Where the News Ends:
CHAMBERLIN, WILLIAM HENRY
WHERE the NEWS ENDS By William Henry Chamberlin Soviet Ideology and World Government One of the more impressive products of the growing output of American scholarship in the field of Soviet...
...An enormous amount of research in Russian and other sources has gone into the preparation of this work and Goodman is eminently successful in proving two propositions, one positive, one negative...
...Goodman is not the first politioal thinker to fail to make altogether clear just how these desirable goals are to be attained...
...The values upon which the Soviet and non-Soviet worlds rest are so incompatible that it is not possible to form even that minimal sense of community indispensable to the successful operation of any institution of world government...
...Goodman ends his book with a plea for "a strong and unified West, capable of discouraging Communist aggression and dedicated to a positive approach to the uncommitted world...
...But this master-satellite formula has not worked with China and probably would not work in the West, were Russia to conquer the U.S., Britain, Germany or any advanced Western state...
...One of the strangest contradictions of Communist theory is its attitude toward the state...
...In 1850, Marx was most insistent that it was the task of the proletariat "to make the revolution permanent until the proletariat has conquered state power not only in one country, but in all the dominant countries of the world...
...He shows that the Soviet leaders, following the teaching of Marx and Engels, are committed to the goal of a world Communist state...
...What, then, should the West do...
...Lenin, too, referred repeatedly to a coming "world-wide Soviet Republic" or "World Federal Soviet Republic of Soviets," and this aim was affirmed in similar language by Trotsky, Bukharin and Stalin...
...Communist doctrine has been a kind of cement that has served the purposes of old-fashioned Russian imperialism in Poland, Hungary and other satellite nations...
...Following the authority of Marx and Engels, Lenin and other Soviet Communist leaders predicted that the state, as a result of the introduction of Communism, would "wither away," since its only purpose was the suppression of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie...
...Nationalism remains a pretty tough old bird...
...World empire, operating from one center, is probably as much of a fantasy as world federation or a world constitution...
...At the same time, there may be at least a kind of negative consolation in reflecting that the Communist goal of a world state has not been proved viable...
...Goodman marshals impressive evidence that should be earnestly commended to the attention of all wellmeaning believers in world federalism, world government, world law and similar political delusions...
...While there has been a departure from the worst excesses of Stalin's paranoid terror, rigid thought control and intensive indoctrination continue...
...He also calls for a "supranational Atlantic Community...
...but the Soviet state shows not the slightest sign of withering away...
...The Soviet regime is now in the fifth decade of its existence...
...In 1847, Engels wrote: "The Communist revolution will not be merely national, but will take place simultaneously in all civilized countries, that is, at least, in England, America, France and Germany...
...Let us be united, let our enemies be disunited and disorganized," he tells us, might well be called the basic canon of Soviet strategy, both in maintaining power in Russia and in realizing the larger design of imposing Communism on the whole world...
...He makes clear that Trotsky's famous "permanent revolution" was directly derived from the writings of Marx, and Lenin's more striking revolutionary conceptions usually turn out to be glosses on the supreme authority of Marx and Engels...
...Pointing up this contradiction with still other illustrations, Goodman dryly comments: "This formula might be explicable to those initiated into the rites of dialectical materialism...
...Goodman offers citations from Lenin's "State and Revolution" to show that the Communist leader envisaged the process of withering away as something that would begin immediately...
...To others, the demand for a state that should simultaneously maximize and minimize its powers would seem to be an expression of schizophrenia...
...The author concludes: "No meaningful accord with the Soviet regime for the higher integration of nations is presently conceivable...
...The last spoke of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as "the prototype of the future World Soviet Socialist Republic...
...But the prelude to this "withering away" was to be a dictatorship without any of the safeguards of "bourgeois democracy...
...WHERE the NEWS ENDS By William Henry Chamberlin Soviet Ideology and World Government One of the more impressive products of the growing output of American scholarship in the field of Soviet affairs is Elliot R. Goodman's The Soviet Design for a World State (Columbia University, $6.75...
...Goodman's work also confirms one's impression of the poverty of Russian Communism in creative original thought...
...Its bureaucracy is huge, hierarchical and all-encompassing...
Vol. 44 • May 1961 • No. 21
