SOCIAL AND INDIVIDUAL ASPIRATIONS IN THE POLISH REVISIONIST MARXISM

During the post-Stalinism “Thaw” in the 1960, Polish philosophers and historians of ideas, such as Adam Schaff (“Marxism and the Human Individual”, 1965), Leszek Kołakowski (“Toward a Marxist Humanism”, 1967), Leszek Pomian (“The Existential Philosophy”, 1965) offered a rereading of Marxism challenging one of the last grand narratives of history and its dogmatic interpretation, Stalinism. They attempted to reinterpret Marxism in two ways: studying the alienation in the capitalist and socialist societies through the philosophy of “a Young Marx”, author of “historical works”, and trying to reconcile Marxist historical determinism with Sartre's existential indeterminism. In this manner, placing the individual in the centre of their reflection and advocating a humanist interpretation of Marx, they showed the disparity between the Marxist's view of the future classless society and reality. At the same time, this historical revision of Marxism aimed to reform socialist societies of the Central and Eastern Europe by giving them intellectual means of renewal. The author of this paper structures it around the connection between a collectivist doctrine and individualism, and discusses through a close reading of Polish revisionist Marxists how their reinterpretation of Marxism relates to the understanding of the Polish society and its aspirations in the 1960.