MARXISM IN OUR TIME
31
The fear of liberty, which is fear of the masses, marks almost the
entire course of the Russian revolution.
If
it is possible to discover a major
lesson, capable of revitalizing Marxism, more threatened today than ever
by the collapse of Bolshevism, one might formulate it in these terms :
SOCialism is essentially democratic- the word, "democratic," being used
here in its libertarian sense. One sees today in the U.S.S.R. that without
liberty of thought, of speech, of criticism, of initiative, Socialist production
can only go from one crisis to another. Liberty is as necessary to Socialism,
the spirit of liberty is as necessary to Marxism as oxygen to living beings.
4
7.
In the very wake of its sensational victory in the Russian revolution,
Marxism is today threatened with a great loss of prestige, and in the working–
class movement, with an unspeakable demoralization. It would be futile to
pretend otherwise. We have seen, in the country of Socialist victory, the
Marxist party-enjoying the greatest, the most deserved prestige-in the
space of fifteen years undergo -the most disconcerting degeneration. We have
seen it reach the point of dishonoring and murdering its heroes of yesterday,
drawing from their very loyalty, for the purposes of judical frame-ups
based on glaring forgeries, confessions which are even more sinister than
they are disconcerting. We have seen the dictatorship of the proletariat
transform itself insensibly into a dictatorship of bureaucrats and of police
agents over the proletariat. We have seen the working class, still in the
Bush of its recent victories, condemned to a moral and material level
decidedly below that which it had under the Czarist regime.
5
We
have seen the peasantry dispossessed and exiled by millions, agriculture
ruined by forced collectivization. We have seen science, literature, thought
literally handcuffed, and Marxism reduced to formulae which are frequently
manipulated for political ends and emptied of all living content. We have
seen it, f\,lrthermore, falsified, crudely adapted to the interests of a regime
which in its
mores,
its actions, and the new forms of exploitation of labor
it
has superimposed on the base of common ownership of the instruments
of production. We have seen, we still see the indescribable spectacle of the
black terror, permanently established in the U.S.S.R. We have seen the
cult of "the Beloved Leader," the corruption of the intellectuals and the
workers organizations abroad, the systematic lies broadcast by a huge jour-
4 Note that Trotsky, in
The Revolution Betrayed
(1936) , sets himself to demonstrate
the
necessity for workers· democracy to achieve the highest level of production, and
that he for the first time here includes in the Soviet plan the restoration of workers·
parties.
) A very detailed analysis of all the official Soviet figures on salaries which was made
by
the economic bureau of Professor Pokovitch and was published in No. 138 of the
BIIlletin
of this bureau (in Russian; Prague, November-December, 1937) permits us
to
conclude that the real wages of the Soviet workers are about 30 percent lower than
they
were before the Revolution. (Note that this refers to
real
wages.) This checks
perfectly with the observations which I mrde on the spot over a period of years and
which I set down in
RUSJia, Twenty Y ears Alter.
(Hillman-Curl, 1937, $2.50-Editcrs.)
