Time Essay: What Workers Get out of Communism

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As the stolidly relentless vehicle of Marxism lumbers through history toward the light, its honored cargo has always been a rather dense abstraction called "the proletariat." But Karl Marx never lavished much bourgeois sentimentality on the proletariat in person, on real workers as individuals. In their private correspondence, Marx and Engels even referred to them as "stupid asses."

In Poland this summer, the real workers have taken a little revenge on Marx and Communism's vulgar pretensions to inevitability, on the regressive hoodoo of the All-Daddy state. They have knocked a hole in the wall, climbed outside their totalistic system and marched angrily around it demanding things. That is very embarrassing. It is also, communistically speaking, impossible. It is a little like the old Second City comedy routine in which Ahab thunderously demands, "Hast seen the white whale?" and the other ship's captain calls back, "Yeah. We killed him yesterday." What happens now to the metaphysical plot, to the primordial story? Communism, after all, loses ideological face if the workers, the stars of Marx's historical drama, step so radically out of their assigned role and indict the system that is their supposed salvation. The Polish workers have given the Communist Manifesto's "Workers of the world, unite!" a dimension of irony that the Politburo over in Moscow is incapable of savoring. Communism is supposed to be the solution; the Poles say it is part of the problem.

For years, only those encumbered by ignorance or a wistfully doctrinaire need to believe have invested either hope or credibility in the Workers' Paradise as it has taken shape in the world. Many, it is true, are still attracted by the ideals of Marxism—by its promise of egalitarianism and social justice. The appeal is especially forceful in the Third World, where capitalism is usually implicated emotionally with colonialism and where some form of socialism seems the surest road to justice. But on the whole, those farthest away from the thwarting and soul-wrecking little details of the Workers' State are the ones most inclined to be eloquently sentimental about it, or at least to make excuses for it. Almost every university faculty in the West has members who call themselves Marxists; in contrast to a couple of decades ago, it is now generally safe and chic to wear the label like a blue work shirt under a tweed jacket. Many defend their faith by arguing that, as Chesterton said of Christianity, real Marxism has not failed because it has never been tried.