THE FUTURE
OF SOCIALISM
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for certain of the vital shortcomings of organized socialism. Marx
and Engels ridiculed the speculations of the utopians. They were
"scientific" socialists, and it was beneath their dignity to try to read
the future. They were content to demonstrate that capitalism must
decay and that the proletariat must come to power. They did point
out that, since there would be no class for the proletariat to exploit,
it would be forced to create a classless society, but they were so
frightened of utopianism that they refused to think about the transi–
tion from the socialist revolution to the perfect socialist state. Lenin,
for somewhat different reasons, was quite as hostile to speculation, and
when, on the verge of the Russian Revolution, he paused to ask him–
self what might be expected if the revolution succeeded, he could only
reaffirm the original Marxist abstractions.
The State and Revolution
has its sharp insights, but one cannot help feeling that it is primarily
a plea for faith. Lenin was too much of a realist not to know that
vast disorders would accompany and follow the revolution, and he
wanted to strengthen his comrades by convincing them that their goal
would eventually and inevitably be won.
This refusal to be concerned with the character of socialist society
has had extraordinary consequences in the decades since the Russian
Revolution. Marx and Engels taught that if the first step were taken–
the expropriation of the expropriators, the socialization of the means
of production-all other things would follow. Since the Bolsheviks
did socialize the means of production, orthodox Marxists were bound
to conclude that the Soviet Union was a socialist state and could not
help but develop into a classless society. Hence not only have the
Stalinists justified every phase of Soviet foreign and domestic policy;
the Trotskyites, after criticizing Soviet policy from top to bottom,
have insisted on the defense of the socialist fatherland. Moreover,
countless liberals and progressives, many of them perfectly sincere,
have persisted, despite repeated disillusionment, in the belief that Rus–
sia is somehow on their side.
There is a kind of double inflexibility in the Marxist-Leninist
tradition. There is, first, the simple and obvious inflexibility that leads
Stalinists and some other self-styled Marxists to regard as heresy any
questioning of any part of the Marxist canon. But there is also a
subtler and less commonly recognized type of inflexibility: it is "un–
Marxist" to state explicitly the ends of socialism and thus make them
a usable criterion of socialist actions.
If
Stalinists are asked how they
can be sure that the means they employ will lead to the ends they
desire, they insist that they are interested not in means and ends but
