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Aleksander Smolar - The left suffers a crisis (120/201)

96 views · Published 19 December 2018 · 2:10 · Indexed 10 October 2026

Channel: Web of Stories - Life Stories of Remarkable People · 2018 · News & Politics

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To listen to more of Aleksander Smolar’s stories, go to the playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVV0r6CmEsFwlxPLurqAOCrabBgGrqLA7

Aleksander Smolar (b. 1940) is a Polish writer, political activist and adviser, vice-president of the Institute for Human Sciences and president of the Stefan Batory Foundation. [Listener: Vitek Tracz]

TRANSCRIPT: It's absurd but it also says something about my character. I mean, in some sense this was as much about my desire to know as it was about my desire for politics, my need to learn about a world which we share. Those were my only motives; it wasn't about earning money because just like in the Polish collectives, I earned pennies here. I can't even remember how much. These were my first experiences; later, there were many more.

The meetings we had and the discussions were quite obviously observed by the secret police. Jacek and Karol came out of prison – debates began again, fundamental political debates during which they altered their views which become, you could say, more general. Later, in the '70s, these views came to be dominant in the West, too, namely, the defence of human rights, of the constitution. In the West, this is connected to the crisis in left-wing thinking which followed the collapse… the compromising of the Soviet Union. You could say that this language – this general humanist language is the last incarnation of the ideological left. It was evidence of a deep crisis within the left. They are also to a large extent coming around to our position, like all of our group – I think partly, at least, for tactical reasons. I mean, I think that they could see that their revolutionary language was isolating them. The university, which tried to defend them, to show understanding – many very highly respected academics attended their trials to testify… yet at the same time, almost no one at the university identified with their views. They must have realised this wasn't a language that would win them support. I don't know. To be honest, I never spoke with them – with Jacek it's far too late and with Karol, too, I never talked to him about how this change came about.

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