The Unfinished Revolution: Russia 1917-1967 by Isaac Deutscher 1967
Coming to the end of this survey of the Soviet half-century we ought to return to the questions with which we began. Has the Russian revolution fulfilled the hopes it has aroused? And what is its significance for our age and generation? I wish I were able to answer the first of these questions with a plain and emphatic yes, and conclude my remarks on a properly triumphal note. Unfortunately, this I cannot do. Yet, a disheartened and pessimistic conclusion would not be justified either. This is still in more than one sense an unfinished revolution. Its record is anything but plain. It is compounded of failure and success, of hope frustrated and hope fulfilled — and who can measure the hopes against one another? Where are the scales on which could be weighed the accomplishments and the frustrations of so great an epoch, and their mutual proportions established? What is evident is the immensity and the unexpected character of both the success and the failure, their interdependence and their glaring contrasts. One is reminded of Hegel’s dictum, which has not yet dated, that ‘history is not the realm of happiness'; that ‘periods of happiness are its empty pages’, for ‘although there is no lack of satisfaction in history, satisfaction which comes from the realisation of great purposes surpassing any particular interest, this is not the same as what is usually described as happiness’. Certainly these fifty years do not belong among history’s empty pages.
‘Russia is a big ship destined for big sailing’, this was the poet Alexander Blok’s famous phrase, in which we sense the undertone of intense national pride. A Russian looking at the record of this half-century with the eyes of the nationalist, one who sees the revolution as a purely Russian event, would have good reasons to feel even prouder. Russia is now a bigger ship still, out on a much bigger course. In terms of sheer national power — and many people the world over still think in these terms — the balance sheet is to the Soviet Union absolutely satisfactory. Our statesmen and politicians cannot consider it otherwise than with envy. Yet it seems to me that few Russians of this generation contemplate it with undisturbed exultation. Many are conscious of the fact that October 1917 was not a purely Russian event; and even those who are not do not necessarily see national power as history’s ultima ratio. [14] Most Russians seem aware of the miseries as well as the grandeur of this epoch. They watch the extraordinary impetus of their economic expansion, the rising stacks of huge and ultra-modern factories, the growing networks of schools and educational establishments, the feats of Soviet technology, the space flights, the impressive extension of all social services and so on; and they have a sense of the vitality and élan of their nation. But they know, too, that for most of them daily life is still a grinding drudgery, which mocks the splendours of one of the world’s super-powers.
To give one indication: despite the immense scale of housing construction, the average dwelling space per person is still only six square yards. In view of the prevailing inequality this means that for many it is only five or four yards, or even less. The average is still what it was at the end of the Stalin era. This is not surprising if one recalls that in the last fifteen years alone the mass of town dwellers has grown by as much as the entire population of the British Isles. However, such statistics offer little relief or consolation to people who suffer from the desperate overcrowding; and although the situation is bound to improve gradually, the amelioration will be long in coming. The disproportion between effort and results exemplified by housing is characteristic of many aspects of Soviet life. In all too many fields the Soviet Union has had to run very fast, indeed to engage in a breathless race, only to find that it is still standing in the same place.
Western travellers, struck by the Russians’ intense, almost obsessive, preoccupation with material things and with the comforts of life, often speak on this account about the ‘Americanisation’ of the Soviet mentality. Yet the background to this preoccupation is obviously different. In the United States the whole ‘way of life’ and the dominant ideology encourage the preoccupation with material possessions, while commercial advertising works furiously to excite it constantly so as to induce or sustain artificial consumer demand and prevent overproduction. The Soviet craving for material goods reflects decades of underproduction and underconsumption, weariness with want and privation, and a popular feeling that these can at last be overcome. This popular mood compels the rulers to take greater care than they have been accustomed to take of popular needs and to satisfy them; to this extent it is a progressive factor helping to modernise and civilise the national standard, and ‘style’, of living. But as the Soviet way of life is not geared to individual accumulation of wealth, the ‘Americanisation’ is superficial and in all probability characteristic only of the present phase of slow transition from scarcity to abundance.
The spiritual and the political life of the Soviet Union is also variously affected by the grandeur and the miseries of this half-century. Compared with the realm of dread and terror the Soviet Union was, say, fifteen years ago, it is now almost a land of freedom. Gone are the concentration camps of old, whose inmates died like flies, without knowing what they had been punished for. Gone is the all-pervading fear that had atomised the nation, making every man and woman afraid of communicating even with a friend or a relative, and turning the Soviet Union into a country virtually inaccessible to the foreigner. The nation is recovering its mind and speech. The process is slow. It is not easy for people to shed habits they had formed during decades of monolithic discipline. All the same, the change is remarkable. Soviet periodicals are nowadays astir with all sorts of dramatic, though often muffled, controversies; and ordinary people are not greatly inhibited in expressing their genuine political thoughts and feelings to complete strangers, even to tourists from hostile countries, whose inquisitiveness is not always innocuous. Yet the Soviet citizen often frets at the relatively mild bureaucratic tutelage under which he lives as he never fretted at Stalin’s despotism. He feels that his spiritual freedom, too, is restricted to something like his miserable six square yards. It is one of the sublime features of the human character that men are not satisfied with what they have achieved, especially when their attainments are dubious or consist of half-gains. Such discontent is the driving force of progress. But it may also become, as it sometimes does in the Soviet Union, a source of frustration and even of sterile cynicism.
In their political life also the Russians all too often feel that they have run fast to keep in the same place. The half-freedom the Soviet Union has won since Stalin’s days can indeed be even more excruciating than a complete and hermetic tyranny. Recent Soviet writings, some published in the USSR, others abroad, have expressed the mortification that arises from this state of affairs, the morose pessimism it sometimes breeds, and even something like the mood of ‘Waiting-for-Godot’. But, here again, similarities between Soviet and Western phenomena may be deceptive. The despair which permeates quite a few recent Soviet works of literature is rarely inspired by any metaphysical sense of the ‘absurdity of the human condition’. More often than not it expresses, allusively or otherwise, a kind of baffled anger over the outrageous abnormities of Soviet political life, especially over the ambiguities of the official de-Stalinisation. The spirit of these writings is more active, satirical and militant than that which has produced recent Western variations on the old theme of vanitas vanitatum et vanitas omnia. [15]
The failure of the official de-Stalinisation is at the heart of the malaise. It is more than a decade now since, at the Twentieth Congress, Khrushchev exposed Stalin’s misdeeds. That act could make sense only if it had been the prelude to a genuine clarification of the many issues raised by it and to an open nationwide debate on the legacy of the Stalin era. This has not been the case. Khrushchev and the ruling group at large were eager not to open the debate but to prevent it. They intended the prologue to be also the epilogue of the de-Stalinisation. Circumstances compelled them to initiate the process; this had become an imperative necessity of national life. Since the protagonists and even the followers of all anti-Stalinist oppositions had been exterminated, only men of Stalin’s entourage were left to inaugurate the de-Stalinisation. But the task was uncongenial to them; it went against the grain of their mental habits and interests. They could carry it out only half-heartedly and perfunctorily. They lifted a corner of the curtain over the Stalin era, but could not raise the whole curtain. And so the moral crisis, opened up by Khrushchev’s revelations, remains unresolved. His disclosures caused relief and shock, confusion and shame, bewilderment and cynicism. It was a relief for the nation to be freed from the incubus of Stalinism; but it was a shock to realise how heavily the incubus had weighed down the whole body politic. Of course, many a family had suffered from the Stalinist terror and had known it in detail; but only now were they allowed to catch for the first time an overall glimpse of it, to glance at its true national dimensions. Yet this fleeting glimpse by itself was confusing. And it was a grievous humiliation to be reminded how helplessly the nation had succumbed to the terror, and how meekly it had endured it. Finally, nothing but bewilderment and cynicism could result from the fact that the grim disclosures had been made by Stalin’s abettors and accessories, who, having revealed the huge skeleton in their cupboard, at once slammed the door on it and would say no more.
The issue has been too grave and fateful to be treated like this, especially in view of its close bearing on current politics. The official de-Stalinisation created new cleavages and aggravated old ones. ‘Liberals’ and ‘radicals’, ‘right-wing’ and ‘left-wing’ Communists could not but press for an uninhibited national settling of accounts with the Stalin era and a complete break with it. Crypto-Stalinists, entrenched in the bureaucracy, have been anxious to save as much as possible of the Stalinist method of government and of the Stalin legend. Outside the bureaucracy, especially among the workers, quite a few people have been so antagonised by the hypocrisy of the official de-Stalinisation, that they have been almost reconverted to the Stalin cult, or want to hear no more of it and would rather see the whole issue buried once and for all.
At the back of the divisions there is the fact that Soviet society does not know itself and is intensely conscious of this. The history of this half-century is a closed book even to the Soviet intelligentsia. Like someone who had long been struck with amnesia and only begins to recover, the nation not knowing its recent past does not understand its present. Decades of Stalinist falsification have induced the collective amnesia; and the half-truths with which the Twentieth Congress initiated the process of recovery are blocking its progress. But sooner or later the Soviet Union must take stock of this half-century, if its political consciousness is to develop and crystallise in new and positive forms.
This is a situation of especial interest to historians and political theorists; it offers a rare, perhaps a unique, example of the close interdependence of history, politics and social consciousness. Historians often argue whether an awareness of the past contributes at all to the wisdom of statesmen and to the political intelligence of ordinary people. Some believe it does; others take the view Heine once expressed in the aphorism that history teaches us that it teaches nothing. In class society political thinking, governed by class or group interest, benefits from the study of the past only within the limits required or permitted by interest. Even the historian’s views are conditioned by social background and political circumstances. Normally, ‘the ideas of the ruling class’ tend to be ‘the ruling ideas of an epoch’. In some epochs those ideas favour a more or less objective study of history, and political thinking gains thereby; in others they act as powerful inhibiting factors. Whatever the case, no ruling group and no society, if it is only a little more than half-civilised, can function without possessing some form of historical consciousness satisfactory to itself, without a consciousness giving most members of the ruling group and of society at large the conviction that their view of the past, especially of the recent past, is not just a tissue of falsehoods, but that it corresponds to real facts and occurrences. No ruling group can live by cynicism alone. Statesmen, leaders and ordinary people alike need to have the subjective feeling that what they stand for is morally right; and what is morally right cannot rest on historical distortions or forgeries. And although distortions and even plain forgeries have entered into the thinking of every nation, their very effectiveness depends on whether the nation concerned accepts them as truth.
In the Soviet Union the moral crisis of the post-Stalin years consists of a profound disturbance of the nation’s historical and political consciousness. Since the Twentieth Congress, people have been aware how much of what they once believed was made up of forgeries and myths. They want to learn the truth but are denied access to it. Their rulers have told them that virtually the whole record of the revolution has been falsified; but they have not thrown open the true record. To give again only a few instances: the last great scandal of the Stalin era, the so-called Doctors’ Plot, has been officially denounced on the ground that the plot was a concoction. But whose concoction was it? Was Stalin alone responsible for it? And what purpose was it to serve? These questions are still unanswered. Khrushchev has suggested that the Soviet Union might not have suffered the huge losses inflicted on it in the last war had it not been for Stalin’s errors and miscalculations. Yet those ‘errors’ have not become the subject of an open debate. The Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 is, officially, still taboo. The people have been told about the horrors of the concentration camps and about the frame-ups and forced confessions by means of which the Great Purges had been staged. But the victims of the Purges, apart from a few exceptions, have not been rehabilitated. No one knows just how many people were deported to the camps; how many died; how many were massacred; and how many survived. A similar conspiracy of silence surrounds the circumstances of the forcible collectivisation. Every one of these questions has been raised; none has been answered. Even in this jubilee year most of the leaders of 1917 remain ‘unpersons'; the names of most members of the Central Committee who directed the October rising are still unmentionable. People are asked to celebrate the great anniversary, but they cannot read a single trustworthy account of the events they are celebrating. (Nor can they get hold of any history of the civil war.) The ideological edifice of Stalinism has been exploded; but, with its foundations shattered, its roof blown off, and its walls charred and threatening to come down with a crash, the structure still stands; and the people are required to live in it.
Opening this series of lectures I alluded to the blessings and curses of the continuity of the Soviet regime. We have dwelt on the blessings; now we see the curses as well. Sheltered by continuity, the irrational aspects of the revolution survive and endure together with the rational ones. Can they be separated from one another? It is clearly in the Soviet Union’s vital interest that it should overcome the irrationalities and release its creative powers from their grip. The present incongruous combination breeds intense disillusionment; and because of this the miseries of the revolution may, in the eyes of the people, come to overshadow its grandeur. When this happened in past revolutions the result was restoration. But although restoration was a tremendous setback, indeed a tragedy, to the nation that succumbed to it, it had its redeeming feature: it demonstrated to a people disillusioned with the revolution how inacceptable the reactionary alternative was. Returned Bourbons and Stuarts taught the people much better than Puritans, Jacobins or Bonapartists could, that there was no way back to the past; that the basic work of the revolution was irreversible; and that it must be saved for the future. Unwittingly, the restoration thus rehabilitated the revolution, or at least its essential and rational accomplishments.
In the Soviet Union, we know, the revolution has survived all possible agents of restoration. Yet it seems to be burdened with a mass of accumulated disillusionment and even despair that in other historical circumstances might have been the driving force of a restoration. At times the Soviet Union appears to be fraught with the moral-psychological potentiality of restoration that cannot become a political actuality. Much of the record of these fifty years is utterly discredited in the eyes of the people; and no returned Romanovs are going to rehabilitate it. The revolution must rehabilitate itself, by its own efforts.
Soviet society cannot reconcile itself for much longer to remaining a mere object of history and being dependent on the whims of autocrats or the arbitrary decisions of oligarchies. It needs to regain the sense of being its own master. It needs to obtain control over its governments and to transform the state, which has so long towered above society, into an instrument of the nation’s democratically expressed will and interest. It needs, in the first instance, to re-establish freedom of expression and association. This is a modest aspiration compared with the ideal of a classless and stateless society; and it is paradoxical that the Soviet people should now have to strive for those elementary liberties which once figured in all bourgeois liberal programmes, programmes which Marxism rightly subjected to its ruthless criticism.
In a post-capitalist society, however, freedom of expression and association has to perform a function radically different from that which it has performed in capitalism. It need hardly be stressed here how essential that freedom has been to progress even under capitalism. Yet, in bourgeois society it can be a formal freedom only. Prevailing property relations render it so, for the possessing classes exercise an almost monopolistic control over nearly all the means of opinion formation. The working classes and their intellectual mouthpieces manage to get hold of, at best, marginal facilities for social and political self-expression. Society, being itself controlled by property, cannot effectively control the state. All the more generously is it allowed to indulge in the illusion that it does so, unless keeping up the illusion causes the bourgeoisie too much embarrassment and expense. In a society like the Soviet, freedom of expression and association cannot have so formal and illusory a character: either it is real, or it does not exist at all. The power of property having been destroyed, only the state, that is, the bureaucracy, dominates society; and its domination is based solely on the suppression of the people’s liberty to criticise and oppose. Capitalism could afford to enfranchise the working classes, for it could rely on its economic mechanism to keep them in subjection; the bourgeoisie maintains its social preponderance even when it exercises no political power. In post-capitalist society no automatic economic mechanism keeps the masses in subjection; it is sheer political force that does it. True, the bureaucracy derives part of its strength from the uncontrolled commanding position it holds in the economy; but it holds that too by means of political force. Without that force it cannot maintain its social supremacy; and any form of democratic control deprives it of its force. Hence the new meaning and function of the freedom of expression and association. In other words, capitalism has been able to battle against its class enemies from many economic, political and cultural lines of defence, with much scope for retreat and manoeuvre. A post-capitalist bureaucratic dictatorship has far less scope: its first, its political line of defence, is its last. No wonder that it holds that line with all the tenacity it can muster.
The post-capitalist relationship between state and society is far less simple, however, than some ultra-radical critics imagine. There can, in my view, be no question of any so-called abolition of bureaucracy. Bureaucracy, like the state itself, cannot be simply obliterated. The existence of expert and professional groups of civil servants, administrators and managers is part and parcel of a necessary social division of labour which reflects wide discrepancies and cleavages between various skills and degrees of education, between skilled and unskilled labour, and, more fundamentally, between brain and brawn. These discrepancies and cleavages are diminishing; and their reduction foreshadows a time when they may become socially so insignificant that state and bureaucracy may indeed wither away. But this is still a relatively remote prospect. What seems possible in the near future is that society should be able to retrieve its civil liberties and establish political control over the state. In striving for this the Soviet people are not just re-enacting one of the old battles that bourgeois liberalism had fought against absolutism; they are rather following up their own great struggle of 1917.
The outcome will, of course, greatly depend on events in the outside world. The tremendous, and to us still obscure, upheaval in China must affect the Soviet Union as well. In so far as it loosens up or upsets one post-revolutionary bureaucratic-monolithic structure and releases popular forces, rising from the depth of society, for spontaneous political action, the Chinese example may stimulate similar processes across the Soviet border. China is undoubtedly in some respects more progressive than the Soviet Union, if only because she was able to learn from Russia’s experience and avoid some of the latter’s erratic drifts and blunders; and she has been less affected by bureaucratic ossification. On the other hand, China’s economic and social structure is primitive and backward; and Maoism carries, in its rituals and cults, the dead weight of that backwardness. Consequently, the lessons it sets out to teach the world have all too often little or no relevance to the problems of more highly developed societies; and even when Maoism has something positive to offer, it usually does it in so rigidly orthodox a manner and in such archaic forms that the positive content is all too easily overlooked. And when the Maoists try to galvanise the Stalinist cult, they merely shock and antagonise all forward-looking elements in the USSR. But perhaps the Russo-Chinese conflict may drive home one important lesson, namely, that arrogant bureaucratic oligarchies, incorrigible in their national narrow-mindedness and egoism, cannot be expected to work out any rational solution of this or any other conflict; still less can they lay stable foundations for a socialist commonwealth of peoples.
Events in the West will contribute even more decisively, for good or evil, to the further internal evolution of the Soviet Union. We may leave aside here the frequently discussed and more obvious, diplomatic and military aspects of the problem: it is evident enough what severe restrictions the Cold War and the international arms race place on the growth of welfare and the enlargement of liberty in the USSR. More fundamental and difficult is the issue of the stalemate in the class struggle, the makings of which were examined earlier. Is this stalemate going to last? Or is it only a fleeting moment of equilibrium? The view that it is going to last has gained much ground recently among Western political theorists and historians; many are inclined to consider it as the final outcome of the contest between capitalism and socialism. (No doubt this opinion has its adherents in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe as well.) The argument is conducted on various social-economic and historical levels.
The social structures of the USSR and the USA, it is pointed out, have, from their opposite starting points, evolved and moved towards one another so closely that their differences are increasingly irrelevant and the similarities are decisive. Among others, Professor John Kenneth Galbraith expounds this idea in his Reith Lectures. He speaks emphatically about the ‘convergence of structure in countries with advanced industrial organisation’ and surveys the main points of the convergence in American society. There is the supremacy of the managerial elements; the divorce of management from ownership; the continuous concentration of industrial power and the extension of the scales of its operation; the withering away of laissez faire and of the market; the growing economic role of the state; and, consequently, the inescapable necessity of planning, which is needed not merely to prevent slumps and depressions, but to maintain normal social efficiency. ‘We have seen’, says Professor Galbraith, ‘that industrial technology has an imperative that transcends ideology.’ Pricking some current Western misconceptions about ‘the revival of a market economy in the USSR’, Professor Galbraith remarks: ‘There is no tendency for the Soviet and the Western systems to convergence by the return of the Soviet system to the market. Both have outgrown that. What exists is a perceptible and very important convergence to the same form of planning under the growing authority of the business firm.’ In this presentation the ‘convergence’ appears to occur not so much halfway between the two systems, as just within the boundaries of socialism, and the picture is not one of stalemate, but rather of a diagonal resulting from the parallelogram of capitalist and socialist pressures. [16]
Historians find a precedent for this situation in the struggle between Reformation and Counter-Reformation. Professor Butterfield, one of the early exponents of this analogy, points out that at the outset of their conflict both Protestantism and Catholicism aspired to total victory; but that, having reached a deadlock, they were compelled to seek mutual accommodation, to ‘coexist peacefully’ and content themselves with their respective ‘zones of influence’ in Western Christianity. [17] In the meantime, their initial ideological antagonism had been whittled down by a process of mutual assimilation: the Church of Rome enhanced its strength by absorbing elements of Protestantism; while Protestantism, growing dogmatic and sectarian, lost much of its attraction and came to resemble its adversary. The stalemate was thus unbreakable and final; so is the deadlock between the opposed ideologies of our time — on this point the arguments of our historians and of the political or economic theorists converge.
The historical analogy, convincing though it is in some points, has its faults and flaws. As such analogies often do, it overlooks basic differences between historic epochs. In the age of the Reformation, Western society was fragmented into a multitude of feudal, semi-feudal, post-feudal, pre-capitalist and early capitalist principalities. The Protestant consciousness played its prominent part in the formation of the nation-state; but the nation-state set the outer limits to its unifying tendencies. The reunification of Western Christianity under the aegis of one Church was an historic impossibility. In contrast to this, the technological basis of modern society, its structure and its conflicts, are international or even universal in character; they tend towards international or universal solutions. And there are the unprecedented dangers threatening our biological existence. These, above all, press for the unification of mankind, which cannot be achieved without an integrating principle of social organisation.
Protestantism and Catholicism confronted one another primarily in ideological terms; but in the background there was the great conflict between rising capitalism and declining feudalism. This was by no means brought to a halt by the ideological-religious stalemate. The division of spheres between Reformation and Counter-Reformation corresponded, very broadly, to a division between the two social systems and to a temporary equilibrium between them. As the contest between the feudal and the bourgeois ways of life went on, it assumed new ideological forms. The more mature bourgeois consciousness of the eighteenth century expressed itself not in religious but in secularist ideologies, philosophical and political. The stalemate between Protestantism and Catholicism was perpetuated on a margin of history, as it were; for all practical historical purposes, in effective social and political action, it was transcended. Not only did the social conflict not congeal with the religious divisions, but it was fought out to the end. After all, capitalism achieved total victory in Europe. It did so by a wide variety of means and methods, by revolutions from below and revolutions from above, and after many temporary deadlocks and partial defeats. Thus even in the terms of this analogy it seems at least premature to conclude that the present ideological stalemate between East and West brings to a close the historic confrontation between capitalism and socialism. The forms and ideological expressions of the antagonism may and must vary; but it does not follow that the momentum of the conflict is spent or diminished. Incidentally, the story of the Reformation offers many a warning against hasty conclusions about ideological deadlocks. When one is told that a hundred and twenty years have passed since the Communist Manifesto without a victorious socialist revolution in the West, one thinks willy-nilly of the many ‘premature’ starts the Reformation made and of the protracted manner in which its ideology and movement took shape. More than a century lay between Hus and Luther; and yet another century separated Luther from the Puritan revolution.
But has not the Marxist analysis of society, and have not the universal aspirations of the Russian revolution, been invalidated by the mutual assimilation of the opposed social systems? A degree of assimilation is undeniable; and it is due to the supranational levelling impact of modern technology and to the logic of any major confrontation which imposes identical or similar methods of action on the contestants. The changes in the structure of Western, especially American, society are striking indeed. But when we look at them closely, what do we see? The deepening divorce of management from property, the importance of the managerial elements, the concentration of capital, the ever more elaborate division of labour within any huge corporation and between the corporations; the withering away of the market and laissez faire; the increase in the economic weight of the state; and the technological and the economic necessity of planning — all these are in fact manifestations of that socialisation of the productive process which, according to Marxism, develops in capitalism. Indeed the socialisation has now been immensely accelerated. In the description of the process which Marx gave in Das Kapital, he very clearly foreshadowed precisely these developments and trends that seem so novel and revolutionary to Western analysts. Has not Professor Galbraith described to us something with which we are, or should be, familiar, namely, the rapid growth of the ‘embryo of socialism within the womb of capitalism'? The embryo is evidently getting bigger and bigger. Should we therefore conclude that there is no longer any need for the act of birth? The Marxist will reflect over the paradox that while in Russia the midwife of revolution intervened before the embryo had had the time to mature, in the West the embryo may well have grown over-mature; and the consequences may become extremely dangerous to the social organism.
The fact is that, regardless of all Keynesian innovations, our productive process, so magnificently socialised in many respects, is not yet socially controlled. Property, no matter how much it is divorced from management, still controls the economy. The shareholder’s profit is still its regulating motive, subject only to the needs of militarism and of the world-wide struggle against Communism. In any case, our economy and social existence remain anarchic and irrational. The anarchy may not show itself in periodic deep slumps and depressions, although, on a longer view, even this is not certain. European capitalism, within its smaller compass, knew, after the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, a similar and even more prolonged prosperity, undisturbed by deep slumps; and this led Edward Bernstein and his fellow revisionists to conclude that events had given the lie to the Marxist analysis and prognostication. Soon thereafter, however, the economy was shaken by convulsions more violent than ever, and mankind was ushered into the epoch of world wars and revolutions.
Nothing would be more welcome, especially to the Marxist, than the knowledge that capitalist property relations have become so irrelevant in Western society that they no longer hinder it in organising rationally its productive forces and creative powers. Yet the test of this is whether our society can control and marshal its resources and energies for constructive purposes and for its own general welfare; and whether it can organise and plan them internationally as well as nationally. Until now our society has failed this test. Our governments have forestalled slumps and depressions by planning for destruction and death rather than for life and welfare. Not for nothing do our economists, financial experts and jobbers speculate gloomily on what would happen to the Western economy if, for instance, the American Administration were not to spend nearly eighty billion dollars on armament in one year. Among all the dark images of declining capitalism ever drawn by Marxists, not a single one was as black and apocalyptic as the picture that reality is producing. About sixty years ago Rosa Luxemburg predicted that one day militarism would become the driving force of the capitalist economy; but even her forecast pales before the facts.
This is why the message of 1917 remains valid for the world at large. The present ideological deadlock and the social status quo can hardly serve as the basis either for the solution of the problems of our epoch or even for mankind’s survival. Of course, it would be the ultimate disaster if the nuclear superpowers were to treat the social status quo as their plaything and if either of them tried to alter it by force of arms. In this sense the peaceful coexistence of East and West is a paramount historic necessity. But the social status quo cannot be perpetuated. Karl Marx speaking about stalemates in past class struggles notes that they usually ended ‘in the common ruin of the contending classes’. A stalemate indefinitely prolonged, and guaranteed by a perpetual balance of nuclear deterrents, is sure to lead the contending classes and nations to their common and ultimate ruin. Humanity needs unity for its sheer survival; where can it find it if not in socialism? And great though the Russian and the Chinese revolutions loom in the perspective of our century, Western initiative is still essential for the further progress of socialism.
Hegel once remarked that ‘world history moves from the East to the West’ and that ‘Europe represents the close of world history’, whereas Asia was only its beginning. This arrogant view was inspired by Hegel’s belief that the Reformation and the Prussian state were the culmination of mankind’s spiritual development; yet many people in the West, worshippers of neither State nor Church, believed until recently that world history had indeed found its final abode in the West, and that the East, having nothing significant to contribute, could only be its object. We know better. We have seen how vigorously history has moved back to the East. However, we need not assume that it ends there and that the West will forever go on speaking in its present conservative voice and contribute to the annals of socialism only a few more empty pages. Socialism has still some decisive revolutionary acts to perform in the West as well as in the East; and nowhere will history come to a close. The East has been the first to give effect to the great principle of a new social organisation, the principle originally conceived in the West. Fifty years of Soviet history tell us what stupendous progress a backward nation has achieved by applying that principle, even in the most adverse conditions. By this alone these years point to the limitless new horizons that Western society can open to itself and to the world if only it frees itself from its conservative fetishes. In this sense the Russian revolution still confronts the West with a grave and challenging tua res agitur. [18]