In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Bradley aBrams From Revisionism to Dissent The Creation of Post-marxism in Central europe after 1968 After forty years and the end of the soviet empire in eastern europe, we have gained enough distance that we can look back on the tumultuous events of 1968 and their aftermaths and see larger and broader meanings in them than was possible before. my reflections are intended in some small way to explore these broader meanings and contribute to the “europeanization” of european history, by looking at both sides of a divided europe. What i will be suggesting is that there are areas after 1968 in which it is possible to conceive of a “european ” intellectual history that encompasses sections of both Western and eastern europe. The centerpiece of my argument is that critical marxist intellectuals were deeply affected by the events of 1968, abandoned marxism in their wake and came, after the Helsinki Accords of 1975, to agree on the significance of several particular themes.1 Before launching this argument, a few caveats are in order. Above all, i recognize the essential differences between the political contexts of Western and eastern europe in the 1970s and 1980s. it is certainly 1 since this is intended as food for thought, and the elaboration of these arguments would more than fill an entire volume, i have deliberately kept from extensive footnoting, including notes only to indicate the location of citations. The works cited and a few other books helped me think about these issues. As anyone familiar with the materials will know, these reflections, while having different emphases (and especially in the consideration of both sides of the iron Curtain), owe a tremendous intellectual debt to the articles by the late Tony Judt cited below, and the many conversation that i had with him over the past twenty years. H. stuart Hughes’ Sophisticated Rebels: The Political Culture of European Dissent, 1968–1987 (Cambridge, mA: Harvard University Press, 1988) and Barbara falk’s The Dilemmas of Dissidence in East-Central Europe (Budapest: CeU Press, 2003) also contributed heavily to my thoughts. i4 Promises.indb 179 2010.10.18. 14:31 180 Promises of 1968 not my contention that the conditions in which intellectuals trying to map a course to an alternative, non-marxist vision of progressive politics in Austria operated were similar to those obtaining for an analogous intellectual just across the border in Czechoslovakia. similarly, it is important to emphasize the wide divergence within the eastern Bloc itself: in the 1970s Poland was in many, many ways different from Czechoslovakia, and Hungary was significantly different from east Germany. Third, i will be drawing my examples largely from the two Germanies, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland. This should not be taken to mean that these were the only places that shared the themes i will be exploring. All of these themes have lives beyond Central europe, and some of them have a reach that surpasses europe’s borders. finally, i will not be arguing that the intellectuals of all of the countries agreed, or even that all of the intellectuals within any given country agreed. intellectuals, quite simply, do not agree, and it would seem a peculiar contradiction if oppositional intellectuals, who are the focus of the following reflections, were unusually harmonious. my argument commences with the tumultuous events of 1968, which i contend were a watershed in european development. The Prague spring, the march days in Poland, and french, italian, and German student activism, among others, called into question the domestic quiet of the previous decade. Despite their challenges to the existing order, however, they failed to achieve meaningful political change. Their failure represented the end of certain illusions about the nature and limits of marxist politics east and West. in the east, in Poland, massive student strikes were put down with force. Among other things, the lack of worker participation in a movement led by revisionist intellectuals showed how little the language of even revisionist marxism held for the working class. similarly, the success of the nationalist and antisemitic campaign launched by interior minister mieczysław moczar revealed both that revisionist marxism was no match for baser ideologies and caused the flight of a number of prominent revisionists. Among these were, most notably, the philosopher Leszek Kolakowski (and his Jewish wife) and the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman (also, as they say, “of Jewish origin”). Leading revisionist students, among them Adam michnik , were expelled from their universities. The more serious blow in the east was...

Share