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PARTISAN REVIEW
reward and opportunity, and the withering away of the state have
been
put into storage, although they are occasionally taken out for airing.
Mr. Marcuse can maintain his position only by very careful and quite
arbitrary selection of examples, though even these can be made to fit
the pattern only by the most tortuous analysis. Indeed, Mr. Marcuse
has
the exasperating tendency of regularly leaving his reader in complete
confusion as to whether a given passage represents what Soviet theorists
actually
say,
or what they don't say but
mean,
or what Mr. Marcuse
thinks they
really
are saying, or what
he himself
thinks.
Since Marcuse is not a Soviet apologist, it is difficult to fathom
why he bothers to attempt to square Soviet developments with the
original Marxist doctrine. One is tempted to conclude that his concern
to prove that the Soviet Union is in the vise of history arises mainly
from his being himself in the grip of the idea of historical determinism.
He acknowledges that there is nothing automatic in the historical pro–
cess: it develops "through the actions of men." But having paid obeisance
to this fact, he proceeds to ignore it.
If
we see the Soviet Union through Mr. Marcuse's eyes we must
accept the decision to industrialize Russia
rapidly,
to telescope stages
of
development, as he puts it, as an historical command. Neither the leaders
nor any other group has it within their discretion or power to shift that
course, and any attempt to do so is bound to fail unless "objective fac–
tors" confirm and verify the new course. Furthermore, if the objective
factors required it, the new course would be forced on the leaders.
So
we return to the ultimate cause, the "objective factors of the interna–
tional and domestic situation." And since everything is historically de–
termined, we obviously must be very cautious about sitting in moral
judgment.
With an unerring sense of direction Marcuse seems to find all the
pitfalls into which determinists generally stumble. Most characteristic
is
the determinist's tendency to define a crucial political decision as an
"objective fact," and then treat it as though it were in a class with
such things as climate, mineral resources, and population. A political
decision is, of course, an objective fact once it is taken, especially as
it
begins to have social consequences. Nevertheless, at one time it
was
some man's decision, subject to the same evaluation as are other human
decisions.
The fact is that rapid industrialization was undertaken because
Stalin decided on it, and through his control over the Communist ap–
paratus imposed his decision on the party and the nation. Many Com–
munist theoreticians and economists actually preferred a lower rate
of
