Vladimir Tismaneanu - The Devil in History

The most significant theoretical achievement of critical Marxism in the Soviet bloc was the enhancement of the humanist, antitotalitarian potential of dialectics, the illumination of the negative-emancipatory substratum neglected and occulted by the official triumphalist-apologetic doctrine, and the revelation of the latent radical tendencies within the bureaucratic continuum. The philosophical and sociological researches undertaken by Kołakowski, Karel Kosik, or the Budapest School contributed to the revival of the qualitas occulta of dialectics, the renaissance of negativity in a social universe that seemed saturated with a distressing positivity. Yugoslav critical Marxism does not enter the area encompassed by this study, for many reasons, at once historical, economic, sociological, and cultural. Nevertheless, the philosophical and sociological investigations carried out by the Praxis group (Mihailo Markovič, Svetozar Stojanovič, Gajo Petrovič, Predrag Vranicki, and others) furthered the theoretical consolidation of the humanist criticism of Soviet-type authoritarian-bureaucratic regimes. Their main objective was to establish a metaphysical and sociological humanism as a counterpedagogy that would have both therapeutic and prophylactic consequences. Another very important function of the Praxis group was their distillation of revisionist thinking from across Eastern Europe in the pages of their journal. The latter became the most important platform of antibureaucratic opposition in the region. At the same time, Praxis succeeded in developing collaborations with anti-Communist thinkers such as Ernst Bloch, Lucien Goldmann, Erich Fromm, and André Gorz. 58One should mention, however, that the relationship between certain East European critical Marxists and the Western New Left was rather contradictory. The latter was suspected of despotic-terrorist temptations and accused, more than once, of messianic sectarism. Kołakowski’s merciless criticism of utopian millenarianism in his Main Currents of Marxism expressed more than a dissatisfaction with the desperate powerlessness of negative dialectics: it was an invitation for critical Marxists to go beyond their ideological and emotional attachments, to assume the basic ambivalence of their doctrine, to honestly examine Marxist false consciousness, and to transcend the metaphysical paradigm of Hegelian-Marxist radicalism.

From France to Czechoslovakia, from Germany to Poland, from Spain to Italy, from the United States to the Soviet Union, the second half of the sixties was defined by the challenges of redefining oppositional politics, with varying degrees of participation and representation in efforts to assert the awakening of society as a response to a perceived crisis of the state. The fundamental difference among these movements was their attitude toward utopia , with crucial consequences for the reconceptualization of the political in all these countries. Some were anti-ideological, others were against established structures of authority, but all were variants of an activism advocating the new societal differentiations developed in the aftermath of the Second World War. The circumstances of bipolarism imposed, nevertheless, a significant difference in rationale: in the West, the logic of 1968 was of politically emancipating spaces previously exempt from public scrutiny; in the East, it was about humanizing Leninism, breaking its ideologically driven monopolistic grip on society. 59Or, to invoke Milan Kundera, the Parisian May was “an explosion of revolutionary lyricism,” while the Prague Spring was “an explosion of post-revolutionary skepticism.” 60

In the Soviet bloc, the crushing of the Prague Spring, the March events in Poland, and the turmoil in Yugoslavia brought about the “death of revisionism” (as Adam Michnik put it). In the West, the inability to articulate a coherent vision of an alternative order and the incapacity to sustain revolutionary action generated a departure from what Arthur Marwick called the “Great Marxisant Fallacy.” 61Tony Judt accurately notes that despite its claims of novelty and radical change, the sixties were still very much dominated by one grand master narrative “offering to make sense of everything while leaving open a place for human initiative: the political project of Marxism itself.” 62The movement of 1968 was a blessing in disguise because through its failures it revitalized liberalism. Agnes Heller perceptively summarized the essential impact of these momentous events: they strengthened the center. 63For the first time in the twentieth century, the hegemony of radical thought among European intellectuals was in retreat.

The year 1968, in the Soviet bloc, signaled the retreat from revisionism and the inception of the dissident movement, a large-scale, cross-regional “goodbye to Marx.” With historical hindsight, one can also identify it as the threshold for the gradual decomposition of the Communist regimes. The system had lost its initial totalizing drive; stagnation and immobility were its main characteristics. The increasingly routinized mechanization of ideology laid open the cracks in the system’s edifice for easier exploitation by the opposition (e.g., “new evolutionism” or the Charter ’77 movement). The Prague Spring of January through August, the Polish March student upheaval, the April student protests in Belgrade (and the later Croatian Spring of 1970–71, an all-out contestation of this country on national bases), and the Soviet intellectuals’ reaction to the Sinyavski-Daniel trial all represented a fundamental challenge to the Stalinist foundations of the Soviet bloc. 64The failure of these movements left an enduring disenchantment with state socialism and the loss of any hope of reforming these regimes. In other words, “it underscored the political and moral sterility… of the attempt to marry the Soviet project to freedom without a return to private property and capitalism.” 65Moreover, as one of Gorbachev’s future advisors remarked, one side effect of the Soviet Union’s reassertion of hegemony was that the Western Communist parties “without confessing it, came to understand the irrelevance of the Communist movement either for the majority of the countries where it was formally present or, even more important, for the Soviet Union itself.” 66The reaffirmation of the status quo and the systemic stagnation in the Soviet bloc signaled an irreversible “disenchantment with the (Communist) world.” Despite the fact that the Berlin Wall came tumbling down in 1989, “the soul of Communism had died twenty years before: in Prague, in August 1968.” 67

The West, on the other hand, experienced an upsurge of “romantic anticapitalism,” a rebirth of radicalism fed by the reenchantment with utopia. In the context of the shock produced by the Tet offensive in Vietnam and the identity crisis of the former colonial powers, 1968 “began [for the New Left] with the scent of victory in the air” (in the words of Jeffrey Herf), for, as Paul Auster reminisced, “the world seemed headed for an apocalyptic breakdown.” 68The second half of the 1960s marked both a return to Marx and a rejection of the existing practices of democracy (with the notable exception of Spain and Portugal, where, between 1966 and 1968, civil unrest targeted the right-wing dictatorships of Salazar and Franco). The influence of the New Left, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the Vietnam War, the Latin American guerilleros , and the decolonization movements combined, in a amorphous blend, with the generational clash, an institutional crisis (the occupation of the Sorbonne, the nearly two-year-long paralysis of Italian universities), and a wave of recession (signaled by workers’ strikes and autogestion projects). This mix produced what some authors later called les années 1968. The sixty-eighters claimed to have developed a critique of the ideological bases of the West in the context of the Cold War (also against older self-representations of the Left) and a spontaneous “direct action” against the “hidden oppression” of the liberal-capitalist establishment. The “anti-politics” of 1968 were, to a certain extent, a topsy-turvy expression of the attempt to reconcile theory with praxis (Theoriewut). The extreme radicalization of certain sectors within the student movement and the cultivation of violence as a cathartic instrument led to a divorce between left-wing post-Marxist thinkers such as Adorno, Horkheimer, and Habermas, and those whom they suspected of “Red Fascist” inclinations. In France, Raymond Aron proposed a scathing critique of the new search for redemptive revolutionary paradigms.