Leszek Kolakowski and the Debate Over Marxism in the 20th Century - Roger Kimball

Roger Kimball
Editor, The New Criterion
This year marks the centenary of the Russian Revolution. This first CCA of the 2017-2018 academic year will explore that revolution’s leaders, its animating ideology, and the 70-year history of the tyrannical regime to which it gave birth.
Watch more from this CCA seminar at www.hillsdale.edu/educational...

[@jancoil4886]

A Lefty to be sure, but one who was well aware of damage that the Leninist tradition had inflicted on Social Democracy in Europe. He also has to be read in light of the discovery and often grudging acceptance of Stalin's crimes by some on the Left. The American Right may try to recruit him for their side but as a thinker he is not easily captured.

[@noiamnotjohn3351]

This comment is pure and unadulterated cope and delusion.

[@IsmailofeRegime]

​@@noiamnotjohn3351 To be fair, Kołakowski semi-jokingly wrote of being a "conservative liberal socialist." In the late 70s he addressed a meeting of the Social Democrats USA, praising social-democracy for its supposed "commitment to a number of basic values: freedom, equal opportunity, a human-oriented and publicly supervised economy" and lamenting that "it does not stock or sell any of the exciting ideological commodities which totalitarian movements-communist, fascist, or leftist-offer dream-hungry youth."

[@hazelwray4184]

@@noiamnotjohn3351 'this comment' - self-referential?

[@hazelwray4184]

@@IsmailofeRegime what is 'leftist' in relation to "Conservative Liberal Socialist" or, Communist, Fascist?

[@IsmailofeRegime]

@@hazelwray4184 Kołakowski seemed to use the term "leftist" to mean New Left thinkers like Marcuse and students inspired by them. He basically argued that such figures, for all their Marxian terminology, could not really be considered Marxists (in his "Main Currents of Marxism" he discusses such figures at some length.)

[@gabrielsyme4180]

Loved your Solzhenitsyn interview. Along those same lines, you should read “The Captive Mind” by Czeslaw Milosz. He was a poet who observed the various ways his fellow artists were corrupted and demoralized by the communist takeover in Poland. Sadly, he’s dead, but a talk with someone who knows the work well would be enlightening.

[@gabrielsyme4180]

Just looked it up. Coincidentally he has a son who is also a composer who lives in California. His name is Anthony Milosz.

[@theswoletariat3479]

what a disingenuous quote-mining troll. Kimball knows very well his cherrypicked quotes in context don't mean what he claims

[@JOHNSMITH-ve3rq]

Care to elaborate bro?

[@hazelwray4184]

'in context'? His cherry picked quotes - existing out of context - don't mean what he claims.

[@TheWhitehiker]

His bowtie and demeanor are squaresville, but stay with it.

[@hazelwray4184]

Introduced by Peewee Herman

[@Captain_MonsterFart]

What's with the bow ties? Is Hillsdale College trapped in it's own type of ideology?

[@MihailGeorgeNeamtu]

Great talk!

[@whazzat8015]

Sees like Trump's influence

[@TheWhitehiker]

Squaresville!

[@hazelwray4184]

@@whazzat8015 'sees like'?

[@jameswebb4593]

I have issues with some of the points in this lecture. He stated that Marx was wrong in the decline of the middle classes, which is precisely what we are seeing today in the USA and Europe. Free Markets not capitalism. if that is correct then why has the EU and specifically Donald Trump been stopping free trade . We are at present wedged between two odious concepts , on the left communism on the right Globalization. Kolakowski was spot on with his Law of Infinite Cornucopia.

[@franktatom1837]

Trump was not against free trade, he was against one-sided free trade, i.e., limitations on import of American goods and commodities by foreign nations while we have no restrictions on import of the same from those countries. His actions were an attempt to leverage more free trade (or contributions to NATO) from those countries by restricting trade into the U.S., and if that occurred, the U.S. restrictions would be lifted

[@oddsman01]

You think the right wants globalization? Where did you come up with that idea? I havent seen the propaganda on Party Media. Not yet, anyway. I agree the left and communism are never far apart. It’s worrying at the best of times, but with so many billionaires and corporations on the left, maybe the Chinese model is looking more and more appealing to that crowd.

[@joegibbskins]

@@oddsman01 the vast majority of economists on the right want free trade. There’s a gap within both parties between what their intellectuals want and what their people want. I would say there’s broad antipathy towards free trade in the general American public on both the left and the right, but it’s almost impossible to find an economist in either party who agrees with them. It’s probably the most widely agreed upon and influential doctrine of the Chicago School. My own suspicion is that because according to charts and figures, growing the pie, increasing efficiency, and living standards, etc. are all great outcomes, and while in actuality they mostly are. However, your average person doesn’t want efficient to be the goal when it means they are being left to the whims of a global economy. How are you supposed to plan for the future when you know your job can be offshored as soon as it makes sense for investors? That’s why the populist right wants to insert barriers, and it’s why the populist left is demanding an ever increasing social safety net and both movements are explicitly against the WTO and G8.

[@IsmailofeRegime]

​@@franktatom1837 Marx pointed out that protectionist policies among the capitalist countries of Western Europe and North America were "the organization of a state of war in time of peace, a state of war which, aimed in the first place against foreign countries, necessarily turns in its implementation against the country which organizes it." Given that national economies obviously can't all be "equal," the capitalists of one country fear falling behind their foreign rivals and seek support from the bourgeois state to keep up prices for their commodities in the home market by limiting competition from abroad. Saying "Trump was not against free trade" is pretty pointless in this context. The effects of "free trade" on an importing country are not necessarily determined by whatever restrictions the exporting country has in regard to its own markets; to pretend one naturally follows the other is standard rhetoric used by critics of "free trade." The fact is that "free trade" often has destabilizing effects on the capitalists of the targeted country who are forced to compete or perish, and this in turn can affect the living standards of workers. But protectionist measures can also have a destabilizing effect on the workers while the capitalists enjoy a temporary economic "security" artificially provided by the state. Trump's rhetoric on this issue, like so much else, was empty "populism" that avoided acknowledging the inherent contradictions of capitalism.

[@hazelwray4184]

Capitalism is inherently global. Marx recognised that 'capitalism' went through various incarnations; took on various forms.

[@blairhakamies4132]

Well done🌹

[@desbolgar99]

If you wanna read a history that treats were did it start the rethoric of comunism, you should check "The enemies of comerce" by Antonio Escohotado. Highly recomended, three books, 1500 pages, probably the biggest survey on the matter.

[@TheWhitehiker]

Proofread your sentences.

[@LuisDiuk]

I am from Spain, spot on Antonio Escohotado Los Enemigos del Comercio is one of the best history of Communism and showing all its flaws, it's a petty has not yet being translated to English

[@hazelwray4184]

'that treats were did'... 'were did it start the rhetoric'

[@hazelwray4184]

@@LuisDiuk 'it's petty'?

[@LuisDiuk]

@@hazelwray4184 sorry I mean "pity"

[@dartagnan4831]

Don't expect people like this to properly represent Leszek. He gave credit to communism where credit was due.

[@mjxw]

What credit was due to communism, in Leszek's estimation?

[@djangotrane]

He may be one of the most pompous, repulsive speakers I have ever heard. Pretty impressive!

[@vkorchnoifan]

In Main Currents of Marxist Thought LK took apart that ideology. He was kick out of Poland for writing that.

[@rayliz5426]

Rebien

[@thunderstruck1078]

It's not a Soviet communism, it's Jewish communism. They invented it. Lenin (Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov), Trotsky (Lev Bronstein), Stalin (Dzhugashvili), Marx, Engels, Bukharin, Grigori Zinoviev (Radomyslsky), Karl Radek (Sobelsohn), foreign affairs commissar Maxim Litvinov (Wallach), Lev Kamenev (Rosenfeld), Yakov Sverdlov (Solomon) was both the Bolshevik party's executive secretary and - as chairman of the Central Executive Committee - head of the Soviet government. I bet you've never heard their real names. I certainly have not learned this in school. The same way as they call Cultural Marxists - Germans, even though they were 100% Jewish. *Communism = 100% Jewish invention* *Proof:* David R. Francis, United States ambassador in Russia, warned in a January 1918 dispatch to Washington: "The Bolshevik leaders here, most of whom are Jews and 90 percent of whom are returned exiles, care little for Russia or any other country but are internationalists and they are trying to start a worldwide social revolution." The Netherlands' ambassador in Russia, Oudendyke, confirmed this: "Unless Bolshevism is nipped in the bud immediately, it is bound to spread in one form or another over Europe and the whole world as it is organized and worked by Jews who have no nationality, and whose one object is to destroy for their own ends the existing order of things." In case anyone thinks I've taken a few selected quotes out-of-context, here's three paragraphs from Dr. George A. Simons, a former superintendent of the Methodist Missions in Russia, Bolshevik Propaganda Hearing Before the Sub-Committee of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, 65th Congress: "We were told that hundreds of agitators had followed in the trail of Trotsky (Bronstein) these men having come over from the lower east side of New York. Some of them when they learned that I was the American Pastor in Petrograd, stepped up to me and seemed very much pleased that there was somebody who could speak English, and their broken English showed that they had not qualified as being Americas. A number of these men called on me and were impressed with the strange Yiddish element in this thing right from the beginning, and it soon became evident that more than half the agitators in the so-called Bolshevik movement were Jews...I have a firm conviction that this thing is Yiddish, and that one of its bases is found in the east side of New York...The latest startling information, given me by someone with good authority, startling information, is this, that in December, 1918, in the northern community of Petrograd that is what they call the section of the Soviet regime under the Presidency of the man known as Apfelbaum (Zinovieff) out of 388 members, only 16 happened to be real Russians, with the exception of one man, a Negro from America who calls himself Professor Gordon.

[@IsmailofeRegime]

Francis' quote demonstrates nothing (unless you think "internationalist" is synonymous with being a Jew, which would certainly be strange in the case of internationalists like Karl Liebknecht and innumerable non-Jews who attended congresses of the Comintern like John Reed and Georgi Dimitrov.) As for Simons' quote, it refers to a nonexistent "Professor Gordon" which should tell you how dubious his access to information (or willingness to accurately report information) was. Anyway, in your list of prominent communists you not only included three non-Jews (Engels, Stalin, Bukharin) but left out numerous prominent non-Jews in the Bolshevik ranks: Georgi Chicherin (who was in charge of Soviet foreign affairs in Lenin's lifetime, not Litvinov), Dzerzhinsky, Bubnov, Lunacharsky, Rykov, Ordzhonikidze, Sokolnikov, Antonov-Ovseenko, Christian Rakovsky, Pavel Dybenko, etc. And yes, most people haven't heard of "their real names" since they used revolutionary pseudonyms which carried over after 1917. Doesn't matter if they were Jews or not. Molotov for example wasn't Jewish, yet he continued to be known by "Molotov" rather than his actual surname of Skryabin. Another non-Jewish example is Kamo, aka Simon Ter-Petrosian. Not to mention that even if you count Lenin as Jewish (since he had a Jewish grandfather on his mother's side), Ulyanov is not a Jewish surname so he'd have no reason to "hide" it for such a reason.