Paradox of the Marxist Philosopher

An enormous literature has been devoted to the subject of the intellectuals’ subservience to Communism and to Communist parties in Russia and elsewhere. From Victor Serge to Arthur Koestler and Whittaker Chambers a first batch of sensitively written, partly autobiographical, partly fictionalized reports emerged from the Western intellectuals’ anguished minds, describing how, after a voyage through hell, they rejected a god that failed. Then a second batch came off the presses, starting perhaps with Czeslaw Milosz’ The Captive Mind to Douglas Hyde’s report on his own break with the party and its ideology; and since the Budapest uprising this growing literature has been enriched by analyses of political, social, and cultural nature, no longer limited to one man’s odyssey but, as in the case of Djilas’ The New Class and The Revolt of the Mind by the two Hungarians, Aczel and Meray, enlarged to embrace the entire mechanism of the Communist power structure.

This is, then, a literature at mid-century which could be labeled: Disillusionment with Communism. But the works illustrating it have, with few exceptions, one thing in common: they remain on the level of the intellectuals’ experience. Their inner rhythm is that of hope (to find a way out of bourgeois-capitalist selfishness), suffering (because of the knowledge of new and possibly worse horrors inside the Communist system), and, finally, emergence (with a more or less confused and wounded consciousness of what happened). We recognize in these three stations the structure of great Western literary works in whose molds the ex-fellow traveler’s experience automatically finds the most convenient expression. But the very fascination of the experience and the search for its expression hide from the narrator some of the even more fundamental reasons why his quest miscarried.

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Thomas Molnar

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An enormous literature has been devoted to the subject of the intellectuals’ subservience to Communism and to Communist parties in Russia and elsewhere. From Victor Serge to Arthur Koestler and Whittaker Chambers a first batch of sensitively written, partly autobiographical, partly fictionalized reports emerged from the Western intellectuals’ anguished minds, describing how, after a voyage through hell, they rejected a god that failed. Then a second batch came off the presses, starting perhaps with Czeslaw Milosz’ The Captive Mind to Douglas Hyde’s report on his own break with the party and its ideology; and since the Budapest uprising this growing literature has been enriched by analyses of political, social, and cultural nature, no longer limited to one man’s odyssey but, as in the case of Djilas’ The New Class and The Revolt of the Mind by the two Hungarians, Aczel and Meray, enlarged to embrace the entire mechanism of the Communist power structure.

This is, then, a literature at mid-century which could be labeled: Disillusionment with Communism. But the works illustrating it have, with few exceptions, one thing in common: they remain on the level of the intellectuals’ experience. Their inner rhythm is that of hope (to find a way out of bourgeois-capitalist selfishness), suffering (because of the knowledge of new and possibly worse horrors inside the Communist system), and, finally, emergence (with a more or less confused and wounded consciousness of what happened). We recognize in these three stations the structure of great Western literary works in whose molds the ex-fellow traveler’s experience automatically finds the most convenient expression. But the very fascination of the experience and the search for its expression hide from the narrator some of the even more fundamental reasons why his quest miscarried.