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My Correct Views On Everything

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In this collection of 21 essays and 2 interviews, Leszek Kolakowski explores timely philosophical issues in a vibrant, witty and scintillating style.

Kolakowski's writings about Marxism are incomparably better than anyone else's. For one thing, he knows the subject inside and out, having apparently read everything that Marx and his disciples every wrote, having spent much of his life in a communist country, and having evolved from Party member, to revisionist, to outspoken opponent. Then there is his matchless talent for lucid exposition: Marx's ideas, muddled and impenetrable in their original form, become perfectly clear when Kolakowski talks about them.

As a critic of Marx, Kolakowski is scrupulously fair and objective, while pulling no punches. His analyses are models of honest, careful, trenchant criticism. His essays are also quite entertaining, full of self-deprecating irony, and biting sarcasm.

No one excels K. in the dissection of Leftist argumentation. In a highly amusing rebuttal of E. P. Thompson's "open letter", Kolakowski slams Thompson's use of double standards: Whatever goes wrong in capitalist countries is attributed, by definition, to "the capitalist system". Whatever goes wrong in socialist countries is excused as a "transitional phase" and/or is attributed to the remnants of capitalism, or to "capitalist encirclement" or to some other non-communist influence. An even-handed, empirical comparison of the two systems would show, says K., "...that the only universal medicine (the Left) has for social evils (state ownership of the means of production) is not only perfectly compatible with all the disasters of the capitalist world - with exploitation, imperialism, pollution, misery, waste, national hatred, national oppression - but that it adds to them a series of disasters of its own: inefficiency, lack of economic incentives and, above all...a concentration of power never known before in human history."

Why has socialism been such a disappointment? Because it promises the achievement of contradictory aims - efficient management and industrial democracy, small communities and central planning, perfect security and technical progress - which make coherent sense only in a "leftist heaven where everything is compatible." Marxists imagine that they can solve "all the problems of mankind" with a few magic words "which, when repeated often enough, start looking as if they had content."

Marxism is certainly passe, but is it really dead? Perhaps not. Apocalyptic fantasy is a perennial secretion of the human mind. As Kolakowski says of Marxism: "I wish it were obsolete, but I am not sure it is...It might come back to life."

The collection also contains gem-like essays about the challenges of modernity, the relevance of Christianity, the dominance of relativism and other timely subjects.

From the start it is evident that this book is the product of a brilliant though secular mind. The author is at his best describing quite convincingly the deficiencies and failures of the several social and political systems which have come and gone, namely, socialism, communism, Marxism, Stalinism, Nazism, etc. These obviously bear the mark of personal and direct experience. However, when the author ventures into realms of theology, I feel he is at his weakest. Those parts of the book would probably serve best by their omission. The chapter on What is Socialism is brilliant and so tongue in cheek that it could easily be read on Saturday Night Live. The two observations that struck me the most are: First, the almost complete absence (except for a paragraph or so in the last chapter) of any mention of another of the author's Polish contemporaries, who was arguably equally brilliant and famous if not more so, namely John Paul II; Second, the author often stresses the need for respect of universal human dignity, the value of tradition, etc. and yet it is difficult for me to recognize the Polishness of his soul, if I may say so. Despite his insistence of the importance of tradition and the bemoaning of the decline of Christianity, which were the most prominent factors in the survival of the Polish soul during that country's various divisions and occupations yet, in that sense, he seems to have abandoned his own roots.