The collapse of communism opened the floodgates for historical revision. No sooner had Russia and the Eastern bloc closed the book on Lenin and Marx than a fresh wave of intellectuals in the West piled on, denouncing anew the crimes of Stalinism and trying to link those horrors up with the excesses of the New Left in the 1960s and the failure of many on the left to embrace democracy.
Geoff Eley's more optimistic reading claims that, whatever its intentions, the European left has contributed to the vitality of democracy. He avoids the pitfalls of leftist historians who either celebrate a revolutionary élan that suggests that the cause is not yet lost or criticise a cautious reformism that exchanges its radical birthright for a bowl of reformist porridge. Eley unites both modes in a simple equation: Reform + revolution = democracy, which is forged in the fires of conflict.
Eley charts the ways that this democratic equation assumes more complex forms as each newly achieved level of democracy becomes institutionalized. At this point, in Eley's scheme, a left movement becomes a reformism that has to be challenged by a new upsurge. For example, political conflicts of the 1860s culminated in a liberal constitutionalism that faced a revolutionary social democracy; when the social democrats agreed to join the war effort in 1914 in exchange for new reforms, they were opposed by a revolutionary wave that found a harbor in Russia but that also nurtured the threat of fascism elsewhere in Europe.
Eley insists that the left was always larger than socialism and always in need of allies whose goals were not strictly social. After the explosion of the "new" left in 1968, leftists had to look beyond class politics to find new allies among feminists and marginal social and cultural movements.
Eley's democratic equation takes account of this expended vision of the left. It is based on a clever interpretation of the events of 1917. The reformist social-democratic politics of the Mensheviks emerged from the assumption that economic development on its own would ripen the conditions for revolution. The Bolsheviks' revolutionary seizure of power grew out of what the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci famously called "the revolution against [Marx's] Capital." Economic evolution was replaced by the revolutionary intervention of the human will, and class struggle acquired a cultural dimension.
Eley recognizes that the USSR hardly incarnated Gramsci's cultural vision. Nonetheless, his synthesis of the new cultural left with the old labor left arises out of Gramsci's framework, seeking to add the veneer of democratic culture to the old leftist project. Eley's final 150 pages attempt to reconstruct the shifting elements of this type of alliance and he hopes to awaken the revolutionary ferment that can inject new energy into the outdated legacy with which Eley admits he still sympathizes.
A running theme in Eley's narrative is the failure of European leftists to invent political institutions that could encompass the revolutionary spirit that arose after World War I and reappeared in 1968. The first such institutional failure led to fascism and war, after the failure of the reformist popular front - but Eley is more optimistic about the legacy of the second, which he sees bound up with the possibilities opened by the demise of communism. The grounds for his optimism lie in the simple logic of his basic equation, which continually nudges revolutionary upheavals and reformist movements into the tidy frame of democracy.
Overeager for synthesis, Eley's equation forgets that the revolution that shakes the placid pace of reform may not come from the left - which for him is the font of all that is good. Everything that moves need not be politically correct.
Eley's synthetic vision justifies too many "revolutionary" choices simply because they can be fit into his analytic framework. His outlook is incurably optimistic - it doesn't account for the uglier impulses and unintended consequences that are all too evident in the history of all political movements. While 1968 and feminism explained that "the personal is the political," and widened the scope of politics, this insight could also spark a retreat into a private world, if not a destructive solipsism.
Democratic can be self-destructive. Cornelius Castoriadis, a Greek leftist critic of totalitarianism, noted that their awareness of the self-destructive hubris of democracy led the Greeks to invent tragic drama. Had Eley incorporated more of that tragic sensibility, he could have produced a more suggestive equation, one that would make democracy not the by product of the struggle of the two lefts, but rather their goal.
The Washington Post
