Under a cloud
STUART HOOD
The Unperfect Society Milovan Djilas (Methuen 35s) On the night of 7-8 December 1953, Milovan Djilas, then a member of the Central Com- mittee of the Yugoslav Communist party, experienced one of those moments of crystal- lisation of thought and feeling familiar enough from the lives of the saints but less common in those of politicians. Waking shortly after midnight, he was convinced to the root of his being that he must ineluctably clash with his colleagues on the Central Committee, men with whom he had 'burned away half his youth and half of his mature years in search of an ideal which . . . had proved unreal and unrealisable.' That ideal was the perfect society. The cost of his decision would, he knew, be high. He would sacrifice his family and could expect a prison sentence—seven to nine years scrubbing floors and carrying slops.
The consequences of that midnight resolu- tion are well known. His prophecy fulfilled itself. In January 1954 he was expelled from the Party; in 1956, sent to prison where he remained, with a brief intermission, until 1966. Of this, twenty months were spent in solitary confinement. There he was faced with the choice between recantation and madness. He chose madness but 'in due course conquered himself, the facts of his life and the forces that brought the dilemma upon him.' His struggle has been a mental and spiritual one, a revolt against 'higher powers', an assertion of his right to exist. He is Camus' hero asserting existence by rebel- lion.
In prison or out he has contrived to write and (more difficult still) to be published: The New Class, a critique of the Communist bureaucratic structures, Conversations with Stalin—which contains a chilling portrait of the Russian dictator, awoke Khrushchev's anger and cost Djilas a prolongation of his prison sentence—short stories, a novel, biography. Although forbidden to publish any writings before 1972, he has released for publication abroad the present volume.
The title is important. Not the 'imperfect' society but the 'unperfect' one. By this semantic distinction he announces his renun- ciation of utopias, which he rightly sees as the breeders of fanaticism and repression. Imperfect' might suggest that society is merely flawed; 'unperfece expresses his con- viction that it must now and for ever fall short of whatever dreams men have of the good life. He states his reasons in terms of theology. Man is sinful, so society, which is man's creation, must of necessity be unper- feet. It is perhaps a relic of his Marxist thinking that it is precisely in the dialectical struggle between sinful man and an unper- feet society, the long Sisyphean effort, that he sees the safeguard for our future, the possibility that, by acceptance which does not exclude striving, we may continue to be creative human beings.
There is one fundamental difference be- tween the present volume and The New Class. The latter was written from the view- point of the professing Marxist. The Unper4 feet Society marks his breach with Marxist thought, which he rejects as doctrine while conceding to it a limited usefulness in the field of economic and social studies. A great deal of the book is taken up, however, with an examination of Marxist ideology and the manner in which it has disintegrated into a state religion, backed by the repressive powers of the Communist national states, whose leaders draw on it for texts with which to wage their ideological battles. Djilas deals in turn with Engels's role as a syste- matiser of Marx's thought, with Lenin's continuation of the tradition and Stalin's vulgarisation of it in that official catechism of Marxism, The Short History of the CPSU (b).
Unfortunately theory has never been Djilas's strong point; his criticisms of Engels and Lenin are those of a philosophical amateur. He allows himself to expend a good deal of space dealing with Lenin's attacks on Mach and Avenarius in Materialism and Empirio-criticism, which is also the work of an amateur. He does it too much honour in bothering to refute its theses. This is not in any sense of the word a philosophical work; it is an ill-natured tract. As Valentinov, the revolutionary who was Lenin's friend in the early years of the century, points out, it is rage that makes the book unique—rage and intolerance and the echoes of that seventeenth century Russian archpriest who wrote: 'I will uphold until death what I have myself received. And if anyone should change anything let him be accursed.'
There are three main ways in which those who are subjected to it react against the communist state religion. One is the attempt to return to the pure font of Marx's own writings, particularly those dating from be- fore 1848; a second is to embrace a religious faith—baptism is a formalised protest; a third is to adopt an existentialist position. Djilas has chosen the third of these. It is in his description of his mental and spiritual struggles, of how he endured life in the company of illiterate and semi-literate mur- derers whom the passage of time had trans- formed into a bunch of harmless old men, that Djilas's human qualities become appar- ent. In isolation and suffering he has con- trived to erect a minimal structure of belief in human nature which enables him not only to live but to concern himself with the fate of other individuals.
What he offers as a political philosophy is also minimal. It is a brand of Bevanite social democracy which will, he believes, meet the aspirations of that new social stratum which is forming in Communist society—the new class, not of bureaucrats, but of intellectuals, specialists and skilled workers, whose desire for a better, freer life is a growing challenge to the system. It is on them that he places his hopes. They will transform the Communist world from within, burst the bonds of ideology, of a monopolistic government, of an economy dominated by a single power group. This he believes they will be able to accomplish by peaceful means. Revolution is not necessary for victory over the Com- munist oligarchy.
In this he seems unduly optimistic. His view is not shared by representatives of the new class, who live at the heart of the Communist system, in the Soviet Union. They would deny that the Soviet people, for example. will achieve their basic human rights without bloodshed. A man like Amal- rilc, whose essay Can Russia Survive till
1984? has recently reached the West, foresees fratricidal strife, pogroms, civil war. It is one of the tragedies of a man like Djilas that his isolation, if too prolonged and too rigorous, may begin to cloud his judgment.
Previous page
