24
PARTISAN REVIEW
to exclude
others from its use or enjoyment. No matter what claim
a man may make to anything, if the law will not exclude others from
taking or using it, he does not
own
it. Now if we soberly look at the
situation in Russia, we find that the workers do not
own
the instru–
ments of production, but that a group of men in political posts, who
control the armed forces, have the right to exclude any worker or
group of workers from access to the instruments of production. On
paper, every one is guaranteed the right to work; in practice, only
those have the right to work who have not opposed the bureaucracy.
If
we judge the truth of a proposition by observations of human
behavior, we cannot escape the conclusion that, in the ordinary sense
of the term ownership, Stalin and the C.P.-G.P.U. apparatus own
the Russian instruments of production.
There may be other special senses of the word ownership in
which it is not true that Stalin and the C.P.-G.P.U. camarilla own
the instruments of production. But there is at least one common and
important sense in which they do. This may not be the Marxian
sense but it is more legitimate than any other which has hitherto
been applied, for we can test it. A complete discussion would have to
be based on more concrete data; but no matter what data is assem–
bled, if we do not know the meanings of the terms used, and what
constitutes evidence for propositions containing those terms, the dis–
cussion will turn into a hopeless muddle.
This is not saying that where the discussion leads to a muddle
there are no genuine issues between the disputants. There probably
will be some, which further analysis may bring to light, although they
may not be the ones around which the discussion seems to revolve.
Usually a disagreement about whether or not some fancied practical
consequence is desirable is at the bottom of the noisy confusion. The
discussion, for example, as to whether the U.S.S.R. is a workers' state
often conceals a dispute as to what course of action it is desirable for
socialists to take in relation to Russia and the Stalin regime in the
event of war. The disputants often think it is necessary to find some
theoretical analysis which can serve as a premise from which their
practical policy follows as a logical corollary. They are surer of what
they want to do than of why they want to do it. It would be much
more fruitful if they tested the desirability of one policy over another
by the predictable consequences of acting upon it, rather than by
building under it a scaffold of semantic confusion,
The difficulties in applying proper semantic analysis to social
affairs are obvious. There are so many undefined terms in use that
the analysis may become wearisome. Sooner or later someone is sure
to say, "but all this is purely verbal."
As
for the first point, it
is
