Ten Years After 1989
Berman, Paul
WHAT WERE my expectations for Eastern and Central Europe ten years ago? I did have my hopes. They were vast. I was hoping, a little wistfully, to see a new kind of society arise—a society...
...The East bloc workers organized their revolutionary councils and shop committees only as steps toward building a Western-type liberal market democracy...
...I could cite the example of Polish Solidarity...
...For, in the twentieth century, left-wing theory has been a giant telescope, trained on the past...
...Every new left-wing discussion from now on should begin with that question...
...A libertarian socialist aspiration had become fairly popular in student movements all over the West circa 1968, which put me in a large company in the years that followed...
...A turn in what direction, though...
...The highest intentions of solid left-wingers 8 • DISSENT / Fall 1999 like myself were these: to undo poverty, to make work more creative and fulfilling, to put muscle into the pieties of social solidarity, and to impose a rationality on large social and economic decisions...
...We thought we could already make an adequate distinction between good leftism and bad leftism, between leftism's virtues and its perversions...
...Anyone on the left who stands up and advocates some liberal new departure from yesterday's certainties has my vote...
...I wasn't, entirely...
...The 1989 revolution broke out, and I went to what was then Czechoslovakia, looking for instances of workers taking over production and forming democratic councils to administer the enterprises, exactly as predicted in the writings of Cornelius Castoriadis and C. L. R. James, who were my theoretical guides...
...A republic of workers' councils...
...Which of our old assumptions were flat-out wrong...
...Some of the more imaginative people in Poland during the 1980s gave active thought to the very ideas that I am describing...
...It was for reasons that seem painful to me now...
...The workers of the ex-communist world—the ones who chose Western-style liberalism—were more perceptive than we, in that respect...
...I had my logic...
...We leftists clung to a very peculiar way of expressing those intentions, though...
...We could...
...and our struggles and even our enemies confirmed our self-esteem...
...We modern leftists have ended up resembling the people Marx mocked in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon—we, the befuddled citizens of 1999, dressed in the costumes of 1848, or of Roosevelt's New Deal, or of Sweden's social democracy, or of America's identity movements from the 1960s, or, silliest of all, in the medieval robes of feudal backwaters like Chiapas, Mexico...
...I could cite a considerable theoretical literature, written by genuinely brilliant thinkers who speculated about the libertarian and socialist possibilities in the old Soviet bloc, if only the communists could be overthrown...
...I wrote at some length about one—a colorful but fairly representative effort by the members of the Czech Philharmonic to take over their own orchestra...
...The rebelling workers of 1989 did not want to create a republic of workers' councils, though—not in Czechoslovakia or anywhere else...
...But our rightness prevented us from noticing that, in our own fashion, we, too, as much as any slippery Nation editor or forthright Fidelista or honest Sandinista, had gotten frozen in the past...
...We should put our entire emphasis on one point only: on what is new and fresh in our thinking...
...Our ideas prevented us from seeing how thoroughly the liberal democracies had evolved over the decades, how creative the economies had become, how much opportunity the liberal democracies offered to individuals and to societies...
...DISSENT / Fall 1999...
...We were right...
...What do we actively support today that would have provoked our indignation yesterday...
...WE MEMBERS of the anticommunist left imagined that we were too smart to get lost in the past...
...Why had I failed to predict such an aspiration...
...Well, nearly anyone...
...Why was I wrong...
...And so, I convinced myself that my own hopes were more than idle fancies...
...We insisted on the utility of left-wing theory...
...And I found those instances, plenty of them...
...Universally despised phrases like "the third way" sound bracing and attractive, in my ears, because, at least, they imply a turn against the assumptions of the past...
...We should ask ourselves, How have we changed...
...And there our problems began...
...And why did I fumble for a moment, before recognizing those liberal hopes as right and appropriate...
...What do these thoughts imply today...
...I have come to think that, for many of us, our own socialist traditions, as conventionally understood, do us more harm than good, right now...
...As for the East Bloc workers who have slid, instead, into an ugly nationalism or a new life in organized crime—those people have only demonstrated how badly communism prepared its citizens for any future life in the open air of freedom...
...I was hoping, a little wistfully, to see a new kind of society arise—a society with socialist values and libertarian practices...
...PAUL BERMAN is a fellow at the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library...
...I could cite historical precedents—aspects, for instance, of the East German workers' movement in 1953, of the Hungarian workers' councils in 1956, and of the Czechoslovak reform in 1968...
...I am anti-orthodox today...
...We only saw the bad part...
...We fought against communism, and the communists and their friends fought back, and our name was mud in the Nation magazine...
Vol. 46 • September 1999 • No. 4
