THE POLISH INTELLECTUALS
249
In the days of Stalin the doctrine was applied universally. Science,
literature, art-everything was subordinated to politics. Now party dog–
matism has been definitively abolished. One of its last flare-ups was
actually self-destructive: even before Gomulka's accession to power,
Leszek Kolakowski, the most brilliant young Polish Marxist, wrote-in
the September 1956 issue of
Nowe Drogi
("New Roads"), the party's
theoretical organ-that since Marxism represents the truth, and since
human reason will always
be
automatically drawn toward the truth, the
most complete intellectual freedom cannot possibly do any harm. This
freedom manifests itself today in a somewhat melancholy skepticism on
the part of those who were once the most ardent believers. For instance,
the young Communist writer
J.
Bochenski says:
Communism was once for me a universal system, a system of knowl–
edge, ethics, and organization. It showed me how to judge all phe–
nomena, how to act under any circumstances.... What is left of
it?
Not much, for it is universal no longer. In fact I no longer have con–
fidence in universalism as such. I no longer yearn for an all-encompassing
doctrine.
If
such a doctrine makes Prometheuses of us, it is not because
it enables us to steal fire from the gods, but because it chains us to a
rock.
(Przeglad K ulturalny
("Cultural Review"), No. 38, 1956.)
Needless to say, the Stalinist version of Marxism-Leninism is re–
jected: according to
Po Prostu
"it was not Marxist and did not represent
Marxism." While continuing to profess respect for Marxism, the Polish
Communist intellectuals insist that it "should be subject to the same
methods of control and scientific verification as any other discipline:
we must continually test it in the light of reality, revise it, develop
it... ."
(Po Prostu,
No. 48, 1956).
The Polish Marxists have already embarked on a critique of Marx–
ism that would not surprise us
if
it
came from Sidney Hook. The
building of socialism, they point out, did not take place under the con–
ditions foreseen by Marx, i.e., in the face of a fully developed capitalism,
but rather in economically underdeveloped countries. This leads to the
rejection of a number of theses that only yesterday were Marxist dogma
-the law of the progressive impoverishment of the working class under
capitalism, the Marxist theory of economic depressions, the theory of
the socialist revolution, all the ideas on the mechanism of power in
Communist-governed countries, on the role of imperialism, on the sig–
nificance of technological progress. What the Polish intellectuals con–
tinue to regard as valid in Marxism is essentially only that part of
it which
has
been incorporated into most modern sociological and eco–
nomic theories; what remains is, as M. CzerwiDski said recently in
