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October 24, 2006
Tony Judt has a review in the New York Times of Leszek Kolakowski's 3 volume Main Currents of Marxism: The Founders, the Golden Age, the Breakdown The title of the review is 'Goodbye to all That' and that certainly captures Kolakowski's central argument about Marxism. Judt is not so convinced. The review has been picked up over at Catallaxy without any engagement with the main arguments.
I read the Kolakowski's texts in the early 1990s. From memory Kolakowski's intended analogy is clear: German culture is to Nazism as Marxism is to Stalinism. According to Marx Wartofsky what Kolakowski meant by this is not simply that there were some elements in Marx's work that lent themselves to Stalinist interpretation. What Kolakowski argues is that the Stalinist interpretation of Marxism may, in fact, be derived, as a possible and valid interpretation, from the fundamental premises of Marx's own thought, rather than as an aberration or distortion based on ambiguities. If the monstrous tyranny of Stalin is there in Marx's own formulations, then there is a classical "fatal flaw" internal to the very soul of Marxism: a flaw whose historical working out comes to negate the very premises of the original humanism.So Stalinist dictatorship derives from the central core of Marx's theory, not as an interpretation of some elements of it which are open to different interpretations.
I thought that the first two volumes were of high quality in terms of intellectual history whilst the third, which deals with late Marxism, lacked intellectual rigor and transformed into polemics. As I recall my central concern was that Kolakowski failed to engage with the philosophical arguments of Frankfurt School in a serious way. This philosophical engagement/evaluation was important as their Marxist engagement with modernity---the Enlightenment and the liberal tradition --- had little to do with the standard Marxism of "saving" Marx from his "distortion" at the hands of Stalin and Lenin. It was a defence of philosophical reason (a critical, self-conscious reason) against the ravages of a simplistic modernism (positivism) and instrumental reason (as in utilitarianism). It is a self critical reason because it questions the false claim of reason to universality and disinterestedness when reason has always been demonstrably interested and historical.
Kolakowski called Adorno's magnum opus, Negative Dialectics, a "model of professorial bombast concealing poverty of thought". Kolakowski had run out of intellectual puff and he had little time for either dialectics, Adorno or left-Hegelianism. Judt's only reference to this is that the the last part of third (Breakdown) volume:
deals with assorted twentieth-century theorists in other lands. A few of these, notably Antonio Gramsci and Gyorgy Lukacs, are of continuing interest to students of twentieth-century thought. Some, such as Ernst Bloch and Karl Korsch (Lukacs's German contemporary), have a more antiquarian appeal. Others, notably Lucien Goldmann and Herbert Marcuse, seem even less interesting now than they did in the mid-Seventies when Kolakowski dismissed them in a few pages.
Buried underneath Kolakowski's philosophy becoming polemics is the argument that the Marxist tradition is dead. The Main Currents of Marxism text is a long goodbye.
I agree with Judt in his assessment that Marxism as a socialist political movement ran dry in the later 20th century due to the social democratic creation of the welfare state after 1945. Judt says:
Marxism, as the Polish historian Andrzej Walicki----one of its more acerbic critic----openly acknowledges, was the most influential "reaction to the multiple shortcomings of capitalist societies and the liberal tradition." If Marxism fell from favor in the last third of the twentieth century it was in large measure because the worst shortcomings of capitalism appeared at last to have been overcome. The liberal tradition---thanks to its unexpected success in adapting to the challenge of depression and war and bestowing upon Western democracies the stabilizing institutions of the New Deal and the welfare state---had palpably triumphed over its antidemocratic critics of left and right alike. A political doctrine that had been perfectly positioned to explain and exploit the crises and injustices of another age now appeared beside the point.
Marxism was more than a political movement trying to realize communism, as a society beyond a liberal capitalist one. It was also economics, sociology, philosophy and aesthetics.
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Actually, I think of Adorno's work as "therapy" for Marxists, bearing an analogous relation to the Marxist tradition of thinking as Wittgenstein's to the tradition of logical empiricism, or Heidegger's to continental metaphysics. His paradoxical Marxism without a proletariat is at once a dismantling criticism and an effort to retrieve its "original" emancipatory intent or impetus, shorn of its ossified, dogmatic form, and transpose it onto an new terrain. But in all three cases, what that transformed core and new terrain would be and what would be its implications is difficult to figure.