Reappraisals (24 page)
The similarity, of course, consists in a common failure to learn from the past—and a symbiotic interdependence, since it is the myopia of the first that lends spurious credibility to the arguments of the second. Those who cheer the triumph of the market and the retreat of the state, who would have us celebrate the unregulated scope for economic initiative in today’s “flat” world, have forgotten what happened the last time we passed this way. They are in for a rude shock (though, if the past is a reliable guide, probably at someone else’s expense). As for those who dream of rerunning the Marxist tape, digitally remastered and free of irritating Communist scratches, they would be well advised to ask sooner rather than later just what it is about all-embracing “systems” of thought that leads inexorably to all-embracing “systems” of rule. On this, as we have seen, Leszek Kołakowski can be read with much profit. But history records that there is nothing so powerful as a fantasy whose time has come.
This essay, published on the occasion of Norton’s praiseworthy decision to republish in one volume Leszek Kołakowski’s
Main Currents of Marxism
, first appeared in the
New York Review of Books
in September 2006. My brief allu
sion to E.
P.
Thompson provoked a spirited retort from Mr. Edward Countryman.
His letter and my reply were published in the
New York Review of Books
, vol. 54, no. ii, February 2007.
Main Currents of Marxism
, first appeared in the
New York Review of Books
in September 2006. My brief allu
sion to E.
P.
Thompson provoked a spirited retort from Mr. Edward Countryman.
His letter and my reply were published in the
New York Review of Books
, vol. 54, no. ii, February 2007.
NOTES TO CHAPTER VIII
1
“On Exile, Philosophy & Tottering Insecurely on the Edge of an Unknown Abyss,” dialogue between Leszek Kołakowski and Danny Postel,
Daedalus
(Summer 2005): 82.
Daedalus
(Summer 2005): 82.
2
Glowne Nurty Marksizmu
(Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1976);
Main Currents of Marxism
(Oxford: Clarendon Press/Oxford University Press, 1978; New York: Norton, 2006).
(Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1976);
Main Currents of Marxism
(Oxford: Clarendon Press/Oxford University Press, 1978; New York: Norton, 2006).
3
See, e.g., his
Chrétiens sans église: la conscience réligieuse et le lien confessional au XVIIe siècle
(Paris: Gallimard, 1969);
God Owes Us Nothing: A Brief Remark on Pascal’s Religion and on the Spirit of Jansenism
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); and the essays collected in
My Correct Views on Everything
, notably “The Devil in History” and “Concern with God in an Apparently Godless Era.”
Chrétiens sans église: la conscience réligieuse et le lien confessional au XVIIe siècle
(Paris: Gallimard, 1969);
God Owes Us Nothing: A Brief Remark on Pascal’s Religion and on the Spirit of Jansenism
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); and the essays collected in
My Correct Views on Everything
, notably “The Devil in History” and “Concern with God in an Apparently Godless Era.”
4
Andrzej Walicki,
Marxism and the Leap to the Kingdom of Freedom: The Rise and Fall of the
Communist Utopia
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), vii. Of his own journey from confident orthodoxy to skeptical opposition, Kołakowski has just this to say: “True, I was almost omniscient (yet not entirely) when I was twenty years old, but, as you know, people grow stupid when they grow older. I was much less omniscient when I was twenty-eight, and still less now.” See “My Correct Views on Everything: A Rejoinder to E. P. Thompson,” originally published in
The Socialist Register
, 1974; reprinted in
My Correct Views on Everything
, p. 19.
Marxism and the Leap to the Kingdom of Freedom: The Rise and Fall of the
Communist Utopia
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), vii. Of his own journey from confident orthodoxy to skeptical opposition, Kołakowski has just this to say: “True, I was almost omniscient (yet not entirely) when I was twenty years old, but, as you know, people grow stupid when they grow older. I was much less omniscient when I was twenty-eight, and still less now.” See “My Correct Views on Everything: A Rejoinder to E. P. Thompson,” originally published in
The Socialist Register
, 1974; reprinted in
My Correct Views on Everything
, p. 19.
5
Kelles-Krauz, at least, has been retrieved from neglect by Timothy Snyder, whose
Nationalism, Marxism and Modern Central Europe: A Biography of Kazimierz Kelles-Krauz, 1872-1905
was published by Harvard University Press in 1997.
Nationalism, Marxism and Modern Central Europe: A Biography of Kazimierz Kelles-Krauz, 1872-1905
was published by Harvard University Press in 1997.
6
Elsewhere Kołakowski writes of Lukács—who served briefly as cultural commissar in Béla Kun’s Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919 and later, at Stalin’s behest, abjured every interesting word he ever penned—that he was a great talent who “put his intellect at the service of a tyrant.” As a result, “his books inspire no interesting thought and are considered ‘things of the past’ even in Hungary, his native country.” See “Communism as a Cultural Formation,”
Survey
29, no. 2 (Summer 1985); reprinted in
My Correct Views on Everything
as “Communism as a Cultural Force,” p. 81.
Survey
29, no. 2 (Summer 1985); reprinted in
My Correct Views on Everything
as “Communism as a Cultural Force,” p. 81.
7
See “What Is Left of Socialism,” first published as “Po co nam pojecie sprawiedliwosci spolecznej?” in
Gazeta Wyborcza
, May 6-8, 1995; republished in
My Correct Views on Everything
.
Gazeta Wyborcza
, May 6-8, 1995; republished in
My Correct Views on Everything
.
8
In
Main Currents
Marx is firmly placed in the German philosophical world that dominated his mental landscape. Marx the social theorist receives short shrift. As for Marx’s contributions to economics—whether the labor theory of value or the predicted fall in the rate of profit under advanced capitalism—these get little sustained attention. Considering that Marx himself was unhappy with the outcome of his economic investigations (one reason why
Das Kapital
remained unfinished), this should perhaps be thought a mercy: The predictive powers of Marxian economics have long been discounted even by the Left, at least since Joseph A. Schumpeter’s
Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy
(New York, London: Harper and Brothers, 1942). Twenty years later, Paul Samuelson condescended to allow that Karl Marx was at best “a minor post-Ricardian.”
Main Currents
Marx is firmly placed in the German philosophical world that dominated his mental landscape. Marx the social theorist receives short shrift. As for Marx’s contributions to economics—whether the labor theory of value or the predicted fall in the rate of profit under advanced capitalism—these get little sustained attention. Considering that Marx himself was unhappy with the outcome of his economic investigations (one reason why
Das Kapital
remained unfinished), this should perhaps be thought a mercy: The predictive powers of Marxian economics have long been discounted even by the Left, at least since Joseph A. Schumpeter’s
Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy
(New York, London: Harper and Brothers, 1942). Twenty years later, Paul Samuelson condescended to allow that Karl Marx was at best “a minor post-Ricardian.”
Even for some of his own disciples, Marxist economics were rendered moot by history within a few years of their first appearance. In
Evolutionary Socialism
(first published in 1899), Engels’s friend Eduard Bernstein decisively dismantled the prediction that the contradictions of capitalist competition must lead to worsening conditions for workers and a crisis that could only be resolved by revolution. The best English-language discussion of this subject is still Carl E. Schorske,
German Social Democracy, 1905-1917: The Development of the Great Schism
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1955).
Evolutionary Socialism
(first published in 1899), Engels’s friend Eduard Bernstein decisively dismantled the prediction that the contradictions of capitalist competition must lead to worsening conditions for workers and a crisis that could only be resolved by revolution. The best English-language discussion of this subject is still Carl E. Schorske,
German Social Democracy, 1905-1917: The Development of the Great Schism
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1955).
9
Kołakowski, “The Devil in History,”
Encounter,
January 1981; reprinted in
My Correct Views on Everything
, p. 125.
Encounter,
January 1981; reprinted in
My Correct Views on Everything
, p. 125.
10
The best single-volume study of Marxism, brilliantly compressed but embracing politics and social history as well as men and ideas, remains George Lichtheim’s
Marxism: An Historical and Critical Study
, first published in London in 1961. Of Marx himself, two very different biographies from the seventies, by David McLellan (
Karl Marx: His Life and Thought
, New York: Harper and Row, 1974) and Jerrold Seigel (
Marx’s Fate: The Shape of a Life
, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), remain the best modern accounts, but should be supplemented with Isaiah Berlin’s remarkable essay
Karl Marx: His Life and Environment
, which first appeared in 1939.
Marxism: An Historical and Critical Study
, first published in London in 1961. Of Marx himself, two very different biographies from the seventies, by David McLellan (
Karl Marx: His Life and Thought
, New York: Harper and Row, 1974) and Jerrold Seigel (
Marx’s Fate: The Shape of a Life
, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), remain the best modern accounts, but should be supplemented with Isaiah Berlin’s remarkable essay
Karl Marx: His Life and Environment
, which first appeared in 1939.
11
“The Devil in History,” in
My Correct Views
, p. 133. A little later in the same interview Kołakowski emphasizes again the eschatological structure of political messianism: descent into hell, absolute break with past sins, the arrival of a New Time. But in the absence of God, such undertakings are condemned to incoherence; faith pretending to be knowledge doesn’t work. See pp. 136-137.
My Correct Views
, p. 133. A little later in the same interview Kołakowski emphasizes again the eschatological structure of political messianism: descent into hell, absolute break with past sins, the arrival of a New Time. But in the absence of God, such undertakings are condemned to incoherence; faith pretending to be knowledge doesn’t work. See pp. 136-137.
12
The unreliability of such witnesses was a long-standing theme of Western progressive apologetics for Stalinism. In much the same way, American Sovietologists used to discount evidence or testimony from Soviet bloc exiles or émigrés—too much personal experience, it was widely agreed, can distort a person’s perspective and inhibit objective analysis.
13
Kołakowski’s scorn for
bien-pensant
Western progressives was widely shared by fellow Poles and other “Easterners.” In 1976 the poet Antonin Słonimski recalled Jean-Paul Sartre’s encouragement to Soviet bloc writers twenty years earlier not to abandon Socialist Realism lest this weaken the “Socialist Camp” vis-à-vis the Americans: “Freedom for him, every limitation for us!” See “L’Ordre règne à Varsovie,”
Kultura
3 (1976): 26- 27, quoted in Marci Shore,
Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation’s Life and Death in Marxism, 1918-1968
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 362.
bien-pensant
Western progressives was widely shared by fellow Poles and other “Easterners.” In 1976 the poet Antonin Słonimski recalled Jean-Paul Sartre’s encouragement to Soviet bloc writers twenty years earlier not to abandon Socialist Realism lest this weaken the “Socialist Camp” vis-à-vis the Americans: “Freedom for him, every limitation for us!” See “L’Ordre règne à Varsovie,”
Kultura
3 (1976): 26- 27, quoted in Marci Shore,
Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation’s Life and Death in Marxism, 1918-1968
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 362.
14
See Maurice Merleau-Ponty,
Humanisme et terreur: essai sur le problème communiste
(Paris: Gallimard, 1947). The quotation is from the 1969 American edition,
Humanism and Terror
(Boston: Beacon), p. 153. For an exemplary account of the founding generation of Polish Communist intellectuals (a startlingly gifted group of artists and writers born around 1900, the last to be educated in the old polyglot empires and the first to come of age in independent Poland), see Marci Shore’s recently published
Caviar and Ashes,
a scholarly elegy to a lost world.
Humanisme et terreur: essai sur le problème communiste
(Paris: Gallimard, 1947). The quotation is from the 1969 American edition,
Humanism and Terror
(Boston: Beacon), p. 153. For an exemplary account of the founding generation of Polish Communist intellectuals (a startlingly gifted group of artists and writers born around 1900, the last to be educated in the old polyglot empires and the first to come of age in independent Poland), see Marci Shore’s recently published
Caviar and Ashes,
a scholarly elegy to a lost world.
15
Raymond Aron, “Un philosophe libéral dans l’histoire” (1973), in
Essais sur la condition juive contemporaine
(Paris: Éditions de la Fallois, 1989), 222. See also Aron,
D’une sainte famille à l’autre: essais sur les marxismes imaginaries
(Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 11: “Like the friends of my youth I never separated philosophy from politics, nor thought from commitment; but I devoted rather more time than them to the study of economics and social mechanisms. In this sense I believe I was more faithful to Marx than they were.” A full quarter century after his death, Aron’s lectures on Marx at the Collège de France were reconstituted and published by his former students and colleagues under the revealing title
Le Marxisme de Marx
(Paris: Éditions de Fallois, 2002).
Essais sur la condition juive contemporaine
(Paris: Éditions de la Fallois, 1989), 222. See also Aron,
D’une sainte famille à l’autre: essais sur les marxismes imaginaries
(Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 11: “Like the friends of my youth I never separated philosophy from politics, nor thought from commitment; but I devoted rather more time than them to the study of economics and social mechanisms. In this sense I believe I was more faithful to Marx than they were.” A full quarter century after his death, Aron’s lectures on Marx at the Collège de France were reconstituted and published by his former students and colleagues under the revealing title
Le Marxisme de Marx
(Paris: Éditions de Fallois, 2002).
16
György Konrád and Ivan Szelényi,
The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power
(New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1979). Waclaw Machajski, an early-twentieth-century Polish anarchist, anticipated just this aspect of Marxism in his criticism of the implicit privileges that Marxist social democracy would accord the intelligentsia. See Marshal Shatz,
Jan Waclaw Machajski: A Radical Critic of the Russian Intelligentsia and Socialism
(Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989). Kołakowski discusses Machajski briefly in
Main Currents
(pp. 493, 917) and in “The Myth of Human Self-Identity,” in
The Socialist Idea: A Reappraisal
, edited by Leszek Kołakowski and Stuart Hampshire (New York: Basic Books, 1974), reprinted in
My Correct Views on Everything
.
The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power
(New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1979). Waclaw Machajski, an early-twentieth-century Polish anarchist, anticipated just this aspect of Marxism in his criticism of the implicit privileges that Marxist social democracy would accord the intelligentsia. See Marshal Shatz,
Jan Waclaw Machajski: A Radical Critic of the Russian Intelligentsia and Socialism
(Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989). Kołakowski discusses Machajski briefly in
Main Currents
(pp. 493, 917) and in “The Myth of Human Self-Identity,” in
The Socialist Idea: A Reappraisal
, edited by Leszek Kołakowski and Stuart Hampshire (New York: Basic Books, 1974), reprinted in
My Correct Views on Everything
.
17
Seigel,
Marx‘s Fate
, p. x.
Marx‘s Fate
, p. x.
18
Intelligent proponents of globalization, like Jagdish Bhagwati, insist that free trade and international competition have not directly reduced the real wages of workers in advanced countries. But it is the threat of outsourcing, job loss, or factory relocation that restrains pressure for higher wages, not the fact of competition per se—and it applies with equal effect in unionized, “Rhineland” economies like Germany and more competitive societies like the U.S. But even Bhagwati concedes that there has been a steady depression of real wages in advanced countries, though in his optimistic account globalization has at least helped slow the process somewhat. See Jagdish Bhagwati,
In Defense of Globalization
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 123-124. See also the remarks by Paul Donovan, an economist at UBS, quoted in the
Financial Times
, June 5, 2006, p. 1: “The US labour market may be tightening but there is still an ample supply of workers worldwide, and this may be capping what domestic workers can demand.”
In Defense of Globalization
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 123-124. See also the remarks by Paul Donovan, an economist at UBS, quoted in the
Financial Times
, June 5, 2006, p. 1: “The US labour market may be tightening but there is still an ample supply of workers worldwide, and this may be capping what domestic workers can demand.”
19
Quoted in S. S. Prawer’s
Karl Marx and World Literature
(Oxford: Oxford University Press/ Clarendon Press, 1976), 151.
Karl Marx and World Literature
(Oxford: Oxford University Press/ Clarendon Press, 1976), 151.
20
Marx received 28 percent of the votes cast, more than Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, and Kant combined. David Hume came second with 13 percent. For Attali see Jacques Attali,
Karl Marx ou l’esprit du monde
(Paris: Fayard, 2005).
Karl Marx ou l’esprit du monde
(Paris: Fayard, 2005).
CHAPTER IX
A “Pope of Ideas”? John Paul II and the Modern World
The glossy publicity material for
His Holiness,
a book published simultaneously in eight countries and in excerpted form by
Reader’s Digest,
contains a list of nineteen “Possible Questions” for the authors.
9
Designed for anticipated press conferences and interviews, these questions are anything but probing and do not suggest that the authors, both investigative journalists, hold their colleagues in high esteem. Nevertheless, such “puff” questions are revealing in their way: More than half of them are invitations to the authors to boast of their discoveries, and they show that Bernstein and Politi (who writes for the Italian daily
La Repubblica
) mean their subtitle to be taken seriously. They do believe that they have brought to light the hidden history of our time.
His Holiness,
a book published simultaneously in eight countries and in excerpted form by
Reader’s Digest,
contains a list of nineteen “Possible Questions” for the authors.
9
Designed for anticipated press conferences and interviews, these questions are anything but probing and do not suggest that the authors, both investigative journalists, hold their colleagues in high esteem. Nevertheless, such “puff” questions are revealing in their way: More than half of them are invitations to the authors to boast of their discoveries, and they show that Bernstein and Politi (who writes for the Italian daily
La Repubblica
) mean their subtitle to be taken seriously. They do believe that they have brought to light the hidden history of our time.
Their book is written in a style appropriate to such a claim, rhetorically inflated and awash in hints of secret conversations, confidential informants, and unrevealable sources. In their chatty descriptions of people, places, and events, the authors miss few opportunities to reproduce a cliché. A Jewish attorney in the pope’s birthplace is said to have been held “in the highest esteem both by his co-religionists and by most of the Gentile movers and shakers of Wadowice.” As a substitute for an account of Karol Wojtyła’s debt to Polish literature, we are told that “Adam Mickiewicz, the Romantic bard, in particular set strings resonating in Karol.” At audiences with the new pope, we learn, “nuns went crazy.”
His Holiness
is simultaneously urgent and soggy, with gobbets of interesting information adrift in a tumbling onrush of breathless, “colorful” prose.
1
His Holiness
is simultaneously urgent and soggy, with gobbets of interesting information adrift in a tumbling onrush of breathless, “colorful” prose.
1
What have our authors discovered that lay hidden before? According to their own claim, two things. First, a hitherto unknown alliance during the 1980s between Pope John Paul II and the Reagan administration, whose aim was to bring down Communism in Europe and prevent its appearance in Central America. Second, that the role of the pope in engineering the downfall of Communism in Europe was vastly more important than anyone had hitherto suspected. They also claim to have revealed for the first time the nature and extent of U.S. (covert) support for Solidarity after the imposition of martial law in Poland in December 1981, and to have shown that it was papal influence that shaped U.S. policy in other matters—notably the opposition of the Reagan and Bush administrations to international agencies that support and practice family planning.
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