Counter-Revolution Against A Counter-Revolution - Left Curve

Demonstration in Budapest on the anniversary of the 1956 revolution,Oct.23, 2006. The lead marchers hold letters spelling “szabadság”(freedom).Unlike the revolutionary upheavals of 1953,1956, 1968 and 1981 (respectively: East Berlin, Budapest,Prague, Gdansk), the East European régime change in1989 did not proclaim a purer and better socialism,workers’ councils, self-management or even higherwages for proletarians. It was seen as a re-establishmentof “normalcy”, historical continuity and a restoration ofthe treble shibboleth: parliamentary democracy, “themarket” and an unconditional allegiance to “the West”.As I have shown earlier, this idea of continuity was amirage. No such system existed before in Eastern Europebut a backward agricultural society based on ramshacklelatifundia, an authoritarian political order led mostly bythe military caste drawn from the impoverished gentry,prone to coups d’état, and a public and intellectual lifedominated by bitter opponents of a perceived hostile“West”. Elements of modernity, such as they were, hadbeen introduced subsequently by Leninist planners andmodernisers who, exacting an extremely high price ofblood, suffering, scarcity, tyranny and censorship, hadbeen able to impose mobility, urbanisation, secularisation,industrialisation, literacy, numeracy, hygiene, infrastructure,nuclear family, work discipline, and the rest.Those were the foundations on which the new marketcapitalism and pluralist democracy were built, not arediscovery of a spurious liberal past, but its introductionby decree for the first time. It was an extremely populardecree for that portion of the population (and of whichI, too, was an enthusiastic and active member) whichparticipated in the marches, rallies, meetings—not tospeak of the shenanigans and skulduggery unavoidableeven in utopian politics—and which seemed at the timeto have been “the people”, but which was at best five percent of the actual, empirical demos. Still, to those of us,stepping into the light from our sombre dissident conventiclesof a few dozen people, a hundred thousandpeople appeared as “the masses”. This minority, sincedispersed, possessed a political attitude and a world-viewthat was a combination of 1848 and 1968: a joyful democraticnationalism and constitutional liberalism mingledwith a distaste for authority, repression (cultural and sexual),discipline and puritanism. These transient ideologicalphenomena which seemed so profound, interestingand solid to us at the time, reflected a state of affairs thatnearly all observers had been very slow to understandand even slower to describe comprehensively.Neither the Leftish bent of most dissident criticismof “real socialism”, nor the the Sixty-Eightish, libertarianfeel of some of 1989 was ever explained satisfactorily.Even the most glaringly obvious historical comparisonswere not made. What I find most curious is that thecoincidence in time of the crisis of the welfare state—East and West—did not awaken any interest. Historicaland political imagination was paralysed by the unthinkingacceptance of the claim that Soviet bloc régimesmust have been (in some elusive sense) “socialist” since61

this is what they have declared of themselves and, in amore important sense, this was why they were relentlesslyfought by the great Western powers of various hues.Here, a few precisions should be made.I don’t think there can be any doubt as to “realsocialism” having been state capitalism of a peculiarsort. It was a system with commodity production, wagelabour, social division of labour, real subsumption oflabour to capital, the imperative of accumulation, classrule, exploitation, oppression, enforced conformity, hierarchyand inequality, unpaid housework and an absoluteban on workers’ protest (all strikes illegal), not to speakof a general interdiction of political expression. The onlyremaining problem is, of course, the lack of “market coordination”and its replacement by government planning.The term “private property” is misleading here,since if its essence is the separation of proletarians fromthe means of production, it also refers to state property,even if we should not try to minimise the considerabledifferences. If property is control (and legally it is control),then “state property” is private property in thissense: nobody can pretend that in Soviet-type régimesthe workers controlled production, distribution, investmentand consumption.Nor can there be any doubt that post-Stalin statecapitalism in the Soviet bloc and in Yugoslavia (roughly1956-1989) attempted to create a kind of authoritarianwelfare state with problems very similar to, and immanentin, any welfare state in the West, be it of the socialdemocratic, Christian Democrat or Gaullist or, for thatmatter, New Deal, variety. (I shall neglect features ofwelfarist state capitalism in Fascist and Nazi régimes,however apposite.)The social purpose of any welfare state—includingpost-Stalinist “real socialism” with the Gulag closeddown—was (we can safely use the past tense here)the attempt to bolster consumption through countercyclicaldemand management, to include and co-opt therebellious working class through affordable housing,transportation, education and health care, to create adopolavoro (a Mussolinian idea already much admired byNew Dealers, but of course equally prevalent in theStalinist Russia of the 1930s) replete with paid holidays,mass tourism, cheap popular entertainment, moderatelypriced sartorial fashions, and The Motor Car. The MerryKids, a 1930s Soviet movie musical featuring YoungPioneers (the greatest Russian box-office hit ever), withits unbearable happiness, is indistinguishable fromHollywood or the Third Reich UFA studios’ deliriouslysmiley output, perhaps with less stress on sauciness andgirls’ legs. At the same time, in “socialist” EasternEurope there were a few features more reminiscent ofSouth East Asian corporate welfare methods—companyholiday camps and company-owned holiday hotels,usually free for the employees, managed by the tradeunions (access to them was basically a right for all citizens),free crèches and kindergartens for the workforce’soffspring—and some features inherited from Europeansocial democracy, but generalised and made mandatory,such as well-stocked lending libraries and cut-pricebookshops in every entreprise, affordable good books,theatre and cinema tickets (moreover, books and ticketsordered through your trade union were to be had at halfof that non-competitive price), positive discrimination infavour of working-class youngsters at higher educationadmissions, job security, cheap basic food, cheap alcohol,cheap tobacco, cheap and plentiful public transport, easyaccess to amateur and spectator sports. The absence ofconspicuous wealth, let alone ostentatious luxury, of theruling class together with ever-recurrent shortages anda very reduced consumer choice, sexual puritanism,lengthy terms of military service, the cult of hard work(“popular mechanics” and space flight cults for theyoung) and a relentless propaganda emphasising theplebeian and “collectivist” characteristics of the régimewhere everybody was supposed to know what to do witha tool-chest, a hoe or a pitchfork, promoted an atmosphereof equality.An atmosphere, a mood, yes, but also a reality ofincomparably greater equality than today. Nation-statesin “real socialism” oppressed ethnic minorities—outsideSoviet Russia especially after Stalin’s fall—offering assimilationinstead (training films for Hungarian social workersand local council officials in the early 1960s showforcible baths, haircuts and delousings for nomadic Romafamilies, operated by police and military hospital personnel,amid scenes of infernal humiliation and artificial forcameragrins) suggesting “unity” and “harmony” and anend to age-old cultural conflicts. The transfer of peasantpopulations to industrial townships, unlike in the nineteenthcentury, had been relatively well organised: untilthe 1970s when resources had begun to run out, theywere moved into high-rise council estates, and immediatelyoffered the whole set of comprehensive and egalitariansocial services including health and culture—there are countries, such as Romania or the formerCzechoslovakia where the majority of urban populationstill lives in disintegrating “communist”-era blocks offlats.There is no doubt that these societies were intolerablyauthoritarian, oppressive and repressed, but we arebeginning to see how well-integrated, cohesive, pacified,crime-free and institutionalised they were, a petty bourgeoisdream, but a dream nevertheless. Also, “vertical”,that is, upward social mobility was fast and comprehensiveand, since we speak of initially backward, peasantsocieties, the change from village to town, from backbreakingphysical work in the fields to technologicalwork in the factory, from hunger, filth and misery tomodest cafeteria meals, hot water and indoor plumbingwas breathtaking—and the cultural change dramatic.Also the route from illiteracy and the inability to read aclockface to Brecht and Bartók was astonishingly short.(By the way, it is instructive to see how institutionally62

embedded cultural needs can be—how half a continentstopped to read serious literature and listen to classicalmusic in a couple of years since the social and ideologicalcircumstances ceased to make such activities bothhandy and meaningful: Doch die Verhältnisse, sie sind nicht so.)When, after the régime change in 1989 (in whichthe present writer has played a rather public rôle andabout which his feelings are quite ambivalent retrospectively),the concomitant onslaught on “state property”through privatisation at world market prices, asset-stripping,outsourcing, management by-outs (companies subsequentlybought up by multinationals and closed downto minimise competition and to create new captiveconsumer markets) caused unheard-of price rises, plummetingreal wages and living standards, massive unemployment.Market liberalisation meant that the hithertoprotected, cushioned, technologically backward localindustries could not withstand the enormous competitionin retail markets which has led to the collapse oflocal commerce unable to resist dumping and similartechniques. Almost half of total jobs have been lost. Thevery real rejoicing over pluralistic political competitionand hugely increased freedom of expression was dampenedby immiseration and lack of security, accompaniedby the ever-increasing dominion of commercial popularculture, advertising, tabloids and trash. What has beenconceived of at first as colourful proved merely gaudyand as it became more and more shopsoiled its novelcharm has waned.Also, it should not be forgotten that we must draw asharp distinction between bourgeois society and the societyunder the domination of capital, called in an un-Marxianfashion “capitalism”. The bourgeois, especially the rentier,not to speak of the educated, cultivated, stylish(romantic-liberal) Bildungsbürgertum, is politically anextinct species, like the old, rust-belt industrial workingclass of Ford, Renault, Putilov, Thyssen, Krupp, ManfredWeiss, Fiat and the Union Minière—although the latterstill exist and are economically more important thangenerally thought. The flâneur wouldn’t know where tostroll. Bourgeois society was in the main politically dominatedanyway by some sort of Whiggish aristocracy, themilitary or an overlapping bureaucracy, civil service andclasse politique. What has appeared to Marx’s predecessors—andthis appearance was then empirically true evenif it proved ultimately to be only a surface phenomenon—as the conflict between socio-culturally constitutedand parochial “estates” (Stände, “corporations”) withtheir contrasting world-views and peculiar “organisationforms”, was (and is) in reality a system of impersonaldomination (to use Moishe Postone’s expression), fundamentallyuninterrupted by the “communist” interlude.Granted, “real socialism” did not have a bourgeoisie,although I think it had a “new class”, and it did not possessthe specific class rule based on the personal andinformal group version of “private” property; thus the“corporative” resistance of the proletariat against it (oreven against the various fascisms) was much weaker thanin times and places where an identifiable, clear-cut classenemy was culturally and politically visible. The universallyignored fact, e. g., that not only party functionariesbut secret police and intelligence dignitaries and leadingoperatives were in their overwhelming majority of proletarian(or poor agricultural labourer) origin—shown byall historical monographs on the subject—demonstratesclearly that class struggles had to take radically differentforms under state capitalism dubbed “state socialism”than under market-driven capitalist régimes of whatevercolour, including National “Socialism”. The corporativestruggles between the old bourgeoisie and what wascalled “socialism” in Europe, i. e., the working-classmovement (trade unions, political—often underground—parties and the adversary culture) in the nineteenthand the twentieth century had not been able to address amuch more insidious form of “capital régime” where thelessons of “state socialism” have been learned by heart.The social-cultural antagonism is now radically divorcedfrom the “class struggle” as a structural given in any societybased on the appropriation of surplus value and onthe loss of control over one’s life (the definition of theproletariat according to Guy Debord). Hence the mythicalcreation of an enemy (the “neo-liberal” or “neo-conservative”élite of nebulous world institutions, usuallyfinancial and commercial ones) which embodies exploitationbut has the political disadvantage (for socialists) thatit does not actually exercise, execute or implement it. Itis a merely political adversary, and it is not and it cannotbe a replacement for the—vanished—bourgeoisie, just asthe bureaucracy of the Stalinist or neo-Stalinist statecould not replace it as the “deep” antagonist.When this bureaucracy has lost its political paramountcyand the old forms of hierarchy, deference andsolidarity have collapsed together with the old dispensation,one of the great legitimising forces—which were atthe same time extremely perilous for the “communist”old régime—has waned, namely, the ever-present possibilityof the recurrence to the revolutionary roots of“really existing socialism” which had always been there,buried, to point towards the unavoidable direction ofmoral criticism, to wit, social justice. With the collapseof this possibility—together with the very modest variantof the welfare state in “developing” Eastern Europe—poverty has not only become destiny for the majority buta state of affairs impossible to classify, interpret, condemnor justify.This was regarded by the unhappy East Europeanpopulations as unmitigated and incomprehensible catastrophe.The political groups on the ground possessed bya little critical sense had been those which fought theformer régime and continued to fight its ghost for a longtime to come and pushed the post-Worl War II liberalagenda—freedom of expression, constitutionalism, abortionrights, gay rights, anti-racism, anti-clericalism, antinationalism,certainly causes worth fighting for, but63

ewildering to the popular classes, otherwise engaged—without any attention to the onset of widespread poverty,social and cultural chaos. These groups combined the“human rights” discourse of the liberal Left with the“free to choose” rhetoric of the neo-conservative right(they still do, after 18 years) and thought of privatisationas the break-up of the almighty state which—armed withthe weapon of redistribution—appeared the enemy tobeat, the “dependency culture” to be the ideologicaladversary preventing the subjects of the Sozialstaat frombecoming freedom-loving, upright, autonomous citizens.I remember—I was a member of the Hungarian parliamentfrom 1990 to 1994—that we discussed the questionof the republican coat of arms (with or without the HolyCrown; the party of “with” won) for five months, butthere was no significant debate on unemployment whiletwo million jobs went up into the air in a small countryof ten million.The task of a welfarist rearguard action went toany political force considered to be beyond the pale. Incountries where there was official discrimination againstfunctionaries of the “communist” apparat and where themembers of the former ruling party had to stick togetherfor self-protection and healing wounded pride, like inEast Germany and the Czech Republic, this was incumbentupon the so-called “post-communist Left”, and forthe rest, it usually went to extreme nationalist and“Christian” parties. Since there was a certain continuityof personnel between the ruling “communist” parties’pro-market reformist wing (and their expert advisers inuniversities, research institutes and state banks) who,being at the right place at the right time, profited handsomelyfrom privatisations, there was a superficial plausibilityto the popular theory according to which “nothinghas changed,” which was only a conspiracy to prolongthe rule of a discredited ruling class. The truth of thematter is, of course, that the changes have been sogigantic that only a fraction of the nomenklatura wasable to recycle itself into capitalist wheelers-dealers. Theultimate winner was nobody local, but the multinationalcorporations, the American-led military alliance and theEU bureaucracy.Nevertheless, there is a grain of truth in this populartheory, namely the suspicion that the contrast betweenplanned state capitalism (aka “real socialism”) and liberalmarket capitalism may not be as great as solemnly trumpetedin 1989. Popular theories formulated as paranoidurban legends, however understandable, cannot (andshould not) replace analysis. But they do have politicalsignificance, especially as many successor parties to former“communist” organisations are now touting theneo-conservative gospel (the term “neo-liberal” is somethingof a misnomer: today’s ultracapitalists and marketfundamentalists are no liberals by any stretch of theimagination) and are dismantling the last remnants ofthe welfare state. Hence the strange identification insome countries of Eastern Europe of “communists”with “capitalists”—after all it is frequently former “communists”who are doing this to us, it is always the samepeople on top, the democratic transformation was afraud, this is all a Judeo-Bolshevist cabal, and so on.Now the identification of socialism and capitalism iswell known to have been a Nazi cliché—both are “raciallyalien”—but “the circumstances, they are not so,” theycould not be more different. After all, communists andsocial democrats in the 1920s and 1930s were united andadamant in their false consciousness concerning theirintegral opposition to capitalism and tyranny. False consciousnessdoes not preclude sincerity. The ex-communistparties at the beginning of the twenty-first centuryare opposed not only to socialism but to the most elementaryworking-class interests: this is nothing new andit also not limited to Eastern Europe. (When speaking ofEastern Europe, I always include the European part ofthe former Soviet Union, following the good example ofGeneral de Gaulle.) After all, the Italian CommunistParty and its leader Enrico Berlinguer have called forausterity measures and the proletarian duty to acquiescein them two years before Mrs Thatcher’s accession topower. (The right-wing of the former PCI, the DS, hasmerged with its enemy of sixty years, the ChristianDemocrats…) Therefore the cliché, while it has notbecome any truer, represents fair and just historicalrevenge.This is why and how the neo-conservative counterrevolutionis countered by forms of resistance couchedin the terms of the pre-war nationalist and militaristRight, often intermingled with open fascist rhetoric andsymbols and, in the case of the former Soviet Union,extreme eclecticism trying to synthesise Stalinism andfascism. (The Communist Party of the RussianFederation, the main opposition force in Russia, isinspired by the loony ideologues of the White Guards,who represented the political “brain trust” of the generalstaff of Admiral Kolchak and Baron Wrangel.) There is agreat variety of political solutions. After the defeat of the“neo-liberal” or neo-conservative régime of ex-communistPresident Kwaśiewski in Poland, the ultra-CatholicKaczyński twin brothers’ act, however ridiculous it mayhave appeared at first, was quite successful and appearedto be consolidating, combining extreme social conservatism,anti-gays, anti-women, anti-minorities, anti-Russian, anti-German, anti-semitic and, above all,anti-communist, with monetarist orthodoxy, pro-Bushmilitary zeal, persecution of everybody on the Left (theyhave stopped the pensions of the few surviving veteransof the International Brigades in the Spanish civil war inthe 1930s), censorship and savage ethnicist propaganda.(Later, being dropped by “the West”, the twins have lostthe forced early elections in favour of their more streamlinedconservative rivals.) In Slovakia, the government ofthe Left social democrat, Robert Fico, is an alliance ofhis own party with the nationalists of Vladimír Meciarand the quasi-fascist National Party led by the notorious64

In post-Fordist, twenty-first century protests thefundamental principles of the political and legal orderand of statecraft are not directly challenged. The regulararmy is not opposed by a Red Army, police by RedGuards or Republikanischer Schutzbund (Austria 1934),national, parliamentary governments by workers’ councils,bourgeois parties by proletarian parties, nationstatesby a universal republic of councils (let us notforget that the coat of arms of the Soviet Union was theterrestrial globe swathed in red strips inscribed with“Proletarians of all countries, unite!” in languages not local—such as French, English, German, Hindi, without theslightest parochial allusion to Russia—and initially its“national” anthem was, simply, the Internationale), principlesof private ownership, of the separation of powers, ofthe distinction between state and civil society are notannounced in a straightforward manner to be abolishedpresently, cultural or ideological sub-systems (from lawto art) are not directly denounced to have been nothingelse but deceit. As we have seen, the demands of theprotesters are not wholly unimaginable within the systemas greater equality, an end to imperialistic interventionand to the pile-up of nuclear weapons, greaterjustice towards various groups, etc. And even if theyare not the “stuff” that practical, feasible politics of themoment are made of, they have nothing in them thatcould not be welcomed into a more generous, moreinnovative liberal politics. (I have said earlier that theanti-globalisation movements combine social democratic,reformist policies with revolutionary street theatre.)Why the despair then?I do not think that the actual policies propoundedmatter very much. These movements are profoundly a-political or anti-political. They are addressing “problems,”not attacking state-forms. They are attempting to ignorestudiously the state as such which they recognise implicitlysince they are more or less expecting their demandsand proposals to be made into government (or globalgovernment: IMF, World Bank, WTO, OECD) policy,but not trying at the same time to create a new stateformmore amenable to prosecute such policies.In these post-Fordist protest movements there isnothing that would be inherently impossible to be alsoattained by change(s) of government(s) through electionsby parliamentary parties or an international alliance ofsuch parties. Why then the reluctance to join the by nowtraditional varieties of political participation, e. g., elections,referenda, plebiscites, strikes or different butlonger, more patient and more purposeful methods ofpassive resistance or civil disobedience? Or, if this provesimpossible, why not prepare, and train for, revolution?The answer is, I think, in their a-political substance:it is the withdrawal of recognition from pluralistic politics—which presupposes the conquest and exercise of power—as such, including revolutionary politics. It is not apathy—there is a lot of passion, particularly hatred, contempt,scorn—but an objectless repudiation of a subjectlessorder (that of capital). But the wholesale rejection of thepresent order is not matched by a corresponding andresponding utopia (like in 1968); this is a projectless,anti-utopian revolt, pure negation—which makes it paradoxicallystronger since the wrecking debates aboutmeans and ends are implicitly void.It is important to establish that the new protestsare, by the same token, not less subversive than theirpredecessors had been, since what they attack is not thepolitical and social order per se, nor liberal politicalinstitutions as such (not even the markets: “fair trade”presupposes markets), but legitimacy. Civil disobedience,when partial and particular in its aims, however radical,is a morally grounded, publicly declared and assumedlaw-breaking. But however much it resists law, the veryresistence is couched in terms of liberal constitutionalism.Now generalised civil disobedience (generalised in itsobjectives, not in its prevalence), even if it is plain that itcannot trigger a collapse of the prevailing order, poses aproblem for liberal democracy. Without the systemicopposition being able (or indeed, willing) to createcounter-power, government by consent—which is thebasis of any “free” polity—becomes imposible. Consentis increasingly, albeit passively and symbolically, withdrawn,not counterbalanced by resistance (which is naturallypolitical) but by a checking-out from institutionsand by a relegation of reflection on human affairs ontoan altogether different, usually ethical, plane. But sincethis ethics is usually some species of distributive justice,it needs an authority in which the intellectual force necessaryfor fair redistribution rests.The ever more consensual character of formerlyand supposedly adversarial political processes (elections,party politics, the nations’ contest, conflict of capital andlabour in the workplace) proved self-defeating. Authorityis historically asserted only against something: the conflationof authority and politics is extremely dangerous.Nevertheless, all other forms of authority (religion, consensualsocial morality and “moral sense”, high culture,science, tradition as such comprising old people’s allegedwisdom and the like) have atrophied, therefore all scissionwithin politics causes panic.The one surviving formof authority by assent is still with us since it is not maintainedby the community by virtue of its excellence, butonly as an expression of the serendipity of surreptitious,whimsical, capricious, impermanent will. When this willappears to be cheated, hell breaks lose. This popularwill, perceived as an empty screen, onto which anythingcan be projected, is subservient to mood and fashion. Ifthe dominant style of public decisions and pronouncementsis not in tune with these transient perceptions ofdemotic preferences, this serves as a proof of the hypocriticalor illusory character of political institutions whichare “out of touch” with these demotic preferences, hencesubservient to occult élite powers, interests or cabals.Small wonder, then, if the desperate and déclassémiddle-class youth in Eastern Europe dreams of sinister67

plots, and feels that its sorrow and anxiety is both democraticand profound beacuse somehow it matches thestyle of the epoch.The unmediated, direct negation of legitimacyseems to contradict the lack of truly revolutionary intentionsI have just imputed to the new social movements.But revolutions are quarrels. The revolutionary says tothe tyrant, “You declaim that your order is just; no itisn’t; it is the next order we are going to inaugurate thatis just; you are wrong, and we are right; God is on ourside.” The new social movements would say nothing ofthe sort. Justice as conceivable by conventional politicsis of no interest to them. They desire an end to globalwarming or to child poverty by means they despise,while they do not think there are any other means available—,but it will not be them who would have to usethose means.The shift of the political struggle from form to substancemakes constitutional, legal, legitimising argumentssuperfluous. The apparent recognition that there are nocontemporary alternatives to capitalism in the offingdoes not mean that capitalism now is considered legitimateor even bearable. On the contrary. It means theabandonment of the constitutional and social idea oflegitimacy and of the philosophical ideas of justice andliberty seen in the context of conscious human action.This is in marked contrast to Marx who saw that theproblem with capitalism is precisely that it (togetherwith exploitation, oppression and hierarchy) prevailsamong free and equal subjects.The Zeitgeist that makes young Western Europeansmarch under red and black flags is different from youngEast Europeans, who imitate their Palestinian scarvesand bandannas, their hoods and masks, their stonethrowingand their rebel cool they have watched enviouslyon television, but combining all this with extremeauthoritarianism, racism, and so on. While WestEuropean, North and Latin American anti-globalistdemonstrators evince a nostalgia for the revolutionaryproletariat, their East European counterparts expressunambiguously their fear and loathing of proletarians.Even if this is merely politico-cultural atavism, it (classas as orientation point) is highly significant.The adaptation of the props and stage managementof gauchiste demonstrations by reactionary, bourgeoisnuclei of future storm-troops is in part a cargo cult.More importantly, though, it is the application of militantanti-politics—at its heart there is, both East andWest, a culturally anti-étatiste defense of the redistributionist,protective, strong state, a living self-contradiction—tothe ruins of a secular society based onegalitarian planning, 1945-1989. R. I. P. Involuntarypost-modern pastiche plays a certain rôle. A born-again(as fake Catholic and fake nationalist) burgher middleclasscreated by “communists” striving and seeking topreserve institutions and routines practiced by “communists”all the while shouting “death to the communists”meaning capitalists: this would have warmed the lateJean Baudrillard’s cunning heart.The working class is silent. There are hardly anystrikes. This battle is fought between transnational capitaland its native agents and the local, ethnic middleclasses and the ethnicist and clericalist intelligentsia. Anauthentic Left has not surfaced.Yet.Gáspár Miklós Tamás, a Hungarian writer and philosopher living in Budapest, was one of leaders of the Hungarian dissident movementsbefore 1989 and a member of Parliament (1990-1994). He has since turned to the radical Left. He has taught at Columbia,Oxford, Chicago, Yale, the New School, etc.68