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PARTISAN REVIEW
as much committed as Lenin or Stalin, is equally fallacious. In this
theory it is assumed that a party, in the true sense of that term,
can
maintain itself as such in the absence of o.ther parties.
But do we not
take for granted, in the very concept of a party, the existence of other
parties? What
is
a party? It is a voluntary political association, and
only in so far as it preserves its voluntary character can it be said
to practice internal democracy and to express the will of its member–
ship. But when a party monopolizes the state-power and political life,
depriving all other parties of legal existence, it rapidly loses the essen–
tial attributes of a party and
is
transformed into another type of or–
ganization altogether. Historical experience has demonstrated that
the one and only party is bound to degenerate, regardless of its pro–
grammatic intentions, into a power-machine used by its bosses to per–
petuate their domination. One cannot count on exceptional circum–
stances to prevent this development. In other words, the ruling party
can have no hope of insuring internal democracy if it proscribes
all
other parties, thus destroying freedom of political opposition. Democ–
racy in one party turns out to be as impracticable as socialism in
one country.
Since the theory of one-party dictatorship provides no institu–
tional safeguards against abuses of power, one must suppose that its
proponents relied on the personal integrity of the party leaders, which
they took for
~ranted
once and for all, as a sufficient guarantee
against degeneration, betrayal, and all those reversals and transfor–
mations that history knows only too well. Such reliance constitutes
psychological as well as political primitivism. Of course, in practice
the one-party dictatorship was built up by the Bolsheviks empirically,
in piecemeal fashion, more in accordance with that inescapable
"discipline of vicissitudes" of which Polybius speaks in his
History
than through theoretical rigor and foresight. It was only after the
event that the dogma was erected and at once consecrated as an in–
separable part of revolutionary Marxism. (In Marx, however, the
idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat is in no sense identical
with the idea of the dictatorship of a party; it hardly means anything
more than the rule of the majority applying forcible means to over–
come the opposition of the bourgeois minority.) And Trotsky is
vulnerable precisely in that he failed to dismember the Bolshevik
theory of dictatorship so as to reveal its totalitarian essence. Instead
he vied with Stalin in an attempt to prove his Leninist orthodoxy.
The truth is that Trotsky had so thoroughly identified himself
with the Bolshevik tradition as to become incapable of a consistently
