Abstract

The crushing of Prague Spring in August of 1968 meant not only the failure of the hope of reforming a communist system from within the party and by using its own ideology; it also meant the death of Marxism in central Europe. In Kolakowski's words, from that time on, communism “was no longer an intellectual problem; it was simply a problem of power.” But although communist ideology may be no longer an intellectual problem, power has now become a problem that must be confronted. One of the crucial developments of the last 15 years is that, alongside the dissidence in the East has arisen the construction of “the other Europe,” an independent political orientation which is caught up neither in the Marxist reformism of the 60s nor in the weight of nationalist ideology