DISILLUSIONMENT ANO PARTIAL ANSWERS
in the nineteenth century, when socialism was not yet a practical
possibility, it needed to bolster itself with an ideology. Its principal
ideology turned out to be Marxism, a system containing many
valuable insights and therefore by no means to be thrown over as
a whole; but this system is
also
a metaphysical explanation of reality,
a mystique of History on the March, a proletarian cult, and the
projection of a Messianic kingdom. Insofar as it is so mystifying a
totality, radicals would do well to transcend it. For what we need is a
disenchanted socialism,
a socialism defined simply as a socio-economic
project of twentieth-century man. Such a project can be freely chosen
as a value and as a plan of action. Its purpose cannot be to usher
in an era of universal happiness and salvation but rather to solve cer–
tain elementary though agonizing problems of human organization
in an industrial age. Utopian attitudes are entirely incompatible with
this conception, for utopianism subsists on unqualified promises and
expectations. The traditional ideologies of socialism have sickened
because of their inherent utopianism which passes itself off as science.
Lenin,
particularly, despite the brilliance of his strategic concepts,
was, historically speaking, at once the master and the martyr of
utopian illusions. His
State and Revolution,
written on the eve of
the October overturn, is a veritable textbook of such notions. From
this point of view his thought was far inferior to that of Dostoevsky,
who was acute enough to discern that to start with a theory of un–
limited freedom is to end up with unlimited despotism in practice.
The kingdom of freedom, in the Marxist sense of that phrase, is per–
haps unattainable, but one can still believe that human energy and
mind are not so sluggish as to be unable to lift mankind to a higher
level of necessity.
Philip Rahv
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