This article is adapted from Professor Kołakowski’s keynote address to the 1978 national convention of Social Democrats, USA.

Leszek Kołakowski has a long record of devotion to the cause of truth and the struggle for freedom. In 1956, in articles and speeches, he voiced the protests of’ intellectuals and workers against the Communist dictatorship in Poland, going so far as to pin the bulletin board at Warsaw University 48 theses calling for democratic reform of the country. Thereafter he became the lending spokesman for the school of thought known as revisionism, which looked toward democratic transformation of communism. During the Polish crisis of 1968, Communist Party chief Gomulka referred to Professor Kołakowski as the “spiritual father” of the student unrest. The Communist Party, charging that he had turned his chair at Warsaw University into ‘center for political opposition,’ took away his professorship and forced him to leave the country. Since then he has taught at Berkeley, Yale, and Oxford.

To say that all over the world social democracy is not just a political lobby voicing the aspirations and grievances of workers, of underdogs and the oppressed, but an idea of a better human community as well is neither controversial nor very enlightening. The trouble with the social-democratic idea is that it does not stock or sell any of the exciting ideological commodities which totalitarian movements—communist fascist, or leftist—offer dream-hungry youth.

It has no ultimate solution for all human misfortune; it has no prescription for the total salvation of mankind; it cannot promise the firework of the final revolution to settle definitively all the conflict and struggles; it has invented no miraculous devices to bring about the perfect unity of men or universal brotherhood; it believes in no final, easy victory over evil. It is not fun; it is difficult and unrewarding, and it does not suffer from self-inflicted blindness.

It requires the commitment to a number of basic values—freedom, equal opportunity, a human-oriented and publicly supervised economy—and it demands hard knowledge and rational calculation, as we need to be aware of, and to investigate as deeply as possible, the historical and economic conditions in which these values are to be implemented. it has an obstinate will to erode by inches the conditions which produce avoidable suffering, oppression, hunger, wars, racial and national hatred, insatiable greed and vindictive envy, yet it is aware of the narrow limits within which this struggle is being waged, limits imposed by the natural framework of human existence, by innumerable historical accidents, and by various forces that have shaped for centuries today’s social institutions.

The social-democratic idea admits the inescapable truth that many of the values it honors limit each other and can be implemented only through compromises, often painful and awkward. All the institutions of welfare and social security, all the organs of economic planning, all the social instruments for the more rational use of land and natural resources, for preventing waste and pollution, can be built only at the price of a growing state bureaucracy and of restrictions imposed on the autonomy of smaller economic and regional units. Nobody knows how this price can be avoided; but the outcry against big government heard all over the democratic world proves that the price is heavy. Yet social democracy is ready to uphold both ideas—planning and autonomy—and it is right; it is right as long as it keeps unceasingly in mind that these two principles run counter to each other and in no conceivable society will they be implemented fully. Therefore it must not promise measures which are supposed to bring simultaneously the efficiency of high centralization and the freedom of decentralization.

Similar clashes are clearly unavoidable in most of the values we cherish. Much as we might be appalled at the sight of man-made natural disasters which endanger both the human future and the existence of birds, fish, and trees, we must not forget that ecological slogans alone, isolated from the complexity of modern life, can as little contribute to rational proposals for economic organization and political reforms as can the idea of economic growth as the supreme or exclusive objective. Zero pollution is obviously impossible without the utter destruction of civilization and thereby of most of the human race since its survival depends largely on industry. Pollution is a matter of a rational reckoning of risks, of gains and losses. Granted that we have to worry about man’s survival in the first place and about the whales only in the second: the nature-worship ideology is incapable of taking up the challenge of the modern economy. On the other hand ecological slogans may be, and are in fact, exploited to manipulate people for various political purposes which only marginally have something to do with the welfare of butterflies, let alone of people.

Among the values included in the social-democratic idea, even the value of majority rule cannot be accepted as an absolute principle. It must be restricted by the principle of the inalienable rights of individuals, which no majority verdict may abrogate. The concept of democracy would be a parody of itself if it implied that anything endorsed by a majority were acceptable—that, for instance, 51% of a population is acting democratically if it decides to massacre the remaining 49%. If we accepted the principle of unconditional majority rule as the sufficient mark Oo democracy, Hitler’s rule in Germany, which for a period clearly enjoyed the support of the majority, would appear as a model democracy, as would all the populist or quasi-populist dictatorships which once made claims to represent the majority and then represented it axiomatically and indefinitely because its critics were slaughtered or silences. We have to admit that the principle of majority rule must be constrained by the principle of individual rights which no majority may infringe upon and that the human rights’ concept is valid irrespective of the majority’s decrees.

The value of freedom has to be seen as the core of the social-democratic idea simply because without it all other values are empty and inefficient. Put another way: social democracy defends freedom both because it is a value in itself, the most precious treasure of life, and because It is the condition within which most of the other things it defends can flourish. There is no point in talking about equality in the absence of freedom, for one of the most important goods in today’s world is the free access to information and the participation in power, both of which are denied to a majority in despotic systems, totalitarian or not. Therefore it is sheer absurdity to say, for instance, that in Cuba or China ‘people have less freedom, yet more equality.’ They have none, quite apart from the distribution of welfare and the access to scarce material goods. And, fortunately for us, civil liberties are the necessary condition of productive efficiency; slavery is economically efficient only during the earliest stages of technical development, and political slavery is an enormous obstacle to productivity.

It is both common-sensically true and abundantly proven by the experience of communist states that a political system operating with built-in information barriers, burdened with an obsessive secretiveness, using the criterion of political servility in promoting managerial cadres, and not having to respond to the needs and wishes of the population except under the threat of desperate revolts, is bound to be chronically sick in terms of the production of wealth. Having concentrated an enormous power without responsibility—an accumulation of power exceeding anything known in history—the ruling class, by virtue of its very position, generates permanent mismanagement and huge waste, and the attempts to set up the all-encompassing planning system end fatefully in all-pervading chaos. The working class adulated in slogans and kept quiet by the police machinery, has neither power nor moral or economic reasons to help the ailing economy; as the political and economic power of the communist exploiting class support each other, so do the political and economic enslavement of the working society. The economic advantage this society enjoys consists in its being able to keep its failures, or some of them, a secret by producing false statistics or none at all. Mendacity is not an accidental blemish on the body of communism: it is the absolute condition of its health, of its life, more so than in non-totalitarian tyrannies. Here is a regime which is supposed to be ruled by, and get its legitimacy from, an ideology with universalist pretensions and with an ‘ultimate goal‘, thus all areas of life and all past and present events must be depicted as elements of the triumphant march towards this goal. A system that wants to leave no domain of human existence, including human memory, out of control, is compelled to apply the huge machinery of the lie to all forms of expression and to give mendacious names to everything it produces.

Still, if it is true that among the values of social democracy freedom is the condition of all others, it is misleading to apply the name ‘freedom’ to anything people need or claim. The scope of freedom is defined as the area within which individuals may make decisions as they wish, unrestricted by law, and though it is obviously the case that the freedom to decide is of no use for those whose choices are anyway determined by the lack of material power, the degree of power is not to be confused with the extent of freedom. Freedom is negatively related to law, not positively to power. For people who cannot afford to travel, freedom of international travel appears of little meaning, to be sure; yet the material ability to travel, important though it might be, does.not derive from freedom. There are many justifiable claims which do not derive from freedom and should not be said to. Much as we are aware of social disasters caused by large scale unemployment—economic waste, criminality, human suffering—the fact is that being employed is a condition enabling people to use their freedom in various ways; it is not itself a freedom. There is no unemployment in concentration camps, and concentration camps do not become the abode of freedom; the compulsory abolishment of unemployment through forced labor hardly deserves to be hailed as a giant step in the fight for freedom. Briefly, there are many well-justified claims which ought not to be confused with each other, as such a deliberate confusion is one of the ideological instruments to glorify oppression and violence.

Another case of conceptual confusion which there is perhaps no need to dwell upon, as it has been repeatedly criticized recently, is the left-right distinction. Certainly, nowadays one hardly finds people who explicitly endorse the Stalinist slogan of old that the measure of ‘being left’ is one’s attitude towards the Soviet Union. Nonetheless, these labels are still widely employed without anybody providing us with intelligible criteria of how they are defined, and these labels carry the suggestion that the entire world of political ideas, movements, and regimes forms a continuous spectrum in which every unit may be located according to the amount of ‘rightist’ components it contains. Various states and political movements are quasi-automatically being called ‘left’ (or ‘Marxist’) if they get Soviet weapons; some others are labelled ‘rightist’ once they want to shed the foreign yoke if this yoke happens to be Soviet. One easily notices the persistence of absurd old clichés in journalistic jargon all over the world.

Therefore the question, “Which side are you on, left or right?” has to be rejoined by another question: “What do you mean by asking if I am on the left side? Do you ask if I am on the same side as the guardians of Gulag and invaders of Czechoslovakia? If I am on the side of the policemen who two years ago savagely tortured hundreds of Polish workers and a few years earlier slaughtered a still unknown number of dockers in Polish ports in cruel revenge for their protest against increasing poverty? Or do you ask whether I am on the side of those German terrorists who in a hijacked airplane designated all the passengers with Jewish names for slaughter? Or on the side of Cambodian ‘liberators’ who managed to convert the entire country into a concentration camp after murdering all those suspected of being literate?” The answer can only [be], “no, I am not on the same side and I do not care a damn about being called ‘left’ if this means to applaud or excuse the violence, oppression, tortures, exploitation, and invasions provided only that the hangmen and the exploiters get their weapons from an anti-American source, this being the unspoken ideological criterion.” The conclusion is simple: either the distinction has lost any recognizable sense or it has to be redefined completely and be applied only to movements and attitudes within the democratic segment of the political spectrum with an unequivocal exclusion of all terroristic movements, totalitarian ideologies, police and military regimes, no matter what they call themselves.

There are no such things as reactionary tortures and progressive tortures, left labor camps and right labor camps, censorship for oppression and censorship for liberation. This is the reason why the non-violent anti-totalitarian movements in Soviet-dominated countries go beyond the left-right categories; their claims are based on the human rights idea which cannot possibly be defined in terms borrowed from this anachronistic distinction.

This leads us to the question, often discussed, of double standards in assessing political regimes. The point is not that we should make chimerical claims and demand that political criteria not be applied to political actions; what may be demanded instead is that political criteria not appear under the guise of moral norms. People who define themselves by the so-called left tradition are, as a whole, more guilty of resorting to double standards, not because they are naturally immoral, but because their socially inherited reflexes render them more hypocritical, because they have always employed moralistic language, while in many countries the conservative establishment has pretended much less to be guided by moral ideals and more freely admitted a concern with matters of realpolitik, raison d’etat, and trade.

The governments that do business with both Chile and the Soviet Union cannot be accused of using double standards; leftist moralists who demonstrate before the embassies of South Africa and Iran and seem to believe that Vietnam and Albania overflow with democratic virtue appear grotesque. However obvious might be the position of those who display their moral indignation according to their political allegiances, it is true, on the other hand, that our concern with the internal conduct of regimes of various countries is usually prompted by other considerations as well.

The recent record of various military dictatorships in Latin America has been arguably worse than that of European communist states in such essential points as the scale of tortures and government-initiated assassinations. In terms of human rights the assessment is clear enough. Still, a not-negligible difference between Uruguay and the Soviet Union is that the Uruguayan regime, abominable though it might be, poses no threat of world-wide expansion supported by mighty military machinery.

We do admit—and I believe it to be a traditional element of the social-democratic approach—that no country in the world may maintain that its political regime, however oppressive, is protected from the eyes of outsiders; no, we are both entitled and duty-bound not to leave the oppressors quiet on the pretense of the non-interference principle. This readiness to behave like importunate meddlers ought to be applied evenly, of course. Yet in the case of the Soviet system, we have additional reasons for our discourteous behavior: unlike the case of Uruguay, South Africa, or for that matter, Albania and Cambodia, the Soviet internal regime is obviously linked with the never-saturated hunger of an imperialist state for new areas of domination. It is clearly essential to keep one’s own population in ignorance, fear, and isolation, if one wants to use it as a helpless and inert tool for imperial purposes—if, for instance, one needs soldiers who, as in the case of Czechoslovakia 10 years ago, either did not know which country they were in or believed that they had been sent to a Czechoslovakia which had requested aid in the face of an imminent invasion by German fascists. In today’s world the Soviet internal regime is probably the most potent single factor likely to trigger off a global war (which does not mean that this is the actual intention of its rulers).

This is why we, people from somewhat exotic Central and East European plains, do believe that in exposing and opposing Soviet despotism, we stand up not only for the regional interest of lands forcibly incorporated into a predatory empire as a result of the Yalta agreement, but for a better and safer world order as well. East Europeans are well aware that America has no wonder-making contrivance to force changes on oppressive regimes and to reverse immediately the situation of countries which were robbed of their national independence and democratic institutions, What they expect from America is not miracles, but a consistent strategic idea. ‘Strategic idea’ by no means implies war planning. It means a long-term policy which seeks global order without the risk of global war, and this admittedly involves wearing out the most aggressive expansionism encouraging by all nonviolent means the diversity and variety within Soviet dependencies, opening access to truth to the peoples who were thrust into spiritual slavery. Not in spite of, but because of, the fact that the question of how to avoid the danger of global war and how to design a workable disarmament scheme has to have unconditional priority, it is of paramount importance that democratic countries exert peaceful, yet firm and unremitting pressure to advance the gradual and non-explosive disintegration of totalitarian regimes.

That so many local issues almost automatically acquire a global meaning is a fact we cannot escape, and America is clearly incapable of shedding the responsibility for the world order it has helped to shape for many decades. The tendency to escape is sometimes expressed in slogans like, ‘the fight for democracy begins at home.’ Such slogans might be all right insofar as they express simply the trivial rule that foreign-policy issues may not be used as a pretext for neglecting or disregarding a just and democratic domestic order. Remember, however, that in the second world war the same slogan was launched to explain why the United States should not join the war; in this period the slogan meant: ‘let Hitler swallow the whole of Europe; nazism and Europe are not our business.’ It matters not what is behind such slogans—the permanent and apparently incurable short-sightedness of big business or the outmoded leftist inhibitions of the liberal lobbies; to say that since we are not saints ourselves, we should forget the oppression elsewhere amounts to saying let us forget the oppression. Well, if social democracy has any meaning, it is precisely not to forget that.

I am one of those who see no reason why they should give credence to the prophets announcing the decline of Western civilization, the ruin of democratic institutions, and the victorious return of barbarity, yet who do believe that it is spiritual, rather than economic, recession that threatens us; in other words that the roots of disarray in affluent open societies are in our minds, rather than the price of oil. The worldwide degradation of educational systems and the uncertainty about their function is a particularly glaring symptom of this disarray. Some aspects of this confusion may be accounted for by our inability to cope with changes which otherwise are obviously positive—the staggering growth of knowledge and the rapid extension of schooling. Yet there are grounds to suspect that much more is involved: a lack of confidence among older generations in the intellectual and moral standards we inherited and, consequently, the loss of a strong will to convey these standards to our successors.

It might sound impertinent when someone like myself, who is only a superficial and casual observer of the American scene, makes comments on this subject, yet similar trends, more or less advanced, are noticeable in many highly developed areas of the world. When I had the opportunity, for the first time, to make a longer sojourn in the United States in the late sixties, what struck me was that in the then-frequent discussion about the social role of the school nothing seemed to be certain except one thing: it appeared that what school is not about is giving the pupils knowledge and intellectual skills. Incidentally, this utter scorn for knowledge and logical abilities, for anything that one can acquire only through long and disciplined work and that cannot be converted into amusement, this used to be called, grotesquely enough, “liberalism,” as if liberalism consisted in self-satisfied ignorance or as if it specifically reflected the ideology of spoilt upper-middle class children. It is consoling, though, that nowadays one hears more and more voices of people who have reached the conclusion that the old-fashioned theory that the task of schools is to teach was not entirely absurd after all.

Yet the roots obviously go deeper than that. There is apparently agreement that the process of spiritual self-mutilation of youth we witnessed in the late sixties is not over, even though its forms have changed, and that it resulted from the collapse of the value system young people had inherited from us. One cannot take satisfaction in the fact that subsequently this breakdown found puerile, absurd, or sometimes barbarian outlets or that it was politically expressed in the pathetic fudge of the New Left that had no solutions and no alternatives to offer. Under the ideological rubbish there was real despair; drugs, false mysticism, and revolutionary daydreams were three main pseudo-cures for a genuine disease which cannot simply be dismissed by pointing out the inefficacy of the medicaments; these were three ways of escaping a world young people felt they did not fit in any longer.

To be sure, no political party or movement may claim to have found a successful therapy for the moral void; no artificially concocted ideals or mirages can be imposed on people; ultimately the new generations have to seek out ways for themselves to rediscover the meaning-giving life forms. Political movements, except for totalitarian ones, are anyway not capable of providing solutions for metaphysical and religious worries; they ought not to try to expand their ideas into a sort of all-embracing worldview with ready-made catechisms. They must not, nevertheless, evade the question: what went wrong and what is wrong with the set of values which we were brought up with, why have so many people not found these values life-supporting, why are they not ready to die for them? The reply will perhaps not be beyond our reach if we are prepared to confront all the sides of the question. It might turn out that after all most of our traditional values are neither dead nor obsolete, even though they were probably very badly ordered; and that there are viable possibilities besides the withdrawal from the world, putting one’s own reason to sleep, or sinking into despair (three aspects of each of three false cures I have just mentioned).

We should admit that we have no prescription for the perfect world, hold no secret of happiness and no clue to the riddle of the universe, and still we are perhaps able to show more modest things and more modest goals which can give meaning to life. In the world as it is, full of misery, hunger, and oppression, this much at least seems to be clear: that neither technical devices alone nor political measures alone are sufficient to bring about the hope for a peaceful and more equitable order. Something more is needed which cannot be a by-product of institutional and technical improvements: reorientation of both individual and collective value attitudes. This is admittedly a generality that does not yet entail any well-defined and feasible proposals. But this generality is good enough to pose a permanent challenge to social democracy if it wants to remain equal to its best tradition and to its very name.