Vladimir Tismaneanu - The Devil in History

At the very core of Marxism one finds a millenialist myth about justice, fraternity, and equality, a social dream about a perfect world where the ancient conflict between man and society, between essence and existence, would be transcended. More than anything else, Marxism represented a grandiose invitation to human beings to engage in a passionate search for the City of God and to construct it here and now. Leninism relied on its utopian aspect, as it proposed what Eric Weitz describes as a “capacious vision” of historical development: “By clearing the rubble of the past, they believed they would open the path to the creation of the new society that would permit the ultimate efflorescence of the human spirit.” 40This human adventure has failed, but the deep needs that Marxism tried to satisfy have not come to an end. According to Leszek Kołakowski, “Marxism has been the greatest fantasy of the twentieth century.” The professed unity between theory and praxis that Marxism found was its historical cul-de-sac: its practical failure was the confirmation of its theoretical fallacies. In other words, a philosophy that proclaimed praxis as the criterion of truth and maintained that concrete reality is the test of validity was dramatically belied by the practical impossibility of its implementation as originally designed and by the human costs linked to its Leninist and post-Leninist revisions and experiments. As Leszek Kołakowski concluded in his unsurpassed trilogy, “The self-deification of mankind, to which Marxism gave philosophical expression, has ended in the same way as all such attempts, whether individual or collective: it has revealed itself as the farcical aspect of human bondage [my emphasis].” 41

In Andzej Walicki’s view, Marx’s double-faceted concept of freedom was the conceptual grounding for Stalinism. One the one hand, there was freedom as “conscious, rational control over economic and social forces”; on the other, the notion of that individual freedom is to be replaced by “species freedom”—the liberation of mankind’s communal nature. 42Subsequently, the fundamental utopian element of this totalizing polity was the drive toward fulfilling such a free society. Leninism argued for a telos of “democratic dictatorship” (allegedly the only real democracy) and for communism, with the party as the magical entity injecting the necessary consciousness and offering the type of leadership for the completion of this journey. 43Neil Robinson argues:

This telos was transcendental because, although communism could be described, it was separate from experience and was immutable. It performed an ontological function because it acted to make sense of general experience for all: all real phenomena could be judged against it and were ascribed value, form and essence in its light. It therefore acted, as a kind of “super” or “main” discursive convention: it determined what could be claimed as being good (that which was conducive to communist construction) and what had to be rejected as bad (that which was harmful to the process of communist construction). In performing this ontological function, the telos therefore provided the party with an idea of the meaning of the material world. This idea was unchallengeable and kept the discourse from fragmenting…. there could be no commentary on the way in which the system was structured for such commentary would be a denial of the truth of the telos, a denial of the idea that the actions taken to secure historical development were appropriate and legitimate. 44

Such a conceptual framework for ideological discourse, combined with what Rachel Walker labels “the invariate conventions governing it” (that is, dogmatism as opposed to defending the purity of Marxism-Leninism), 45provided a continuous but variable narrative of emancipation, a source of incessant re-enchantments with state socialism as utopia in action. It comes as no surprise, then, that the revolutions of 1989 brought about for the Western Left what Jan-Werner Müller identified in the German case as “the loss of utopia.” 46Writing shortly before his death in 1983, Raymond Aron concluded his lifelong endeavor to analyze Marxism by pointing to its colossal theological and practical failure: “The prophecy, contradicted by both the evolution of capitalism and by the experience of so-called socialist regimes, remains as empty as it was at the beginning: How would the proletariat become the ruling class? Why would the proletariat become the ruling class? Why would collective ownership suddenly produce unprecedented efficiency? What magic wand would accommodate authoritarianism and centralized planning to personal freedom and democracy? What was to replace the market economy other than bureaucratic planning? The mystification began with Marx himself when he called his prophecy scientific.” 47

This is indeed the way Marxism appears in the aftermath of the convulsive twentieth century: a hidebound and often abstruse millennialism, having little to do with the reality and challenges of industrial civilization and unable to offer as remedies for human suffering anything other than empty slogans and ossified dogmas. As the “opium for the intellectuals,” it is almost extinct. This twilight is, at least in its implications, a grandiose fin de partie: we see the final agony of a hopeless attempt to overcome the limits of human nature by imagining a total break in the chain of those often strange and inexplicable occurrences that for want of a better term we have come to call “history.” The waning of utopian radicalism does not mean, however, the demise of an enduring yearning for social engineering. Historical hubris has not vanished; anguishes and malaise are here and can lead to new follies: “The communist ideology seems to be in a state of rigor mortis, and the regimes that still use it are so repulsive that its resurrection may seem to be impossible. But let us not rush into such a prophecy (or anti-prophecy). The social conditions that nourished and made use of this ideology can still revive; perhaps—who knows?—the virus is dormant, waiting for the next opportunity. Dreams about the perfect society belong to the enduring stock of our civilization.” 48

The question of Marxism’s culpability has not receded in importance in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Indeed, it is an essential question of modern historical self-understanding, especially in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, because at the present moment—over twenty years after the revolutions of 1989—Leninist legacies endure, and there are forces in both East and West that maintain that the Communist catastrophe was essentially exogenous to the generous pledges of Marxist humanism. This is true, for instance, of the prominent Romanian Marxist philosopher Ion Ianoși, for whom the text of the Manifesto and its historical consequences should not be amalgamated for “partisan reasons.” 49Comparing Marx to Nietzsche, Ianoși wrote about “culpables without culpability.” In the same vein, Hungarian former dissident (and briefly Straussian) thinker G. M. Tamás has lately (after 2000) become increasingly vocal in criticizing liberal values (not only liberalism) and championing the need to resurrect working-class political radicalism. Former Romanian dissident thinker Andrei Pleșu responded bitterly to this idealized view of the Marxist legacies in the region, insisting that for the denizens of the former Soviet Bloc, these are not abstract speculations but tragic facts of life. 50Recently, I engaged in a polemical exchange over G. M. Tamás’s espousal of French philosopher Alain Badiou’s irresponsible exaltation of revolution as the ultimate évènement , a cataclysmic moment in which an anarchic, inchoate version of liberty allegedly triumphs over the mediocrity (or, in Žižek’s neo-Leninist terms, the cretinism) of liberalism. 51Another interesting case is Lukács’s former disciple, István Meszáros, a student of the Hegelian-Marxist concept of alienation, whose enduring anticapitalist convictions have been enthusiastically acclaimed as a paradigm of pensamiento critico by Venezuela’s “Bolivarian socialist” Hugo Chávez. 52In all the former Communist countries, the Far Left and the Far Right tend to share animosities, idiosyncrasies, neuroses, and phobias. What unites these two trends is that they are both “far”: they resent the “grayness” of liberal democracy and abhor the “philistine mediocrity” of bourgeois existence. 53The neoromantic hostility to the challenges of a globalized economy generates new salvationist mythologies, including utopian flights into agrarian reveries and the cult of the unadulterated, pristine, archaic völkisch community. Disciples of Marx and Lenin close ranks in the company of frantic admirers of Carl Schmitt and Julius Evola, the Italian Fascist mystical philosopher. 54