BOOKS
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industrialization, which Stalin himself had earlier favored. History de–
fined only the
conditions,
in the sense that at any given time and place
there are only certain material, human and social resources available.
But this is not the same as defining the
alternatives
of action. Those
were defined by men through the interpretations they made of existing
conditions; and many alternatives were possible within the given historic
situation. To fail to see that what happened in Soviet society resulted
from the distinctive way in which the Bolsheviks-and Stalin-defined
their alternatives and made their choices, is to miss one of the central
points of the Soviet experience. It is striking that the idea of respon–
sibility seems not to figure at all in Mr. Marcuse's thinking: at least it
is
nowhere mentioned in his book. Man's conscience has here been dele–
gated to history.
Mr. Marcuse justifies this approach on the grounds that we can–
not effectively criticize Soviet Marxism from "outside," since such an
attack will be "easily blunted by the argument that its conceptual
foundations have been undermined by the Marxist transition into a dif–
ferent area of historical and theoretical verification." To understand
Soviet Marxism we must, of course, get inside it; but to criticize it, we
can perfectly well stand outside it. This is the only way we can main–
tain any historical and moral perspective for judging Communist acts.
Even accepting the rather arbitrary limitation imposed by the
method of what Mr. Marcuse calls the "immanent critique," we might
have expected more incisive criticism and more penetrating analysis.
Some of the Yugoslav and Polish efforts to evaluate Soviet Marxism
in strictly Marxist terms are much more incisive and effective than any–
thing offered by Mr. Marcuse. Indeed he often comes through more
unambiguously in his critical analysis of Western life and society than
he does in his analysis of the Soviet Union. And he does so by applying
rather different criteria, always stressing the gap between the ideal and
the achieved in Western society while generally restricting his evaluation
of the Soviet case to the stated ideal.
Alex Inkeles
