the first vision of an ideal secular state in which power would reside in the hands of philosophers who would know best what their stupid fellow citizens needed in order to be happy...
...This is a quotation not from the Communist Manifesto but from the papal encyclical, Rerum novarum, issued in 1891 by Leo XIII...
...In these countries, the only possibility of achieving power was through the collapse of the state as the result of war, foreign intervention, or other circumstances...
...On the other hand: the dominance of the state over society, the centralization of political power, respect for authority, law and order, censorship, the elimination of "wrong-thinking" associations— SPRING • 1990 • 201 What Can The Lett Otter...
...This is the origin of the first myth of the left: 150 years ago, it took umbrage at God, and that's how things stayed...
...It is in the economy that the right has enjoyed most success, and economics is decisive everywhere, not just in Poland...
...any liberal despot can grant a magnificent package of such rights and still keep his power intact...
...slightly to the left, the Confederation for an Independent Poland...
...The notorious "specter" that haunted Europe in the mid-nineteenth century was not conjured up by the devil but by human beings protesting against an inhuman world...
...that humans are not only individual beings but social creatures and thus have certain obligations to their communities...
...No doubt, in a few years, people will begin to reject the conservatives and liberals, just as they have rejected the socialists...
...As a result, they are in a panic to change sides, losing all common sense in the process...
...Only the socialist movement raised the issue of the humanization of work and the dignity of the worker—until John Paul II referred to them in his encyclicals...
...It proclaims its goal to be "a coalition of left-wing forces," although until now it has preferred hegemony to coalition...
...Karl Popper, in his The Open Society and Its Enemies, coined the phrase "enchantment with Plato...
...Are we all supposed to be friends now...
...It was written more than fifty years after the works of Charles Fourier and the followers of SaintSimon, fifty years after the uprising of the Lyons textile workers, forty-three years after the publication of the Communist Manifesto, twenty years after the bloody suppression of the Paris Commune, two years after the formation of the Socialist International...
...The left does better in power during a time of economic prosperity...
...Until the time of Leo XIII, the first reformist pope, who took office in 1878, the Vatican saw no alternative for labor other than to subordinate itself to capital, whereas the conquered nations of the world were to submit to those who ruled by "divine right...
...They prove to be more generous toward education and culture, but society pays for this generosity with an increase in taxes, expansion of the bureaucracy, a slowdown in economic growth, and increasing inflation...
...In my opinion, the notion of a socialist system or even a socialist ideology is simply an illusion...
...This enchantment is shared by totalitarians of all stripes, right and left...
...they have simply succumbed to a gnostic delusion, but we pay an unacceptable price when our rulers nurture utopian visions of any kind...
...Moreover, what right do we have to determine the world in which our children will live...
...The wave of today will also pass, as day follows night: this does not necessarily mean that we shall return to the starting point, since during every cycle, each side learns something from the other...
...Socialists provided the only words of comfort in the dark, the only hand stretched out in friendship...
...In a pinch, I guess you could call it "socialist...
...One nineteenth-century work does contain the following statement: "A handful of rich and powerful people has virtually enslaved a vast number of workers...
...Lenin's oft-repeated phrase about the need for a conscious revolutionary elite to "raise" the consciousness of workers and peasants served simply as a justification for a dictatorship over the proletariat...
...In the industrialized West, where the socialist movement had a large working-class base, social democracy, with its notion of peaceful social change, came to the fore...
...it has become a populist movement, based on opposition to the excessive growth of the bureaucracy engendered by the "welfare state...
...It is a dispute between democracy and the entire spectrum of authoritarianism: from the totalitarianism of Pol Pot and the rulers of Albania through the remnants of "Stalinism with a human face" to theocracies like that of Khomeini, tin-pot dictatorships like that of Pinochet, and our Neanderthals of the traditional right...
...individuals who, by our very nature, possesses inalienable rights, are burdened with duties toward others, and are capable of distinguishing between good and evil...
...In the communist utopia, it is the workers who are predestined to rule, or rather the avant-garde party...
...Yes, I'm a socialist, but I don't know what it means," said Professor Edward Lipinski in an interview shortly before his death...
...All we have is the attitude I've outlined above...
...As a result, the social democrats return to power, raising the level of social security and reducing the most glaring inequalities...
...If socialism— understood as an attitude and a way of perceiving the world—does not contain within itself a gnostic faith in the inevitability of a 204 • DISSENT What Can The Lett Offer...
...Some socialists who consider themselves democratic and antitotalitarian have also become "enchanted with Plato" by nurturing hopes for a "better kind of socialism...
...that there can be no freedom without justice and that justice without freedom is nothing more than a prison...
...This article, slightly abridged in English, first appeared in the Warsaw weekly Polityka, October 14, 1989...
...Those who argue that this antipathy derives from the scientism of the Enlightenment, whose offspring were the founding fathers of socialist doctrine, perceive only part of the truth—or rather they prefer not to see the other part, the part that today's church finds so shameful and painful: the church's indifference to the misery of its flock...
...We especially do not have this right in a country that has been forcibly rammed into an artificial, ill-fitting system and has emerged in its current sorry state...
...they loyally supported those who wielded power...
...Although wage earners are initially happy with the new prosperity, they soon begin to feel the effect of cutbacks in social expenditure, of a less humane social system...
...Most people who have hitherto lived on this earth have not lived in a democracy...
...They also had a noble vision of a utopia in which it would be possible to ensure social justice here, on this earth, and that could be achieved through revolutionary transformation of the social order...
...There remains the conviction that all people are equal and of equal worth, although variably endowed with qualities of body, heart, and mind...
...This is not just a dispute about human rights and their interpretation...
...In Poland we are faced with a wave of rightist dogmatists who think the answer to every problem is to be found in the market, competition, and unlimited freedom for individuals to enrich themselves...
...Sooner or later, the gulag appears in the middle of the Platonic heaven, no matter how noble the intentions of its founders...
...Except for the American Protestants, it was no different in the other churches...
...Today, the [Communist] party that until recently claimed the exclusive right to govern Poland now increasingly lays claim to what it calls "the traditions of the left...
...The problem with social democracy is that it doesn't provide any exciting ideological products with which young people can intoxicate themselves," wrote Leszek Kolakowski...
...It has become so socialist that it has been attacked by liberals for its collectivism and its disdain for the market, property, and capital...
...But no other system is possible when an "enlightened" elite seizes power in the name of an "unconscious" majority which is denied a voice in the affairs of the country...
...Not necessarily...
...Socialists became atheists, enemies of God, and it could not have been otherwise...
...This dilemma opened the door to changes that would save capitalism, although socialists didn't realize this at the time...
...We have nothing with which to defend it, other than the few values in which we so stubbornly believe and the pragmatic conviction that it works better than any other system...
...Liberals tighten the screws on the trade unions and increase the prospects of unemployment...
...Here we could cite a long list of tragic episodes: from the uprisings of the textile workers in Lyons and Silesia, the uprisings of 1848, the Paris Commune, the shots fired at workers in Chicago (which provided the origin of the May Day parades), to the revolutionary ferment on the eve of the First World War...
...Many Poles prefer not to recall these events...
...It is possible that this will also be true of most people in the future: democracy and freedom do not have their Marx to proclaim them the "highest stage" of inevitable social development...
...But there is another significant development...
...Of course, liberals and conservatives accord priority to other values that are equally impossible to prove and that also are based on personal convictions...
...It should, of course, be noted that the Western "neo-right" of today—particularly in the United States—has little in common with the traditional, elitist, and aristocratic right of the kind we are used to...
...Anyone who refuses to recognize this not only disregards history but also forgoes the possibility of understanding what happened later...
...Here we come to the most dangerous myth of the left, especially the communist left, and one that it shares with many who are by no means leftists: the desire to construct on earth an ideal state, one of the oldest dreams of humanity...
...Today, when many people are searching for a "third way," a "self-governing republic," or similar constructs formulated under the slogan of "the democratic left," they too are echoing, however faintly, Plato...
...kingdom would have been organized and who would have sat on the throne...
...After the experience of the last few decades, it is the only part of the "leftist" heritage worth keeping...
...There is no proof that this is indeed the case, other than our vague faith and hope...
...Perhaps democracy, freedom, and human rights simply constitute a local—albeit ingenious— attempt to swim against the tide of historical entropy...
...Brave New World, if it does not promise all other kinds of happiness, what is left...
...It is more useful, therefore, to characterize the left by its ethos, the slogans and values leftist groups proclaimed in their days of glory: national independence, free elections, independent trade unions, abolition of censorship, workers' self-management, freedom of speech and association, social welfare, an eight-hour day, higher wages...
...I call these recent converts "utopian capitalists...
...Plato was sufficiently farsighted to demand the expulsion of poets from his city-state, on the grounds that they were by nature dissidents...
Vol. 37 • April 1990 • No. 2
