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Leszek Kołakowski Books

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“The word “evil” contains nothing pathetic, nothing horrible, nothing sublime, it is objective and dry, it precisely indicates what it is actually about, it is ordinary, it is the same as the word “stone” or the word “cloud”; it's accurate matched to the subject, unmistakably falls into its reality, [...] Evil is a thing, it is as simple as a thing. But you don’t want to hear about it. While facing the destruction you will keep repeating with manic persistence: it is so, it became so, it just became so, but it could have been different: evil is an event that happens by chance and anywhere, but if someone can stand with resolve on its way — it can be prevented. The end of the world will find you in full confidence that the end of the world is an accident. After all, you don't believe in the devil. Seeing unnecessary cruelty, seeing joyless and aimless destruction, you don't even think about the devil. You have so many explanations and so many names at hand to explain away every aspect of the problem. You have your Freud to talk about the aggressive drive and death instinct, you have your Jaspers who tells you about the “passion for the night,” [...] you have yours Nietzsche, you have your psychologists with their “will to power”. You know how to hide a case behind words under the pretext of revealing it.”

Evil
Book:Rozmowy z Diablem
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“In the developed industrial countries, all social institutions for the purpose of evening out inequalities and ensuring a minimum of security (progressive taxation, health services, unemployment relief, price controls, etc.) have been created and extended at the price of a vastly expanded state bureaucracy, and no one can suggest how to avoid paying this price.”

InequalityBureaucracy
Book:Main Currents Of Marxism: The Founders, The Golden Age, The Breakdown
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“it was Marx who declared that the whole idea of Communism could be summed up in a single formula—the abolition of private property; that the state of the future must take over the centralized management of the means of production, and that the abolition of capital meant the abolition of wage-labour. There was nothing flagrantly illogical in deducing from this that the expropriation of the bourgeoisie and the nationalization of industry and agriculture would bring about the general emancipation of mankind.”

CommunismPrivate PropertyEmancipationBourgeoisieMarxExpropriation
Book:Main Currents Of Marxism: The Founders, The Golden Age, The Breakdown
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“There is a abundant evidence that all social movements are to be explained by a variety of circumstances and that the ideological sources to which they appeal, and to which they seek to remain faithful, are only one of the factors determining the form they assume and their patterns of thought and action.”

Social Movements
Book:Main Currents Of Marxism: The Founders, The Golden Age, The Breakdown
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“There are no rational means of predicting 'the future of humanity' over a long period or foretelling the nature of 'social formations' in ages to come. The idea that we can make such forecasts 'scientifically', and that without doing so we cannot even understand the past, is inherent in the Marxist theory of 'social formations'; it is one reason why that theory is a fantasy, and also why it is politically effective.”

FantasyMarxismPredicting The Future
Book:Main Currents Of Marxism: The Founders, The Golden Age, The Breakdown
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“St. Paul was not personally responsible for the Inquisition and for the Roman Church at the end of the fifteenth century, but the inquirer, whether Christian or not, cannot be content to observe that Christianity was depraved or distorted by the conduct of unworthy popes and bishops; he must rather seek to discover what it was in the Pauline epistles that gave rise, in the fullness of time, to unworthy and criminal actions.”

St PaulPauline EpistlesInquisitonRoman Church
Book:Main Currents Of Marxism: The Founders, The Golden Age, The Breakdown
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“No one can be certain whether our civilization will be able to cope with the ecological, demographic, and spiritual dangers it has caused or whether it will fall victim to catastrophe. So we cannot tell whether the present 'anti-capitalist', 'anti-globalist', and related obscurantist movements and ideas will quietly fade away and one day come to seem as pathetic as the legendary Luddites at the beginning of the nineteenth century, or whether they will maintain their strength and fortify their trenches.”

Anti CapitalismLuddites
Book:Main Currents Of Marxism: The Founders, The Golden Age, The Breakdown
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“The importance of Chinese Communism does not depend on the intellectual level of its dogmas. Mao was one of the greatest, if not the very greatest, manipulator of large masses of human beings in the twentieth century, and the ideology he used for the purpose is significant by reason of its effectiveness, not only in China but in other parts of the Third World.”

MaoChinese Communism
Book:Main Currents Of Marxism: The Founders, The Golden Age, The Breakdown
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“Nor did Khrushchev make any attempt at a historical or sociological analysis of the Stalinist system. Stalin had simply been a criminal and a maniac, personally to blame for all the nation's defeats and misfortunes. As to how, and in what social conditions, a blood-thirsty paranoiac could for twenty-five years exercise unlimited despotic power over a country of two hundred million inhabitants, which throughout that period had been blessed with the most progressive and democratic system of government in human history—to this enigma the speech offered no clue whatsoever.”

StalinismKhrushchev
Book:Main Currents Of Marxism: The Founders, The Golden Age, The Breakdown
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