of the panel thought it was. This year, if a similar panel were held, the question would be: Can Communism save itself? Who would be so bold to say that it can?
Why were we so wrong? Because all of us, Kolakowski included, had our roots in the intellectual traditions of the socialist left. Experience had taught us all to be anti-Communist, but our critique of socialism was based on political theory and political considerations. We knew that totalitarianism was evil, but we thought that socialism worked. We were wrong. It does not work.
While we were wrong, others all along had been right. All those years, outside the socialist tradition, there had been voices crying in the wilderness saying that not only would socialism bring tyranny and suffering, it would not work. Seventy-seven years ago, five years after the Bolshevik triumph, Ludwig von Mises wrote a book on socialism that predicted the catastrophe we see before us. Socialist economy, he argued, was economic irrationality, and socialist planning a prescription for chaos. Only a capitalist market could provide a system of rational allocations and rational accounts. Only private property and the profit-motive could unleash the forces of individual initiative and human creativity to produce real and expanding wealth—not only for the rich but for society as a whole.
Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich von Hayek, and the other liberal theorists of a free-market economy who warned of this outcome are the true prophets of the reality we see before us—of socialist bankruptcy and Communist retreat. Glastnostian democracy has not completed and cannot complete the socialist dream; it can only expose this dream as a nightmare from which Communism cannot wake up. The only way to wake up is to give up the dream. In 1989, according to Soviet economists, the average Soviet citizen had a daily ration of meat that was smaller than the daily intake of the average Russian in 1913 under the czar. Socialism makes men poor beyond their wildest dreams. The average Polish citizen is poorer today, in 1989, than my poor grandfather was in America fifty years ago, when I was born.
The law of socialist economy is this: from each according to his exploitability, to the nomenklatura according to its greed. Not only does the socialist economy not produce wealth at the rate a free economy does; the socialist economy consumes wealth. It consumes the natural wealth of the nation and also the wealth it accumulated in the past. Every Communist revolution begins as a rape of the present and continues as a cannibalization of the past. Every Communist Party is the colonizer of its own country, and the Soviet empire is the colonizer of them all. That is the law of socialist distribution: from each nation according to its exploitability, to the empire according to its greed.
But a system that lives by cannibalism, which consumes more wealth than it produces, is sooner or later destined to die. And that is what is happening before our eyes.
For myself, the family tradition of socialist dreams is over. Socialism is no longer a dream of the revolutionary future. It is only a nightmare of the past. But for you, the nightmare is not a dream. It is a reality that is still happening. My dream for the people of socialist Poland is that someday soon you will wake up from your nightmare, and be free.
This is from a talk delivered at the Second Thoughts Conference in Krakow, Poland, May 4–7, 1989, just before Poland became free. http://archive.frontpagemag.com/Printable.aspx?ArtId=21734
I was recently invited to address the question “Are We Conservatives?” before an audience at the Heritage Foundation. The very posing of the question tells us something about contemporary conservatism. I could no more have put the question “Are We Progressives?” to a comparable gathering of the left than I could ask a crowd of citizens “Are we Americans?” To raise such an issue to those audiences would be to question an identity and the foundations of a faith.
Conservatism, then, is not an ideology in the sense that liberalism is, or the various forms of radicalism are. It is not an “identity politics” whose primary concern is to situate its adherents in the camp of moral humanity and thus to confer on them the stamp of History’s approval. Conservatism does not have a party line. It is possible for conservatives to question virtually any position held by other conservatives including, evidently, the notion that they are conservatives at all, without risking excommunication, expulsion, or even a raised eyebrow.
Conservatives do sometimes claim religious principles as the basis for their convictions. But it is not a religious commitment that makes them conservatives. There are radicals and liberals who have similar commitments and make similar claims. What makes an outlook “conservative’ is that it is rooted in an attitude about the past rather than in expectations of the future. The first principles of conservatism are propositions about human nature and the way human beings behave in a social context; about limits, and what limits make possible. This practicality, this attention to experience, to workable arrangements, explains why the conservative community can be liberal and tolerant toward its members in ways that the progressive left cannot.
In contrast to the conservative outlook, liberal and radical ideologies are about the future, about desired outcomes. The first principles of the left are the principles of politically constructing a “better world.” Throughout the modern era, the progressive future has been premised on a social contract that would make all of society’s members equal—or at least provide them with equal starting-points.
Since ideologies of the left are commitments to an imagined future, to question them is to provoke a moral rather than an empirical response: Are you for or against the equality of human beings? To dissent from the progressive viewpoint is not a failure to assess relevant facts but an unwillingness to embrace a liberated future. It is, therefore, to will the imperfections and injustices of the present order. In the current cant of the left, it is to be “racist, sexist, classist,” a defender of the status quo.
That is why not only radicals, but even those who call themselves liberals, are instinctively intolerant towards the conservative position. For progressives, the future is not a maze of human uncertainties and unintended consequences. It is a moral choice. To achieve the socially just future requires only that enough people decide to will it. Consequently, it is perfectly consistent for progressives to consider themselves morally and intellectually enlightened, while dismissing their opponents as morally repulsive reactionaries, unworthy of the community of other human beings.
While the politics of the left is derived from assumptions about the future, its partisans are careful to construct a view of history that validates their claims: history as a narrative of progressively expanding human rights. Thus the revolutions of the 18th century institutionalized civil rights of free speech and religion, and a government of laws for white property-holding males. The 19th century extended the rights of suffrage and the political base of freedom, ending slavery and establishing the equality of individual males as participants in the political process. The 20th century’s task, and now the task of the 21st is to extend the same rights to women and other minorities, while adding social and economic rights to education, health-care, material wellbeing, and equality. This is the revolution for “social justice,” which, of course, is the socialist revolution that has failed, but that the left will not give up.
Modern, or post-modern, or better still post-Communist conservatism begins with the recognition that this agenda and the progressive paradigm that underpins it are bankrupt. They have been definitively refuted by the catastrophes of Marxism, which demonstrate that the quest for social justice, pressed to its logical conclusion, leads inexorably to the totalitarian result. The reason is this: to propose a solution that is utopian, in other words impossible, is to propose a solution that requires coercion and requires absolute coercion. Who wills the end wills the means.
Post-Communist conservatism, then, begins with the principle that is written in the blood of these social experiments. “It is just not true,” as Hayek wrote in The