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italism, not structurally compelled to follow an expansionist line.
It
is
surprising that Sternberg nevertheless treats Stalinite Russia as a non–
socialist country.
It
does not become quite clear why: apparently be–
cause she does not live up to certain ideals of equality and freedom
which Sternberg takes from Western democracy. To a Marxist, such con–
siderations should of course remain meaningless. A country which has
effectively overcome the supposed intrinsic "self-contradictions" of a
capitalist market system, and, in contrast to the partly state-controlled
United States, is no longer subject to cyclical crises and to the need of
market expansion, should not be denied the
«
epithefxm omans"
of
being a socialist country. Orthodox Marxism, it is true, believed that a
society thus liberated from the basic vice of capitalism (the restrictions
capitalism is supposed to impose upon the productive forces) would also
throw off all other vices of previous societies. That such a post-cap–
italist society can, on the contrary, return to slave labor, torture and
genocide should make Marxists revise their prejudice according to which
capitalism is today invariably "reactionary" and "socialism" invariably
progressive. It must however be admitted that those who, like Stern–
berg, wish to keep unstained their old faith in socialism as a secular
religion of salvation, can only do it by changing their vocabulary and
by refusing to call "socialist" the only completely socialist country of the
world.
Nobody will regard as very original the basic ideas of Sternberg's
new work as we have sketched them in the preceding remarks. There is
not a single one of them which has not been presented and argued for
a generation. The connecting link used by Sternberg in binding these
ideas into a coherent whole, namely, his theory of non-capitalist markets,
is not entirely convincing to this reviewer, especially in the context of
Sternberg's present thesis.
It
is undeniable that the decline of European
capitalism-in itself an undeniable fact-has been accompanied by a
loss of its power of expansion. But it is by no means evident that this
decline preceded the profound transformation of Europe's social and
economic structure, and is its basic cause; rather it seems to be no more
than one aspect of a much wider process. But to face this process in its
concrete totality, as a crisis not simply of this or that economic structure
but of the whole of our present civilization, would be deadly for the
socialist faith (though not necessarily for a great many specific reforms
tending more or less toward socialism). Rather than accept this, the
faithful prefer to munch incessantly the old formulae, even though they
are becoming more and more irrelevant to the facts. What is thus
produced has the flavor of epigonic thought, and sharply contradicts, in
its very tone, the high hopes placed by the author and his political
