Reading Marxism through Kolakowski

In the New York Review of Books, Tony Judt takes another look at Kolakowski's Main Currents of Marxism (which Cosma Shalizi will tell you is the magesterial piece on the topic) and the history and future of the movement.

Main Currents of Marxism is not the only first-rate account of Marxism, though it is by far the most ambitious. What distinguishes it is Kolakowski's Polish perspective. This probably explains the emphasis in his account on Marxism as an eschatology —"a modern variant of apocalyptic expectations which have been continuous in European history." And it licenses an uncompromisingly moral, even religious reading of twentieth-century history:

The Devil is part of our experience. Our generation has seen enough of it for the message to be taken extremely seriously. Evil, I contend, is not contingent, it is not the absence, or deformation, or the subversion of virtue (or whatever else we may think of as its opposite), but a stubborn and unredeemable fact.

No Western commentator on Marxism, however critical, ever wrote like that.

But then Kolakowski writes as someone who has lived not just inside Marxism but under communism. He was witness to Marxism's transformation from an intellectual theorem to a political way of life. Thus observed and experienced from within, Marxism becomes difficult to distinguish from communism—which was, after all, not only its most important practical outcome but its only one. And the daily deployment of Marxist categories for the vulgar purpose of suppressing freedom—which was their primary use value to Communists in power—detracts over time from the charms of the theorem itself.

Comments

[JonJ]

A very thought-provoking essay, as is usually the case in the New York Review. A few thoughts it provoked in me:

Judt writes:

"As Kolakowski has observed, Marx is still worth reading—if only to help us understand the sheer versatility of his theories when invoked by others to justify the political systems to which they gave rise."

I think Marx is definitely still worth reading, but I don't think Judt (or Kolakowski, perhaps) has quite pointed to why. I certainly agree that Marxism as a "secular religion" is as discardable as any religion, secular or otherwise. (Though billions of people around the world seem to be far from discarding their religions, so us "brights" should not be so smug in our wisdom as we tend to be.)

Judt again:

"To be sure, neither Marx nor the theorists who followed him intended or anticipated that a doctrine which preached the overthrow of capitalism by an industrial proletariat would seize power in a backward and largely rural society. But for Kolakowski this paradox merely underscores the power of Marxism as a system of belief: if Lenin and his followers had not insisted upon (and retroactively justified in theory) the ineluctable necessity of their own success, their voluntaristic endeavors would never have succeeded. Nor would they have been so convincing a prototype to millions of outside admirers. To turn an opportunistic coup, facilitated by the German government's transport of Lenin to Russia in a sealed train, into an 'inevitable' revolution required not just tactical genius but also an extended exercise of ideological faith. Kolakowski is surely right: political Marxism was above all a secular religion."

It would be infinitely desirable, we "brights" like to think, to be rid of these ideological faiths, and all secular or sacred religions. But it seems that this would require redesigning human nature so that we could act to transform bad social conditions on the basis of purely rational world views. So far, some sort of irrational faith seems to be required to motivate the large numbers of people needed for any political movement. And this always generates the well-known dangers that, for example, Communism, Fascism, and what our current ideologues are pleased to call "Islamo-Fascism" present.

As Judt recognizes, we still need some sort of progressive politics which liberalism, unfortunately, doesn't seem able to provide, despite its seemingly safe reasonableness and calmness:

"Today, however, things are changing once again. What Marx's nineteenth-century contemporaries called the 'Social Question'—how to address and overcome huge disparities of wealth and poverty, and shameful inequalities of health, education, and opportunity—may have been answered in the West (though the gulf between poor and rich, which seemed once to be steadily closing, has for some years been opening again, in Britain and above all in the US). But the Social Question is back on the international agenda with a vengeance. What appears to its prosperous beneficiaries as worldwide economic growth and the opening of national and international markets to investment and trade is increasingly perceived and resented by millions of others as the redistribution of global wealth for the benefit of a handful of corporations and holders of capital."

That is, it seems that the "class struggle" is still with us. Again Judt:

"One hardly needs to be a Marxist to recognize that what Marx and others called a 'reserve army of labor' is now resurfacing, not in the back streets of European industrial towns but worldwide. ... [T]his global pool of cheap workers helps maintain profits and promote growth: just as it did in nineteenth-century industrial Europe, at least until organized trade unions and mass labor parties were powerful enough to bring about improved wages, redistributive taxation, and a decisive twentieth-century shift in the balance of political power—thereby confounding the revolutionary predictions of their own leaders. ... And since no one else seems to have anything very convincing to offer by way of a strategy for rectifying the inequities of modern capitalism, the field is once again left to those with the tidiest story to tell and the angriest prescription to offer."

Unfortunately, I don't have such a strategy to offer, either. But I would suggest that we first need to be clear about whether there is in fact such a thing as "the capitalist system" that we need to be concerned about and need to analyze to see how it can be dealt with politically, either by reforming or abolishing it. If not, then we can go on being complacent, or attached to conventional liberalism. If so, then we have to go back to the hard slog of analyzing it, as Marx tried to do so long ago. And perhaps _Capital_ can be worth rereading for that purpose, as some people are now suggesting. It may be that its very aridity and high level of abstraction (especially in the famous opening chapters) may in fact help us to avoid the fatal intellectual laziness that Judt and Kolakowski warn of. You can't get anything at all out of those texts by being lazy!