THE FUTURE OF SOCIALISM
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"should not set up offices.
If
the masses want to engage in political
activities, they must have politicians.") So far as the Marxist scheme
of things is concerned, there is nothing the proletariat can do to con–
trol the politicians and bureaucrats. Lenin, it is true, did try to pro–
vide a kind of check by limiting the salaries of functionaries to the
level of wages paid skilled labor, but this check did not last long, and
today the luxuries enjoyed by Communist Party functionaries are a
cause for scandal not only in the Soviet Union but also, since World
War II, in satellite countries such as Yugoslavia. Politicians and
bureaucrats, in other words, behave like politicians and bureaucrats,
not like the heroes of some proletarian novel.
Nearly thirty years ago Spengler predicted that the socialism
toward which the world was moving would resemble "not Marx's
theory but Frederick William I's Prussian practice which long pre–
ceded Marx and will yet displace him." In our time we have seen
the authoritarian state arrived at by the Communist route and by
the fascist route, and if we can discern any general historical ten–
dency, it is a trend toward totalitarianism.
III
If
we do not wish to be swept along by the tendency toward
totalitarianism, we must become nay-sayers. To begin with, we had
better get rid of any remnants of belief in progress. My generation
was brought up on the straight Victorian idea of progress-"the pro–
gress of mankind onward and upward forever," as the Unitarians
phrase it. Many of us were weaned away from this belief in the period
after World War. I, both by experience and by exposure to European
pessimism. In the thirties, however, we fell for the Marxian version of
the idea. Marxism does not affirm the idea of progress as such, and
the concept of dialectical materialism allows for ups and downs, but
Marxism, as I have pointed out, does assert that impersonal historical
forces will inevitably achieve the good society. This is the notion we
must put aside. I think we must develop a theory of history that rests
on firmer foundations than dialectical materialism, but whether we
do that or not, the facts of the present situation force us to abandon
the myth of inevitability.
In the second place, and more concretely, we shall have to view
with skepticism any program that advocates the socialization of the
means of production without simultaneously proposing practical meas–
ures for the control of the bureaucracy that socialization makes nee-
