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PARTISAN REVIEW
Their uneasiness is understandable enough. It is of course aroused
chiefly by those Polish writers who continue to believe or to say they
are Communists. Other writers, apolitical ones or Catholics, express
their own ideologies without being questioned, provided they find their
place in the building of a Socialist Poland. I am speaking here only
of the intellectual "Left," which formed the vanguard of the October
revolution. But this group-in itself, and as an image of the Polish
Communist party as a whole-represents a kind of microcosm of the
nation.
The ideological position of these Polish writers and intellectuals
who call themselves "Communists" is similar to that of Silone, Koestler,
Edmund Wilson, or Stephen Spender. Some of them are even expressing
pragmatic tendencies, in which ideologies are subordinated to considera–
tions of efficiency-ideas which in the West would generally be con–
sidered Rightist, and which fall somewhere between the views of Ray–
mond Aron and Peter Wiles, on the one hand, and Jules Monnerot
and James Burnham on the other.
If
The God that Failed
were being
reissued today, suitable contributions
to
the symposium would be found
among the recent writings of almost every Leftist Polish writer. Western
Communist writers are expelled from the party for lesser heresies.
The Polish Communist intellectuals do not confine themselves to
denouncing the so-called cult of the individual. In Stalinism they see,
not merely the "necessary evil" that Deutscher, and the Western fellow
travelers as well, found it, but evil pure and simple--or, in the words
of
Po Prostu
("Plain Talk"), the most genuinely revolutionary weekly
in Poland, "the greatest piece of cheating in the history of the working
class." Thus, within a doctrine that postulates a historical teleology,
they effect a cleavage that cannot be reconciled with orthodoxy. But
where, for the same offense, Western Communists were driven out of
the party, the Polish Communists have remained within it-and it
is
their party that controls the government. The Western Communist
intellectuals, once they were rejected by the party, slandered and
charged with treason, generally followed a path that led them farther
and farther away from Communism. Repelled by Stalin's methods, they
discovered that it was Leninism that had made possible the establish–
ment of such tyranny, and ended by rejecting Marxism because Lenin–
ism and Stalinism were its historical embodiments. The Polish intellec–
tuals are following an entirely different path. Instead of seeking truth,
justice, and morality outside their ideology, they are endeavoring to ex–
pand their ideology to include these things.
If
Communism has assumed
monstrous historical forms-well, then it must be redefined. . . .
