Main Currents of Marxism: The Founders, The Golden Age, The Breakdown
by Leszek Kolakowski, P. S. Falla
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Book Summary Information
Author: Leszek Kolakowski, P. S. FallaEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2005-11-07
ISBN: 0393060543
Number of pages: 1284
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Book Reviews of Main Currents of Marxism: The Founders, The Golden Age, The Breakdown
Book Review: The Definitive Anatomy of Marxism
Summary: 5 Stars
This book is the definitive anatomy of Marxism - as well as its most authoritative post-mortem.
Writing in the late 1970's, Kolakowski called Marxism "the greatest fantasy of our century... a dream offering the prospect of a society of perfect unity, in which all human aspirations would be fulfilled and all values reconciled." As we know, the fantasy of "values reconciled" soon turned into the reality of murder on an industrial scale - 100 million dead by the end of the century and billions more reduced to poverty and the daily insult of compulsory lies.
Marxism pretends to be a scientific system, but K. shows that it derives not from empirical observation, but from speculative metaphysics. Indeed, Kolakowski exposes Marx as a man of intellectual brilliance - AND breathtaking naivete. Marx blames social inequality and alienation on the division of labor and says that "the chief purpose of communism must be to abolish (it)" But even a child can see that productivity relies on specialization. He believes that if private property were eliminated, all human egoism and conflict would magically disappear - as if under communism there would not be a hundred new issues to fight over and a thousand new opportunities for selfishness to rear its ugly head. Authentic science generates accurate predictions, but "all of the prophecies of Marx ... have proved to be false." His theory of "exploitation" is based on arbitrary assumptions and his contributions to economic science are nil.
In one respect, Kolakowski is too generous to Marx. He says that Marx's "historical materialism" has "enriched our understanding of the past." But historical materialism is absurd in its strict form and platitudinous in its liberal form. It is hard to see how it could have enriched anything.
Among K's virtues is his refusal to allow communists to escape their horrendous legacy with the usual dodge that "Marxism" was "never tried". Communism - as the world came to know it in the regimes of Stalin and Mao and Ceausescu - was not a "mere degeneration of Marxism, but a possible interpretation of it and even a well-founded one." If Marxism was never successfully "implemented", it certainly wasn't a matter of not trying, nor a matter of good ideas betrayed, but the logical outcome of false ideas all-too-conscientiously put into practice.
Marxists are fond of talking about the "contradictions" of capitalism, but the contradictions of Marxism are far more obvious. As Kolakowski describes one of these: "The idea of perfect equality...is not only unfeasible economically, but is contradictory in itself: for perfect equality can only be imagined under a system of extreme despotism, but despotism itself presupposes inequality..."
That communist ideas, however enticing, are false - has been recognized for a very long time. David Hume, writing in 1751, was able to capture the futility as well as the menace of communism in a single paragraph: "However specious the ideas of perfect equality may seem, they are really, at bottom, impracticable; and were they not so, would be extremely pernicious to human society. Render possessions ever so equal, men's different degrees of art, care and industry will immediately break that equality. Or if you check these virtues, you reduce society to the most extreme indigence...The most rigorous inquisition too is requisite to watch every inequality on its first appearance and the most servere jurisdiction to punish and redress it....So much authority must soon degenerate into tyranny." Kolakowski himself could not have put it better.
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