The end of the evil empire that Marxists believed was impregnable has deflated their sense of certainty about history, social progress and future. Many Marxist sympathisers have tried to find relief by taking recourse to blaming Stalin and Stalinism for the 'setback' while hardcore Marxists in an attempt to put up a brave face have come forward to staunchly defend Stalinism. Communists of all colours today have no reason to continue their belief that the ideology that they passionately espouse is still relevant. Marxism as a social project is no more relevant than any brand of political or religions utopian ideas. Living as we are in the early years of 21 st century, we need no refresher course to understand that any doctrine that envisages an utopian society has a latent streak of coercion, terror and violence. We have seen this in Stalinism, Pol Potism, Maoism and in Talibanism.
Leszek Kolakowski, a dissident Polish philosopher and historian of ideas revered as an icon of anti-communism in Poland, is among the thinkers and writers whose exposure of the ideology has finally brought it down. Having spent half of his life in exile from Poland, he died in Oxford at the age of 81 on July 17, 2009. Kolakowski's three-volume Main Currents of Marxism is an exposition of his view that far from being an aberration, Stalinism is a logical end product of Marxism. Like Karl Popper (1902-1994) who was attracted to Marxism in his early years, joined the Social Democratic Party of Austria that fully espoused the Marxist ideology and then became disillusioned with that ideology, Kolakowski attacked the historicism of Marxism for what it is: a delusion.Marxism has always claimed superior insight into the 'laws of history' and it was this 'insight' that often helped Marxists justify totalitarian communist regimes. Hegel and Marx, in Popper's view, are guilty of upholding the view that history has a pattern and a meaning that can be used in the present to predict and fashion the future. Kolakowski also hits hard at the Hegelian and Marxist belief in the 'laws of history'. In his 2003 speech upon receipt of the first Kluge Prize instituted by the Library of Congress in the U.S., he said: 'Human history is a collection of unpredictable accidents, and we can all easily cite any number of instances where an event that was clearly decisive in shaping the destiny of mankind for subsequent decades or centuries could have gone a different way than it did; there was nothing necessary in its happening or in its results.'
History is concerned with unrepeatable events that are unique and particular. The Marxist doctrine of historical materialism is based on a belief that there is a hidden evolution going on behind historical events. There is a trace of social Darwinism in this idea of evolution in history. Social Darwinists portray human history in terms of Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection, the selective adaptation that shapes the natural environment. Engels in his speech at the graveside of Karl Marx in 1883 said that 'just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history.'This half-baked attempt to fit the communist doctrine of progress in human productive activities and class struggles between the exploiting and the exploited into the social Darwinist theory of the 'survival of the fittest' (a term that Darwin never used) is battered by Kolakowski when he says that history is unlike the natural sciences as it does not try to establish general law guiding it. He says that 'there is no such thing as "the law of history,"in the sense of true and justifiable statements that would tell us that in certain well-defined conditions certain well-defined phenomena invariable occur.'
The whole edifice of Marxism is built upon this notion of the 'laws of history' that allows the Marxists to claim that Marxism is a science and that they can predict future evolution of historical events on a 'scientific' basis. Anti-Marxist thinkers like Kolakowski demolishes the edifice with their critical examination of its tall claims. There is hardly any prediction of Marx or Marxists that has not turned out to be falsse. Marx predicted that bourgeois society will vanish. It never happened. Communist Manifesto predicted that the working class, engaged in a struggle with the bourgeoisie, was the political force which would accomplish the destruction of capitalism and a transition to socialism. It sounds funny today. Countries having capitalist economies today are more democratic and open than communist or Islamic countires. Private profit, after all, is not so bad as Marxists would have us believe. In fact, it has become an impetus to innovation and entrepreneurial activity. To the disbelief of die-hard Marxists, social development has not moved according to the script drafted by Marx and Engels and experimented by Lenin and Stalin.
Just like any other political ideology, communism that inspired dreams of a classless society turned out to be a dogma whose enforcement required killing of its opponents, their deportation to Siberia or labour camps of the Gulag, establishment of the police state, torture, and censorship. The breaching of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago marked the crumbling of that ideology that appeared to have been here to stay for many many more years. Kolakowski is one of those brave thinkers whose portrayal of the true face of that ideology also played a great role in bringing it down.
