THE ENDURING MAGNETISM OF UTOPIA
Despite Leninism's decline, the utopian reservoir of humanity has not been completely exhausted: refurbished ideologies have resurfaced, among them populism, chauvinism, and fundamentalism of different shades. The ghost of the future conjured up by young Karl Marx in the Communist Manifesto has been replaced with revamped specters of the past, summoned into the present by disconcerted political actors unable to come to terms with the hardships of the democratic project and the challenges of (post)modernity. To the soulless “Europe of butter” lambasted and decried by various neoromantics, they often contrast the myth of the original communal democracy of the agrarian societies. In short, the end of Communism, the revolutions of 1989, and the disturbing Leninist legacies have created a world full of dangers, in which traditional lines of demarcation have completely disintegrated and new forms of radicalism simmer under the carapace of pseudostability. With the breakdown of Leninism a crucial threshold was crossed, but the readiness to indulge in ideological fallacies is not totally extinct. This is the reason for Kołakowski's wry conclusion to the new epilogue of his masterful trilogy: “No one can be certain whether our civilization will be able to cope with the ecological, demographic, and spiritual dangers it has caused or whether it will fall victim to catastrophe. So we cannot tell whether the present ‘anti-capitalist,’ ‘anti-globalist,’ and related obscurantist movements and ideas will quietly fade away and one day come to seem as pathetic as the legendary Luddites at the beginning of nineteenth century, or whether they will maintain their strength and fortify their trenches.”9
Marxism was a protean political movement, but what distinguished it as a movement were its grandiose and ideologically driven political ambitions.10 According to Jan Patočka, the systematization of man and history, culminating in Marx, made evident “that, in a full working out of the spirit of metaphysics that means man, as historical and as social, placing himself in the position once reserved for the gods and for God, myth, dogma, and theology were reabsorbed into history and flowed into a philosophy that discarded its time-honored name of a simple love of wisdom in order to become a scientific system.”11 Once this scientific pretense ceased to inspire genuine commitment, the spell of Marxism as a promise of earthly salvation started to dissipate. The eclipse of Marxism as a strategy for social transformation ended an age of radicalism and justified a number of reflections regarding the destiny of utopian thought in this century. One can agree with Ferenc Fehér's masterful obituary of “Marxism as politics,” but we still need to discuss Marxism's utopian component, which Marxism has never acknowledged.12 On the contrary, Marx and his followers were convinced that they possessed access to the hidden laws of historical development and that their historical waver was meant to result in an immanent kingdom of freedom.
With characteristic nineteenth-century hubris, Marx declared his social theory the ultimate scientific formula, as exact and precise as the algorithms of mathematics or the demonstrations of formal logic. Not to recognize their validity was for Marx, as for his successors, evidence of historical blindness, ideological bias, or “false consciousness,” which were characteristic of those who opposed Marxist solutions to social questions. Prisoners of the bourgeois mentality, alienated victims of ideological mystifications, and non-Marxist theorists—all purveyors of false consciousness—were scorned and dismissed as supporters of the status quo. At the opposite pole, the proletarian viewpoint, celebrated by Marx and crystallized in the form of historical materialism, was thought to provide ultimate knowledge and the recipe for universal happiness. Thanks to proletarian class consciousness, the doctrine maintained, a revolution would occur that would end all forms of oppression. Mankind would undertake the world-historical leap from the realm of necessity (scarcity, injustice, torments) into the realm of freedom (joy, abundance, and equity). This would end humanity's prehistory and begin its real history. All human reality was thus subordinated to the dialectical laws of development, and history was projected into a sovereign entity, whose diktat was beyond human questioning.
Here lies a fatal methodological error in Marxism: its rendering of history as a gesetzmässig (law-governed) succession of historical formations, and the corollary of this rendering: the dogma of class struggle as the engine of historical progress. In this theory, individuals are nothing more than hostages of forces whose workings they can scarcely understand. This combination of philosophy and myth, so persuasively explored by Robert C. Tucker,13 prevented the German radical philosopher and his disciples throughout the decades from grasping the subjective dimension of history and politics. The main difficulty with the Marxian project is its lack of sensitivity to the psychological makeup of mankind. This obsession with social classes—what French sociologist Lucien Goldmann once referred to as the viewpoint of the transindividual historical subject (a Lukácsian formulation, to be sure)14—the failure to take into account the infinite diversity of human nature, the eagerness to reduce history to a conflict between polar social categories, this is indeed the substratum of an ideology that, wedded to sectarian and fanatic political movements, has generated many illusions and much grief throughout the twentieth century. With its cult of totality, this social theory, which purports to be the ultimate explanatory archetype, set the stage for its degeneration into dogma and for persecution of the heretics that were to punctuate Marxism once it was transfigured into Leninism.
An example of this dogma is the Communist Manifesto's thesis of the inherent internationalism of the proletarian class, that famous assertion according to which proletarians have no fatherland. In this thesis, metaphysically deduced from the proclamation of the proletariat as the social embodiment of Hegelian reason, Marx bestows on the working class a universalist mandate with no empirical validity (as it was borne out in the outburst of nationalism during World War I, to the dismay of the Zimmerwald Left and other Marxist internationalists). Marx imagined an ideal proletariat, ready to renounce all social, communitarian, and cultural bonds. What really happened was precisely the opposite of Marx's prophesy: the proletariat failed to initiate the apocalyptical breach, the cataclysmically chiliastic cleavage so powerfully heralded in the Manifesto.
The Communist Manifesto was perhaps the most inflammatory and impassioned text ever written by a philosopher. In this scathing, vitriolic, and incandescent pamphlet, Marx (in coauthorship with his loyal friend Friedrich Engels) at once pilloried and glorified a whole social class—the bourgeoisie—and a whole social order—capitalism—and prophesied the objective, inexorable necessity of their overthrow by a higher form of society. Written in the middle of the nineteenth century, the Manifesto became in the twentieth century the charter of the Bolshevik oracular creed. Marxism, for all its scientific aspirations, from the beginning represented a secular substitute for traditional religion, offering a totalizing vocabulary in which “the riddle of history” was solved, and envisioning a leap from the realm of oppression, scarcity, and necessity to a realm of freedom. Its chiliasm helps to explain its magnetism, its capacity to elicit romantic-heroic behavior, to generate collective fervor, to mobilize the oppressed, to incite political hostility, and to inspire both social hope and mystical delusions. Precisely because of its deliberately simplified rhetorical devices, the Manifesto became the livre de chevet for generations of professional revolutionaries. It was the political counterpart to the eleventh of Marx's Theses on Feuerbach, in which he assigned philosophy an urgent transformative task by proclaiming that the issue was not how to interpret the world but how to change it.