The History and Impact of Marxist-Leninist Organizational Theory
Shattan, Joseph
THE HISTORY AND IMPACT OF MARXIST-LENINIST ORGANIZATIONAL THEORY John P. Roche/Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis, Inc./$7.50 Joseph Shattan I n his now famous Letter to the Soviet Leaders,...
...First, even when viewed solely as an "operational code," Marxism-Leninism can carry philosophical implications...
...The Sakharov-Solzhenitsyn debate brought to the fore issues that have long divided anti-Communists...
...The optimistic view of individual conscience that underlies Johnson's argument is nonetheless at odds with the ideas of Nikolaus Lobkowicz...
...There is obvious truth in this propOsition, though Lobkowicz rather overstates the threat of widespread decadence...
...There were some among us, certainly, who ponderedthe Constitution and the American promise, or dream," he writes, "but for most of us the colleqtive improvisation of a Dixieland combo came to mean, if only subliminally, the perfect emblem of freedom and all the necessary energy to defend it...
...John Roche obviously did have the time to write a short book, and a most important one as well...
...All the varieties of genocide, terror, persecution, of whatever hue, are being committed for the sake of 'freedom.' In a sense, we may think that this is a victory for the idea of freedom: nobody dares attack it under its name...
...it is defined by the scope of human activities which are not regulated by any law or restricted by violence"), outlines some implications, and suggests that we set the whole on an anthropological foundation: To be human is to demand freedom...
...For how should we, in a world as mentally chaotic as ours, save our liberty if it presupposes a moral change in our innumerable fellow citizens...
...In another of the essays, Leszek Kolakowski professes dismay at those who take such a devil-may-care attitude toward the definition o f freedom...
...that in fact is why he urges its adoption...
...regime, that which accounts for both its history and its character...
...And it is surely to be hoped that he is gregarious and his circle of acquaintances a large one...
...It was then, as a young radical, that Roche first acquired his passionate detestation of the Communists and their methods...
...The belief that Western society, for all its economic and technological achievements, is fundamentally decadent, may well be another premise of MarxismLeninism widely shared by its adherents...
...Or as Roche himself puts it, in dealing with Marxist-Leninists, " D o n ' t listen to what they say...
...Leopold Tyrmand opens the book, for example, with a story about members of the Polish underground listening to American jazz records during World War II and drawing moral sustenance from the music...
...To which Solzhenitsyn replied, "Ideology wrings out our souls like floor rags...
...It had no fifth column as its servant, no world to bury, and no world to win...
...I n all w a r s , " he observes, "'freedom' is invariably on both sides...
...for the Englishman's entertaining and incredible reply was telephoned at once ~o Stalin and the most important offices of State, provoking new waves of mirth everywhere...
...The joke quickly spread all over Moscow...
...The theory and practice of Communism was something Roche encountered first~hand, and the encounter left him with an enduring distrust of all Communist ideological protestations, on the one hand, and with an equally enduring fixation on Communist o~ganizational strategy, on the other...
...Our college program is based on the Humanities as discerned in the great books of Western civilization and as seen through the eyes of the Christian humanist...
...He appropriates a definition from the Anglo-American tradition ("freedom is a negative concept...
...He witnessed how Stalinist henchmen cynically exploited the often sincere idealism of the so-called "useful idiots" to advance Soviet interests, and how they set out to destroy those individuals and institutions that could not be captured...
...Having abandoned his father's Coughlinite politics at the age of fifteen to become a member of the Young People's Socialist League, Roche has been an active anti-Communist for almost forty-five years...
...In a sense, this book is a meditation on those fortyfive years of political activity, an attempt to explain how someone who holds "anti-Communist primitives" in open contempt, who served for three terms (1962-65) as National Chairman of the Americans for Democratic Action, and who has been closely identified throughout his entire political life with the American labor movement, can be as unyieldingly anti-Communist as the staunchest Reaganaut...
...Perhaps because he already subscribes to the belief that history is on the side of greater freedom, Paul Johnson is less worried by despots' routinely speaking the language of freedom...
...Solzhenitsynites stress its eschatological, utopian dimension--its attempt to create a "new man," to inaugurate a new era in human history...
...Last but not least, Solzhenitsynites often write from an avowedly religious perspective-feeling, perhaps, that only religion offers an adequate response to the ideological challenge posed by Marxism-Leninism--while Sakharovites are just as often secular in outlook...
...Second, in downplaying the ideological factor in Soviet foreign policy, Roche perhaps inadvertently conveys the impression that the aims of Soviet foreign policy are basically no.different from traditional Russian foreign policy, that ideology serves merely to disguise age-old ambitions and interests...
...John Roche's masterful study of Marxist-Leninist thought is very much in the Sakharovite tradition...
...Excessive liberty to trade and to move, after all, is hardly a prospect one loses sleep over these days...
...Peter V. Sampo Thomas More Institute of Libet'al Arts One Manchester Street Merrimack, NH 03054 _9 Please send me information about this program...
...This assertion provoked a debate between Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov in the journal Kontinent...
...Yet it is most unlikely that genuine idealists could long survive in such a polluted environment...
...He denies, in fact, that such distinctions are proper, and says that freedom is indivisible...
...Like Joseph Shattan works for the Human Rights Bureau of the Department of State, Washington, D.C...
...The jazzman, of course, when asked to define his music, said that if you had to ask, he couldn't tell you...
...THE HISTORY AND IMPACT OF MARXIST-LENINIST ORGANIZATIONAL THEORY John P. Roche/Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis, Inc./$7.50 Joseph Shattan I n his now famous Letter to the Soviet Leaders, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn attributed the evils of modern Russia to its ruling Marxist-Leninist ideology...
...The question he asks--how to create a new awareness of American and European freedom--is nevertheless a bothersome one and one uppermost in the minds of those who underwrote the conference that...
...watch their hands...
...it is precisely a lack of concern over ideological consistency, and an overwhelming emphasis on undermining the opposition and controlling the organizational levers of power, that constitutes the central message of Leninism...
...Though he doesn't say it so bluntly, he is asking if we would take up arms so that our neighbors might indulge a taste for porn videos...
...For the "Solzhenitsyn wing," on the other hand, ideology is the very essence of the Soviet...
...Though it might prefer autocracy in its neighbors, it did not feel impelled to set up a replica of its own regime wherever its armies entered...
...it brings us down below the le~,el of animals--and it is 'of no importance...
...Indeed...
...Johnson's concern is that some freedoms are less valued than others, specifically the two he discusses--freedom of markets and freedom of movement...
...His style throughout is discursive and anecdotal, yet his scholarship is impeccable, and he manages to compress an enormous amount of history into a very short volume...
...For the "Sakharov wing" of the antiCommunist movement, MarxistLeninist ideology is not the driving force behind Soviet expansionism, but constitutes, rather, what the Italian political philosopher, Gaetano Mosca, called a "political formula," justifying the rule of the Soviet "new class...
...It is an agonizing concern for Lasky, both because of the central role his generation played in fostering this faith after World War II, and because of its inability to sustain it...
...how and why, Lasky wonders, did influential Americans and Europeans lose faith in the virtue of their civilization...
...nor did it feel "insecure" and "provoked" unless all the world should consist of autocracies...
...This message may sound hopeless," he says...
...But as the late Bertram Wolfe put it in a well-known essay, "Communist Ideology and Soviet Foreign Policy," there are a number of important differences between the foreign policies of the autocratic Russian state and the totalitarian Soviet state, differences that are ultimately the result of ideology: Just as autocracy, though it claimed absolute power, did not dream of totalist THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1984 power within its own realm, so it had no global aims in foreign policy, no allembracing plan for the world, no overall unifying idea...
...The authors, some of whom may be familiar to American Spectator readers, are a mix of American and European academics and journalists...
...Along the way, he discusses Lenin's possible role in the murder of Rosa Luxemburg, the disastrous theory and practice of "Social Fascism," the intricate diplomatic dance that led to the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939, the internal feuds in the Stalinist bureaucracy that culminated in the Cold War of 1945, the bizarre antics of the American Communist party, such as its 1944 decision, later reversed, to self-destruct, the evolution of Sino-Soviet relations, and other episodes in the sordid saga of international Communism...
...Though suggestive, Tyrmand's metaphor unfortunately provides little help when one tries to define freedom...
...That the genuflection to freedom is considered necessary even by tyrannies," he writes, "is progress of a kind, an acknowledgement even by those who in practice deny it that freedom is a social good...
...This line of questioning brings Lobkowicz to doubt the utility of the forum in which he announces it: "One can lecture about [freedom], organize conferences around it, preach it, but the only real way to carry it on, to maintain, to save it, is through our personal example, through the conduct of our own lives in the circle of the few with whom we are personally acquainted...
...I see present-day Soviet society as being marked rather by ideological indifference and the cynical use of ideology as a convenient facade," Sakha'rov wrote...
...As the hapless English Communist's remark suggests, not everyone who joined the Communist movement, especially in its early years, was a cynic...
...I forget who it was who said that he lacked the time to write a short book, so he wrote a long one instead...
...The closing essay, a memoir by Encounter editor Melvin Lasky, approaches the question indirectly...
...The typical Communist apparatchik is not a "true believer" or an ideologue, but rather a "cynical gangster," an "ideological whore," someone who thinks that all ideals are worthless, except insofar as they enable him to manipulate others...
...On Freedom is a collection of nine essays that were presented at a recent conference in Frankfurt, West Germany sponsored by the Rockford Institute...
...Some of the book's other contributors would no doubt dispute this...
...Roche traces the history of MarxistLeninist manipulations from the establishment of the Comintern in 1919, to the "Peace Movement" of today...
...Sakharov, Roche is a genuine liberal, one who understands that if the world is to be made "safe for diversity" (as John Kennedy once put it) Communism must be contained...
...Lasky divides postwar Western THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1984 49...
...The belief that politics is essentially an arena of acute conflict, a contest over "who [will destroy] whom," is one such implication that Communist leaders, for all their cynicism, genuinely accept...
...How should we create a new awareness of American and European freedom if everything depends upon a moral renewal...
...Armed with a definition rooted in human destiny, defenders of free society could claim to be "agents of progress"--a claim they once made but which has been ceded in this century to the enemies of freedom...
...it corrupts us and our children...
...I n n o c e n t s C l u b s , " "Transmission Belts," "Boring from W i t h i n , " "United Front from Below' '--this is the true vocabulary of Leninism, which is less an ideology, in Roche's view, than a blueprint for seizing power, an "operational code for a new style Mafia.'" Along with many other American liberals, social democrats, and trade unionists, John Roche fought this "new style Mafia" during its heyday in the 1930s and 40s...
...This concept, he freely admits, is not empirical, it cannot be supported or attacked with evidence...
...One should not be put off by the rather dry title...
...In another sense it is a defeat Richard Starr is assistant editor of the Public Interest...
...On the whole, Roche's emphasis on the cynical ,character of the MarxistLeninist elite, and on the instrumental significanco of Marxism-Leninism, is well taken...
...His argument can be sensed in the pithy formulation he gives it" " I f freedom were our highest value, a dungeon would be the only real e v i l . " He wishes, then, to remind us of the "older political philosophers," who maintained "that the ultimate end of all political order consists in helping man to be virtuous...
...Neither an ideocracy, nor insurrectionary, its generals brought no plans for revolution in their baggage...
...it will lack the desire to defend itself...
...Johnson's application of this principle in defense of free markets and free movement across political boundaries, however, should not ruffle their feathers overmuch...
...and then, in practice, should do exactly the contrary...
...The English Communist interrupted, "But that'would be a lie...
...It seems that at a meeting of the Executive Committee of the Comintern, the issue to be decided was how the British Communists should react when confronted by a Labour party demand that any branch which admitted Communists be expelled: THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1984 47 The Russian delegate Piatnisky put forward a suggestion which seemed obvious...
...Unlike Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov minimized the importance of MarxismLeninism...
...In the end, Lobkowicz has far less faith than Johnson in the virtue of unfettered or uninstructed human conscience...
...Sakharovites tend to stress the manipulative, instrumental features of Marxism-Leninism--the ways in which it serves to buttress, rationalize, and extend the power of the Soviet leadership...
...These reservations notwithstanding, however, Professor Roche's study remains a small gem...
...He is less interested in the condition of being free than in how man behaves when he is allowed to behave as he wishes...
...in disguise: a victory for the word, a defeat for meaning...
...Name Address City State Zip Telephone of Soviet ideology are based on a faulty premise~ They assume that Marxism-Leninism is a form of high theory, a corpus of ideas, whereas in reality it is "an organizational theory, which the Mafia must envy, devised to enhance the power of an elite working in the framework of Russian self-interest...
...Lobkowicz worries that a society of people who are merely free will forget the value of freedom...
...Certainly the feeling that some Americans and Europeans are overly critical of their society is a widespread one...
...Such a defeat is not, in Kolakowski's view, to be taken lightly...
...Did Lobkowicz meet anyone at this conference...
...According to Roche, most analyses THE GREAT UNIVERSITIES provided the ground for the important political leaders, philosophers, theologians, scientists, lawyers, poets, and religious of the past...
...THOMAS MORE INSTITUTE OF LIBERAL ARTS For Catalogue and Brochure Write To: Dr...
...To paraphrase the theater critics, if you read only one book on Communism this season, make it this one...
...Loud laughter greeted this ingenuous objection, frank, cordial~ interminable laughter the like of which the gloomy offices of the Communist International had perhaps never heard before...
...He even delights in this fact...
...spawned this book...
...One anecdote, in particular, told by the disenchanted Italian ex-Communist, Ignazio Silone, sums up for Roche the essential character of the Communist movement...
...The branches," he suggested, "should declare that they submit to the discipline demanded...
...But Roche's anti-Communism is as much a product of experience as reflection...
...Yet I must record two reservations...
Vol. 17 • December 1984 • No. 12
