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...But this is far from being matched by social gains for the people...

...But here the question only begins...

...Marx, Selected Correspondence, pp...

...Deutscher states, the regime "still wields all the material instruments of power" and if "no one can say how or when it will relinquish them," what matters is not to repeat that "a profound contradiction is maturing" and that it will be solved by reforms, but to show, in terms of specific social forces, how it will come to the point of explosion...

...Does not the social and political structure in which they are embodied imperil and unbalance them both domestically and internationally...

...Deutscher reckons that forced labor in Russia constitutes about a tenth of all industrial labor, while in the same breath he dismisses that forced labor as a purely marginal aspect of Russian economy...

...The result, I take it, is a totalitarian form of State Capitalism...

...Stalinism, says Mr...

...Are not disproportionalities a typical feature of the Russian economy...

...But this is an entirely impermissible procedure...

...McCarthy knows this, but he knows, too, that to eliminate him, to eradicate McCarthyism, would mean to put the threat of Communism, internal or external, into an entirely different perspective—a perspective of which even conservative Americans, like Acheson and Telford Taylor, have proved capable...

...Despotic, yes...

...Deutscher must answer before he can so blithely pose the possibility of a peaceful emergence from Stalinism...

...Why should Stalin's death keep that course from being followed again...

...Deutscher counters by saying that in Russia the specific organization of the economic process—the existence of nationalized economy—allows for socialism...

...Has the quantitative increase in basic industries been matched by a proportionate qualitative improvement...

...It is a sum total which must be judged by its predominant traits...

...Is this to suggest that under Stalinism this "contradiction" is more acute than under capitalism...

...Post revolutionary Russia has developed very dynamically, to be sure, bet that does not in the least imply socialist consequences...

...For neither in the case of Stalinism nor capitalism can socio-political institutions be divorced from economic achievements...

...What matters is not the absolute amount of forced labor but its consequences upon the character of industrial labor as a whole, not to speak of the working of the Russian economy...

...McCarthy's political base, as Howe's own comparison of Eisenhower with Hindenburg and of McCarthy with Hitler implies, is a large segment of the population whose political know-nothingism and cultural ignorance combine with a deepening conservatism, itself due to the stake they have in a prosperity produced chiefly in war or conditions of war, and therefore unworthy of confidence as to its health and permanence...

...But Stalinism has dynamized Russian backwardness rather than overcome it...

...That factor was hardly present in the Yugoslavian revolution and not present in the Chinese or Indo-Chinese ones—the only genuine social revolutions* which occurred and triumphed since October 1917, and which were patterned on what was thought to have been the Bolshevik precedent...

...The industrial revolution in England led to a gradual democratization...

...Surely the kind of working class that has emerged Autumn 1954 • DISSENT • 401 from the process of Stalinist industrialization must be decisively shaped by the existence of forced labor...

...This, I know, is currently denied today on account of Russia's strength...

...True, Howe also states that this panic is "the result of the split between American power and American inability to use its power...

...However, they would rather do it Brownell's than McCarthy's way...

...It is these forces which prevent stabilization in the world, even if it were desired...

...It is probably no exaggeration to say that while a progressive social policy in foreign affairs is anyway excluded by the nature of American national interests as interpreted by the present powers in Washington, McCarthyism prevents even the rational pursuit of these interests by means of negotiations, agree ments, etc...

...As Geneva has proved, as another Berlin conference—if the U. S. consents to one, which I doubt—would prove, negotiations favor the Soviet bloc, not because the Russians and Chinese are better diplomats than the Americans but because their diplomacy proceeds from a policy...

...I would contend, on the contrary, that totalitarianism presents an alternative development in backward countries during their process of economic growth, just as, in a different form, it presents such a possibility in advanced countries whose productive forces have outgrown their market limits...

...And why does he assume that the present economic level of Russia, still a relatively backward country, is sufficient to render a totalitarian organization of the state machine unnecessary...

...They are: 1) Howe's analysis of the "secret of McCarthy's power," and 2) what he sees as the need for "temporary agreements," for establishing "temporary balances of power...

...Through its economic development, Stalinism has armed the Russian state with an unprecedented power...

...Are the obstacles to be overcome in such a process of transformation greater or smaller in Russia than in the West...

...It is due to his cold appraisal of the needs of the politically and socially reactionary forces in this country...

...And secondly, even the Bolshevik leaders thought that their revolution could not be said to be socialist except as a promise, predicated upon its support by a triumphant Western socialism...

...And domestic forces can, * This is not meant in any normative sense, but simply to connote a process of social transformation provoking, at the time it happens, unquestionable popular support...

...Deutscher's assumptions there is one which sees postStalinist Russia as a kind of enlightened despotism...

...And what about the level of productivity and its rate of increase...

...Deutscher asks whether a higher level of civilization corresponds to a higher level of economic development and whether a mass increase in literacy induces progress toward democracy...

...Such a fallacy has been still further popularized by all those who have a vested or fancied interest in representing as socialism any departure from private ownership...

...According to Howe, McCarthy is the product of America's inability to cope with international Communism...

...HERE I COME TO THE SECOND POINT ll Howe's article which I wish to discuss...

...After a certain degree of economic development Tzarism could neither win the support of an increasingly large part of the population nor adapt itself to the new socio-political requirements of that economic development...

...And he took special care never to "metamorphose" such an "historical sketch of the genesis of capitalism in Western Europe into an historico-philosophical theory of the marche generale imposed by fate upon every people whatever the historical circumstances in which it finds itself in order that it may ultimately arrive at the form of economy which will ensure, together with the greatest expansion of the productive powers of social labor, the most complete development of man...

...To N. K. Mikailovski, the Russian populist writer, who had thus "metamorphosed" Marx's historical analysis, he offered the example of Rome where the combined emergence of free proletarians and accumulated wealth did not result in capitalism...

...Though Mr...

...11 On the basis of its planned society, contends Mr...

...Finally, its acceptance has been facilitated by certain concepts of modern economics about formal economic organization and functioning...

...It is not enough to declare in the abstract that planning as an eco nomic technique may be, and has been proven to be, superior to the decen tralized processes of an economy based on private ownership...

...I would go further and agree that the Russian pattern represents, though in a special form, a general trend in today's world toward a publicly owned and planned economy...

...If, as Mr...

...it depends also on the possibility for, and direction of, their further development...

...Now, Autumn 1954 • DISSENT • 403 how could that be if socialism is conceived of in Marx's terms, as an economically organic though socially revolutionary process evolving, on the one hand, from productive forces of a given character and at a given stage of their development and, on the other, from social forces of a given strength, maturity and cohesiveness...

...As to the analogies Mr...

...Marx concluded: "Thus events strikingly analagous but taking place in different historical surroundings led to totally different results...

...As a result, there is not one focus out of which any opposition could arise...

...Very well...

...Can these struggles be disposed of and, as it were, be overcome automatically in the mere course of things...

...Deutscher fails to consider the cost of this tempo, its effects on the structure of the country—technically, economically, culturally, socially, politically...

...Deutscher, potentially socialist economic foundations have engendered in Russia an antagonistic political edifice...

...Deutscher considerably qualifies his forecast by an analysis of the eventual impact on Russia of the international conjuncture, he does not seem to realize that it is essential to start from the world situation in order to explain the very foundations of Russia's evolution...

...That is why the advance of industrialization or the growth of literacy in Russia cannot be discussed as isolated phenomena...

...It has thereby shown itself liable to its own forms of "moral and economic instability...

...Even if the statement were accepted as it stands, it would beg the question, which is to inquire after the roots of America's impotence in the face of the world-wide threat of Communism...

...The price for this, to be sure, is great...

...Both systems behave according to specific motives, imposed by some people upon others...

...International pressure and the competition of powers have impelled Stalinism to develop backward Russia...

...On that basis, a scheme of evolution applying to Russia as a closed system does not hold water...

...Do then her economic achievements constitute an unambiguously progressive trend simply because they are irreversible...

...Deutscher speaks in his name—stressed the need to describe historical movements in their specific contexts...

...McCarthy's strength is neither dependent upon the Republican Party nor, as the writers of the Monthly Review have it, upon the new Texas millionaires...

...What has been developed has been sharply limited to what makes the people the best tools available to the State...

...The Russian economic process is not, then, a planned economic expansion in general, but a definite one...

...Indeed, it was this very failure of socialism to make even a start in Russia which promoted the advent of Stalinism and opened up a course of development completely different from and opposite to what the Bolshevik leaders had envisioned...

...Short of that, they said, it would be doomed to failure...

...That is why it has proven so delusive to think that economic improvements will lead to relaxation...

...III According to Mr...

...But can this be asserted without further ado for a backward society in which that process is regulated at all steps by political and administrative command without any democratic controls...

...A single point of identity with it, inconclusive to my mind, is that the urban workers did indeed provide the Bolsheviks with the strategically decisive force for their revolution as well as the rallying center for the rebellious soldiers and peasants...

...Why this is neces sarily so, however, he never says...

...This is hardly the first case in which the technical, economic and cultural "resources" of more advanced countries were borrowed for the purpose of building up a fundamentally backward and irrational order—much of Russian history consists of such borrowings...

...More specifically, all these disturbing forces and disruptive trends released by the consequences of World War II and its aftermath, however unusual and politically confused they be, have an importance and an impact which must not be obscured by the dazzling polarization of the international struggle between two giants...

...First, Marx's scheme relative to the conditions and eventual process of a socialist revolution did not apply to the Russian revolution...

...By contrast, the task of the Bolsheviks in Russia was to create modern industrialism on the concentrated but sparse basis bequeathed by Tzarism...

...But this makes only more transparent that the considerations of U. S. foreign policy are essentially military and will remain so, and this means continued support to everything that is most reactionary in Asia, Latin America and Africa...

...Anything beyond that, even when economically feasible, has been frowned upon as a potential danger to the State...

...More important, however, is the fact that a social order is an organic whole, the elements of which you cannot arbitrarily take apart and then define as bad or good, progressive or backward...

...And this is true for McCarthyism, too...

...Marxism in Russia has been an ideology subordinating human energies to material development, and as such it has lacked the human element Marx premised for socialism...

...The fundamental explanation for the power of McCarthyism, he says, is "the deep-seated if frequently suppressed state of panic...

...Deutscher points—there occurs an enormous waste of energies and a process of barbarization which are, however, the price to be paid to keep the regime going...

...Negotiations, by gaining time for the Soviet bloc, will also gain time for the undermining of these reactionary regimes, for a more total and efficient domination by Communists of indigenous radical movements, thus making overseas bases, and military personnel furnished by U. S. allies, slowly but surely and "peacefully" ineffective against the day when they might be needed...

...Both the Westernizing Tsars and Stalinism equipped that backwardness rather than did away with it...

...To do this, however, would deprive the Brownells of the motivation for their incursions upon civil liberties, it would necessarily blunt the edge of the reactionary attack and would undoubtedly precipitate a political realignment...

...In each case, to be sure, it arose out of specific—that is, different—conditions...

...There will unquestionably be upheavals within the Soviet bloc, within Russia itself perhaps...

...Will Mr...

...What matters is whether the "force of economic circumstances" is a constraint upon, or a spur to, the people's labor...

...And Russia is clearly in a far lower social condition...

...The future does not, of course, depend upon America alone...

...Consider the rise of totalitarianism in Russia and Germany...

...Deutscher, enforced industrialization and literacy upon Russia in a backward, brutal and irrational fashion, and it will wreck 400 • DISSENT • Autumn 1954 itself because of these very achievements...

...404 • DISSENT • Autumn 1954 in that respect, only modify the main course thereby determined for Russia...

...To such general questions, general answers may be given...

...The point Mr...

...True, even Secretary Wilson conceded that the defeat in Indochina was due "95 per cent" to political factors...

...Deutscher enlighten his readers about the kind of planning through which the Russian economy is managed...

...406 • DISSENT • Autumn 1954 However, in the absence of the policies suggested by Howe, in the absence of the active political struggle against Communism which he and a large body of liberals have in mind, time is against America...

...What then is the corresponding combination for Russia...

...Deutscher tell us precisely what was achieved there beyond rapid increases in the quantities of specific products...

...It is essentially an inquiry into the conditions favorable to man's mastery over economic forces and, therefore, over social processes...

...How then are the Russians to break up the Stalinist straitjacket...

...Among Mr...

...But it is not true at all, because even for as long as the limited time in which such regimes can hold sway, they require stability, which is what Russia mostly lacks...

...If thus the nature of American society as it exists today precludes a progressive foreign policy and if (due to this fact) negotiations, too, will prove futile—what of the future...

...It is my impression that Howe sees the problem of McCarthyism as psychological, not political...

...Hence the forever faltering efforts to weaken McCarthy, the moral decrepitude of most of his Republican and many of his Democratic opponents...

...Recognizing, though without the necessary explicitness, America's inability to institute the kind of foreign policies which would check the advance of Communism and encourage social democracy, i.e., huge investment grants, etc., he pleads for negotiations and at least temporary accommodations, so that time might be gained to grope for solutions...

...Nonetheless, it is they which will mainly set the conditions for Russia's next stage—and not along a line of stabilization...

...Surely he cannot be contending that Stalinism as a fetter on Russian economy has now been rendered anachronistic in the sense that one may say, for example, that private enterprise has become so at the level of production presently achieved in advanced countries...

...That is hardly crucial to the problem Mr...

...And that is what happened, and even before Stalin's rise to power...

...His main argument, besides economic growth, is that there is technically no way back from the statified forms of economic organization created by Stalinism...

...To cite a particular example: Mr...

...Marx took MODERN INDUSTRIALIZATION for granted, and investigated the conditions under which a socialist order might result from it...

...Hence—together with the process of industrialization to which Mr...

...Deutscher claims that a deep and now irrepressible contradiction has arisen within Stalinism—a contradiction between its intentions and methods of power, on the one hand, and its economic achievements, on the other...

...Deutscher raises...

...Russia's "dynamics" simply do not make sense unless seen as the resultant of a corresponding international development...

...A LAST BUT MOST IMPORTANT POINT needs to be made with reference to the international setting of Russia's development...

...Deutscher emphasizes is that industrialization leads to democratization...

...That they are irreversible hardly means that they are indestructible...

...As Howe indicates, it makes the rational conduct of foreign affairs impossible...

...But what is that strength irrespective of Europe's decay, the restlessness, the incipient emancipation and self-assertion on the world scene of the unindustrialized countries, and of the United States having become on short notice a potentially paramount power...

...the changes which these would bring cannot be predicted, but the strong desire for stability which undoubtedly exists in Russia (though possibly not in China) and America may bring a new "Roosevelt-Stalin era" in which both would police their assigned parts of the world...

...Just because the mechanism of power in Russia is much grosser and less stable than in the Western nations, it can afford to impose itself upon society by means of a harsh State-directed class struggle...

...Can we then believe that industrialization tends to develop democAutumn 1954 • DISSENT • 399 racy by itself, so to speak, and at any time...

...For Marxism is not a theory of economic development proper, though Marx's analysis has profoundly contributed to such a theory...

...It is thus illusory to count on negotiations and agreements concerned not with national boundaries, naval quotas and similar matters of a bygone age, but the fate of entire populations to whose vital interests such negotiations, in order to have meaning and a degree of permanence, must somehow be relevant...

...But what of it...

...Yes, answers Mr...

...And by what means of analysis does Mr...

...Only if he confronted such questions could Mr...

...The international conjuncture simply does not allow it, even if both Russia and the United States nourished the best of intentions for a lasting compromise...

...The truth is that such a fancied contrast is optimistically misread into the context of Russian reality...

...Deutscher is guilty of having used in a different context just such a wrong method of social analysis...

...Yet in both instances totalitarianism had one fact in common: that the economic development of both countries had previously been blocked, in Russia by the isolation of a backward economy and in Germany by the isolation of an advanced economy...

...Even the technologically higher achievements of the West are marred by the social structure in which they grew...

...Fallacy it remains, for all that...

...What Marx looked for was not generalities about capital formation, but an historical analysis of primitive accumulation as the path by which in Western Europe the capitalist order of economy emerged from the feudal...

...It flows also from the further misconception that a publicly owned and planned economy is of necessity and cannot but be potentially socialist...

...Quite the contrary...

...But as a statement of cause this is meaningless: What is power if not the ability to act...

...There are frictions and antagonisms within the State, but they are streamlined into an elaborate web of totalitarian controls...

...But this is merely the quasi-objective condition of McCarthy's power...

...By studying each of these forms of evolution separately one can easily find the clue to this phenomenon, but one will never arrive there by the universal passport of a general historico-philosophical theory the supreme virtue of which consists in being super-historical...

...At one point Howe implies that "those who bear the burden of power," too, look to McCarthy...

...So it will be in Russia...

...Both societies have developed the economic forces, but only within a given direction and context...

...The problem is to determine under what conditions their stabilization and further development is possible...

...which has seized large sections of the American population...

...These roots—which I have no intention to discuss here at length—are Autumn 1954 • DISSENT • 405 found in the social structure of American society as it exists today, not in panic or ignorance or contempt for other peoples' aspirations...

...This would, of course, further entrench reaction everywhere, producing stagnation and making universal the kind of brutal suppression characteristic of the Russian police state...

...For them the issue of Communism, not of international but of the allegedly internal threat of Communism, is providing the means to gradually straitjacket labor, to streamline the press and other organs of communication, to "clean out" the schools and universities, even the churches, and, generally, to wage a quietly efficient war against all actual or potential opponents...

...352-355...

...The comparison could be true only insofar as such regimes are known to come too late...

...These 402 • DISSENT • Autumn 1954 are the questions that Mr...

...To my mind Mr...

...But whether Russian society is or is not State Capitalism does not here matter nearly so much as whether one sees clearly that it is not a socialist or potentially socialist society...

...True...

...If the U. S. cannot "use its power," it lacks the ability to act, hence, in the given circumstances, is powerless...

...Thus, there is no future, not in "peace," certainly not in war—unless and until the American people themselves rise to the stupendous tasks confronting them...

...This "somehow," as regards American policies, is utterly lacking...

...Here, as in the West, though with obvious differences, the difficulty is: how to adjust to economic achievements and potentialities while overcoming social and political institutions that have come to be an obstacle upon them...

...And Stalinism, which compresses into its life span both the achievements of the Westernizing Tsars and the weaknesses of their successors, cannot, any more than the latter, disestablish itself merely because, like the former, it has begun to overcome Russian backwardness...

...But he neglects to add that Stalinism enforced them only in such ways and to such a point as to strengthen its own regime...

...Deutscher, because under Stalinism economic growth favors democratization and socialism at some point and because that point has been reached by now...

...Enlightened it just cannot afford to be, even if it so wished...

...Which system is more flexible and which more rigid...

...Neither Russia nor the United States can afford to allow these forces a free development, nor can they influence or control them except to a limited extent...

...But they are bound to be either arbitrary or skeptical in tone, and in both cases sterile...

...This they did while being motivated by a socialist ideology...

...And this flows from the premised misconception that the Russian revolution had been socialist in character, and has remained so at the economic level to this very day, in spite of all "distortions...

...And if they so much as present the suspicion of a threat to the State, they are dealt with through a frightful suppression, even if this means a temporary weakening of the State...

...This is manifestly untrue...

...Even as he insists upon the terrific tempo of Russia's industrial revolution, Mr...

...and, belatedly, the State Department has begun to emphasize economic measures...

...As against such generalizations, which were the pet prejudices of bourgeois liberalism in the nineteenth century, Marx —I turn to him since Mr...

...I readily admit the point even for the agricultural sector of Russian economy...

...Whether a society is to be described as "progressive" depends on far more than the level reached by its economic forces...

...PIERRE TRESSE In Irving Howe's article on "The Problem of American Power" DISSENT, Summer 1954) there are two major points with which I wish to take issue...

...The case of Germany, or of Japan, proves, however, that a specific and very complex combination of factors, involving far more than the mere fact of industrialization, determines the outcome...

...Deutscher determine that at precisely this stage of Russian economic development Stalinism is rendered anachronistic...

...The improvements have thus far been so limited and their effects so potentially explosive—though without yet allowing the people an articulate and independent mode of expression—that each time they have led the State to reassert its power with renewed brutality and to destroy everything which did not directly strengthen its power...

...Au+umn 1954 • DISSENT • 407...

...One must then analyze specifically, in time and place, what the consequences of this planned technique have been in Russia, and what the limits of its cumula tive application are in terms of equipment and labor efficiency...

...Why should it be supposed that economic expansion is inherent in this society...

...But such an analogy neglects the trends of world economic development as they were in the early 19th century and as they are in the mid 20th century, one vastly different from the other, as well as the impact on them of different national contexts...

...Actually, the same thing could be said about capitalism...

...Deutscher draws between Stalinist Russia and certain periods of Tsarist Russia, they actually work against his argument...

...Deutscher, Russian society can be reformed peacefully...

...Both contain determinate social groups, which are to different extents antagonistic to each other and thus carry on corresponding social struggles...