Clinging to faith: public intellectuals and the God that failed.

• Author: Hollander, Paul

THE COLLAPSE of communist states in Eastern Europe in 1989 and of the Soviet Union itself in 1991 was widely assumed to mark the end of the historical career of communist systems and movements; it was also expected to discredit durably the ideas that animated them. The remaining incarnations of "scientific socialism"--notably the grotesque North Korean dictatorship and the bankrupt patrimony of Fidel Castro--were hardly inspiring models of a "socialism with a human face" for Western idealists and sympathizers.

The fall of communist states has been accompanied by a growing amnesia about the human toll exacted by the attempts to implement socialist ideals in the not-so-distant past, coupled with a revival of anti-capitalist sentiments generated by the problematic results of globalization, stimulating a new susceptibility to socialist ideals.

Needless to say, no similar attempts have been made to downplay or reinterpret non-judgmentally other major historical atrocities, including, in more recent times, the mass murders carried out by Nazi Germany. Academics today are not attempting to parse the populist elements of Nazism from its genocidal practices in the way ideologues cull communism's egalitarian message from its sordid applications.

In Russia an abiding veneration of that great guardian of order and stability, Stalin, is coupled with ambivalence about the Soviet past and a yearning for the security and superpower status it provided. Maoist guerillas have become powerful in Nepal in recent years and remain entrenched in many parts of India. Market economies failed to solve all social and economic problems in the countries where they were introduced; as a result, left-of-center governments and movements made progress in parts of the world, particularly Latin America. Democratically elected leftist governments came into power in Venezuela and Bolivia, likely to be followed, according to some experts, by others of their kind in the region.

In the West no such trends can be discerned at the present time, but the rejection of capitalism and bourgeois cultural values continues to prevail among many intellectuals and in academic subcultures. Although specific communist states, extinct or surviving, are no longer widely admired by Western intellectuals, their anti-capitalism and egalitarian rhetoric are still attractive. There also remains a steadfast denial on the Left that Marxism was implicated in the moral and political-economic failures of the now defunct communist states. As Kenneth Minogue observed in 1990: "When regimes collapse ... the principles and ideals which animated them can be glimpsed creeping stealthily away from the rubble, unscathed. Communism 'never failed'--its exponents can be heard muttering--it was 'never tried.'" This is especially the case when, as Enrique Krauze wrote in the New Republic a decade later, "celebrity utopians need a new address for their fantasies", and no such address is available because no political systems or movements exist upon which wishful fantasies can be readily projected. What remains are the good intentions and hopes that have proved impossible to realize. This is why Cornel West could maintain that "Marxist thought becomes even more relevant after the collapse of Communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe than it was before." A flickering loyalty to the ideals that promised to transcend sordid socio-political inequities persists, as the hard-core loyalists refuse to accept that the human condition cannot be radically altered and improved, and that the failed attempts to do so required huge amounts of coercion and violence--as the history of communist states has shown. Leszek Kolakowski's observation made in 1978 (in his history of Marxism) about the influence of Marxism remains largely valid: "Almost all the prophecies of Marx ... have already proved false, but this does not disturb the spiritual certainty of the faithful ... for it is a certainty not based on ... 'historical laws', but simply on the psychological need for certainty. In this sense Marxism performs the function of religion...."

The Old Guard

PRESENT DAY radical leftists, anarchists and supporters of the (left-over) counterculture continue to draw inspiration from old-guard leftist thinkers, some dead and others of an advanced age--those prepared to minimize, deny or explain away a political system that resulted in the deaths of tens of millions.

Long before the fall of the Soviet Union, Western Marxists were compelled to find ways to protect their beliefs from the assault of the realities of...