Revolutionaries (25 page)

Is it therefore likely that what attracted ‘revisionists' to the Hegelian Marx was not so much what they were to find in him in the 1950s – Lukács's own deductions from him were far from liberal – but the fact that he was defined as heterodox, and that his champions, exposed to the nagging and thundering of the party hacks, therefore attracted the critical young. To read ‘revisionism' back into the Marx of 1844 or the Lukács of 1923 is, to a much greater extent than either the orthodox or the authors of this symposium appear to realize, hindsight. It is also to oversimplify the process by which ideas, some more and some less suitable for the purpose, are adapted to certain political attitudes, because the attitude requires the idea rather than the other way round.

Such procedures are not the only ones likely to confuse the reader of this book who seeks chiefly to discover what ‘revisionism' as an historical phenomenon is about. Though one would not suppose so from a symposium which ranges impartially over Bernstein and Trotsky, Bukharin and Otto Bauer, Luxemburg, Plekhanov, Deborin, Lukács and Tito, historically ‘revisionism' consists of two relatively brief periods in the doctrinal history of marxism, one round the turn of the last century, the other since the 1950s. Both have certain things in common. Both occurred at times when the course of events – in particular the strength and prosperity of capitalism in the western world – appeared to throw grave doubts on the predictions of its imminent demise which marxists believed, and hence on the general analysis on which these were thought to be based. Both were therefore associated with a ‘crisis in marxism' (the term was coined by T.G. Masaryk in 1897), i.e. with attempts to revise or supplement it, or to look for satisfactory or realistic bases for socialist action. Both these periods of hesitation proved temporary, but while they lasted they were chiefly confined to the countries in which the old-fashioned revolutionary perspectives of marxism had grown
dim or pointless. Those in which they were not remained largely immune.

As in 1896–1905 the Russians, the Poles, the Bulgarians and the Serbs were the strongest defenders of the old verities of class struggle and revolutionary forward sweeps, so in the 1950s Asia, Africa and Latin America remained largely untroubled by the events which convulsed the communist parties of Europe. It is in these countries that the Chinese, now the defenders of old truth against new dilution, have sought or found most of their support within communist movements.

In both cases, moreover, the trademark ‘revisionism' was or ought to be applied not, as the editor of this volume suggests, to all unofficial deviations from accepted marxist orthodoxy, but only to one type: that situated in the political topography of socialism on the right. This was quite clear in 1900, when ‘revisionism' meant the marxist Fabianism of Bernstein and was coined to describe it. It was not so clear in the 1950s, when orthodox communists leaders hastened to apply the name, which clearly suggested the abandonment of class struggle, revolution and socialism to all who were familiar with it, to all dissidents to whom it could be plausibly attached. Paradoxically in this respect they had much in common with the present symposium. Nevertheless it is clear in this period also that on the global issues which divided ‘revisionists' from their opponents – the stability and prospects of capitalism, gradualism versus old-style revolution, the virtues of bourgeois democracy or bourgeois thought, and the like – the ‘revisionists' were those who stood on the right of the communist spectrum.

Of course they included various degrees of moderation, and it might well be desirable to confine the name to those who, in theory or fact, moved from their original leninism to something hard to distinguish from western social democracy or liberalism, for instance to Mr Djilas. In practice such a distinction is impossible to maintain clearly, partly because many east
European revisionists of this kind prefer, for obvious reasons, the camouflage of leninist argument, partly because static distinctions falsify the nature of ideas which are still in evolution, partly because everyone likes to have some revisionist on his right wing from whom he can demonstratively distinguish himself. Nevertheless it has some meaning. Mr Gomulka, though clearly a right-winger by the standards of classical communist discussion, was plainly a communist and likely to remain one. This was not the case with several of the young Polish revisionists of the
Po Prostu
circle.

In one respect, of course, the two episodes are unlike. The revisionism of the 1950s was largely preoccupied with the internal problems of socialism – especially with stalinism – which did not exist in 1900. It therefore became inextricably tangled up with several traditional debates within the socialist movement such as that between libertarian and state socialism and with the Soviet controversies of the 1920s. These had no original connection with right-wing revisionism. On the contrary, they were often raised by the utopian or non-utopian left or at all events by those who, like Rosa Luxemburg and Trotsky, had impeccable credentials as radical revolutionists, and vociferous opponents of the original revisionism. Moreover, in the reaction against stalinism it was natural for communists to search for precedent and inspiration among non-stalinist or pre-stalinist marxists, and almost any neglected or divergent marxist might do. Hence interminable confusion. Thus stalinist suppression and the soundness of his criticisms of many Soviet tendencies made Trotsky popular among some revisionists. At the same time the wing of the communist movement which then most clearly represented the Trotskyite approach to world revolution was without doubt the Chinese.

None of these confusions is effectively dissipated by the symposium of twenty-seven studies, on rather haphazardly chosen subjects, several already published in one form or
another, which Mr Leopold Labedz has edited. It will give the reader a convenient conspectus of the work of some relatively undocumented thinkers, some interesting arguments (e.g. about Lukács) and some information about writers, journals or groups of mainly secondary importance in the West. Except for two lesser chapters on India and Japan, it neglects the extra-European world entirely. Except for Mr Galli's Italian chapter, it pays little attention to the crises within the western communist parties, which are an obvious part of the phenomenon of ‘revisionism'. Professor Coser in an essay on the United States actually succeeds in not mentioning the American
CP
at all, and Mr Duvignaud, in what is admittedly the most parochial of all the chapters, leaves us entirely in the dark about the French political situation – e.g. about the role of the Algerian war in crystallizing discontent within the
CP
– and omits even such leading dissident marxists as Lucien Goldmann and Serge Mallet.

Some of these omissions are no doubt due to the inevitable difficulties of editing a symposium, the quickest but also one of the least satisfactory ways of making a book. Others, however, are due to the general limitations of the historical approach which this work appears to represent. We still await the book which will put the ‘revisionism' of the 1950s in its perspective as an historic phenomenon. The present collection of essays may feed a temporary curiosity among amateur ‘students of communism' and ‘sovietologists', but it is doubtful whether its permanent mark on the literature of modern communism will be great.

¹
Leopold Labedz (ed.),
Revisionism, Essays on the History of Marxist Ideas
, London 1962.

In our age men distrust the western universe and do not expect much of the future except perhaps Crusoe's luck, a personal island off the beaten track. To resist the assaults of the large machines made by and of men, to survive the consequences of collective human lunacy, are the highest ambitions of Atlantic intellectuals. Even the dream of the hungry, a continent filled with T-bone steaks and television quizzes, turns into a reality of ulcers and fatty degeneration. A modest wariness seems the best posture for man: lack of passion his least harmful social goal.

Can we, after all, it is argued, hope for anything better than that the human race will just avoid blowing up its planet, that political institutions will maintain a gentle order among foolish or sinful men, with perhaps a little improvement here and there; that a tacit truce be established between ideals and realities, individuals and collectivities? It is probably no accident that the four major states of the west were at the end of the 1950s presided over by paternal or avuncular images drawn (in Europe at least) from memories of the last age of stability which our continent recalls, that before 1914.

An entire generation was educated into such emotional middle age in the affluent but insecure societies of the postwar west, and its ideologists have been those of despair or scepticism. Fortunately the education has been ineffective. Already the late
products of the 1950s, works like Mr Daniel Bell's
End of Ideology
or Professor Talmon's
High Tide of Political Messianism
, are oddly out of tune with the passionate, turbulent, confused but hopeful atmosphere of that international phenomenon, the intellectual ‘new left'. Perhaps it is time for Ernst Bloch's
Das Prinzip Hoffnung
.
¹
The historian of the future may well see this noble and massive work – all 1,657 pages of it testifying to its subject – standing outside the 1960s as the arch used to stand outside Euston station: symbolically, though not functionally, anticipating new departures.

Hope is Professor Bloch's subject and indeed has been so since his unduly neglected career as a philosopher of men's dreams began with
Geistder Utopie
(l9l8) and
Thomas Münzer als Theologe der Revolution
(1921). Hope bore him through the years of American exile when the present work was written (1938–47). It appears before us now in both an East and a West German edition, as revised in 1953 and 1959.

It is a strange, overcrowded, sometimes absurd, but nevertheless superb work. The British reader may find it well-nigh incredible, for in our country the old-fashioned philosopher as our grandparents knew him is dying out like the bison of the prairies, hunted down by the mathematical logicians and the definers of askable questions. The German reader will recognize in him a splendid specimen of traditional German romantic philosophy, a sort of marxist Schelling, as one reviewer has with some justice called him. But even in his native country philosophers such as he are now rare. No doubt, like several other aspects of traditional German culture, they found it easier to survive in East Germany under a crust of doctrinaire marxism than in the Americanized West. At all events it has struck at least one West German critic as ‘irritating' that so magnificently and archetypically German a phenomenon as Professor Bloch's
philosophy should come from ‘beyond the Elbe'. However, he has remained a somewhat isolated figure since his transfer to the Federal Republic.

The starting point of Professor Bloch's argument is the empirical observation that man, in spite of the gloomier
littérateurs
, is a hoping animal. To be unsatisfied, to wish to envisage a more general state when things could be other (i.e. better) than they are, is the most elementary form of this fundamental human urge. Its highest form is Utopia – the construction of perfection which men seek or try to realize or which at least hangs above them like an intellectual sun. Such Utopia is not confined to the building of ideal commonwealths. There are images of desire everywhere: in our dreams of perfect bodily health and beauty, pushing back sickness, old age and even death: in those of a society without want. There are the images of a world transformed by the technical control of nature, the dream buildings or cities imperfectly reflected in all but the most modestly functional architecture of real life. The Utopia of a lost or undiscovered Eden or Eldorado haunted the explorers; the dream landscape of perfection – ‘a world more adequately fitted to man' – haunts poetry, opera and painting. There are the perspectives of absolute wisdom.

But for Professor Bloch Utopia is more even than this wide range of ‘anticipations, images of desire, the contents of hope'. It lies in all men who strive to ‘realize themselves', i.e. to realize here and now the ideal of full humanity which we know to be latent in ourselves. It lies in the dream of eternity in this life, as in Faust's longing for the moment of life which shall be everlasting: ‘Verweile doch, du bist so schön'. This dream of the present intensified into eternity finds its expression for Bloch in the art of music. It lies finally in the revolt against the limits of man's life and fate, in the images of hope against death, which find a mythical expression in our religions.

But hope, desire of change, Utopia, are not merely
fundamental aspects of human behaviour. They represent reality because for Professor Bloch they echo the fundamental fact of change in nature, which is itself thereby oriented towards the future. Life itself, being in evolution, ‘unfinished' and, therefore, changeable and perfectible, gives man scope for Utopia and is its objective counterpart. There is for Professor Bloch a materialist-utopian tradition in philosophy from which he would claim descent: that of the ‘Aristotelian left', which took the master's doctrine of entelechy as its starting point and developed a concept of self-moving and self-creating matter. Some late Greeks, the medieval Islamic Aristotelians, an entire body of heretical Christian thought culminating in Giordano Bruno, belong to this tradition; so in spite of his deliberate philosophic idealism, does Hegel, at least in part. And so, using this tradition to help turn Hegelianism right side up, does Marx, in whom the utopian tradition and utopian hope reach their first really adequate practical and philosophical expression. For in Marx the gap between the wish and its fulfilment, the present and the future, is at last closed.