Utopia Overturned
Bobbio, Norberto
The catastrophe of historical communism is, literally, before our eyes: the catastrophe of communism as a world movement, born from the Russian revolution, promising emancipation of the poor,...
...In one of their documents the Chinese students declared that they were fighting for democracy, liberty, and law...
...But the problems remain, precisely the same problems, which exist now and will in the future on a world scale, those that the communist utopia had pointed to and considered solvable...
...Plato knew that the ideal republic about which he talked with his friends was not destined to exist in any place on earth but, as Glaucon said to Socrates, was true only "in our conversations...
...the democratic state after the state of liberties...
...and, finally, the most difficult to obtain, liberty of association, from which are born free unions and free parties and, with these free unions and free parties, the pluralistic society without which democracy does not exist...
...That is why it is foolish to rejoice at the defeat and, gleefully rubbing one's hands, to say: "We always told you so...
...The result of this centuries-long process has been political freedom, that is to say, the right of all citizens to participate in the fotmulation of collective decisions that concern them...
...The catastrophe of historical communism is, literally, before our eyes: the catastrophe of communism as a world movement, born from the Russian revolution, promising emancipation of the poor, the oppressed, the "wretched of the earth...
...Translated from the Italian by RAYMOND ROSENTHAL SUMMER • 1990 • 341...
...that has aroused not only an indomitable material but also spiritual force that on many occasions appeared to be irresistible—from the Red Army in Russia to Mao's Long March, from the conquest of power by a group of determined men in Cuba to the desperate struggle of the Vietnamese people against the world's most powerful army...
...on the contrary, there has appeared, in a form that seems irreversible, the total overturn of a utopia, of the greatest political utopia in history (I'm not speaking of religious utopias), an overturn into its exact opposite...
...Historical communism has failed, I won't dispute that...
...I ask myself this question, because just founding a state of liberal and democratic rights is not enough to solve the problems that gave rise to the proletarian movements of the countries that initiated the process of industrialization in an unquestionably ferocious manner and then became "the hope of revolution" for the poor 340 • DISSENT European Revolutions peasants of the Third World...
...The explosive and, so it would seem, irresistible onrush of the popular movements that are shaking the communist regimes is due to the fact that these great liberties are now being demanded all at once...
...The state of liberties arrived in Europe after the state of authoritarian rule...
...But with what means and what ideals is it preparing to face those very problems from which the communist challenge was born...
...Oh, you who cherish false hopes, do you really believe that the end of historical communism (I insist on the word "historical") has put an end to the need and thirst for justice...
...Its dissolution gathers speed, outdistancing all possible predictions...
...that has induced men of high moral sentiments to sacrifice their lives, to face imprisonment, exile, and extermination camps...
...And now, the first utopia that tried to enter into history, to pass from the realm of "talk" to that of facts, not only did not materialize but is being overturned, has already been overturned in those countries in which it was put to the test...
...In a youthful essay Marx had defined communism—why not recall this?—as the "solution to the enigma of history...
...Democracy has won out over the challenge of historical communism...
...Such a situation is objectively revolutionary...
...the liberty of press and opinion...
...That is the question...
...The unprecedented SUMMER • 1990 • 339 European Revolutions drama of the recent events resides in the fact that this has not been merely a crisis of a regime or the defeat of a great invincible power...
...None of the ideal cities described by the philosophers had ever been proposed as a model to be realized...
...the liberty to assemble, which we have seen conquered peacefully but contested in Tiananmen Square...
...In particular I refer to the four great liberties of the modern age: personal liberty, that is, the right not to be arrested arbitrarily and to be judged in accordance with well-defined penal and trial laws...
...The conquest of freedom for modern man, supposing that it is possible and to the extent to which it is possible, can only be, for the countries of the overturned utopia, a point of departure...
...Remember, this is a utopia that for at least a century has fascinated philosophers, writers, and poets— can you remember Gabriel Pery's "tomorrows that sing"?—a utopia that has stirred masses of the disinherited, driving them into violent action...
...Now that there are no barbarians left," the poet says, "what will become of us without them...
...Leading where...
...Would it not be well to realize that, if in our world there rules and prospers a society composed of two-thirds who have nothing to fear from the third of have-nots, in the rest of the world the society of have-nots is two-thirds, or four-fifths, or actually ninetenths...
...Are the democracies that rule the richest countries of the world capable of solving the problems that communism has been unable to solve...
...Indisputable, however, even more than the failure of the communist regimes, is the failure of the revolution inspired by communist ideology—that is, the ideology of the radical transformation of a society considered oppressive and unjust into a completely different, free, and just society...
...Such a situation, where no revolutionary outlet is possible, as seems to be the case in those countries, can only have a gradual solution, the most advanced of which seems to be the Polish one, or a counterrevolutionary solution, as is happening in China—unless it develops in the well-known form of failed or impossible revolutions, which is civil war...
...The best proof of the failure lies in the fact that all those in the communist world who have rebelled periodically over the years, and now with particular energy, are demanding precisely those rights to freedom that constitute the basic foundation of democracy: not, it must be pointed out, a "progressive" or "popular" democracy, or whatever it's been called to distinguish it from our democracies and to exalt its superiority, but indeed a democracy that I cannot help but call "liberal," the democracy that arose and was consolidated through the slow, laborious conquest of a number of fundamental liberties...
...In a world of frightful injustices to which the poor are condemned, crushed by unreachable and apparently unchangeable great economic powers that almost always underlie political powers, including those that are formally democratic— to think at this juncture that the hope for revolution has been extinguished only because the communist utopia has failed is tantamount to closing one's eyes in order not to see...
Vol. 37 • July 1990 • No. 3
