NEWS & LETTERS, August - September 2009
Kolakowski's legacy
The philosopher Leszek Kolakowski has passed away at the age of 81. Kolakowski came to the attention of the world for his prominent role in challenging the official Communists of his native Poland in the decade following the mass unrest of 1956 and the curtailment of the reforms known as the "Polish October." A collection of many of his devastating philosophic attacks, steeped in a rigorous understanding of the revolutionary humanist content of Marxism, was published in the U.S. in 1968 as Toward a Marxist Humanism.
Kolakowski's criticisms resulted in increasingly harsh responses from Poland's rulers. His writings were banned and he was forbidden from teaching. The repression resulted in his emigration to the West in 1968, where he was held in high regard by that part of the Left not beholden to "actually existing socialism." Raya Dunayevskaya praised in particular his book The Alienation of Reason, a trenchant critique of positivist trends in philosophy. Beneath its focus on the thinkers of positivism, she discerned a penetrating attack on the theory and practice of Stalinism.
Immediately upon moving to the West, however, Kolakowski began to change his interpretation of Marxism. He began a long process of adopting a conservative critical position towards Marx, even to the point of holding him responsible for aspects of what became Stalinism. Kolakowski's sympathizers were intensely disappointed and the English socialist E.P. Thompson engaged in a long polemic with Kolakowski in 1974 in the pages of The Socialist Register. Dunayevskaya included a sharply critical footnote on Kolakowski's development in Philosophy and Revolution.
Despite the trajectory of Kolakowski's intellectual career, his post-emigration work is worth reading. His 1973 essay "The Myth of Human Self-Identity" is an important discussion of what he believes to be the limitations of Marx's view of post-revolutionary society as a re-unification of the social and political spheres, or civil society and the state, divided under capitalism. The first volume of his enormous work Main Currents of Marxism is also a challenging and valuable contribution, particularly its first chapter, "The Origins of Dialectic." In short, one can learn more about Marxism from reading the anti-Marxist Kolakowski than one can from reading nine out of ten self-professed Marxists.
Kolakowski won great acclaim in the west, including a 1983 MacArthur Fellowship and a prestigious 2003 award for lifetime achievement from the Library of Congress. The three-volume Main Currents of Marxism was just republished by Norton last year. One senses that even though the prevailing liberal intellectual opinion regards Marx as a figure safely consigned to the past, there is some feeling that it is necessary to keep Kolakowski's sophisticated critiques of Marxism in circulation in the eventuality that dissatisfaction with the system results in a return not to the Marx of the Stalinists, but to the revolutionary humanist so profoundly recognized by Kolakowski in the 1950s.
Kolakowski won great acclaim in the west, including a 1983 MacArthur Fellowship and a prestigious 2003 award for lifetime achievement from the Library of Congress. The three-volume Main Currents of Marxism was just republished by Norton last year. One senses that even though the prevailing liberal intellectual opinion regards Marx as a figure safely consigned to the past, there is some feeling that it is necessary to keep Kolakowski's sophisticated critiques of Marxism in circulation in the eventuality that dissatisfaction with the system results in a return not to the Marx of the Stalinists, but to the revolutionary humanist so profoundly recognized by Kolakowski in the 1950s.
--Kevin Michaels
To discover how Marx restructured Capital, buy Marxism and Freedom, by Raya Dunayevskaya.
"Marx no sooner relegated the history of theory to the end of Capital, and began to look at the history of production relations, than he of necessity created a new dialectic instead of applying one... A new dialectic flowed out of the labor process."
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