End of the Marxist Epoch
MOYNIHAN, DANIEL PATRICK
Thinking Aloud END OF THE MARXIST EPOCH BY DANIEL PATRICK MOYNIHAN The editorial writers at the New York Times axe a careful lot, certainly not given to gushing. So it was no small event to...
...No such system of total government control had ever before existed...
...What saved us...
...Robert Warshow, writing in Commentary in December 1947, summed up the 1930s in New York: "For American intellectuals, the Communist movement of the 1930s was a crucial experience...
...It seems t? me that in the 1980s a good many people in Washington missed all this...
...Sooner or later, people came to see how hideous it was...
...The Baltic Republics are in open, if orderly, rebellion...
...We're not going to invade them and they're not going to invade us...
...If we must learn to live with military parity, let us keep all the more in mind that we have consolidated an overwhelming economic advantage...
...This was indeed true the world over...
...The laws of history so decreed...
...But I have some thoughts...
...I have no greater claim than the next person to having figured this out...
...For the moment, the point is that we have a prospect of peace on earth such as we've not known for most of a century...
...my first political memories are of New York City in the 1930s...
...A half century ago the "future" seemed at hand...
...I might add, a Congress too...
...Kerensky," came the reply, "well that was awful long ago, and uh...
...Have no fear that the "L" word will catch hold there...
...And then there are those thriving overseas protectorates, Cuba and Vietnam...
...The Caucasus is riotous...
...There might not have been much of a Communist Party in, say, Peru, but you may be sure there was one...
...But they were not talking about Holland...
...Hence the stunning moment when the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union stood before the General Assembly of the United Nations and told the world: "We are, of course, far from claiming to be in the possession of the ultimate truth...
...it would soon spread...
...History is moving away from it with astounding speed...
...I tried to lay out this argument in the commencement speech I delivered at New York University in 1984: "The "truth is that the Soviet idea is spent...
...But how were the Sandinistas to know...
...Lars-Erik Nelson of the New York Daily News, whose commentary on that week's events was unequaled in my view, suggested I go back and read the editorial in Pravda, the Communist Party newspaper, following Khrushchev's ouster in October 1964...
...In 1961, Khrushchev declared that by 1970 the USSR would "overtake and surpass" the U.S...
...Yes: especially whentheWestallowscommunismto identify with nationalism...
...Gorbachev declared the end of the Marxist epoch, a century or more in which great nations, great movements the world over were seized by the absolute conviction that the future was foretold, and that that future was theirs...
...There was much talk of Soviet military superiority...
...And there were men and women who would not submit...
...Soviet missiles are real...
...He wasn' t faking...
...and fear...
...There was a time when virtually all intellectual vitality was derived in one way or another from the Communist Party...
...Marx predicted that under the new mode of industrial production a simple world-wide hierarchy of classes would emerge in which ethnic differences would disappear, as workers submerged their personalities into what might be described as auniform, international mass...
...When you consider how fiercely the Bolsheviks believed they would win out, you have a sense of what they must feel today...
...Our defense budget has been declining for four straight years...
...The Soviet allies are economic basket cases...
...The notion of Soviet conquest, however, is surely behind us...
...Are there Marxist-Leninists here and about in the world...
...The Soviet economy is about to soar: "Undeviatingly pursuing this Leninist line, the Party and the Soviet people are gaining victories in accomplishing the chief economic task—creating the material and technical base of communism...
...The Workers of the World belief, central to MARXISM, is increasingly presented as central to the falsification of Marxist prediction...
...The challenge now is that economic strength is the more important chip, and what we need is a President with an economic interest, not just a military-security interest...
...Many scarcely spoke the language, had no roots in the place, no attachment to the owners of capital...
...End the illusion of efficiency...
...They were talking about Korea—South Korea, that is—Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore...
...These have been the martyrs of the 20th century...
...Next came the revelation that the Soviets couldn't even feed themselves...
...The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains...
...Then in 1956, three years after Stalin's death, in a secret speech to the 20th Party Congress of the CPSU, Nikita S. Khrushchev told of the crimes of Stalin...
...The rest of the world catches on...
...I agree, but with a particular reading of the term "vision...
...And there were mass political parties in all of continental Europe...
...Next came the break with Red China...
...Apart from Afghanistan, an old involvement, I could not see anything new in the Marxist-Leninist regimes that popped up here and there in the Third World...
...wrote Beyond the Melting Pot, a study of ethnic groups of New York City...
...By mid-century no one in the West had any illusions about the nature of Soviet society: There was no equality, no justice, merely horror...
...albeit Gorbachev, in his UN address, suggested they can no longer afford it...
...I invite the thought that there is a certain symmetry to these events...
...End the illusion of justice...
...I am now a man in his 60s...
...Economics...
...That is what they believed...
...There was once an international Communist movement with great expectations...
...But expansion...
...But the greatest failure was precisely where there was going to be the greatest success...
...But we have allies who could do much more than they are doing...
...The center of all this was New York City, the center of political writing and thinking, much as London was when Marx scribbled away at the British Museum, the counterpart of the New York Public Library...
...In the bookcase behind his desk, I spotted works by three men I have met in m.iiife...
...Peter the Great figured out Holland...
...Even so, the vision of world ideological dominion is past...
...In 1987 in Moscow, officials would speak of the "widening gulf between the Soviet Union and the advanced capitalist countries...
...The "scientific" work of Karl Marx and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was said to have discovered the laws of history, much as Sir Isaac Newton discovered the laws of gravity...
...For that is exactly what Communists had claimed for a century...
...Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, whose article here has been adapted from his most recent "Letter to New York, " is a longtime contributor to The New Leader...
...The proverbial toiling Asian masses were suddenly sweeping world markets with electronic circuitry, whilst all the Soviets could sell abroad was fish eggs and furs, trading goods of a hunter-gatherer economy...
...If you were not somewhere within the party's wide orbit, then y ou were likely to be in the opposition, which meant that much of your thought and energy had to be devoted to maintaining yourself in opposition...
...That is truly an event...
...We have to watch that the rest of the world doesn't conclude that we, too, exhausted ourselves in the "long twilight struggle" of which President Kennedy spoke in his Inaugural Address...
...So it was no small event to turn to their page last December 8 and read: "Perhaps not since Woodrow Wilson presented his Fourteen Points in 1918, or since Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill promulgated the Atlantic Charter in 1941, has a world figure demonstrated the vision Mikhail Gorbachev displayed yesterday at the United Nations...
...Don't expect democracy...
...And for how long...
...Take one proposition from the Communist Manifesto of 1848: "Working men of the World unite...
...Granted, their military force was and is formidable...
...The text is triumphant...
...Then there was the United States, the Great Republic, as John F. Kennedy was fond of saying...
...End the illusion of proletarian unity...
...The first totalitarian state...
...We were in the Depression in the 1930s, and in the course of that decade a vast number of both ordinary and extraordinary people came to the conclusion that Marx and Lenin were indeed correct, that capitalism was in its final, doomed stage, and that Communism was the foreordained next step in history...
...But that will keep...
...Half a century ago in New York you' d have had a hell of an argument over so bald an assertion: Marxism falsifiedlNo more.* In his UN address, Gorbachev spoke pointedly of the urgency of "harmonizing interethnic relations" in the Soviet Union...
...There is a swelling torrent of joyous tidings of new enterprises being opened, of the mastering of production of progressive types of goods, of glorious labor achievements by our working class, collective farm peasantry, State farm workers, and specialists in all branches of the national economy...
...in economic production...
...But it summons no loyalty...
...Well, the outcome seems beyond doubt now...
...What is the rest of the world to think...
...But, still, freedom prevailed...
...It takes a long time for word to reach a place like Managua, or La Paz, or Maputo...
...The historical outcome is certain if we can keep the nuclear peace and attend to our own arrangements in a manner in which they continue to improve...
...Paul Kennedy of Yale notes that Britain, Japan, France, and West Germany each spend more on defense than the non-Russian Warsaw Pact countries together...
...It was already in place in Russia...
...Yet, there was more...
...The Pacific Rim took off...
...In Leningrad I asked my Soviet hosts why they could find no place for a memorial to Aleksandr Kerensky, who in 1917 led Ihe provisional democratic government that Lenin's Bolsheviks overthrew...
...It was a kind of rear vision...
...I would not press the image, but it is as if the whole MarxistLeninist ethos is hurtling off into a black hole in the universe...
...Nor is the phenomenon by any means completely over...
...Millions of Soviet people by their creative labor in plants and factories, at construction projects, on collective farm and State farm fields, in scientific institutes and laboratories and in cultural, educational and public health institutions are implementing in practice the Program of the CPSU, advancing the great cause of Communist construction, which has become the dear cause of the millions, of the entire Soviet people...
...Marx, after all, was a London correspondent of the New York Daily Tribune...
...then the Soviets catch on...
...Hitler merely copied it...
...and their grace has touched us...
...But they have given up on the belief that they can live as a closed society and eventually triumph...
...It is the end of the postwar world," he states...
...Not that long ago, I responded in turn: "He used to come around and talk tous when I was a student at Benjamin Franklin High School in East Harlem...
...One almost has to have had such a personal history to take the measure of the event at the UN on December 7.1 am therefore going to ask those of you who are younger, those who never went to City College, never listened to speeches in Union Square, never attended lectures at the Rand School (I still have a book Bertrand Russell autographed for me there)—I'm going to ask you to be patient with me and let me walk you through some of those times and places...
...We contributed the entry on "ethnicity" to the new Harper Dictionary of Modern Thought, which reads in part: "In the Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels forecast that all preindustria] distinctions of an ethnic character would disappear with the emergence of a world-wide industrial PROLETARIAT united by a perceived common condition and shared interest...
...The 24 members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, known as the OECD—a quintessential initiative in world politics of the postwar United States—now produce 60 per cent of the world's GNP.The Soviet bloc produces 19 per cent...
...Should that society commence to break up, it could be a hugely dangerous moment...
...Many puzzled looks...
...Some years later we edited a volume, Ethnicity: Theory and Practice...
...Theirs continues to rise...
...It commands some influence in the world...
...Which is the end of an epoch...
...We should be less obsessed with the Soviets...
...Groups retained distinctive qualities that mattered to them...
...They have hardly surrendered...
...Soviet antagonism is real...
...As the conflict grew ominous at midcentury, led by the likes of Harry S. Truman, George C. Marshall and Dean Acheson, we armed ourselves and armed allies and decreed that we would not go quietly into the "dustbin of history" (a favored Communist phrase...
...Ethnic conflict within the Soviet empire is likely to prove a major element in 21st-century world politics...
...We are not at the end of our problems with the Soviets...
...And, of course, in the 1950s theChinese made clear they were not about to have Russians tell them how to run a revolution...
...Now it is all over, and the General Secretary of the CPSU so states...
...Ayezuago, I visited Lenin's study in the Kremlin...
...Although it is now hard to remember, a central tenet of Marxist-Leninist belief was that "socialist" production would be more efficient than capitalist production...
...Over in New York, in Paris, in Rome, good Lord, overinMoscow...
...The basic reality is that Marxism did not predict the future, even though it claimed to do so...
...This was to prove momentously mistaken...
...Let'sbe clear...
...By the 1980s this had been over for years...
...If ever there was a place where Marx's proletariat was going to emerge, it was our town, with its hugely varied population...
...Soviet expansion...
...Nevertheless, we found nothing of the sort...
...Thus the Russian Communists fell in with the Vietnamese Communists because they hated the Chinese Communists who hated the Russian Communists, and so it goes...
...A quarter century ago Nathan Glazer and I (working at the New York Public Library...
...At just that moment, the new leader, Leonid I. Brezhnev, began 18 years in power which Pravda now refers to as "the period of stagnation.' American wheat began arriving...
...But in truth, when they do succeed, how well do they do...
...It was what was coming next...
...Will the next superpower competition be the drive to replace the United States as the world's largest debtor...
...The closed nature of Soviet society obscured how much connection we have with their history and they with ours...
...As for the Soviet Union, as one writer observed, its claim was not so much to be a competitor with the Western nations but rather to be a step forward in history...
...The Soviet Union remains the Soviet Union...
...Altogether, as many as a million Americans belonged to the Communist Party at one time or another (there was much turnover...
...It seems to me that Jerry Hough of Duke University has it about right...
...Remember New York in the 1930s...
...We found no support for Marxist prediction in either theory or practice...
...First of all, above all, thereis the fact that the Communist state in Russia almost immediately became a totalitarian state...
...Ethnic conflict as usual...
Vol. 72 • January 1989 • No. 2
