3.6 - mazlish, bruce - reflections on the eastern european revolutions. the god that failed (en)

7/30/2019 3.6 - Mazlish, Bruce - Reflections on the Eastern European Revolutions. the God That Failed (en)

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Reflections on the Eastern European Revolutions: The God that Failed

Reflections on the Eastern European Revolutions: The God that Failed

by Bruce Mazlish

Source:

PRAXIS International (PRAXIS International), issue: 3+4 / 1990, pages: 237-240, on www.ceeol.com.
http://www.ceeol.com/http://www.ceeol.com/http://www.ceeol.com/http://www.dibido.eu/bookdetails.aspx?bookID=03554d8d-bd83-4e93-9862-8c5f16fb4d72http://www.ceeol.com/


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REFLECTIONS ON THE EASTERNEUROPEAN REVOLUTIONS: THE GOD

THAT FAILEDBruce Mazlish

The tumultuous events of 1989 in Eastern Europe leave us reeling, familiarlandmarks gone, a sense of chaos gripping us. We need to make sense ofwhatis happening, to see some sort of meaningful change in place of mere chance.Under the flux of happenings - where each day's stories seem to outdo theprevious, with, for example, Hungary going beyond Poland, and then beingleapfrogged by developments in Czechoslovakia, and so on in the dance ofthe headlines - we need to discern the deep structural transformations takingplace. We must understand, I shall argue, that the demise of Marxismpresents us with a unique macro event in history, the first birth and death of agod in the modern, material world.

The essential causative context is Gorbachev's perestroika and glasnost inthe Soviet Union. While it should always have been clear that the communistdomination of Eastern Europewas unstable, flying in the face of nationalisticfeelings, imposing, as some Eastern Europeans saw it, an "Asiatic" yoke on"Western" oriented countries, and so forth, there was nothing deterministicabout the ultimate crumbling. A strong Soviet Union, determined to imposeits will bymilitary force on an inert Eastern Europe, in time, might have worndown even the possibilities of upheaval. While I shall have more to say aboutthis later, I want simply to underline here the causal role of Gorbachev'sRussia. When, during the summer of 1989, I spent a short t ime in Hungary. Ihad occasion to ask a wily old peasant, "What should America do?", hisanswer was, "Support Gorbachev." His peasant shrewdness shot straight tothe historian's problem of causality. (More recently, Vaclav Havel, in hisaddress to the American Congress, touched on the same point.)In the infinite regress that is historical explanation, an analysis of the pasthalf decade in the Soviet Union would be essential to understanding thecontext in which 1989 in Eastern Europe took place. Iwant to go even furtherback, however, and to limit my analysis to two major structural features: thenature of Marxism as a belief system, which I shall identify as a secularreligion; and the nature of Soviet dominion, as a form of imperialism.1. Marxism as a belief systemIn a book, The Meaning ofKarl Marx, which I published a few years ago, Itried tomake the case for Marxism as a secular religion; this, of course, is not a

Praxis International 10: 3/4October 1990& January 1991 0260-8448$2.00


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Praxis International 237particularly original idea, but I tried to develop It In a novel fashion,especially by emphasizing the religious, particularly Lutheran, roots inMarx's own life. To underline the importance of the subject , however, Ibegan the book by pointing out that as a secular religion, Marxism "has cometo hold sway over more hearts and minds, or at least to dominate theideologies of those in power in proportionately more parts of the world thananyone of the major historical religions."

One can readily see my present embarrassment. True, I had hedged myassertion with the qualification that "many of the 1.5 to 2 billion or so'followers' may be unwilling ones. Many Poles, Hungarians, etc., and evenRussians, detest the Communist system." Nevertheless, I added, "theirchildren are brought up in the new 'faith,' the public ceremonies areMarxist,etc." It seemed to me then that, just as Christianity under Constantine was abelief system held by only about one tenth of the population of the RomanEmpire and imposed on the rest, gradually triumphing, so communism toomight gradually come to be accepted, in some form or other, by the majorityof the people under its dominion.In the event, I was obviously off the mark. Not because I didn't foresee theevents of 1989 - no one else did either - but because I didn't probe furtherinto the nature of Marxism as a secular religion holding political power.Errors can oftentimes be fruitful; let us see what we can learn from what isinvolved in my commission, or rather omission, here.Tocqueville is a good starting point. Writing of the unexpected revolutionsof 1848, he declared that "Usually revolutions brought about by the emotionsof the mob have been desired, but not premediated ... They springspontaneously from some general malady of men'smind suddenly brought toa crisis by an unforeseen chance incident." What, then, were the "desires"waiting to be expressed in action, what the "general malady" ready to rageinto reality on the occasion of the unforeseen chance, in the EasternEuropean countries under communism's rule?Again, resort to Tocqueville is helpful. What he saw in mid-nineteenthcentury France was "not just a party that triumphed this time; men aimed atestablishing a social science, a philosophy, and I might almost say a commonreligion to be taught to all men and followed by them. Therein lay the reallynew element ... " The triumph in 1848 was short-lived, with its finaldenouement in the Eighteenth Brummaire ofLouis Napoleon. The man whowrote the classical analysis of that denouementwas Karl Marx; and it was hissocial science and "common religion" that triumphed in 1917 in Russia andthen spread out to the one to two billion Marxists of the late twentiethcentury.As a secular religion, we can now see in hindsight how Marxism hassuffered from one fatal flaw: its millennial claims are to be measured by itsearthly success, and not in a supranatural world. Its supranatural religiouscompetitors claimed moral powers that were rarely tested by their exerciseon this earth; thus Catholicism, aside from challenges by purists such as thethirteenth-century Cathars, claimed the validity of its sacraments irrespectiveof the morality of the priest administering the sacraments. Islam preaches

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238 Praxis Internationalabsolute submission to the ways of God, even though his hand usuallydispenses poverty. And so on.Only Marxism claimed that its "common religion" would improve both themoral and the material conditions of its adherents, leading the proletariat outof alienation and into affluence. In doing so, it would finally realize truemorality and its attendant human equality. No one would ever again exploitanyone else. The human species would finally have reached its true destiny offreedom.

The utopian nature of this dream became devastatingly clearer with eachpassing year. Utopia means "no place." But communism had promised itsreligious fulfilment in "this place." Instead, whether in the Soviet Union orits satellites, this place turned out to be filled with placemen, a nomenclatura,who not only were unable to deliver the material goods, but were morallyillegitimate in their grasp of undemocratic power and their self-indulgentcorruption. Corruption in the Christian religion could lead to a reformationand a counter-reformation; the goal was to restore the purity of asupranatural religion and to free it from the cloying earthly imperfections ofan as yet unredeemed man. The removal of corruption in the communistworld entails as well the removal of the belief system that is held responsiblefor its existence. What I mean by this is that corruption is seen as endemic tothe system, and not merely a matter of personal errancy.The signs of the collapse in beliefwere, in fact, there to be seen. In 1941, asa "sign of the times," a number of ex-communists published a book called

The God that Failed, detailing their earlier belief and now their apostasy.Edited by Richard Crossman, the book included accounts by such men asIgnacio Silone, Arthur Koestler, and RichardWright. What was then the lossof faith by a few intellectuals has now become the massive hemorrhaging of"religious" belief by the masses upon whom Marx sought to build his"church."In the 1950s, in the West, it was fashionable to discuss the idea that "Godis Dead." Resurrection of the supranatural religions has, clearly, occurredtoday just as an earlier account two thousand years ago described a return tolife then. Amos Elon, in 1989 Czechoslovakia, tells how one of the posters inPrague announced MARX IS DEAD. His resurrection is rather moreproblematic, for the reasons I have hinted at above. It is a foolish person whotrumpets "The End ofHistory," or brags about the triumph of capitalism, forsuch simplicities overlook the mote in the West's own eye and the resultantproblems of vision with which it will have to deal. Nor is the moral aspirationofMarxism, its millennial inspiration, entirely without continuing attraction.As capitalism, in its ascendant mode, reveals more of its own flaws,communism may perhaps experience a minor nostalgic resurrection as acounterweight. More of the lustre lost by capitalism is likely, however, to fallupon socialism or some other-"ism" yet unknown.Nevertheless, it does appear that as an overall belief system communismhas lost its power. We are witnessing, it seems, one of those silentrevolutions in the human spirit, as Hegel put it, which flared up only ahundred or more years ago and is now dying out. It is not the end of history,


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Praxis International 239but one more sign of the increasingly rapid pace of change that marks ourepoch.

To conclude this section with one last quotation from Tocqueville:"Antecedent facts, the nature of institutions, turns of mind and the state ofmores are the materials from which chance composes those impromptuevents that surprise and terrify us;" these, he said, are what constitute theprocess of history. I have tried to hint at the turns ofmind and state of moresin what I have said aboutMarxism as a secular religion, whose hold on its pastbelievers is now gone. Its demise presents us, as I remarked at the beginningof this article, with a unique macro event in history, the first such birth anddeath of a god in the modern, material world.2. The nature of Soviet domination

Antecedent facts and the nature of institutions: these are also what need tobe analyzed now and by future historians, in great detail. Any attempt at afuller explanation of 1989 will certainly have to ground itself in the contingentnature of the events that have so rapidly unrolled, and are continuing to doso. Assuming that this will be done, I want to turn now to the second of thetwo long-range factors that I mentioned earlier: the collapse of an empire.It is easy to forget that ours is an age of massive decolonization. The firstWorld War started the process for the West, and the second World War

turned it into a landslide. Outstandingly, Britain was forced to give up India,and France to surrender Algeria and Vietnam, after protracted armedstruggle (in the la tter case, inherited by the United States). It is in thiscontext, though it is taking a largely non-violent form, that we must envisionthe events of 1989 in Eastern Europe.

What obscures our vision is that 1) the Soviet Union acquired its empireafter 1945, when the Western nations were losing theirs; and 2) the Sovietempire was a continental one, imposed on close neighbours, ethnically andlinguistically as well as geographically.We have already seen that the cementmeant to hold the empire together , along with arms, was the communistbelief system. With the complete failure of the latter, Soviet hegemony wasbased only on force; and with Gorbachev's removal of the latter, the hold ofempire dissolved (or is dissolving).

In short, by different paths, and perhaps with different outcomes, theSoviet Union and the West have experienced the massive shock ofdecolonization. Without minimizing the differences between the twoexperiences, it is important to understand what has happened in 1989 as avariant on a common experience.In itself, the loss of Soviet empire would have only limited effect. Whatmakes it so muchmore painful than the Western experience is that the SovietUnion within its own boundaries is itself an empire, some of whose peoplefeel "subject" in the same way as the Eastern Europeans. Britain has itsUlster; one needs to imagine it as riven by powerfulWelsh, Scottish and, yes,Birmingham Moslem separatists to achieve the true comparison withGorbachev's Russia. In this case, therefore, the analogy must go beyond the


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240 Praxis InternationalWestern experience of decolonization in the postWar years, and perhaps thecomparison be made with the Ottoman (or Hapsburg) Empire.Will the Soviet Union, or internal empire, dissolve along with the regimeof communism? Will we witness the emergence of a Russian state, similar tothe Turkish one of Ataturk Kemal Pasha, out of the ruins of its presentboundaries? A state that is no longer a world power (although still possessingnuclear arms)? Predictions today are risky; still, I am prepared to say that Idoubt the "Turkish" outcome for the Soviet Union. Its path, I suspect, will beits own, original one, though yet to be traced.

But this is prediction; the historian's main task is retrodiction; and I haveattempted to carry out that task by highlighting two of the fundamentalstructural features underlying the revolutions in Eastern Europe: the failureof a secular religion and the downfall of a colonial empire. Together with thecontingent events in each of the countries involved, and along with furtheranalysis of other structural features than those I have featured, theexplanation offered here may help give meaning to the chaos of events.

3.6 - mazlish, bruce - reflections on the eastern european revolutions. the god that failed (en)

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