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students and collaborators with Georg Lukacs within the Budapest School
of critical Marxism, as well as Kolakowski, belong to a noble family of
spirits who, in the harsh conditions of state socialism, tried against all odds
to give a good name to the Marxian vision of man and history. In so do–
ing, they contributed to the awakening of politically and intellectually re–
bellious currents in Hungary and Poland. As the system derived its spuri–
ous legitimacy from the ideological myth of the providential role of the
Communist Party, Marxist revisionism contributed to the disintegration
of the elite's supercilious self-confidence. It would thus be impossible to
understand the dissolution of the ideological monolith of Sovietism with–
out referring to the intellectual guerilla war waged by these philosophers
in the late 1950s and the 1960s against the bureaucratic watchdogs of the
senile aristocracy.
The odyssey ofMarxist revisionism is one of those cultural adventures
that included romanticism, idealism, the brutal end of naive hopes, and
the ultimate discovery of the source of evil in the long-worshipped
paradigm itself Indeed, the story of this odyssey is what the aforemen–
tioned authors try to tell: how they have reached a sense of history's
multifaceted reality and broken with the universalistic radical beliefs that
had inspired their initial search for Marxist humanism. Their experiences
with Marxism in its institutional, sclerotic and repressive version, as well
as with the alternative, critical Marxism embraced even now by a plethora
of distinguished academics in the well-protected Western enclaves of free
thought, are especially instructive in light of the inglorious collapse of
communism in the East.
Their testimony offers a voice of lucidity. What they tell us is that
Marxism could not offer effective solutions to human ailments because
such solutions do not lie in utopian projects, hut rather in the gradual
construction of a rational community of free individuals. Instead of con–
tributing to the building of such a liberated order, they argue, Marxism
became, in the Soviet experiment, the name for bondage and oppression.
It
became the faith that numbed critical faculties and justified some of the
worst attacks on individual freedom. Marxism, bastardized and vulgarized,
turned into the religion of a bureaucratic scavenger class known as the
nomenklatura.
As Kolakowski points out, Marxism was a product of
modernity. But this is precisely the source of its ambivalence. On the one
hand, Marxism celebrated the values of modernity (technology, progress,
industrialization, all the components of the bourgeois civilization); on the
other, it deplored the loss of the cosmic unity of premodern times and
denounced the alienation that it attributed to the greed and selfishness of
the bourgeoisie. Kolakowski observes:
