John Clark and Aaron Wildavsky, The Moral Collapse of Communism: Poland as a Cautionary Tale (San Francisco: Institute for Contemporary Studies Press, 1990).  431 pp., $24.95.

No one predicted the sudden and epidemic collapse of communism in 1989.  Many are now trying to explain it.  The importance of this book, what makes it stand out from most of the dozens of other works on the communist experience in Eastern Europe now appearing, is that it has an overarching and arresting theme that, properly understood, points to such an explanation.

That theme is encapsulated in the book's title: the collapse of communism is, essentially and profoundly, a moral collapse.  Stated as baldly as that, the proposition might seem both banal and empty of explanatory power.  But as it is elaborated and explored by Clark and Wildavsky--in a style that is always sophisticated and often mordant and witty--it is novel and illuminating, casting light not only on the reasons for the failure of the communist regimes but on the prospects for progress in the postcommunist period.

A natural first reaction to predictive failure is to search for particulars of which one was unaware or which were overlooked.  Many social scientists have been led to search for a host of such particulars, usually political and economic ones.  How misleading were Soviet statistics?  How divided were communist leaders?  How run down were East German factories?  How deeply diseased are distributive systems in the East?  What is it that markets know that central planners cannot?

It is important to get these tangible matters right, but the house-of-cards collapse of communism suggests that deeper things were awry.  After all, communist leaders still had armies, police, and secret police, and whatever else collapsed, these still carried loaded guns.  Why on the whole, and particularly in Poland, were they not called upon to use them?  And why did attempts to use them as of old--in Romania, for example--backfire so badly?

It may be that our explanatory difficulties lie not in specifics but in something more general and enveloping.  We lack, or are uncomfortable with, the idiom appropriate to one of the most important ways in which social orders can succeed or fail--morally.  Clark and Wildavsky maintain that the collapse of communism was not simply a product of despotism, poor institutions, the senselessness of comprehensive planning, the absence of markets, or contradictions between forces and relations of production.  All these played a part, many of them are linked, and in this wide-ranging work Clark and Wildavsky discuss them all.  They were all, however, connected to a more distinctive and profound failure of communism--its moral failure.  They contributed to it, but it, equally, to them.

The language of morals, of course, has often figured in people's evaluation of communism, with supporters attributing virtues to it and opponents frequently using moral categories to condemn its regimes.  What seemed appropriate for praise or blame, however, has rarely been accepted as apt for explanation.  Tough-minded analysis of the fate of nations and economies has seldom been conducted in the idiom of morals.  And almost no social scientist (aside from the Pope) has ventured to suggest that key, causally significant weaknesses of communist regimes might have to do with their immorality.  That is what Clark and Wildavsky successfully suggest, and therein lies the novelty and force of their work.

What does it mean to be "demoralized"?  The word is usefully ambiguous, suggesting both loss of morale and corruption of morals.  Within the range and interconnection of its several meanings lie some of the key disabilities of communist political economies.

In its most usual sense, to be demoralized means that morale is gone.  This is patently true of the Communist Parties in most of Central and Eastern Europe, preeminently Poland.  Long before they lost office their morale was shattered.  No one believed them or in them.  Worse still, they no longer believed, or believed in, themselves.

Moreover, anyone who has spent time in a communist country knows that it was not only leaders who were demoralized.  Meeting all those denizens of "abnormal" societies and dreamers about "normal" ones--all those queuers, fixers, finaglers, currency changers; tired, sad, unwell, hopeless, perpetual shoppers in perpetually empty shops; shabby inhabitants of smelly, filthy, identical, scruffy apartment blocks; non-workers in non-jobs--one became aware of a pervasive demoralization, a kind of overwhelming slackness of social muscle, which was much more disturbing and inescapable than the fate of a few corrupt and incompetent communists.

Of course the two sorts of demoralization are closely linked.  For in all communist political economies (CPEs) only one institution stands to take credit or blame: the party-state which insinuated itself everywhere, sought to control everyone, and so was held responsible for everything.  These two entities--state and society--symbiotically shared and fed each other's demoralization, with the consequence well described by Clark and Wildavsky:

Both those who lied about its operating norms and those who were lied to are disgusted because in all CPEs the system breeds similar effects, either hostility or disbelief.  When these hollow states no longer exist in the hearts and minds of their citizens, when someone pushes on them, they collapse....[W]hen push comes to shove no one pushes back.  The collapse of communism is, above all, a moral collapse.

And here we have the other sense in which state and society are demoralized: they are not only low in morale, they are low in ordinary morals as well.  Again the most obvious manifestation of this is in the state: it is full of lies.  Public language is totally fraudulent.  The interaction between virtually every level in a command economy is built on lies.  Clark and Wildavsky discuss the pathologies of "planned" economies in detail, and they make it clear that such economies would not work even if everyone told the truth.  But no one does, and that in and of itself makes planning impossible:

It may appear laughable to talk about plans as embodying moral relations.  Nevertheless, without being grounded in the common morality, no plan can be worthwhile.  Those who provide data must be trying to be accurate, or there is no point in hearing from them; those who use data must be honest in how they present them, or there is no point in doing anything.  Those who send instructions must believe these can be carried out; otherwise why bother?  When plans are tissues of lies, however, lies of such different sizes and shapes that it is not even possible to detect a consistent bias, the main effect of the plan is to inculcate lying in all who participate in it....[T]he patterns of mutual falsification have made plans useless to everyone.

Lying is only part of the story.  Stealing and dealing are also endemic, for they must be.  The public economy is short of everything, makes nothing of quality (except for military use or occasionally for export), maintains nothing, repairs nothing.  The "black" economy makes up the slack.  Everyone needs it, everyone uses it.  Everyone is alienated from the state, but the state employs everyone and owns everything, so the state is plundered.  It is a world in which "criminality in regard to the political economy first becomes normal, then normative."

The consequences of these linked forms of demoralization, Clark and Wildavsky suggest, are profound.  In personal life they lead to self-contempt.  We are not talking about some members of a society who choose (or are forced) to be criminals, but of a society as a whole which cannot help but be criminal.  Between the often intensely moral aspects of life among family and intimates, and the intense amorality of dealings in the world, there appears to be neither continuity nor contradiction--no connection really--and no space for a normatively stabilized and regulated "civil society."

More deeply still and extending the insight of the great French sociologist Emile Durkheim, the authors argue that the necessary criminality of public life in CPEs robs the economy of indispensable normative sources of trust and predictability, without which routine and mutually beneficial cooperation among strangers cannot occur.

Every economy is not only a political economy that specifies and expresses a pattern of power relations; it is also a moral economy that expresses and shapes ideas about how people ought to relate to each other.  No system of law, no type of contract is sufficient to sustain productive economic relations without the desire on the part of the interested parties to act honestly toward each other....[In CPEs however, people] must assume that, unless they are dealing with a member of their family or a trusted acquaintance, they are dealing with someone who is not to be trusted.  They will tailor their behavior to their expectations.  Bad moral behavior drives out good.

There is nothing pious, sanctimonious, or preachy in this point; it is really about the social and economic utility of morality.  And, if anything, Clark and Wildavsky understate the case; for eloquent as they are on the past costs of communist immorality, they do not really explore its future consequences.  Yet these consequences may turn out to be decisive.

At the moment, elites in the East are (somewhat anxiously) keen to build democratic political institutions and free economic markets.  This is also what Clark and Wildavsky advise, because the only successful civil societies we know have both, societies without either are unsuccessful, and there are no known alternatives.

However, if, as this book argues, CPEs have been profoundly demoralized and morally corrupted, and if a successful political economy has normative, moral--one might say civilizational--prerequisites, then post-CPEs appear to lie in a normative gap unlikely to be filled quickly or easily.  This is all the more so since no one, including Clark and Wildavsky, has much to say about how to fill it.

In a critique of Hayek's Constitution of Liberty, Raymond Aron observes that "If society is to be free it must first exist."  Many enthusiasts for free markets have ignored this.  They have much more to say about how a society should operate than about its conditions of existence, since most theorizing about free societies has occurred in robust civil societies, where the question did not arise.  Some free societies, particularly in the West, exist as a result of spontaneous growth over centuries; some--like Japan--because of successful grafts onto, and partial but organic transformation of, existing societies; some--as in parts of Latin America--because real societies with real markets have been freed from despotic rule.  Who, however, knows how the normative conditions of civil society can be generated from this social and moral wreckage, and who is attending to these problems?  How to create an independent, interconnected society from more or less pulverized atoms, as exist in Romania, or the normative bases of civil society from the demoralized CPEs that Clark and Wildavsky describe, whose most distinctive achievement was the corrosion of social linkage and its normative underpinnings?  These are questions presently without answers.

One would, then, like to hear a lot more from Clark and Wildavsky on how to overcome the moral consequences of communism.  They do not really confront the task of linking or continuing the moral implications of their diagnosis into their largely political and economic prescriptions.  Perhaps democratic institutions and markets will generate their own prerequisites, but that is a bootstraps operation of no small dimensions.

When dissidents in communist states stressed the importance of (re-)constructing civil society in the space between state and private affairs--a space which communists had invaded and in large part extinguished--they thought in basically political terms.  Certainly their achievements were primarily political: they established political bodies and linkages outside and against the state.  And they dominated these bodies: Solidarity, almost the only independent organization in Eastern Europe, was not pluralist.  In 1989 the focus of attack in Poland--the communist leadership--collapsed, and the most distinguished elites of "self-organization" took over the existing state.  The society itself was again left without leaders.  Again as before, the society had few crystallized interest groups, few organic channels or institutions for articulating and pressing interests, few "normal" horizontal linkages, and an anomic public sphere with few norms of non-intimate interpersonal behavior other than the deformed ones that Clark and Wildavsky describe.  It did have many complaints--all directed, as before and at the same time, to and against the state.

The new government began a primarily economic "revolution from above"--highly market-oriented--with some real achievements, considerable costs, and negligible social consultation or involvement.  Meanwhile Poles went on trying to survive as before, with less money, higher prices, and a falling standard of living.  Since no one seems to be attending to much else--for example social organization or even cooperative consultation--it is not clear what might undo or defuse the widespread social despair, distrust, and hostile dependence upon the state, inherited from the preceding regime.  But it is clear that it can be exploited.

Clark and Wildavsky are much too intelligent to be confident about anything to do with the future of Poland.  In particular they express justified concern that a restless population in straitened circumstances might fail to recognize the difference between a good new government which promises much but delivers little and a bad old government which promised much but delivered little.  However, they conclude optimistically with a quotation from Czeslaw Milosz.  Asked what Poles might have learned after forty years of communism, Milosz replied, "Resistance to stupidities."  Even that is uncertain.

In the presidential elections of November-December 1990--the first democratic test of an honorable and well-intentioned government, bequeathed a calamitous inheritance, and in office for only a year--its leader, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, the Solidarity prime minister, was humiliated.  He gained 18 percent of votes cast, behind Lech Walesa whose program was simply himself in a hurry (no small thing, of course, but not enough and maybe too much).  At least that was a plausible contest.  More distressing was the appeal of an obscure blow-in from Canada whom no one knew and who had nothing to offer except that he claimed to be rich.  He gained a quarter of the vote, twice.

In the course of the past year and particularly in the campaign, all sorts of primitive emotions and attachments surfaced--including anti-Semitic ones in this land without Jews--and many extraordinary things were said.  It was as if a rather confused, angry, hungry, and still sleepy Rip van Winkle--on whom a nasty and debilitating experiment had been conducted between times--had suddenly awakened after fifty years (for the war cannot be forgotten).  Asked his opinion of current affairs and told that, now that he was awake and free he should get on with things, he hankers after old symbols but finds everything daunting, as indeed it is.  It is enough to make anyone nervous, flail about, and want a firm if unpredictable hand.  It is not, however, an ideal recipe for democracy or what Max Weber called "sober, bourgeois capitalism."

That having been said, any pessimism should be measured and restrained.  In hard times and places, pessimists always have more than enough evidence for their views; and optimists easily look unrealistic.  Poland has been such a place for a long time, but in recent years the well-founded predictions of pessimists have repeatedly come undone, while the utopian aspirations of optimists have repeatedly been realized--partly because they believed in them.  And many of those optimists are still at work in Poland today.  The country has suffered hugely over the last fifty years.  It has also accomplished mightily over the last fourteen.  The suffering has been political, economic, and moral.  The accomplishments have been political and heroically moral.  They have not yet been economic or mundanely moral.  Yet in the long haul they need to be both, and at the same time.

Martin Krygier is associate professor of law at the University of New South Wales, Australia.