Thinking Like a Communist / My Dear Alex
D'Souza, Dinesh & Smith, Tony & Fossedal, Gregory
inking Like a Communist, by Tony Smith, is an intelligent attempt to sketch the permutations of Communist theory since Marx. Every Marxist regime faces the basic problem of justifying itself. Lenin...
...That was the Menshevik objection to the Bolsheviki, as you'll recall...
...It's a series of excuses for the rulers to do what they want to do...
...See The Soviet Viewpoint, a book of interviews with Arbatov published a couple of years back...
...Their ideology, in all its variations, is just as self-serving as Marx accused bourgeois ideologies of being...
...Every paragraph should make our indigenous pinkos turn crimson...
...THINKING LIKE A COMMUNIST: STATE AND LEGITIMACY IN THE SOVIET UNION, CHINA, AND CUBA Tony Smith/W...
...Pravda quotes Lewis and McGrory all the time, and Georgi Arbatov, who heads Soviet propaganda operations here, talks like the robot that writes New York Times editorials...
...they provide all the arguments the Soviet Union really needs...
...Communist rulers have always proved nimble in adjusting theory to opportunity, and they have the added advantage of being able to silence anyone who finds non sequiturs in their theories...
...And these gents aren't going to revise their ideology to foreclose the fulfillment of their own ambitions...
...When the economy is in good shape, then "it is all the more shameful that some must live in squalor," and the country "must be generous with our less privileged brethren . . . there is no excuse for being stingy now...
...It still does...
...And even socialist fraternity has its limits: Smith mentions a Maoist broadside with the revealing title On Khrushchev's Phony Communism and Its Historical Lessons for the World...
...Vladimir muses: I am completely enthralled by the liberal argument which maintains, in effect, that there is nothing in principle right or wrong with socialism, but somehow it's always the right thing to do at any given time...
...The main weakness of Thinking Like a Communist is that Professor Smith seems to think Communists think like 46 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1987...
...Mao faced an analogous problem with his peasant revolution in unindustrialized China, and Castro also had to paddle in without benefit of a detectible proletarian surge in Cuba...
...In the Commie view, only a Communist state can ever be legitimate, but its legitimacy is beyond question...
...Checks and balances is yet to be adopted by the Marxist community...
...professors...
...You'd think men like Gorbachev lie...
...He has enough evident common sense to know better, but academic etiquette forbids him to acknowledge he's dealing with cynics...
...The Soviets have long since classified American libs as "progressive forces," and their agents have camouflaged themselves as libs for generations...
...Vladimir is funny when he's in action, scrambling to make the best of a real situation, but when he merely reflects, without the stimulus of concrete occasion, the book lapses into mere accuracy...
...However cogent the Mensheviki may have been, they didn't last long enough to make their criticism stick...
...After all, the general reality doesn't leave much room-for satire...
...Professor Smith (of Tufts University) makes it pretty clear that Communism as a going concern has little to do with whatever Marx may have had in mind...
...It's funny to see a furriner using a native idiom to manipulate native herds, especially those Americans who like to think of themselves as pre-eminently autonomous and unpredictable...
...Vladimir counsels young Alex to study the writings of Mary McGrory, Anthony Lewis, and Arthur Schlesinger...
...The reason there was a Stalin is the same reason there's a Castro: what the Commies want is total power...
...Lenin faced it even before he took power, in that Russia didn't fit the developmental schedule and therefore had no proletarian base to carry the Party to power...
...Every Commie wants to be a Stalin, even if he doesn't abuse the privilege quite as badly as Stalin did...
...Now and then even a conservative will be useful to the Soviets, but of course conservatives aren't reliable, whereas liberalism seems tailored to fill the bill...
...awake nights wondering whether the labor theory of value really holds water...
...At every turn of events—economic upturn or downturn, election time, Grenada, KAL 007, contra aid, SDI—Vladimir extracts from the lib lexicon the appropriate cliche to steer American opinion in the desired direction...
...Smith makes a point that's almost worth the price of the book: in Marxist theory, Stalin is impossible, because totalitarianism is impossible, because Joseph Sobran is a senior editor of National Review and a nationally syndicated columnist...
...My impression is that they don't...
...As commentary, My Dear Alex is right on target...
...Consider poverty programs, for example...
...But it's almost too easy...
...The key to the old hand's advice is that Soviet interests are best served not by overt boasts and threats but by using the idiom of American liberalism...
...When dealing with liberals, it is necessary to use farce...
...It would be more to the point to consider it as a de-legitimating device for the subversion of all non-Communist regimes, at home and abroad...
...The book is a. satire, modeled on The Screwtape Letters, in the form of messages from an old KGB hand to a young disinformation specialist stationed in the U.S...
...Castro's ideal social order is one ruled, with minimal friction and opposition, by Fidel Castro...
...W. Norton/$16.95 MY DEAR ALEX: LETTERS FROM THE KGB Dinesh D'Souza and Gregory Fossedal/Regnery Gateway/$14.95 Joseph Sobran the state is always the creation and instrument of class interests and can never have the kind of autonomy implied by the concept of totalitarianism...
...Smith remarks: "How ironic that the best illustration that can be offered of the state's powerful and autonomous role in all of history comes from the experience of communist governments that have remade from top to bottom the socioeconomic structures over which they rule...
...As satire, though, it should have exploited its central conceit more consistently...
...If, on the other hand, America is in a recession, then "these programs are needed today more than ever . . . this is no time to shred the safety net," etc...
...This is one of the few recent works of satire to bear an introduction by Richard M. Nixon...
...Lenin came up with the answer: the Party in Russia would serve as the Revolutionary Vanguard of the workers...
...Well, it's no accident, comrades...
...Add the two together and you see that for the American left, it is always the right time for redistribution...
...Smith is interested in the ideology as a legitimating device for individual Communist states...
...And though Stalin was posthumously denounced, Commie theoreticians haven't exactly worked overtime to devise institutional restraints against strongman rule, even if the Soviets have in practice distributed the power a little more broadly around the top level of the Party...
...Lenin, Mao, and Castro may have flirted with democratic ideas now and then, but they consistently resolved their difficulties in their own favor: neither free elections nor voluntary retirement has ever been a feature of the Communist regime...
...No matter...
...It never functions as an inhibiting conscience...
...T n My Dear Alex, Dinesh D'Souza 1 and Gregory Fossedal indulge the rude common sense that Professor Smith carefully reins in...
...And there's the problem of Stalin...
Vol. 20 • November 1987 • No. 11
