VOICE OF DISSENT

THE riots were only the outward expression of an intellectual ferment which has seethed through Poland ever since Gomulka declared his provisional independence from Moscow. Its unquestioned leader is a gawky, 36-year-old political philosopher whose devastating attacks on the Russians' brand of Communism have already made him a hero to Poland's students. "Leszek Kolakowski," said one ardent young Communist last week, "is much more important for Polish intellectual development than Khrushchev's speech."

Kolakowski has been a Communist since he was 18, won scholastic fame for the fervor of his pro-Stalinist views. But even before the Soviet 20th Party Congress, Kolakowski had established himself as the leader of the group of passionate dissenters now known as the enrages ("the enraged ones"). Last month, in Warsaw's Nowa Kultura, Kolakowski published a four-part critique that flays the Soviet order, and inferentially Wladyslaw Gomulka, with the cold-steel precision of a surgical scalpel.

Communist Everyman. Politically, Kolakowski cannot speak with an authority comparable to Yugoslavian Dissenter Milovan Djilas. But intellectually, he strikes more deeply at the Communist mystique. In his Nowa Kultura series, Kolakowski casts himself in the role of a Communist Everyman. First, he asks why so many party intellectuals have withdrawn from activity and buried themselves in non-political work and a general effort to avoid responsibility. The answer, he says, is that the party is driving its supporters into passivity by denying them the right of dissent.

Kolakowski then attacks the sacred Marxist dogma of historical determinism. History is not predictable, he insists. This destroys the basis of the Soviet demand for blind obedience on the ground that whatever the party bosses decide to do is part of society's inevitable movement toward the overthrow of capitalism.

To the Marxist protagonists of "political realism," Kolakowski retorts: "Your values change drastically every day, and every day they are proclaimed eternal. This is the worst kind of relativism of values, for it buries historical thinking as well as the immutable and lasting achievements of mankind."

Positive Hypocrisy. Kolakowski draws a devastating picture of what he calls "the positive role of hypocrisy," a nice philosophical turn of phrase which means simply that a criminal regime that cloaks its actions in moral slogans will, soon or late, be forced to start trying to live up to them. Says Kolakowski ironically: "A social system based on unlawfulness, oppression and unhappiness, when it masks itself with humanistic phraseology, does not, in spite of appearances, become more effective in the long run. At a certain moment, its facade turns against it because it was always alien to it." But, he adds, "in the larger view, the increase of hypocrisy is proof of moral progress because it testifies that what was done formerly outspokenly without fear of being compromised cannot be carried out today without that risk."

To non-Communist intellectuals, much of what Kolakowski has to say has been said before, often with less obscurantism. But in today's Poland it is new, fresh and almost suicidal in its audacity. Even in trying to answer him, Gomulka's Polityka fell into admission of the threat he poses to the Communist hierarchy: "Kolakowski and the enrages are not able to present any program of a 'moral' policy which would not lead at once to a national catastrophe and to the annihilation of Socialism." Kolakowski's supporters heard that he will be barred immediately from writing for Nowa Kultura, may even face a trial and expulsion from the Communist Party. But whoever moves against Kolakowski and what he represents in Poland must move carefully, for the memory of Poznan is still fresh.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.