Socialist Democracy Or Revolutionary Consciousness? the Prospects and Limits of ‘Revised’ Marxism in Central Europe in the 1950S and 1960S

Socialist Democracy or Revolutionary Consciousness? The Prospects and Limits of ‘Revised’ Marxism in Central Europe in the 1950s and 1960s Michal Kopecek, Charles University and the Academy of Sciences, Prague The Communist discourse of legitimacy in central Europe First of all, let me touch briefly on a problem that is increasingly attracting historians and political scientists dealing with the Communist past in Central Europe – namely, the question of how the Communist regimes legitimized themselves and how people perceived such legitimation. (Needless to say, my reflection will be more an outline than an extensive analysis of the topic.) Surely almost nobody would disagree that the most important part of the legitimation was Marxist doctrine in its Marxist-Leninist variation. This doctrine claimed to be a comprehensive system of philosophical, economic and political theories based on the teaching of Marx, Engels, Lenin and, during a certain period, Stalin too. The most important part of the system – the theoretical basis of the doctrine – was dialectic and historic materialism, in other words Marxist and Marxist-Leninist philosophy per se. The core of ‘histmat’ and ‘diamat’ was materialist dialectics, whose subject of interest comprised the general laws of the motion and evolution of Nature and society as well as of cognitive and conceptual thinking. In other words, this philosophy claimed to reflect on both the reality and the representation of reality in human thinking. In its Hegelian universalizing conceptual scheme it was by no means silly or even simple - minded. At the epistemological level it claimed its absolute validity and exceptional pretension to truth. As the prolific and also dangerous tool of dialectics necessitated, the doctrine should have been the dialectic unity of theory and practice. On the practical side of the doctrine there were therefore special sciences such as political economy and the theory and tactics of the proletarian movement, which were later transformed into ‘scientific Communism.’ By no means, however, did the legitimacy of the Communist regimes in Central Europe rely solely on doctrine. The ways of legitimising the holding of power had been changing over time. Nonetheless, as the growing literature on the subject shows, even in the most ‘revolutionary’ Stalinist period, when all the great and detrimental socio-economic and politic transformations were initiated, the leaders of the regimes in Central Europe were seeking alternative ways of The Contours of Legitimacy in Central Europe: New Approaches in Graduate Studies European Studies Centre, St. Antony's College, Oxford gaining the support of some parts of society. Among these attempts the most important were invocations to certain national or cultural traditions or both. 1 Hence, there was, from the very beginning, a basic schism in the way of legitimacy of Communist regimes, a schism between the aim of a radical cultural revolution and a tendency to act on behalf of the whole ‘nation’. A schism resembling the clash between the ‘universalistic claim’ of world revolution promoted by Trotsky, for example, and the ‘particularistic’ theory of building Communism in one state, developed by Stalin in the 1920s, the result of which had determined the way the Communist regimes in post-war Central Europe were built. The native Communist regimes claimed they were going to re-construct society as a whole, which included basic human values and moral convictions (that was at the top of the leftist, radical Communist agenda); on the other hand, with the exception of the East Germans, they also insisted that Czech, Hungarian, Polish, Slovak and other histories naturally resulted in Communism (that was at the top of the ‘conservative’ or ‘national’ Communist agenda). The phrase ‘the Communists as the heirs of the great traditions of the Czech nation’, for example, is typical of this position. 2 The enigma of civil society This paradoxical way of trying to legitimize the new political order had its obvious social and economic reasons. Roughly speaking, the original Marxist theory of the proletarian revolution counted on a fully developed bourgeois society that was supposed to break down owing to its own insuperable internal contradictions. In Lenin’s theories of the Communist Party as the vanguard of the proletariat and of imperialism as the ultimate stage of capitalism, developed bourgeois society was no longer the condition sine qua non for revolution. To put it metaphorically, the historical-materialist analysis of Marx had been replaced here by practical political and tactical considerations, whatever theoretically supported the carrying out of a revolution in a backward agrarian country. Later, as these basic Leninist (though called ‘Marxist-Leninist’) principles were applied 1 See, for example, Iko-Sascha Kowalczuk, Legitimation des neuen Staates, Berlin: Ch.Links Verlag, 1998; Sigrid Meuschel, Legitimation und Parteiherrschaft in der DDR, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1992; Marcin Zaremba, Komunizm, legitimizacja, nacjonalizm. Nacjonalystyczna legitimizacja wladzy komunistycznej v Polsce,Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Trio, 2001; Michal Kopecek, ’Ve slu?bách dejin, ve jménu národa. Historie jako soucást legitimizace komunistických režimu ve strední Evrope v letech 1948-1950’, Soudobé dejiny 1/2001, pp. 23–43. 2 This phrase, which gained great currency in Czechoslovakia, was coined by Zdenek Nejedlý, a biographer of Thomas Masaryk, Smetana and Lenin, who became one of the most powerful ideologists of Czechoslovak arts and culture in the late 1940s and 1950s. It was the title of a paper he gave in 1946 and a book of his published in 1953: Komunisté, dedici velikých tradic ceského národa. 2 also in Central Europe after World War II, serious theoretical problems arose. All the states here were fairly well-developed industrial or semi-industria l countries, especially in comparison to Russia. Whatever we may think about its level and quality, it is quiet clear that in terms of social and economic structure, and to a certain extent political culture, the basic foundations of civil society were laid in first half of the twentieth century.3 The Communist regimes made a great effort to destroy the basic elements that provided these civil societies with autonomous character, and to subordinate them to state and party control, and largely succeeded. Yet, they failed in other respects. First, they were not able to destroy the whole social basis of civil society, that is to say, the new middle class, though they did considerably impair its natural development and internal stratification. Second, they were not able to change the truly modern way of political legitimation, which had since the French revolution aimed from below upwards. It is the people, demos, who give or, better said, invest the ruling elite with legitimacy. In the Marxist and Marxist- Lenin ist doctrine too, after the revolutionary dictatorship of proletariat, and after the removal of class contradictions, a peaceful period of general reconciliation and unconstrained support of the Communist project was expected. As this prediction was obviously not fulfilled, the problem of legitimacy and the endeavour to get support from majority society, whose consciousness was everything but revolutionary Communist, represented a crucial theoretical and practical question for the Communist regimes in general. 4 In Central Europe the period from 1953 to 1968/69 represents probably the greatest effort to find a solution to this problem within Marxist doctrine and the socialist state. Revisionism During the de-Stalinisation that half-heartedly began throughout the East bloc in 1953, a number of Party intellectuals in the ‘people’s democracies’ of Central Europe began to criticize the failures in political, economic, cultural and social life. The orthodox branch of the Party called these attempts ‘Revisionism’, with the negative connotations of the term.5 These Revisionists criticized the system 3 Here I use the term ‘civil society’ in its contemporary meaning of social and economic arrangement that provides institutions and norms autonomous and independent of state. 4 See, for example, Zygmunt Bauman, Socialism: The Active Utopia, New York: Holmes and Meier, 1976. 5 Most of them adamantly refused to be classified as ‘Revisionist’. First, to be Revisionist meant being out of the mainstream of the workers’ movement and politically ‘reactionary’. Second, they did not see any links between their own mostly leftist and radical Marxist convictions and the original Revisionist doctrine of Eduard Bernstein and other liberal Social Democrats in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I use this ambiguous term today; I talk about it as an historical phenomenon. There were many 3 of police oppression and called for the democratization of the Party itself. Their criticism was also aimed at the inefficiencies of the planned economy, the privileges and decision-making monopoly of the bureaucracy, censorship and oppression in the arts and culture. The ‘movement’ was especially strong in Poland, where there were established groups of philosophers, sociologists, journalists and economists who could accurately be called Revisionist. The journals Po prostu [Forwards], Nowa Kultura [New culture] were the main tribunes for philosophers and sociologists such as Leszek Kolakowski, Bronislaw Baczko, Krzysztof Pomian, Zykmund Bauman, Jerzy Szacki, Julian Hochfeld, and a number of economists such as Michal Kalecki, Oscar Lange,

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