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Jacek Kuroń - Abandoning Marxism (81/150)

4,755 views · Published 20 October 2017 · 6:02 · Indexed 21 September 2026

Channel: Web of Stories - Life Stories of Remarkable People · 2017 · News & Politics

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To listen to more of Jacek Kuroń’s stories, go to the playlist: https://bit.ly/2PUj6tu

Polish activist Jacek Kuroń (1934-2004) helped to transform the political landscape of Poland. He was expelled from the communist party, arrested and incarcerated. He was also instrumental in setting up Workers' Defence Committee (KOR) and became a Minister of Labour and Social Policy. [Listeners: Jacek Petrycki, Marcel Łoziński; date recorded: 1987]

TRANSCRIPT: And so, there was a discussion, an incredibly important discussion. The reason for it was that we in the whole post-left wing formation were reviewing the left-wing tradition. It was while I was in prison at this time that I stopped being a Marxist. Funnily enough, I abandoned Marxism for purely intellectual reasons, which is hard to believe. Here's what happened. I've already said that time passes differently in prison: the time that's already passed has gone quickly whereas the time you have ahead of you feels like an age. In fact, it stands still. Being under the impression that I was going to spend the next 15 years locked up there, I realised that unless I find a way of making the time pass, I'll go mad. I had to find something that would make the time go quickly. However, in prison, you think about time because time is a problem in prison. Nowhere else do you think about time the way you think about it in prison, and you only ever think about time in prison. Well, maybe not only in prison because you think about time in a sanatorium, too, according to Mann's description. I think thinking about time in prison is much more dramatic, and the fact that time is different, that you suddenly discover that there are different times: there's the time measured by a clock, the time of the past, and the time of the future. This means that you can do something with that time, that is, the function of something, but what? Of survival. The greater your involvement, so activity, projects. The more involved I was in some project, the faster the time went, the less involved I was, the more I was waiting, and the hell of life in prison is waiting. If I'm sitting there waiting to be released, I'll die. So you can't be thinking about the end, you have to be doing something meaningful. And what can you do that's meaningful? I already knew that there was going to be a very difficult investigation. As soon as I arrived on 9th March, by the 10th I was already thinking, what can I do here? Previously, I'd learned to read in English and I'd read a lot of material on sociology to my small group - I'd been doing a PhD at the time in my group.

Later, I decided that this time I needed to think of something else. This was my second stay in prison and was going to be such a long one. And so I decided, I'd always been tempted to do this, in fact, it was Gaja's idea, she was a psychologist and worked with special needs children. We functioned in tandem and we discussed things. She had this... there is the seventh thesis by Marx on Feuerbach in which he says that the essence of man lies in his collective social relations. And she said once, look how everybody always perceives this by interpreting it that social relations are the starting point for reaching man, and they try to interpret his actions from the point of view of social relations. But if it was the other way around, if this journey could be made from the opposite direction? So I decided that I'd make that journey from the opposite direction, starting with what we already know about human psychology, and we know a great deal in relation to these times, through this 20th century which has hugely accelerated these matters, and to approach the collective social relations from this point. This was the entertainment I invented for myself, a theory and I worked on it, and when in November '70 I reached a number of, I'll jump ahead a bit here, there was enough work here to keep me busy for a few years, when I came to social relations, I wasn't at the same point I'd have been at as a Marxist - in other words, I was opposing Marx. So I said to myself right, this means that Marxism is a mistake, it is not true that social conditions shape our awareness, irrespective of how we interpret this whether it's just the conditions or do they determine our awareness more than anything else. It's also not true that what Marxists refer to as a base is the same thing as what Marxists refer to as a superstructure. So Marxism was rejected. This was in November and then in December a massive worker's revolt took place, a real textbook rebellion as if it was from the pages of one of Marx's books. And from our Marxist Open Letter. We had more or less planned this rebellion for this time. I said to Gajka, 'I always have rotten luck. When I'm a Marxist, Marxism doesn't work for me but as soon as I stop being a Marxist, it begins to work.' [...]

Visit https://www.webofstories.com/play/jacek.kuron/81 to read the full transcript.

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