Policies for Socialists
Crossman, R.H.S.
The Future of Communism Policies for Socialists By R. H. S. Crossman Since my knowledge of Russian Communism is limited to book-reading and I have never even visited the Soviet Union, it would...
...Socialists, therefore, should demand that the Western powers outbid the Russians in their proposals for disarmament, in particular in the field of conventional weapons, whose production prevents us from using our skilled manpower and plant to aid the underdeveloped territories...
...They have used the institutions of democracy to begin the job of resolving the inherent contradictions of capitalism, evening out the gross inequalities, and transforming the privileges of the bourgeoisie into rights of every citizen...
...I conclude that our main danger is that we shall be so hypnotized by the growing power and self-confidence of the post-Stalin Communist world that we shall go on thinking in terms of cold war and so concede the political initiative to the new men in the Kremlin...
...Since the death of Stalin and the nuclear stalemate, the threat has become remote, and the Socialist should therefore revert to his traditional opposition to an arms race and to the division of the world into strategic power blocs...
...We should seize the initiative by proposing the phased demilitarization not only of Germany but of Western and Eastern Europe...
...Instead of rebuking those Arab leaders who have refused to commit their countries to the Western defense system and are struggling to free their peoples from colonial status, we should encourage the formation of a Federation of Arab States, committed neither to the East nor to the West and free to sell its oil on purely commercial terms...
...The main task of democratic Socialism in the 1950s, therefore, is...
...Middle East and North Africa...
...They are deciding to adopt the kind of neutral, wait-and-see policy which has so often in the past left the initiative to the Russians...
...Long active as a publicist and journalist, he edited The God That Failed, an anthology of radical disillusionment with Soviet Communism...
...Europe...
...Our longterm aim should be a United States of Europe, whose independence is guaranteed under a United Nations security pact by both Great Powers...
...These assumptions will seem gloomy to anyone who believes that world peace can only be achieved by "defeating" or by "containing" Communism...
...This is the seventh article in our current symposium on the post-Stalin evolution of Communist society...
...in which our white labor movements now share the privileges and display some of the prejudices of an exploiting class...
...first, to challenge the conscience of the Western peoples by exposing the facts of this international class war and...
...The series began in our June 18 issue with an article by George F. Kennan...
...The military risk to the democracies inherent in agreed disarmament is now far less than the political and social penalties of a continued arms race...
...aid to underdeveloped areas will remain an empty phrase and white ascendancy will be legitimately overthrown by war or Communist revolution...
...By forcing the world into competitive rearmament, it made the task of "containing" Communism relatively simple...
...What should be the attitude of the Western labor movements to the new men in the Kremlin and the peace initiative they have launched with such spectacular success...
...subsequent contributors were Adolf A. Berle Jr., Edgar Ansel Mowrer, Louis J. Halle, Norman Thomas, Dwight Macdonald and Franz Borkenau...
...Some of my colleagues are suggesting that it is too early to formulate a new policy...
...In that case their victor) is certain...
...Armaments...
...4. Stalinism, by the brutality of its external policies and the insanity of its internal purges, weakened the Communist challenge...
...secondly, to show that, without socialist planning and public ownership in each of our countries...
...Such a clear threat may have existed in 1950...
...As a democratic Socialist, I would, of course, vastly prefer the industrialization of a backward nation to take place under democratic forms of government...
...2. Nothing except general war could preserve to the North Atlantic nations the virtual monopoly of power they have enjoyed since the Industrial Revolution—and have wasted on internecine wars...
...Here are the assumptions I believe that Socialists should make: 1. If nuclear war is successfully avoided for the next 25 years, the balance of power will continue to shift—as it has been shifting since 1945—toward the Soviet Union and the Chinese People's Republic...
...We should, for instance, make it clear that we are prepared to see France and Western German) withdraw from NATO if Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary are conceded the kind of independence Tito obtained for Yugoslavia...
...Within this framework the unification of Germany and the drawing of its Eastern frontier should not present an insoluble problem...
...For ten years we have been waging political trench-warfare, in which the chances of maneuver by either side were strictly limited...
...A Western initiative, however, must be based on some assumptions about the Communist bloc...
...Richard Crossman, since World War II a Labor Member of the British Parliament, served in the war as a British Army officer attached to SHAEF...
...All this, however, has been achieved within the framework of the highly industrialized nation state, and by a small group of powers with living standards fantastically better than those of Asia and Africa...
...But there is one question to which it is the duty of Socialists to find an answer...
...Here victory will go to those who decide their policies without waiting to see what the other side will do...
...Those who advise us to wait developments in Russia are not, as they imagine, postponing a decision, but making a bad decision...
...From these general reflections I draw five political conclusions...
...Any liberalization, therefore, which takes place inside the Communist states will increase both their internal strength and their chances of success if the cold war is resumed...
...Only when there is a clear threat of military aggression by the Communist powers can a Socialist accept as the basis of his policy the concept of cold war...
...The one clear, indisputable fact about the year 1956 is that it provides the opportunity for new initiatives to those who will seize them...
...3. Because the new men in the Kremlin are aware of this shift of the balance of power and rightly credit it to Communist technological achievement, they are much more confident than the old Bolsheviks ever were that the future belongs to Communism...
...Cold War...
...Socialists should accept the need for a NATO "trip-rope" but urge drastic cuts in the size of NATO forces including the proposed German Army...
...I have never understood how a Socialist with any historical perspective can believe either...
...If there is no far-reaching disarmament agreement...
...Now, as the result of the nuclear stalemate and the death of Stalin, the cold-war battlefield has been transformed into a field of diplomatic maneuver...
...which ranges the Communist and non-Communist worlds against one another in a competitive test of strength...
...Communism, which began as a heresy inside the labor movements of the highly industrialized North Atlantic nations, has achieved power among the backward, non-European peoples and provided their small, educated elites with a ruthless method of telescoping into a generation the industrial development which took hundreds of years in the West...
...If their advice is taken, we shall once again remain inactive and irresolute until the moment for decision has passed...
...Western Socialism will degenerate into a polite form of National Socialism unless we recognize the existence of an international class war...
...Now that, for reasons of self-preservation, general war has been excluded from Western policy, we must recognize that we shall never again be able to "negotiate from strength," i.e., to achieve our political ends by the diplomatic use of military superiority...
...We should make it clear to the Arab leaders that we are determined to guarantee the integrity of an Israel dedicated, like Switzerland, to positive neutrality...
...The Future of Communism Policies for Socialists By R. H. S. Crossman Since my knowledge of Russian Communism is limited to book-reading and I have never even visited the Soviet Union, it would be silly for me to pontificate about events since the death of Stalin, and even sillier to predict what is going to happen in Russia as the result of the 20th Congress...
...The liberal and labor movements of the West have triumphantly refuted the predictions of Karl Marx...
...But if the alternatives are a Chiang Kai-shek regime or a Mao Tse-tung regime, I would certainly not be prepared to defend the use of military force to sustain the former, far less to restore it to power...
...Colonialism...
Vol. 39 • August 1956 • No. 32
