6
PARTISAN REVIEW
will "come around," accept a minor post and occupy himself
with
keeping the firm's books in order.
"I am not what I am." It is !ago speaking, as he dissects
the
means of mystification. The problem is to make sure of identities.
Your interlocutor, your correspondent, your confidant-who are they?
And he who is pressing your hand, is he wearing a disguise? The idea
too is capable of blackmail; likewise the theory, it will soon disown
itself. Ideology has its subconscious, its secret corridors. Its neuroses
contrive amalgams.
At the trials the collaborators of Lenin declare themselves to
have labored for years to bring about the restoration of capitalism.
The accuser is Stalin. Is he the savior of the revolution or its des–
troyer? And Trotsky? He, of course, is the great dragon, the old
serpent, he that is called Satan, the deceiver of the whole world, the
universal demon. But the judges and criminals alike are Marxists,
accustomed to think in terms of social forces and economic deter–
minants. What forces and determinants conditioned the betrayal of
Bolshevism by its organizers and theoreticians? The answer, again,
is Trotsky, who seems to lead both a worldly and other-worldly exist–
.ence. But he himself, powerful as he is, is only a tool in the hands
of the Gestapo. Whose disciples are the defendants-his or Stalin's?
They plotted to kill Stalin, but now they proclaim their love of him.
In confessing are they being loyal to the national state, which Stalin
embodies, or to the revolution? Remember !ago:
Another of his fathom they have none,
To lead their business: in which regard,
Though I do hate him as I do hell-pains,
ret for necessity of present life,
I must show out a flag and sign of love.
But the mystification goes even deeper. We have been told that
only a planned, collectivized economy, such as the Soviet Union has,
is rational. But the paradox is that it is precisely Soviet economy
which is today the most opaque, whose laws
cif
development are the
least known and least understood by social and economic science.
If
it's socialism that is being built there, why the monocratic method of
construction, in the "Egyptian style," with everyone except the ad–
ministrators reduced to the conditions of fellaheen? Legally the work–
ers own the means of production, but the control is monopolized by
the bureaucratic caste. In reality, however, control means ownership
--or rather ownership serves as the theory, and control as the practice.
