Determinism, Freedom, and Ethics. Where the
orthodox tradition is cosmocentric, contemporary
Revisionists have been anthropocentric. Social deter-
minism (seen as a justification of Marxism institu-
tionalized in the rule of a Stalinist party and defined
from moment to moment by that Party in response
to political needs) has been questioned and diluted with
elements of individual responsibility; in this Koła-
kowski led the way in 1957 with a statement of what
amounts to “statistical” but not individual determinism
(Kołakowski [1969], pp. 160f.; cf. also Marković,
1963.); others, apparently forsaking rigorous philo-
sophical statement, have opted for “moderate deter-
minism” (Stojanović, in Lobkowicz [1967], p. 171). This
reaction against determinism, together with its ethical
consequences, is one of the few features common to
Bernstein and to Revisionist philosophers today.
Antideterminism was naturally linked with the re-
habilitation of individual moral autonomy: no longer
could Das Sollen (“the ought”) be derived from Das
Sein (“the is”). Kołakowski insisted that men could not
avoid moral judgments of political reality; Mihailo
Marković, a prominent member of the Praxis group
in Yugoslavia, has argued that science can only offer
alternative probabilities, from which we choose ac-
cording to our moral values. Svetozar Stojanović has
urged that Marxism should develop a system of norma-
tive ethics of its own.
Man and Society: Alienation. Much attention has
been devoted to the relations between Man and Soci-
ety. In this connection, a key concept, derived from
the young Marx, has been that of alienation. Though
the term is much older, it was first “discovered” by
Georg Lukács in the early 1920's, then revealed by
the publication of Marx's “Paris” manuscripts in 1932,
but only brought to the fore by Western Marxists in
the 1940's and 1950's. Alienation has been an important
tool of Marxist criticism of existing socialist societies.
Marx said that man suffers alienation under capitalism.
The contemporary Revisionists' main contribution has
been to assert that alienation persists under socialism,
particularly in the form of bureaucracy. Just as it was
Yugoslav ideologists who first in Eastern Europe pro-
duced a critique of Stalinism as a bureaucratic de-
generation of socialism (there is perhaps an unconscious
echo of Trotsky here), so it is Yugoslav philoso-
phers who have devoted most energy to discussion of
alienation in socialist society. It is, moreover, the
Yugoslavs who profess to see a possible solution to the
problem in their own system of social and workers'
self-management. They sharply distinguish the ideal of
socialism from affluence based on technology (e.g.,
Danilo Pejović, in Fromm [1965], pp. 181ff.): for them
the socialist ideal is defined in the Communist Mani-
festo as a society “in which the free development of
each is the condition for the free development of all.”
The Dialectic. Unlike Bernstein, most contemporary
Revisionist philosophers retain the dialectic view not
of Nature but of Man and Society. Here again, Lukács,
the Neo-Hegelian Revisionist of the 1920's, was their
predecessor. For some, such as Karel Kosík and Milan
Prucha in Czechoslovakia, to accept the dialectic is
to see Man in the totality of his relationships; for others
such as Marković, it is a pledge of permanent social
criticism. In either case it is an expression of philo-
sophical radicalism: in Marx's words, De omnibus dubi-
tandum.
National Traits of Revisionism. We have seen that
Revisionism and nationalism are closely associated in
the orthodox mind: one of the characteristics of politi-
cal Revisionism is an excessive emphasis on national
peculiarities. Insofar as political Revisionism sprang
from the rejection of a single (Soviet) model of social-
ism, this is an understandable judgment, borne out by
the rehabilitation of national traditions which has ac-
companied the manifestations of Revisionism in East-
ern Europe. But national circumstances have also left
their stamp on philosophical Revisionism.
One reason why Polish philosophers took the lead
in Revisionism was the existence in prewar Poland of
a distinguished school of analytical philosophers, some
of whom were still active after 1948. A. Schaff was
a product of this school; in 1951, when Kołakowski
was still orthodox, Schaff used its ideas in a critical
examination of the Marxist theory of truth (Jordan
[1963], pp. 88ff.).
In Yugoslavia, on the contrary, with no philosophical
tradition, official political Revisionism removed for
some years the stimulus of orthodoxy, and thus delayed
the development of philosophical Revisionism. Libera-
tion from the initial dominance of Russian Marxism
in its Leninist-Stalinist form was followed by a period
of Marxist fundamentalism, characterized by close
study of texts, with little application to current social
problems. It was not until about 1962, and particularly
since the foundation of Praxis in 1964, that serious
efforts were made to judge social reality by developing
the criteria of Marxist humanism. In Czechoslovakia,
there was a brief onslaught on philosophical Revision-
ism, defined as philosophy divorced from politics, in
1959. Among those attacked were Karel Kosík, repre-
sentative of a dialectic view of totality akin to that
of Lukács, and Ivan Sviták, a more typical Marxist
humanist, both of whom were prominent in the politi-
cal reform movement of 1967-68.
Revisionism: Right or Left? In the sense that he
could be regarded as advocating a compromise with
bourgeois capitalist reality, Bernstein was correctly
seen as the originator of a right-wing heresy in Social
Democracy. Subsequent forms of political Revisionism
were also to the right of orthodoxy, at least until Soviet
ideologists began to apply the term to the Chinese:
for all except the Chinese (and Albanians) showed a
tendency to move not only away from exclusive alle-
giance to Moscow but towards a position less sharply
opposed to “imperialism.” But on the philosophical
plane the position is far less clear-cut. The Revisionists'
interest in, and openness to, Western philosophy (in-
cluding Thomism and nineteenth-century phenome-
nology) might seem to place them on the Right; but
their emergence has always betokened a radical revolt
against dogmatic, conservative, or ossified features of
socialist régimes. Kołakowski, analyzing the concept
of the Left, ascribed to it “a position of permanent
revisionism toward reality”—meaning socialist as well
as capitalist reality (Kołakowski, p. 96). “Criticism of
all that exists” was the text from Marx under which
Praxis originally launched its campaign against “Sta-
linist positivism,” and the heritage which Marković,
Petrović, and others claim from Marx is not (as with
Bernstein) evolutionary, but revolutionary. Kołakowski
has even touched on the possible use of force by the
Left under socialism (loc. cit.). In Yugoslavia, Marković
has consistently criticized bureaucratic privilege in
socialist society; and when political Revisionism, al-
ready institutionalized in the Party, espoused economic
liberalization, many Revisionist philosophers took up
a position of radical opposition. In Czechoslovakia in
1967-68 on the other hand, faced with a régime both
dogmatic and conservative, political and philosophical
Revisionism joined hands: philosophers such as Karel
Kosík and Ivan Sviták were prominent supporters of
Dubček's reform movement. Revisionism is the product
and antithesis of orthodoxy; it cannot be classified as
Right or Left without prior classification of the partic-
ular orthodoxy to which it is opposed.
