DISILLUSIONMENT AND PARTIAL ANSWERS
cannot control their fate once the elite ·has secured total power through
their support and revolutionary effort. This idea must
be
scrapped,
and so must
the
idea that the sole technique of beneficent change
is
a violent revolutionary upheaval.
This
doctrine is shot through and
through with eschatological elements inherited from the
J
udaeo-Chris–
tian
tradition; besides, its political use is to provide a perfect screen
behind which a new and ruthlessly ambitious ruling class can be re–
cruited and trained. Revolution and reform are both instrumentalities
of change to be employed in accordance with specific historical cir–
cumstances, not
to
be imposed in advance, by wishful theorizing,
on
the
social process.
But by far the most important lesson of the debacle is that
bearing upon the interaction or, better still, the reciprocal dependence
of
socialism
and democracy. It has become indisputably clear that
where there is no democracy there can be no socialism, that, in fact,
under such conditions all claims to socialism are fraudulent. That
was more or less taken for granted among radicals of all groups and
parties until the Bolsheviks, to justify their terroristic dictatorship
and exploitation of the masses, imposed a fetishism of collective forms
of economy, transforming thes<t forms int9 ends in themselves. Actu–
ally, of course, in disregarding the social content which these forms
may serve to conceal one disregards the essence of socialism. And
at no point
is
the
muddleheadedn~
of the liberal collaborators of
Stalinism more evident than in their willingness
to
accept the mere
fact of the abolition of bourgeois property relations as a proof of
the existence of socialism. In reality what
has
been erected in the
Soviet sphere on the basis of the abolition of bourgeois property is
a system of state serfdom-a system to which, from the standpoint
of culture, individual liberty, human decency, and labor's right to
wage an independent struggle for the improvement of its status,
liberal capitalism as we know it is vastly superior.
The revolutionary phrases with which this fetishism of economic
forms is embellished are of course part and parcel of what Dos Passos
rightly describes as "the stale and rotting verbiage left over from
the noble traditions of oldtime socialist theory." It is to
this
verbiage
that
Miss Freda Kirchwey had recourse some months ago in
The
Nation
when she defended the suppression of freedom in the Krem–
lin's vassal states on the ground that those states were undergoing
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