Vladimir Tismaneanu - The Devil in History

In this respect, the late Soviet dissident and philosopher Aleksandr Zinovyev was right to delineate a perfect continuity from the first Stalinist generation—those people who perpetrated the crimes or supported the whole terrorist system—to the contemporary distant, cold, pseudosophisticated cultural (ideological) clerk making use of Marxist rhetoric to cover a moral and intellectual vacuum. However, it is difficult to sympathize with Zinovyev’s simplistic attempt to identify Marxism with Stalinism and his total lack of interest in the “heretic” tradition of Marxism. Zinovyev banished as irrelevant all “revisionist” developments, the entire Hegelian-Marxist heritage and the contemporary negative-dialectical currents, as well as the para-Marxist criticism of totalitarian bureaucracy. He refused the possibility of “critical-genuine” Marxism, rejected as hypocritical and logically inconsistent any position attempting to separate original doctrine from adulterated practice: “Stalin was the most genuine and the most devoted Marxist…. Stalin was perfectly adjusted to the historical process which engendered him.” 54Zinovyev’s negative attitude toward Western Marxism, his skeptical approach to negative dialectics and generally to any hypostasis of philosophical radicalism, should be related to the general metaphysical malaise Soviet and East European intellectuals expressed in their dissatisfaction with the “democratic illusions” and Socialist strategies promoted by the “radical humanist opposition” in the advanced industrial societies. At any rate, he showed a certain short-sightedness, ignoring the libertarian dimension of critical reason and underrating the absolute divorce between this outlook and the bureaucratic-Institutional orthodoxy. To reject de plano the validity and relevance of the antitotalitarian Marxist arguments meant suppressing a valuable segment of the necessary criticism of neo-Stalinist régimes and erasing a whole tradition of utopian-emancipatory thought.

The publication of the young Marx’s philosophical contributions had a tremendous impact in East European societies, because they were perceived as a true manifesto of the freedom of subjectivity, the emancipation of revolutionary praxis, and an unbounded approach to the social, economic, political, and cultural problems of Soviet-type regimes. The young Marx was a precious ally of liberal forces against the political conservatism of the dominant bureaucracies of Eastern Europe; a sensitive reading of these writings revealed irrefutable arguments against the oppressive prevailing order. To use Dick Howard’s formulation, “Marx did announce that the specter of democracy is haunting Europe.” In rediscovering Marx, East European revisionists discovered the democratic implications of his theory. 55

The entire unorthodox Marxist tradition was eventually summoned to participate in the struggle against sclerotic social and economic structures: from Rosa Luxemburg to Trotsky, form the young Lukács and Karl Korsch to Wilhelm Reich and Erich Fromm, from Gramsci to Sartre to the Frankfurt School, a whole intellectual thesaurus was invoked and developed in this offensive against the authoritarian bureaucracies. It was like the unexpected revival of a forgotten tradition, an evanescent osmosis with the impossible utopia , a tragic endeavor to recreate a mentality altogether opposed to the self-satisfactory, philistine logic of the monopolistic Communist elite. In partaking of this revolutionary and Marxist tradition, revisionist intellectuals had yet to renounce socialism. The young Marx’s impulse was thereby unified with the rebellious legacy of classical German idealism; the unhappy consciousness was breaking loose from bureaucratic coercion. It was, therefore, logical that the counterreaction of the ideological apparatus consisted in supporting regimented philosophical and sociological investigations, those research areas that avoided the collision with the power monopoly of the Communist Party. Paradoxically, the watchful guarantors of official doctrine became supporters of the epistemological, praxiological, and logical researches, openly encouraging the once abhorred wertfrei approaches.

Avoiding any simplifying scheme, we can distinguish three fundamental levels of ideological-spiritual stratification within the East European “bureaucratic-collectivist” societies in the 1960s and 1970s. First of all, there was the official ideological party apparatus, whose main concern was to preserve the purity and the integrity of the apologetic dominant doctrine and to ensure its hegemony. There were, of course, differences among the East European regimes: in Hungary the party bureaucrats spoke about the hegemony of Marxism, whereas in Romania or the GDR Marxism, or more precisely, the party interpretation of Marxism, was supposed to enjoy a total cultural-philosophical monopoly. The second level comprises the intellectuals trusted by the party apparatus, who shared the dominant values and myths of the regime. The party recruited many future apparatchiks from within their ranks, especially in the cultural field, thus bringing about a new social structure of the political elite. The third level was represented by those whose subversive and antisystemic voices become gradually more articulated from the ranks of the silent intellectual majority. This stratum was that of the challenging subgroup of dissidents and was made up both of all-out anti-Communists and of those who started along the path of revision but through disenchantment found the door open to apostasy. The interaction between these three camps, especially in the last decade of the Soviet bloc, represents one of the most important keys in explaining the sudden and shocking end of Communist regimes. Their respective positions set up the trajectories for liberalization and democratization in the region.

Turning back to a general assessment of critical Marxism, one must stress that this phenomenon signified more than just resurrection of the original humanist-emancipatory drive of the philosophy of praxis. It brought about a new sense of intellectual responsibility, rejuvenating the critical dimension of spiritual action. In this respect, providing a different matrix than its counterpart in the Western world, the critical Marxist paradigm developed by East European radical thinkers offered the main epistemological and historical-political categories and concepts necessary for a comprehensive criticism of authoritarian-bureaucratic institutions and methods and provided as well the prerequisites for a project of essential change. That was the reason for the angry attack on Rudolf Bahro in the GDR, for the unexpected rage of the Kádár regime regarding the theoretical conclusions worked out by Konrád and Szeleńy, the denunciation of the Prague Spring efforts to humanize socialism, or the “moderate” persecution of the Budapest School. In the words of historian Vladislav Zubok, “The regime, as before, did not want to encourage an autonomous civic spirit or share its control over the cultural sphere with intellectuals, writers, and artists.” 56

The ideological state apparatuses in Soviet-type regimes had no greater fear than the crystallization of the interior resistance, the structuring of a critical social consciousness, the radicalization of the intelligentsia. The latter was perceived as the most perilous evolution, a menace to the stability of the dominant institutions and values. East European critical Marxism attempted to counterbalance the inept official “dialectical triumphalism,” the conservative-dogmatic functionalism promoted by the ruling Communist parties. Its project was to offer the spiritual weapons for criticism of the system in order to engender a more humane, less asphyxiating, eventually democratic socio-political order. Ultimately, it succeeded, as correctly shown by Ferenc Fehér, in transforming “the semantic potentialities of their vocabulary into the language of an actual politics of dissent.” 57