ABSTRACT
With the decline of ideology and proletarian action there appears the real question with which Koestler struggles but never really formulates. The decline of proletarian humanism is not a crucial experience which invalidates the whole of Marxism. It is possible to deny that the proletariat will ever be in a position to fulfill its historical mission, or that the condition of the proletariat as described by Marx is sufficient to set a proletarian revolution on the path to a concrete humanism. The proletariat stays in the Party because it is in it, and as long as the proletariat is in it, the Communist Party remains the proletarian party. It is in the area of politics that Koestler’s humanism shows its vicious side. In only one passage of his book is there any mention of the type of Marxist revolutionary produced by the nineteenth century which falls between the types of the Commissar and the Yogi.
