528
PARTISAN REVIEW
This process, which is as difficult to label as it is easy to observe,
involves the increasing helplessness of individual man, the loss of
energy and direction among traditional social movements, the les–
sening of distinctions between political and economic power, the
triumph of the state in every area of economics and culture, the
"machinization" of life- and
perhaps
a partial solution in the future
of those material problems that were the occasion for, but not the
true motive behind, the rise of socialism. It may be that a world-wide
solution to the problem of hunger is inseparable from at least a
serious effort to solve other, less tangible problems; and in a sense it
would be reassuring to think so. But if we are honest we should face
the possibility- it is surely no more than that-of a general trend
toward a society that would be a sort of low-pressured, usually non–
terroristic yet essentially unfree authoritarianism, a society that might
provide men with food, television, and houses of a kind but would
not permit or encourage them to achieve true human status.
It
would be pleasant to learn that this is merely a bad dream of
my own.
3. One of the mildly amusing aspects of the Russian problem
is that the issues debated by Marxists fifteen or twenty years ago have
a way of cropping up once more among people who haven't the
faintest notion that they are repeating old and weary polemics. For
years the anti-Stalinist Left used to debate the question: Does Russia
need a political reform within the regime or a deep-going social re–
volution that would transform class and institutional relations? Today
this seemingly abstruse question has acquired a new seriousness. The
impulse among certain intellectuals to effect a rapprochement with
the Russian regime will find as its rationale the claim that all Rus–
sia needs is a reform from on high, a gradual dripping down of
moderate quantities of democracy. Trotsky's unfortunate theory that
Russia was a corrupted "workers' state" will now become popular
among people who never heard of it and who will now advance it
without any of his redeeming revolutionary passion.
But is not a reform of totalitarianism a contradiction in terms?
Given the existence of a statified economy, serious political changes
are
socio-economic changes; the establishment of political democracy in
Russia, far from being a desirable adornment or improvement, would
involve the profoundest shifts in class relations and social power.
