Notes on Communism
Notes on Communism

Summary/Abstract: What can the mind give up for the sake of its ideals? Worldly success? Absolutely. Its own inner peace? Happiness? Possibly. Life itself? Perhaps, although—pace Giordano Bruno—we ought not be too harsh on Galileo, either. But can it give up its moral integrity? Gombrowicz reads Le Communisme, a book by the Marxist philosopher Dionys Mascolo, published in 1953, and in fifteen printed pages he tries to sort out his contradictory thoughts and feelings about it. This in itself seems incredible today. Communism is dead, the corpse is decomposing before our very eyes, and refined spirits would waste no more than a few withering epithets on it, the intellect’s bitter saliva, to be spat out in the direction of the stench, before moving on.

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