BOOKS
443
replaced by socialism, that democracy can
be
secure and secured only
in a planned society, and that the Soviet system, in its essentials–
freed from the temporary conditions of its emergence--is the hope of
the world. Laski's appraisal of Russia is not to
be
found in his
chapter on the Russian Revolution, in which anybody can find any–
thing for any purpose, but in his peroration. In it he admits that
Russia is not a democracy but asserts that the Russian masses enjoy a
"positive freedom which the vast majority of human beings have
hardly ever known they might dare to claim." (p. 400) Making but
casual reference to inferior living conditions, political despotism and
cultural regimentation, Laski writes: "When I compare the implications
of this atmosphere with that of the capitalist democracies of Western
Europe and America, it seems to me fantastic to deny it the achievement
, of an emancipation which the mass of men have never known in any
other society." And all this because the Russians live in a planned
society!
No orthodox Marxist could stress more emphatically than Laski
the dominant influence of "the proportion between the forces of produc–
tion and the relations of production." He does not employ this prin–
ciple instrumentally in ,relation to concrete
problems
of socialist
political activity in the present, where it could be tested and supple–
mented by what we have learned in the last fifty years. He takes it as
something whioh has the status of an axiom and
deduces
from it
certain judgments and prescriptions not checked against empirical
data. He tells us that "the values of a civilization are always set by the
proportion between its productive forces and its productive relations."
(p. 202) In a capitalist society the pr_oportion is disharmonious: in a
socialist society, such as Russia, it is harmonious. He does not make
an empirical study of values, as they are embodied in social behavior,
in the different countries he surveys. His description of them follows
from his dogma. When he does admit the similarity between the
value-practices of Germany and Russia, where according to his formula
different proportions obtain, he glosses over its significance with the
assurance that in Russia this is merely a temporary phenomenon and
bound to disappear. The assurance does not follow from an examina–
tion of the
direction
in which Russian culture has been developing
from
l9t
7 to the present in the fields of politics, art, and social life,
where the facts are known, but from the official mythology. Thus,
Laski is capable of writing that "there is nothing in the nature of the
Bolshevik state which is alien to the democratic ideal." (p. 301) For
Laski, the
nature
of the state is not to be construed from its behavior
but from its 'essential' definition, or what it says about itself. But for
anyon-e who judges the democracies in the same way he has un–
measured scorn.
And yet by his own simple logic, Laski's position is hopelessly
