Às vezes, é necessário que um grande filósofo morra para descobrirmos detalhes em seus escritos que não teriam sido percebidos quando ele estava vivo. É o velho adágio: não prestamos atenção ao sol enquanto ele está aí, etc. e tal. Foi o caso do polonês Leszek Kolakowski, que, como vocês sabem, morreu na semana passada aos 81 anos.

Entre um texto e outro que serviu de tributo ao filósofo – em geral, publicados no mundo anglo-saxão, pois, comme il faut, a inteligentsia tupiniquim sequer fez um obituário decente – redescobri, graças aos blogs de Nick Cohen e Michael Weiss, uma singela troca de cartas entre E.P.Thompson, o historiador marxista que, de tão ultrapassado, nem sequer é mais usado na USP (a alternativa caiu sob Eric Hobsbawn, o que não é uma grande mudança…), e o próprio Kolakowski, no annus domini de 1973.

Obviamente, esta foi uma polêmica que não foi muito divulgada provavelmente porque Kolakowski ganhou o debate por nocaute.

O motivo da discórdia foi simples: Thompson simplesmente resolveu pegar o polonês para Cristo. Afirmou que conhecia a sua obra e perguntava-se como Kolakowski, que tinha sido membro do Partido Comunista na Polônia durante as décadas de 40 e 50, podia não só sair das delícias partidárias como também abandonar o Socialismo para sempre.

O tom do historiador britânico é exagerado e, muitas vezes, parece que ele está a fazer um discurso incitando o expurgo de alguém. Talvez não tenha sido por acaso que sua “carta aberta” (como ele intitulou o escrito) tenha cem páginas de extensão.

Kolakowski precisou somente de vinte páginas para responder a todos pontos importantes apresentados por Thompson, talvez porque quisesse homenagear Shakespeare, que, através da rainha Gertrudes, dizia que brevity is the soul of wit.

E que wit! Vejam só este trecho, de grande importância para nós, brasileiros que vivemos sob uma casta política que se baseia na moralidade dos double standards:

“We must not be fervent moralists in some cases and Real-politikers or philosophers of world history in others, depending on political circumstances. This is a point I would like to make clear to you if we are to understand each other. I will quote to you (from memory) a talk with a Latin-American revolutionary who told me about torture in Brazil. I asked: “What is wrong with torture?” and he said: “What do you mean? Do you suggest it is all right? Are you justifying torture?” And I said: “On the contrary, I simply ask you if you think that torture is a morally inadmissible monstrosity.” “Of course,” he replied. “And so is torture in Cuba?”, I asked. “Well, he answered, this is another thing. Cuba is a small country under the constant threat of American imperialists. They have to use all means of self-defence, however regrettable.”

Then I said: “Now, you cannot have it both ways. If you believe, as I do, that torture is abominable and inadmissible on moral grounds, it is such, by definition, in all circumstances. If however there are circumstances where it can be tolerated, you can condemn no regime for the very fact of applying torture, since you assume that there is nothing essentially wrong with torture itself. Either you condemn torture in Cuba in exactly the same way you do for Brazil, or you prevent yourself from condemning the Brazilian police for the very fact of torturing people. In fact, you cannot condemn torture on political grounds, because in most cases it is perfectly efficient and the torturers get what they want. You can condemn it only on moral grounds and then, necessarily, everywhere in the same way, in Batista’s Cuba or in Castro’s Cuba, in North Vietnam and in South Vietnam.)”

Não há como refutar tal argumento. E tudo isso porque, no meio da sua carta, Thompson resolveu afirmar que cinqüenta anos era um período de tempo muito curto para se julgar a eficácia de um governo socialista, seja ele sob a égide stalinista ou não. Kolakowski não deixa pedra sobre pedra neste momento e conta o seguinte caso:

“What is fifty years “to a historian”? The same day as I am writing this, I happen to have read a book by Anatol Marchenko, relating his experiences in Soviet prisons and concentration camps in the early 1960s (not 1930s). The book was published in Russian in Frankfurt in 1973. The author, a Russian worker, was caught when he tried to cross the Soviet border to Iran. He was lucky to have done it in Khrushchev’s time, when the regrettable errors of J. V. Stalin were over (yes, regrettable, let us face it, even if in part accounted for by the Western powers), and so, he got only six years of hard labour in a concentration camp. One of his stories is about three Lithuanian prisoners who tried to escape from the convoy in a forest. Two of them were quickly caught, then shot many times in the legs, then ordered to get up which they could not do, then kicked and trampled by guards, then bitten and torn up by police dogs (such an amusement, survival of capitalism) and only then stabbed to death with bayonets. All this with witty remarks by the officer, of the kind “Now, free Lithuania, crawl, you’ll get your independence straight off !” The third prisoner was shot and, reputed to be dead, was thrown under corpses in the cart; discovered later to be alive he was not killed (de-stalinization!) but left for several days in a dark cell with his festering wound and he survived after his arm was cut off. This is one of thousand stories you can read in many now available books. Such books are rather reluctantly read by the enlightened Leftist elite, both because they are largely irrelevant, they supply us only with small details (and, after all, we agree that some errors were committed) and because many of them have not been translated (did you notice that if you meet a Westerner who learnt Russian you have at least 90% chance of meeting a bloody reactionary? Progressive people do not enjoy this painful effort of learning Russian, they know better anyway).

And so, what is fifty years to a historian? Fifty years covering the life of an obscure Russian worker Marchenko or of a still more obscure Lithuanian student who has not even written a book? Let us not hurry with judging a “new social system”. Certainly I could ask you how many years you needed to assess the merits of the new military regime in Chile or in Greece, but I know your answer: no analogy, Chile and Greece remain within capitalism (factories are privately owned) while Russia started a new “alternative society” (factories are state owned and so is land and so are all its inhabitants). As genuine historians we can wait for another century and keep our slightly melancholic but cautiously optimistic historical wisdom.”

O trecho é longo, mas deve ser lido com cuidado porque Kolakowski joga na cara de Thompson justamente a razão de ser de qualquer um que se diga socialista – ou um revolucionário, que seria o termo correto neste caso. O que são cinqüenta anos quando você tem a História ao seu lado? Nada, é claro. Mas o ser humano, esta pequena abstração que vive através da História, tem uma importância miníma no grande sistema socialista; logo, para reeducá-lo, transformá-lo em um “novo homem” porque não devemos prendê-lo, torturá-lo – e, claro, matá-lo?

(Vejam bem: esta não é uma justificativa exclusiva de um socialista letrado como Thompson. Isto é uma característica essencial daquilo que Olavo de Carvalho chamou de “a mentalidade revolucionária”. Atualmente, se não temos os Thompsons, temos os imitadores de Al Gore e os malucos da Al-Qaeda para comprovar que esse estilo de raciocínio está bem vivo, saltitante e feliz da vida. E se vocês acham que estou indo longe demais, leiam The Pursuit of the Millenium, de Norman Cohn, para saber isto não se trata de um mero problema ideológico e sim de uma profunda doença do espírito.)

O que também importa na polêmica Kolakowski X Thompson não é apenas o modo como o polonês impõe um moral background objetivo ao historiador inglês; certos assuntos que estariam na crista da onda são antecipados com uma presciência assustadora. Ao fazer a conexão entre a visão utópica de Thompson e a realidade dos fatos, Kolakowski profetiza o aumento do poder estatal que se tornaria uma força dominante nestes resquícios da era ecumênica:

In the meantime some traditionally socialist institutions seem to creep’in capitalist societies in a rather unexpected way. Even the most short-sighted politicians realize now that not everything can be bought for money, that a moment might come when no money will buy us clean air, clean water, more land or wasted natural resources. And so, “use value” comes back, slowly, into the economy. A paradoxical “socialism” resulting from the fact that mankind does not know what to do with garbage. The result is growing bureaucracy and the growing role of power centres. The only medicine communism has invented – the centralized, beyond social control, state ownership of the national wealth and one-party rule – is worse than the illness it is supposed to cure; it is less efficient economically and it makes the bureaucratic character of social relations an absolute principle. I appreciate your ideal of the decentralized society with a large autonomy for small communities and I share your attachment to this tradition. But it is silly to deny powerful forces resulting from the technological development itself, and not from the fact of private property, and leading toward greater and greater power of the central bureaucracy. If you pretend to know simple means to cope with this situation, if you imagine to have found the solution in saying “we will make a peaceful revolution and socialism will reverse this trend” you delude yourself and you fall victim to verbal magic. The more society depends on the complex technological network it created, the more problems have to be regulated by central powers, the more powerful state bureaucracy is, the more political democracy and more “formal”, “bourgeois” freedom is needed to tame the ruling apparatus and to secure individuals their shrinking rights to remain individuals. There will never be and there cannot be any economical or industrial democracy without political (“bourgeois”) democracy with everything it entails. We do not know how to harmonize the contradictory tasks contemporary society imposes upon us, we can only try an uncertain balance between these tasks, we have no prescription for a conflictless and secure society. I will repeat what I wrote once elsewhere: “In private life there is the attitude of those who think about how they could gain at one blow the capital that would allow them to spend the rest of their life without worries, in peace and security; and there is the attitude of those who must worry about how to survive until tomorrow. I think that human society as a whole will never be in the happy position of a rentier, living on dividends and having the guarantee of the secure life to the end, thanks to the capital once acquired. Its position will be rather similar to that of a journeyman who must care about how to survive until tomorrow. The utopians are people who dream about ensuring for mankind the position of rentier and who are convinced that this position is so splendid that no sacrifices (in particular no moral sacrifices) are too great to achieve it.””

Através deste trecho, nota-se que Kolakowski sabia que a idéia fixa de uma utopia era algo que fazia parte da estrutura do comportamento humano – e que, portanto, seria algo muito díficil de ser extirpado da face da terra (a propósito, o filósofo polonês deu uma Tanner Lecture sublime a respeito deste tema em The Death of Utopia Reconsidered).

Talvez não seja à toa que outro polonês, o cineasta Andrzej Wajda, diretor de Katyn, película sobre o extermínio cometido pelos soviéticos contra os soldados polacos (e, ainda assim, a culpa caiu sob seus irmãos de genocídio, os nazistas), começa a sua história com a seguinte frase: “O Terceiro Reich está previsto para durar mil anos. O Comunismo quer durar para sempre”.

Entre o forno e a frigideira, entre mil anos e a eternidade, o que é a consciência humana? Apenas um fio de cabelo. Mas, como algum dia – não se sabe quando e, para ser sincero, nem se deve saber isso – este fio será contado, fica aqui as palavras de um morto, reproduzidas aqui para que não sejam deformadas conforme a vontade dos vivos, pois, afinal, temos que lembrar sempre daqueles que foram para que possamos viver alguma coisa mais justa, humana e, sobretudo, menos mortal.