SOCIALISM AND LIBERATION
501
not taken in defiance of the Kremlin's orders. Stalin explicitly con–
demned the American theory of exceptionalism, which simply
as–
serted the banal proposition that each Communist party must take
note of the distinctive peculiarities of its own political history and
geography-primarily to replace one Communist faction by a more
compliant one. Yet when the opportunity presented itself after the
war, he heartily approved of the manner in which the Czech, Yugo–
slav and Chinese Communists seized power, even though in one case
it involved making the peasantry, not the proletariat, the basis of the
Communist movement (China), and in no case did it involve the
use of Soviets in whose name the Communist Party seized power as
it did in the Russian October Revolution.
When we tum from the consideration of "different roads to
power" to "different roads to socialism" we find the variations in
the practices of Communist states just as great, but enonnously more
significant.
l
Even if we consider
all
these different roads to so–
cialism as different ways of enslaving the human spirit-as at the
present time they are-they may also be assessed as providing vary–
ing opportunities if not for immediate liberation at least for some
extension of the areas of freedom.
Different roads to
power
are comparable to different roads
leading to a city. The city is the same irrespective of the way we
reach it. But different roads to socialism, about which the classics
of Marxism really say little, may be compared to different ways of
building a city. The different ways of building a city result in sub–
stantially different cities because the means used are not like the scaf–
folding tom away when the building is constructed but are like the
bricks and mortar, the steel and glass which become intrinsic ele–
ments of the finished construction. The architectural metaphor per–
vades the entire literature of Marxism and Communism and for most
purposes is defective and misleading since it cannot express the facts
of historical process and reciprocity. But it serves admirably to drive
home the logic of the means-end relation.
If
it is true that not pious
words but means determine ends, then the adoption of different
means of constructing socialism involves the very real likelihood of
different
kinds
of socialism, unwelcome as this may be to the leaders
of the Communist movement. In
his
remarkable speech to the Eighth
1. See the illuminating survey by Peter Wiles, "Polycentric Communism,"
in
Soviet Survey,
May 1957.
