Rudolf Bahro's "Neo-Leninism" in Context: Reply to Andrew Arato and Milhaly Vajda

Abstract

Andrew Arato and Milhaly Vajda's critique of Rudolf Bahro' and all those who would uncritically support him is categorical in its effort to create a framework of debate and difference. Bahro, we are told, criticizes the social systems of Eastern Europe only (emphasis mine) in terms that remain deeply embedded in the presuppositions of those systems. The excitement caused in the West by Bahro's book is not because there is any demonstrable connection to a critical western Marxism (there is none, it is suggested), but because Bahro makes palatable a whole set of orthodox paradigms which ought to be questioned and not acclaimed. While such hyperbole may point to the apologetics inherent in some readings of Bahro or help further one's polemical gesture, it does not explain why the book, regardless of its shortcomings and very real contradictions, has had and continues to have a singular impact in the East and the West. Certainly its positive reception has not been limited to a bunch of neo-Leninists or closet Trotskyites, but has included such thinkers as Helmut Fleischer,2 Herbert Marcuse,3 Helmut Gollwitzer,4 Rudi Dutschke,s more recently Raymond Williams6 and even Mr. Vajda himself, who in an article in