You can't outwit the cunning of history
June 4, 1989, marks a pivotal date in world history. With a broken economy, hyperinflation and a rampant black market, the Polish communist government, encouraged by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, held the country's first partially free election in almost half a century. That date paved the way for Solidarity - a one-time trade union turned into a nationwide opposition movement, led by the great dissident Lech Walesa - to take power. The country was ready to transform itself from a planned economy into a market economy, and to return to the European family of nations.
It must also have been a most uncanny day in the life of the great Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski, a historian of Marxism, who died last Friday aged 81. By then, he had been in exile at Oxford University from his homeland for two decades. One imagines he would be observing events of that pivotal day around the world not as surprises but simply as confirmation of his views on the nature of Marxism and communist states that had ruled in its name. A totalitarian state built on a bankrupt ideology must perpetuate the worst form of tyranny to survive.
From this, Kolakowski would have reached two conclusions: the days of Polish communist rule were numbered, for a tyranny willing to compromise (by running a relatively free election, for example) is no tyranny at all; however, the Chinese Communist Party was willing to do what it took to survive. The proof of that was in the blood being spilled on Tiananmen Square on the same day Poles were winning their freedom.
A one-time card-carrying Marxist, turned revisionist-Marxist and finally anti-Marxist, he apparently died a Catholic. That seems plausible, given his intense interest in religious ideas. His most famous book is his three-volume Main Currents of Marxism. It's not so much a history of Marxism as a history of Marxist philosophy as it played out over two centuries. It's a history written by a philosopher. It begins with Plotinus and ends with Mao Zedong . With irony, Kolakowski titled the last section 'The peasant Marxism of Mao Tse-tung'. By that, he meant not only Mao's original idea of the peasantry being China's real revolutionary force, but that the chairman's thought was 'peasant Marxism' when measured by European Marxist standards: 'extremely primitive and clumsy, sometimes even childish'. Hegel, of course, said the same thing about Confucius.
The Mao section, and the new 2004 epilogue on contemporary China that follows, is markedly different in character from the rest of the book. Since there is little real (Marxist) philosophic content to be examined, it reads like a standard, pedestrian account of Maoist China. And the new epilogue would have made a good right-wing opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal about the central government today.
'This is not a communist state in any recognisable sense but a tyranny that grew out of a communist system,' Kolakowski wrote. Maoist ideology may be dead, but the party and the state never repudiate communism, continue to control people's thoughts and expressions, persecute religious life and minorities, conduct 'slave labour and concentration camps', restrict non-governmental bodies and suppress the rule of law.
Kolakowski said Marx was Euro-centric. Well, he, too, was the same with China. Chinese - and Asians - are developing their own models of economic growth and freedom. Who knows what the future will bring? But surveys have repeatedly shown that both Poles and Chinese are terribly optimistic about the future.
On June 4, 1989, a Polish patriot would have been ready to uncork champagne while a Chinese one could only despair. But, what Hegel calls the cunning of history means that future outcomes almost always elude people's expectations. Philosophers are not futurists; their wisdom consists of trying to understand the past. As an anti-Marxist historian, Kolakowski should agree.
Alex Lo is a senior writer at the Post
