The disruptive effects of this ideological relaxation were felt not only in the Soviet Union but also in East Central Europe. It did allow for a redistribution of the constellation of power as a consequence of social self-organization. The experience of the Workers' Defense Committee (KOR) in Poland demonstrated that a tiny nucleus of committed intellectuals could fundamentally change the post-totalitarian political equation.121 KOR contributed to the climate of cooperation between the radical core of the intelligentsia and the militant activists of the working class. Neither a political party nor a traditional trade union, Solidarnosc prefigured a synthesis of nonutopian language for a rational polis and an emancipated community. The pace of reform in the Soviet Union held a vital importance for the fate of East European nations. The intensification of dissent activities in 1987–89 in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and the GDR anticipated the daring, all-out challenge to the Communist regimes in these countries. The October 1986 statement signed by dissidents from Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and the GDR inaugurated a new chapter in the history of antitotalitarian struggles. It showed that international actions could and should be undertaken to emphasize the values and the goals of the opposition. It was the historical calling of critical intellectuals to counter the strategy of cooptation and assert the primacy of those values the system stifles.
At the moment when genuine independent social movements coalesced, intellectuals did provide an articulate program for political change, the exact alternative that revisionism failed to create. In their seminal volume Dictatorship over Needs, Heller, Feher, and Markus offer a thoughtful explanation of the demise of Marxism-Leninism: “A social order is legitimated if at least one part of the population acknowledges it as exemplary and biding and the other part does not confront the existing social order with the image of an alternative one as equally exemplary. Thus the relative number of those legitimating a system may be irrelevant if the non-legitimating masses are merely dissatisfied.”122 In his turn, Archie Brown, rather than advocating a vantage point from above, argues that the collapse of Communism can be explained by a combination of “new ideas, institutional power (the commanding heights of the political system having fallen into the hands of radical reformers), and political choices (when other options could have been chosen).”123
So, why did Communist regimes collapse? The answer is multicausal and requires grasping the many origins and implications of the world-shattering events of 1989–91. If I were to start the list of causes, however, I would say that Communist regimes disappeared because they lost their ideological self-confidence, their hierocratic credentials. Their ritualized hegemony was successfully challenged by the reinvention of politics brought about by dissent. The existence of an alternative in a space previously imbued with myth and ideology triggered a process of individual and collective self-determination. The logic of consent, of emancipation within “ideocratic” limits, was replaced by the grammar of revolt, self-affirmation, and freedom. The Communist project of modernity oriented toward “an integrated accumulation of wealth, power, and knowledge” while relying on the “embedded phantasm of a shortcut to affluence through total social mobilization”124 was rejected on moral grounds. The crystallization of a critical theory focusing on subjectivity and negativity reasserted the central position of the human being in the symbolic economy of Central and East European politics. Ironically, the Soviet warning, “Either we destroy revisionism or it will destroy us!” seems now stunningly prescient. Thanks to critical intellectuals relying upon the tradition and grounds established by revisionist Marxism, revolts ultimately morphed into revolutions.
CHAPTER 5 Ideology, Utopia, and Truth
Lessons from Eastern Europe
Any social Utopia which purports to offer a technical blueprint for the perfect society now strikes me as pregnant with the most terrible dangers. I am not saying that the idea of human fraternity is ignoble, naïve, or futile; and I don't think that it would be desirable to discard it as belonging to an age of innocence. But to go to the lengths of imagining that we can design some plan for the whole society whereby harmony, justice and plenty are attained for human engineering is an invitation for despotism. I would, then, retain Utopia as an imaginative incentive … and confine it to that. The point where despotism differs from totalitarianism is the destruction of civil society. But civil society cannot be destroyed until and unless private property, including the private ownership of all the means of production, is abolished.
—Leszek Kołakowski (in George Urban ed., Stalinism)
More than in any other period of human history, individuals in the twentieth century were tempted by the promises of revolutionary messianism rooted in grandiose teleological fantasies imagined by prophets who mostly wrote their manifestos during the previous century.1 Or to use the formulation of Czech philosopher and dissident Jan Patočka, the last century experienced the rise of “radical super-civilizations” that sought forms analogous to that of a “universal church.” According to him, they were “geared toward the totalizing of life by means of rationalism; we deal with a yearning for a new center, ‘from which it is possible to gradually control all layers all the way to the periphery.’”2 From both extreme left and right, the quest for an absolute reshaping of the human condition inspired frantic endeavors to transcend what appeared to be the philistine carcass of liberal institutions and values.3 Many Bolsheviks, including Aleksandr Bogdanov, Anatoly Lunacharsky, and quite likely even Lenin found Nietzsche's proclamation regarding the advent of the Übermensch (superman) exhilarating or at least intriguing. This type of influence “touched a deep chord in the Russian psyche that continued to reverberate long after his [Nietzsche's] initial reception…. Ideas and images derived from his writings were fused, in various ways, with compatible elements in the Russian religious, intellectual, and cultural heritage, and with Marxism.”4
In Communism and Fascism, ideology was there to justify violence, sacralize it, and to discard all opposite views as effete, sterile, dangerous, and fundamentally false. In the ideological binary logic (Lenin's kto-kogo, who-whom principle) there was no room for a middle road: the enemy—always defined by class (or race) criteria—lost all humanity, being reduced to the despicable condition of vermin. Stalinists and Nazis proudly avowed their partisanship and abolished human autonomy through loyalty to the party/leader/dogma. The main purpose of revolutionary ideological commitment was to organize the mental colonization (heteronomy) of individuals, to turn them into enthusiastic builders of the totalitarian utopia. In brief, totalitarianism as a project aiming at complete domination over man, society, economy, and nature, is inextricably linked to ideology.5 The ideologies of Communism and Fascism held in common a belief in the plasticity of human nature and the possibility of transforming it in accordance with a utopian blueprint: “What totalitarian ideologies therefore aim at is not the transformation of the outside world or the revolutionizing transmutation of society, but the transformation of human nature itself.”6 Ideology cut across all regime dynamics, “grounding and projecting action, without which governance, violent action, and socialization were impossible.”7 Both Leninism and Fascism have inspired unflinching loyalties, a fascination with the figure of the perfect society, and romantic immersion in collective movements promising the advent of the millennium.8