The Devil in History

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 Iano?i, for whom the text of the Manifesto and its historical consequences should not be amalgamated for “partisan reasons.”⁴⁹ Comparing Marx to Nietzsche, Iano?i wrote about “culpables without culpability.” In the same vein, Hungarian former dissident (and briefly Straussian) thinker G. M. Tamas 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 Ple?u 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.⁵⁰ Recently, I engaged in a polemical exchange over G. M. Tamas’s espousal of French philosopher Alain Badiou’s irresponsible exaltation of revolution as the ultimate evenement, a cataclysmic moment in which an anarchic, inchoate version of liberty allegedly triumphs over the mediocrity (or, in Zizek’s neo-Leninist terms, the cretinism) of liberalism.⁵¹ Another interesting case is Lukacs’s former disciple, Istvan Meszaros, 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 Chavez.⁵² In 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.⁵³ The 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 volkisch 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

One of the main effects of Marxist deradicalization in East-Central Europe was a need to redefine the relations between the Western intelligentsia and the liberal tradition, including the legacies of Western humanism. The post-Marxist, that is, postideological, age allowed for reconsideration of the political and moral responsibilities of intellectuals, including a refusal to indulge in long-cherished fantasies of repudiating the liberal democratic status quo.⁵⁵ The fate of Marxism in Eastern Europe highlights the role of awakening, apostasy, and metanoia: it was precisely disenchanted Marxists who decisively contributed to the erosion of the ideocratic- partocratic systems. As I emphasized in the previous chapter, Marxist revisionism represented a major corrosive force in dissolving the Leninist ideological hubris. By contrasting the official pretense to the abysmal realities and offering the concept of alienation as an interpretive key for understanding bureaucratic authoritarianism, the revisionists offered alternative discourses of emancipation. The very fact that they had belonged to the Communist “family” made their critique poignantly explosive and exasperatingly annoying for the nomenklaturas. The destiny of East European revisionism⁵⁶ illustrates a noble tradition of moral dignity, the reclaiming of the concept of alienation from the totalitarian Moloch, and a phenomenology of honor and resistance that played a crucial role in the constitution of dissident movements and the demise of state socialist systems. Their approaches have converged with Western anti-authoritarian post- Marxism,⁵⁷ illustrated by attempts to rediscover the social imagination and new horizons for emancipatory practice beyond the ossified and rigid ideologies of the past. Post-Marxism therefore meant renunciation of the apocalyptical visions of revolutionary catharsis, acceptance of the new challenges in the era of global communications, internet networks, and new social movements, and widespread concern regarding growing inequalities. Post-Marxism recognized the persistence of the traditional socialist agenda but admitted the waning of redemptive forms of political radicalism. Post-Marxism confronted the need to acknowledge the incontrovertible fact that “Marxism as a doctrine cannot be separated from the history of the political movements and systems to which it led.”⁵⁸

THE FATE OF A POLITICAL RELIGION

More than other political theologies, Marxism was able to deter for many decades the emergence of critical questioning, and to nourish an ardent, even fanatical attachment on the part of the normally skeptical Western intellectuals. The disintegration of the Stalinist gnosis as a self-sufficient system of authoritarian norms and quasi-mystical precepts impelled revisionist intellectuals toward the construction of what Kolakowski called an agnostic Marxism, actually a quixotic attempt to salvage the humanistic kernel of the doctrine lest the whole Marxist utopia fall apart. Critical Marxism was therefore an attempt to regenerate the moral dimension of political praxis. Revisionism pondered the relation between means and ends and arrived at the conclusion that no goal could justify the manipulation and degradation of the individual.⁵⁹ Ethical relativism was exposed as a most harmful deception, and moral values were again postulated as transcendent values, independent of contingent circumstances and selfish interests. Less idealistic than their unorthodox adversaries, the ideological supervisors knew better. Committed to a cynical realpolitik, they saw no reason to let the genie out of the bottle. Reified in the figure of ideological power, Marxism was doomed to survive as a disembodied symbolic ceremonial. Trying to revive and to secularize it, as the revisionist thinkers did, amounted eventually to intellectual narcissism. The point was not to recapture a presumed original libertarian thrust, but to formulate the conditions for the invention of a liberated social space. Milovan Djilas presciently identified in the early 1980s the bureaucratic degeneration of Marxism as one of the main causes of the ultimate debacle: “With the extinction of this utopian faith, communism has lost its soul, its raison d’etre. Maintained largely by a relatively well-paid apparatus of officialdom and the imperialist ambitions of the Soviet oligarchy, it has metamorphosed into an ever more banal lust for power, thereby losing its revolutionary strength and, to a large degree, its volcanic force as well. In doing so, communism has been reduced to its power-hungry, monopolistic essence and thereby condemned itself to destruction.”⁶⁰

Some Western philosophers—primarily Cornelius Castoriadis and Claude Lefort—unlike many East European thinkers, predisposed to the traditional reformist illusions, understood that, in order to gain credibility, the discourse of the opposition had to be de-Marxisized.⁶¹ Dialectical (ideological) trump cards had to be debunked and taken for what they indeed were: convoluted justifications for the humiliation of the human being. From the revisionism of the late 1950s and early 1960s to the dissidents’ skeptical treatment of Marxism or even outward anti-Marxism, there was a whole odyssey of ruined hopes and failed illusions. Instead of indulging in what Hegel called a “litany of lamentations,” dissident thinkers have tried to clarify the causes of this abortive end of the romance between Marxism and intellectuals. One cause was a growing awareness of the inherent ambivalence of the Marxian message, a discontentment with pragmatic utopianism. The mentor of the dissidents associated with Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia, philosopher Jan Patocka, simply rejected Marxism’s claim to a revolutionary prerogative over history: “Humans do not invent morality arbitrarily, to suit their needs, wishes, inclinations, and aspirations. Quite the contrary, it is morality that defines what being human means.”⁶²