The Devil in History

attitude is that it comes out of the reality of the human here and now. It places more importance on often repeated and consistent concrete action—even though it may be inadequate and though it may ease only insignificantly the suffering of a single insignificant citizen—than it does in some abstract fundamental solution in an uncertain future.”³⁰ The answer to the pervasiveness of a spuriously revolutionary ideology was to fill the gap between the public and the private existence by way of reestablishing “authentic human relations, which would preserve the direct and genuine communication of the private life, being at the same time politically influential as a counterweight to the oppressive, bureaucratic state.”³¹

With the exception of some vaguely defined concepts like civil society, return to Europe, and popular sovereignty, these revolutions occurred in the absence of and in opposition to ideology. Precisely because ideology had become the justification of state-sponsored lies, coercion, terror, and violence, dissidents, from Solzhenitsyn to Havel, insisted on the need to overcome the schizophrenic ideological chimeras and rediscover the galvanizing power of concepts such as dignity, identity, civility, truth, transparence, trust, and tolerance. For example, Czech philosopher Jan Patocka, himself a victim of Communism because of his central role in the creation of Charter 77, considered that Russian dissidents Andrei Sakharov and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn shared “a sense of the truth of their own humanity that outweighed any material advantage or dogmatic slogan that could be offered to them” [my emphasis].³² In response to the totalist pretension of a totalitarian movement, dissidents reaffirmed what Patocka conceptualized as “care for the soul”—that “which makes whatever is properly human in us possible: morality, thought, culture, history. It is the most sacred thing in us, something through which we become connected to that which is eternal, yet without having to leave this world.”³³ Or, “the attempt to embody what is eternal within time, and within one’s own being, and at the same time, an effort to stand firm in the storm of time, stand firm in all dangers carried with it.”³⁴ Communism was therefore faced with individuals who rejected both living a lie and messianic posturing. One author even remarked that this could also be an explanation for the aftermath of 1989: “Vaclav Havel’s idea of living in truth, as well as Adam Michnik’s new evolutionism, George Konrad’s antipolitics and other dissident conceptions, are actually long-term strategies of resistance—not instructions to civil societies after the reestablishment of liberal democracies.”³⁵

In the aftermath of the demise of the Leninist order, the moral landscape of post-Communism was marred with confusion, venomous hatreds, unsatisfied desires, and endless bickering. This is the bewildering, often terrifying territory in which political mythologies make a return. In Vaclav Havel’s words: “The fall of communism destroyed this shroud of sameness, and the world was caught napping by an outburst of the many unanticipated differences concealed beneath it, each of which—after such a long time in the shadows—felt a natural need to draw attention to itself, to emphasize its uniqueness, and its difference from others.”³⁶ The ideological extinction of Leninist formations left behind a vacuum that has been filled by syncretic constructs drawing from the region’s pre-Communist and Communist heritage (nationalism, liberalism, democratic socialism, conservatism, populism, neo-Leninism, and an even more or less refurbished Fascism). Ethnocentric ideology, as mendacious as the Communist one, has become a new salvationist creed, a quasi-mystical source of identification: “When the nationality conflict obliterates all else and the high priests of the intelligentsia support their nation’s obsession with romantic platitudes, we have what can be called political hysteria.”³⁷ Moreover, Patocka argued that during the twentieth century, and especially under Communism, individuals had to be “shaken” into “an awareness of their own historical nature, their own possibilities for freedom via the assumption of a self- reflective stance and the rejection of ideology.”³⁸ Dissidents themselves were “a community of the shaken,” but they were hardly the majority of the population. The persistence of ideological ruins within post- Leninist societies and the echoes of the last century’s totalitarian temptations made East Europeans vulnerable to resurgent specters of alternative or derivative salvationisms (e.g., clericalism, ethnocentric conservatism, and populism). Havel warned that ideology was “a specious way of relating the world. It offers human beings the illusion of identity, of dignity, and of morality while making it easier for them to part with them.”³⁹

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.”⁴⁰ This human adventure has failed, but the deep needs that Marxism tried to satisfy have not come to an end. According to Leszek Kolakowski, “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 Kolakowski 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.⁴² Subsequently, 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.⁴³ Neil 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),⁴⁵ provided 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 Muller identified in the German case as “the loss of utopia.”⁴⁶ Writing 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