The Failure of Success

...Here the need is indeed great, for there simply are no good introductory texts on the subject, systemic or not...

...Not only do its distinguished authors appear well aware of the traditional inhibition of the field...

...This one just about hits the mark...

...It is increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to focus upon a single unit of the system —the USSR, Poland, or Communist China, for example—without thoughtful consideration of other units...

...The world Communist system not only covers a huge and heterogeneous part of the world but maintains at least three thrusts into the non-Communist world: the ideological, as carried out by the foreign Communist parties...

...Originally a symposium by sociologists, economists, historians and political scientists at the University of California, it was held in response to the appearance of several propagandists, both pro- and anti-Communist, on the Berkeley campus...

...The Communist system is thus caught in a confusing web of both mutually supporting and conflicting relationships...

...This system is undergoing profound political and social changes which have direct bearing on virtually all nations...

...Ironically, the greater the system's success in moving toward professed major objectives, the greater appears to be its disunity...

...and the territorial, which is principally applied in those underdeveloped countries whose behavior shows responsiveness to and affinity with the Communist states...

...the editor, in his Introduction, makes a particular point of emphasizing the whole mosaic of the Communist world and its changing significance for the East as well as the West...

...Perhaps equally important, the book's emphasis is on "world" Communism...

...the functional, as developed by Communist front organizations (trade, youth, women, peace, etc...

...The flux characteristic of today's Communist world—from Peking to Moscow to Hanoi, from Belgrade to Tirana to Rome—challenges even such well-meaning and well-maintained Western cliches as "Communist tactics change but goals do not...

...Herein lies the principal reason that, in my opinion, The Realities of World Communism is worthy of praise...

...Moreover, the texts that are available deal exclusively with either the USSR, "the Slavic world," Eastern Europe, Communist China, the Far East, or the explosive SinoSoviet relations, which tends, a priori, to parochialize the "world" concept of Communism for the sake of geography, language, popular interest or even simple manageability...

...It is no easy task to write a meaningful book for a lay public that, given the complexity of the subject, would be informative as well as readable...

...How can we focus, for example, on the politics of the USSR without taking into account the pushes and pulls of the other parts of the system upon the Soviet Union...

...For one thing, the eight contributions are broadly informative and general, rather than profoundly advanced or original pieces of research...

...And, to judge from the patterns of conflict within the system at present, the final Communist goal—a Communist world— may be reached, if at all, only by ultimately sacrificing a great deal of the movement's unity and cohesion...

...Consequently, there are four contributions dealing with the USSR (Soviet foreign policy by Bertram D. Wolfe, the Stalinist Soviet Union by the Editor William Petersen, the post-Stalin Soviet economy by Gregory Grossman, and the postStalin Soviet Union by Paul E. Zinner) and only one each on Communist China (by Robert A. Scalapino), the East European states (by Paul Kecskemeti), Communists in trade unions (by John Hutchinson) and the Communist parties in Latin America (by Robert J. Alexander...

...There are some theoretical and conceptual works—e.g., by Modelski, Brzezinski, Alexander Dallin, London, Lowenthal, Laqueur and Shoup— but this is hardly an impressive quantity...

...This traditional compartmentalization of Communism—a worldwide system in aspiration as well as in application—has been inhibiting in two ways: Not only are scholars with competence in the whole Communist system virtually non-existent today but the formulators of foreign policy along with the citizenry of the non-Communist world tend to approach the Communist world piecemeal, as if unaware of the relationships among its component parts—in much the same way that the proverbial blind men theorized about the elephant...

...There appears to be an inverse relationship between the number of units within the Communist system and the system's solidarity...

...Reviewed by JAN F. TRISKA Department of Political Science, Director, Studies of the Communist System, Stanford University "The purpose of this book," according to the Preface by Morton Gordon, administrative head of the University of California Extension at Berkeley, "is to raise the level of discourse on one of the most complex political phenomena of our time...

...For another, the scope and method of the book seem to have been dictated not by any particular systemic or systematic intellectual framework, but simply by the availability of the men on the university faculty at the time...

...And the proliferation of considerations, influences, and pressures, both positive and negative, does indeed affect the decisionmaking processes within the individual units, irrespective of their position in the hierarchy of the system...

...In many ways, The Realities of World Communism bears the marks of its origin...

...No wonder the West has no coherent, consistent policy toward the Communist world...

...And yet the book's origin also accounts for its strengths: The fact that the contributions are introductory lectures rather than complex and sophisticated advances in knowledge or method makes the purpose of the book—the search for "a larger audience than could attend the lecture series"—attainable...