BERNARD AVISHAI
241
finished with
Feuerbach
and
State and Revolution,
something had
clicked in my brain which shook me like a mental explosion. To say
that one had "seen the light" is but a poor description of the intel–
lectual rapture which only the convert knows (regardless to what
faith he has·been converted). The new light seems
to
pour from all
directions across the skull. The whole universe falls into pattern
like the stray pieces of a jigsaw puzzle assembled by magic at one
stroke.
Remember, Koestler had never brought himself to identify with ordi–
nary working people when he was either in Paris or Berlin; he never
socialized with them or even frequented their bars. Indeed, the political
impulses he had acquired with Zionism and his kibbutz experience
worked against any common Marxian ideal. He had been a disciple of
the rightist "Revisionist" Zionist Jabotinsky, and had himself flirted
with some of the ideological claims of fascism-Social Darwinist, if not
racialist theories, militarist celebrations, anticommunist dogmas. He
had remained a staunch opponent of socialist-Zionism. Nor, presum–
ably, was Koestler much taken with what we might call the moral tastes
of socialists, with their pure visions of sharing, classlessness-of an end
to greed and self-regard. He might well have
affected
a love for such val–
ues once he was in the Party. Yet Jabotinsky had almost certainly con–
vinced him to doubt that art and bliss could survive socialism.
There is even some question, I think, about whether Koestler was
ever really persuaded by what Marxist intellectuals mean by "political
economy." Search Koestler's memoirs and novels and you will not turn
up a single reference to, say, such iconic communist terms such as "sur–
plus-value" or "relations of production." Significantly, Koestler did
accept casting historical changes in terms of the antagonisms among
social classes. He admired Marx's historical works for their focus on
class conflict. But who didn't? Such varied social thinkers as Thomas
More, Thomas Hobbes, Edmund Burke, Herbert Spencer, and Max
Weber had all accounted for social changes in a corresponding way.
Even after many years of reflection, Koestler seems only to wink at
Marx's most complex and illuminating economic theories, and certainly
shows no mastery of them.
The God That Failed,
for instance, argues
that Marx's version of the classless society was modeled on the image of
a lost paradise, "a legendary Golden Age." Thus, he writes, the com–
munists' revolt was also a revival, and at the end of the "dialectical spi–
ral" stood virtually the same "primitive Communist society" which had
stood at the beginning.
