Retrotopia: Critical Reason Turns Primitive

Abstract

The collapse of the Communist regimes and the failure of the anti-bureaucratic critical left may be traced back to the same roots. Around the middle of the 1960s the critical left turned away from a future-oriented utopia and discovered anthropology, the peasants and the primitive as an anti-capitalist, anti-bureaucratic, anti-centralist, anti-consumerist alternative. East European critical intellectuals were quick to follow the turn of intellectual direction, and became unable to provide a technologically desirable, politically sound, historically acceptable critique of the existing Communist regimes. The anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist retrotopia of the New Left proved to be too seductive to the official Communist ideologues, so they too gave up the future-oriented utopia, the only historical legitimation of the political practices and economic problems of the Communist regimes. The Fall at the end of the 1980s falsified the research programme of the critical social scientists for whom it was professionally almost impossible to come to terms with the peculiar and completely unexpected changes.