In this review essay, Juraj Halas discusses the book „Rehabilitovat Marxe!“ by Jan Mervart and Jiří Růžička, which represents a formidable attempt at mapping and systematizing the development of Marxist philosophy in Czechoslovakia from 1953 to 1969. In their efforts at an “analytical archaeology” of post-Stalinist thought, they identify a range of central tendencies among thinkers who aimed to rehabilitate Marxist philosophy in the postwar period. “Dialectical determinism” was associated with the likes of Josef Cibulka and Jindřich Zelený and focused on ontological or methodological issues. “Marxist humanism” was a current with a heavy philosophical-anthropological focus, represented, e.g., by Karel Kosík. Conversely, the “techno-optimism” of Radovan Richta and his associates was preoccupied with forces of production and the “scientific-technological revolution.” Finally, “legal philosophy,” as propounded by figures such as Zdeněk Mlynář, František Šamalík, and Miroslav Kusý, was set on providing a critical account of modern political institutions and their relation to civil society. Mervart and Růžička associate these four currents with distinct, if overlapping, clusters of philosophical categories. In addition to providing an in-depth analysis of these now largely forgotten contributions to Czechoslovak Marxism, the book offers useful insights into their limits – for example, in terms of their relation to state socialism, (inter)nationalism, and gender. In this review, Halas draws critical attention to a noteworthy omission: Ota Šik’s critique of the “political economy of socialism.” He shows that Šik’s approach satisfies Mervart and Růžička’s own criteria for inclusion. It was specifically post-Stalinist, it was to a large extent philosophical in nature, and it cannot be reduced to any of the other tendencies discussed in the book. Moreover, it was subject to the same kinds of limitations identified in the authors’ analysis of the other four currents. In this sense, Halas’s essay serves to confirm the heuristic import of their approach.
Through an analysis of Zdeněk Doskočil’s monograph on a key period in Ladislav Novomeský’s life and work, this essay attempts to examine the possibilities and limits of biography as a historiographical genre. The author relies on attempts to reformulate biography as a distinct but traditionally convention-bound genre of “writing about the past” so as to bring it closer to what is known as contextual biography (Hans Renders, Binne de Haan). The text places Doskočil’s book among a number of other monographs published in recent years on luminaries of the Czech and Slovak Marxist intellectual elite (e.g. Zdeněk Nejedlý and Gustáv Husák). It focuses on the dilemmas faced by the author, who attempts to follow a different emplotment than the traditional, chronological and rather holistic one.
The article aims to bring about a deeper understanding of the strong emphasis placed on the anti-authoritarian dimension of radical left politics by the Movement of Revolutionary Youth (HRM), a group made up mostly of students that was active in 1968–1969 in Czechoslovakia and was harshly repressed by the normalisation regime. This emphasis is expressed not only in their demands for cultural freedoms but also through a critical dialogue with the history of revolutionary Marxism and a rethinking of the past and the future of the socialist movement in which the most important divide is seen as being between authoritarianism and libertarianism or, in another formulation, centralism and self-government. Taking into account the prevalent image of Trotskyism, this anti-authoritarian emphasis might be considered surprising. Therefore, we discuss three possible explanations for it: (1) a generational reflection of the state socialist dictatorship and the experience of the student movement; (2) the internal dynamics of the development of Trotskyist and post-Trotskyist ideas; (3) the more general development imprinted in the so-called “global 1968” and “the long 1970s.” The combination of all these three contexts opened up space for various analytical insights and political accentuations that made it possible for the group to transcend both Western Trotskyism and the Czechoslovak “socialism with a human face.”