Word: kolakowski
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Dates: during 1957-1957
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Pointing to such men as Djilas in Yugoslavia and Kolakowski in Poland (TIME, Oct. 14), Salisbury quoted a Warsaw observer: "What the West must remember about this process is that all of this started inside the Communist Party. The sharpest critics are Communists or men closely associated with Communism. The process of evolution or revolution is occurring within the Communist movement because that is where the best minds of these countries have been assembled by force of circumstance." Concludes Salisbury: "The Communist myth in Eastern Europe, never strongly established, seems broken beyond repair. This becomes apparent when even the writers...
...Kolakowski then attacks the sacred Marxist dogma of historical determinism. History is not predictable, he insists. This destroys the basis of the Soviet demand for blind obedience on the ground that whatever the party bosses decide to do is part of society's inevitable movement toward the overthrow of capitalism...
...Marxist protagonists of "political realism," Kolakowski retorts: "Your values change drastically every day, and every day they are proclaimed eternal. This is the worst kind of relativism of values, for it buries historical thinking as well as the immutable and lasting achievements of mankind...
Positive Hypocrisy. Kolakowski draws a devastating picture of what he calls "the positive role of hypocrisy," a nice philosophical turn of phrase which means simply that a criminal regime that cloaks its actions in moral slogans will, soon or late, be forced to start trying to live up to them. Says Kolakowski ironically: "A social system based on unlawfulness, oppression and unhappiness, when it masks itself with humanistic phraseology, does not, in spite of appearances, become more effective in the long run. At a certain moment, its facade turns against it because it was always alien...
...Communist intellectuals, much of what Kolakowski has to say has been said before, often with less obscurantism. But in today's Poland it is new, fresh and almost suicidal in its audacity. Even in trying to answer him, Gomulka's Polityka fell into admission of the threat he poses to the Communist hierarchy: "Kolakowski and the enragés are not able to present any program of a 'moral' policy which would not lead at once to a national catastrophe and to the annihilation of Socialism." Kolakowski's supporters heard that he will be barred...