THE FATE OF A POLITICAL RELIGION
More than other political theologies, Marxism was able to deter for many decades the emergence of critical questioning, and to nourish an ardent, even fanatical attachment on the part of the normally skeptical Western intellectuals. The disintegration of the Stalinist gnosis as a self-sufficient system of authoritarian norms and quasi-mystical precepts impelled revisionist intellectuals toward the construction of what Kołakowski called an agnostic Marxism, actually a quixotic attempt to salvage the humanistic kernel of the doctrine lest the whole Marxist utopia fall apart. Critical Marxism was therefore an attempt to regenerate the moral dimension of political praxis. Revisionism pondered the relation between means and ends and arrived at the conclusion that no goal could justify the manipulation and degradation of the individual.59 Ethical relativism was exposed as a most harmful deception, and moral values were again postulated as transcendent values, independent of contingent circumstances and selfish interests. Less idealistic than their unorthodox adversaries, the ideological supervisors knew better. Committed to a cynical realpolitik, they saw no reason to let the genie out of the bottle. Reified in the figure of ideological power, Marxism was doomed to survive as a disembodied symbolic ceremonial. Trying to revive and to secularize it, as the revisionist thinkers did, amounted eventually to intellectual narcissism. The point was not to recapture a presumed original libertarian thrust, but to formulate the conditions for the invention of a liberated social space. Milovan Djilas presciently identified in the early 1980s the bureaucratic degeneration of Marxism as one of the main causes of the ultimate debacle: “With the extinction of this utopian faith, communism has lost its soul, its raison d'être. Maintained largely by a relatively well-paid apparatus of officialdom and the imperialist ambitions of the Soviet oligarchy, it has metamorphosed into an ever more banal lust for power, thereby losing its revolutionary strength and, to a large degree, its volcanic force as well. In doing so, communism has been reduced to its power-hungry, monopolistic essence and thereby condemned itself to destruction.”60
Some Western philosophers—primarily Cornelius Castoriadis and Claude Lefort—unlike many East European thinkers, predisposed to the traditional reformist illusions, understood that, in order to gain credibility, the discourse of the opposition had to be de-Marxisized.61 Dialectical (ideological) trump cards had to be debunked and taken for what they indeed were: convoluted justifications for the humiliation of the human being. From the revisionism of the late 1950s and early 1960s to the dissidents' skeptical treatment of Marxism or even outward anti-Marxism, there was a whole odyssey of ruined hopes and failed illusions. Instead of indulging in what Hegel called a “litany of lamentations,” dissident thinkers have tried to clarify the causes of this abortive end of the romance between Marxism and intellectuals. One cause was a growing awareness of the inherent ambivalence of the Marxian message, a discontentment with pragmatic utopianism. The mentor of the dissidents associated with Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia, philosopher Jan Patočka, simply rejected Marxism's claim to a revolutionary prerogative over history: “Humans do not invent morality arbitrarily, to suit their needs, wishes, inclinations, and aspirations. Quite the contrary, it is morality that defines what being human means.”62
In the aftermath of 1956, but especially after 1968, the post-totalitarian phase of state socialism brought about a system of power based on conformity, co-optation, cynicism, and inclusive, privilege-based regimentation. Reflecting on the hollow-ritualistic nature of the ideological reproduction of state socialism, Václav Havel provides an excellent description of the internalization mechanisms that replaced the terrorist methods:
Part of the essence of the post-totalitarian system is that it draws everyone into its sphere of power, not so that they may realize themselves as human beings, but so that they may surrender their human identity in favor of the identity of the system, that is, so that they may become agents of the system's general automatism and servants of its self-determined goals, so they may participate in the common responsibility for it, so they may be pulled into and ensnared by it, like Faust into Mephistopheles…. What we understand by the [post-totalitarian] system is not a social order imposed by one group upon another, but rather something which permeates the entire society and is a factor in shaping it.63
Mental co-optation was a crucial systemic goal; its achievement meant the perpetuation of endless ideological symbolic performances. The main purpose of this policy was to cauterize any sense of historical transcendence, to preclude any independent nuclei of thought and action. The very concept of truth had long since been distorted (and negated) by Lenin with his Manichean view of philosophical partisanship: for the Leninists, truth is what serves the interests of the proletariat, themselves defined by a self-appointed elite made up of revolutionary zealots. After 1956, however, the dogmatic core started to crumble. Full-fledged totalitarianism never reached perfection, but it was the main ambition during the revolutionary stages of both Nazism and Stalinism. In the Soviet case, the Secret Speech led to disillusionment and ushered in detotalitarianization.64 Ideological lip-service was all-pervasive, but true believers had long since vanished. In fact, with very few exceptions, nobody believed in the bombastic rhetoric of the existing socialism. Still, although everybody knew that it was the incarnation of a huge lie, the system continued to operate, pathetically stifling (or stiflingly pathetic). The Solidarity movement was a major breakthrough, but the real beginning of the end came, as I have shown, when Gorbachev decided in 1987-88 to jettison ideology in favor of frankness and truth.
The ideological camouflage of serfdom was the main underpinning of the post-totalitarian order. In this sense one can argue for the continuous totalitarian ethos of these regimes, despite their reformist vagaries: “When we speak of totalitarian regimes we have in mind not systems that have reached perfection, but rather those which are driven by a never-ending effort to reach it, to swallow all channels of human communication, and to eradicate all spontaneous social life forms [emphasis in the original].”65 The profile of the regimes in former Eastern Europe was determined by the specificities of the ideological content (one might even say hubris) filling the gap between their self-representation and their practice.66 Therefore, following Lefort, their nature was determined by their “self-understanding as a ‘distinctive’ project,”67 in the context of a neotraditionalist degeneration of the socialist system, where “the party's combat ethos was ritualized,” its agents were transformed into “Party principals,” and the issue of political equality was consistently sidestepped and displaced.68 In Arendtian terms, Communism as a regime was permanently beset by a resilient conflict between power and reality.