Thinking Aloud

...The strains between states-between Russia and China, for example-may reflect a competition for dominance, and one may seek to understand them on a political level...

...As Philip Mosely points out in his essay on "The Meanings of Coexistence" in the October 1962 issue of Foreign Affairs, the new Program of the Communist party of the Soviet Union in no way indicates a slackening of the effort to reshape the rest of the world to a Communist pattern...

...In public, though, the Communist leaders still spoke of the revolutionary resistance being led by the party...

...Almost every Communist intellectual has been forced to confront the means-ends question, and in this respect Wolfgang Harrich in East Germany and Leszek Kolakowski in Poland are simply a later generation of Ignazio Silone, Manes Sperber, Arthur Koestler, Victor Serge, et...

...2. The cold war today is irrelevant or false because it was predicated on a static view of Communism, while "systematic anti-Communism seems peculiarly incapable of fusion with a radically innovating social policy...

...Whatever criticisms one may have of the inadequacies of American society -and it is a moot point whether, as alleged, we have been insufficiently critical-there is still a fundamental commitment to liberty in the United States...

...A theologian such as Reinhold Niebuhr, who emphasized the demonic in history, did not say that only Bolshevism was essentially demonic-because, for him, the possibility of the demonic exists in all society-but that the concentration of total power characteristic of the Soviet system released the demonic elements...

...What is involved here is a new romanticism and a search for new dawns...

...If this is meant for some tactical purpose on a political level, the jumbling may make some sense...

...He did not appreciate, Mikoyan continued, the necessity for first laying "the material-technical basis" for Communism...

...In one sense, Birnbaum is inviting American intellectuals to say, "A plague on both your houses...

...But there is a deeper difficulty, which calls the basic premises of MarxistLeninist theory into question: The inability of the theory to account for the existence of Fascism itself...

...Such tenebrous Hegelianism-a reaction, perhaps, to prosaic English analytical philosophy-simply lacks concrete referents...

...that "primitive accumulation" under Communism is as inhuman as it was under capitalism...

...that paninosi, the subjection of culture to official control, leads to sterility in the creative arts...

...The one important, and for the lives of the people crucial, fact is that wholesale terror no longer can work: The regime now has to wrestle, with more indirect means of control...

...and Birnbaum is indeed a weathercock...

...According to Ex-Insider, none of the Communist documents of that period have been either published or made available in archives, simply because they would compromise the legend that the Communists were the most determined opponents of Fascism and that it could have been prevented if Communist policy had been followed by others...

...Perhaps the most startling statement in the magazine is made en passant by the editor, Walter Z. Laqueur, who writes in his introduction: "In the Soviet Union not a single book dealing with the Nazi regime, the party, its leaders, the SS, the Gestapo, the concentration camps, has been published-strictly speaking there is not even a history of Germany covering that period " Why this extraordinary silence...

...Domestic de-Stalinization, however, is not necessarily linked with the decline of an aggressive foreign policy...

...THINKING ALOUD The Fetish God of Revolution By Daniel Bell The current (Summer 1962) issue of Partisan Review contains an article by Norman Birnbaum, the Epimetheus of England's New Left, entitled "The Coming End of Anti-Communism...

...When he says at the end that "Communism is a relevant issue in Africa, Asia and Latin-America" (whatever "relevant issue" means), I take it he implies, as modish Leftists do these days, that indigenous revolutionary forces are now on the march and if we are to be at one with the "world historical process" we must throw in our lot with them...

...Some of the reasons can be surmised: The parallels with the cult of the vozhd, the arbitrariness of the GPU, and the concentration camps in the Soviet Union are all too striking to be easily explained by Marxist-Leninist theory...

...His argument, as best I can reconstruct it, consists of two major propositions: 1. The anti-Communist ideology sees Communists as "blinded servitors of some absurd conception of historical process," and Communism as representing "ahistoric and demonic tendencies manifested in history...

...The groundings of the philosophical theories of Bolshevism have always been diverse...

...He did not understand that only "after having fully exhausted the progressive role of Socialist principles was it possible to attain the full establishment of Communist principles...

...This view of Communism as a monolithic force is wrong, for the Communist world is itself breaking up, releasing new and progressive forces which can "accelerate not alone the development of polycentrism in the Communist movement as a whole but of democratization within individual parties and states...

...By tendenz one means, simply, which way the intellectual wind is blowing...

...There was no sense that Fascism represented a new social force with deep roots in mass irrationality...

...But what Birnbaum means to say, philosophically or politically, is difficult to tell...

...Basing its policy on the assumption that Hitler could not last, the German Communist party continued its anti-Weimar line...

...In the Soviet system, despite de-Stalinization, there is not...

...If there is any point to Birnbaum's confused gropings about "polycentrism" and the potential "democratization" of the Communist movements, it is the masked, or implicit, notion that a regroupment of Left forces may now be possible, or will be in the near future, but that this cannot be on the basis of anti-Communism...

...The only trouble with this invitation is that both houses do not equally deserve the plague...

...Who, what, when, they, those-the simplest canons of exposition go unanswered...

...The question of how far "relaxation" can go is a difficult one, and the regime clearly must seek to balance contradictory pressures...

...Is this mixed plenum the harbinger of the new ideology...

...In re-evaluating anti-Communism what the New Left seeks to do is erase some of those memories...

...The year before, 1931, German Communists were confronted with the problem of whether to support the Weimar Republic-which would have meant a cessation of the party's war against the Social Democrats-or to "let in" the Nazis...

...It stated that a socialist society without liberty is a mockery of the word socialism...

...The second major thread to Birnbaum's essay, the relation of de-Stalinization to foreign policy in the Soviet Union, is equally fuzzy...

...In the orthodox Communist exegesis, Fascism and Social Revolution, written by R. Palme Dutt in the 1930s, Fascism was regarded as the "last stage" of monopoly capitalism, the period in which the bourgeoisie, confronted by the revolutionary workers, "tear off the mask of bourgeois democracy" and rule with naked and open force...

...The grounds that united the anti-Communists of the Left, which I cited above, were specific judgments, derived from a transcendent (which means, one should point out, ahistorical) morality...

...Stalinism began as a system of consolidating all power in the Soviet Union and became, as is evident from Khrushchev's famous Secret Speech to the 20th Congress in 1956, a paranoia that threatened the personal security of almost everyone in the ruling circle...

...To talk of "the" anti-Communist ideology is either to make an unrecognizable pastiche (and what does "ahistoric tendencies manifested in history" mean...

...If indeed this is his point, it is incumbent on him to say so, and to specify with whom, and on what basis...

...The ruling elite has a vested interest in maintaining its power, and one of the paradoxes of last year's 22nd Party Congress, as the Harvard economic historian Alexander Gerschenkron points out in the July 1962 issue of World Politics, is that the major criticism of Stalin at the Congress was that he failed to develop a correct conception of the "prerequisites of Communist society...

...As for Evgeny Evtushenko, though he is an attractive young man whose moral ardor is clear, his political judgment is subject to quick confusion, as evidenced by his recent hip-shooting attack against the young people who protested the Stalinist-type control of discussion at the Helsinki Youth Festival...

...that the Nazi party could command a modern economy by subjecting all groups to its control...

...Behind the New Left, as it looks back over the radical history of the '30s, are the uncomfortable judgments of others who embraced the Fetish God of Revolution, as it now embraces Fidel Castro or Kwame Nkrumah...

...Meanwhile, Russian foreign policy was predicated on the assumption that intervention in Germany would provoke international repercussions, while the replacement of the Weimar Republic would present no direct danger to the Soviet Union...

...dissolved the Crooked Circle, Poland's only free discussion group of intellectuals...

...This may range from Comrades' Courts, (a kangaroo-court device to control petty infractions), to job purges, to shooting selected scapegoat speculators...

...To say, as Birnbaum does, that for "a new Western generation Communism means not simply Stalin but Tito, Gomulka, Nagy, Kolakowski and Evtushenko,' is only to compound confusion...

...At one point in his essay, in discussing the "rediscoveries" of the "intellectuals within the two camps,' Birnbaum cites as a heartening instance an "insistence on measuring institutions by a human standard which can fairly be termed transcendent...

...For the New Left to be radical without ideology is apparently too pallid...

...Yet is heresy alone the basis for moral judgment...

...Gomulka has silenced Kolakowski...

...But there are different kinds of strains, and of different consequences...

...it has been continuous since the first days of the Russian Revolution...

...If there was a common denominator to the antiCommunist views which were shared for two decades or more in the pages of The New Leader, Commentary and Partisan Review, it was primarily a moral one...

...As I indicated earlier, the interest in Birnbaum's essay is not in its argument but in its tendent...

...or to be guilty of the very intellectual crime-that of seeing Communism as an unrelieved force-which Birnbaum attributes to his opponents...

...In short, this anti-Communism, like anti-Fascism, was not primarily political, but a moral criterion for judging the claims of a society, and the question is whether it is still valid...

...Its theme is that "Anti-Communism, as an intellectually respectable position, is ending...

...That cracks and strains have appeared in the Communist world is obvious...

...Stalin, said Anastas Mikoyan, believed the road to be shorter than it is...

...When and if the intellectuals cease to provide it, they will be subject to reprisals by those who need it-but they will have deprived the latter of something of value...

...His prose marches on the self-defined level of the "world historical process": "Constraint, compulsion, force and terror have been curiously under-emphasized in [the various] versions of anti-Communism, treated as epiphenomena derived from Communism's underlying psychic structure-if inevitable results of it...

...It is all a jumble (or amalgam, as an older political rhetoric might put it) which begins without rhyme and ends without reason: "It may be objected, not without reason, that there are as many anti-Communisms as there are anti-Communist groupings [but] the many sources and types of practical anti-Communism, however, do utilize an ideology of anti-Communism fashioned by the intellectuals...

...Good, let us so judge...

...Much of the bewilderment among the Communist leaders at the time of Fascism is conveyed in an interview in Survey with an "Ex-Insider," a former Comintern official who was in Berlin in 1932...

...In fact, as Ex-Insider points out, in 1932 the leadership of the German Communist party accepted the "inevitability of a "temporary' victory of National Socialism in Germany...

...Or is he, as is I fear the purpose of his essay, seeking to abdicate such judgments by reinstating the Fetish God of Revolution...

...that the regime, by its monopoly of communication and the use of terror, could easily erase all opposition...

...and that the expansion of Communist power throughout the world leads not to liberty -or land for the peasants, or freedom for the worker -but to the dictatorial rule of new elites, and that such expansion should be resisted...

...Everything else is evasion...

...That vast social upheavals are taking place goes without saying...

...Tito opposed Imre Nagy when the latter proclaimed his independence (having assented to the Russian maneuver to replace Matyas Rakosi with Erno Gero), and has jailed Milovan Djilas...

...If all this could be blamed on Stalin, the parallels could of course be "explained away...

...Will Birnbaum and the New Left join in judging today's "revolutionary forces" by such tests...

...Daniel Bell, whose books include The End of Ideology, is Professor of Sociology at Columbia University...

...Even then, none of the Party elite was able to stop it...

...that "rapid economic development" without democratic consent uses human beings as "means" rather than as "ends...

...Since it was Stalin who first laid down the line that investment in heavy industry has to precede investment in consumption, a policy that Khrushchev has basically continued (refusing, for example, to divert industrial investment to agriculture), it seems clear that the criticism is only an effort to rationalize the continued pressure on the people...

...Or as Gerschenkron concludes in his article: "The dictators have a vital interest in keeping the elusive goal within sight but out of reach as the Soviet economy develops, more and more stringent preconditions for the advent of the Communist society must be laid down...

...In addition, no persons are specified and no intellectual positions are defined...

...De-Stalinization is not democratization, but an effort to institute a "rational dictatorship...

...These are far different, however, from the disillusionments that have set in among the young intellectuals in Poland, East Germany and even some of the Italian Communists today...

...But Birnbaum is not interested in exploiting political differences for cold war purposes, so the grouping must indicate that here are a range of heresies to be appreciated simply because they represent deviations...

...and is narrowing the scope of criticism in the country...

...Actually, it is not as an intellectual force but as tenderli-a favored term around Partisan Review these days-that one has to consider the Birnbaum article...

...and let us be concrete...

...A naturalist such as Sidney Hook rejected ahistoric and demonic explanations, and sought to explain Bolshevism by a theory of historical antecedent: that it wrenched an historical process by seizing power in a country where it was a tiny minority and therefore had to rule by force...

...But one only traduces liberty by automatically giving a blank check to any group that grabs for power in the name of Revolution or the people...

...Nor is this disillusionment unique...

...The Trauma of Political Memory: The October issue of Survey, the Journal of Soviet and East European Studies published in London, provides a historical and topical background to Russo-German politics that is invaluable to anyone interested in understanding Soviet policy...