COMMUNIST INTENTIONS
217
gigantic warfare against each other. No single question of importance
can be forced into a national frame."
Unquestionably this was the original vision of Marx. It is in–
scribed in the Communist Manifesto itself.
. . . modem industrial labor, modem subjection to capital, the same
in
England as in France, in America, as in Germany, has stripped him ('the
worker' ) of every trace of national character . . . The working men have
no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got . . .
National differences and antagonisms between peoples are daily more and
more vanishing . . . The supremacy of the proletariat will cause them to
vanish still further . . .
Time has dealt more cruelly, perhaps, with this theme of militant
internationalism, which runs through the whole original body of
communist theory, than with any other. One hundred and fifteen
years have passed and "the worker" has on the whole more "national
character" than ever. Far from having no fatherland, it would be
truer to say that he has come to feel that to have a nationally inde–
pendent fatherland is a prerequisite for having anything else. Never–
theless communists have never abandoned their original vision of a
worid unity founded upon the demand that the workers of the world
should unite. Thus Lenin, and still more Trotsky, were deeply imbued
with international faith, founded the Soviet Union in its light, and
would have been profoundly shocked at the idea that their founda–
tion could develop into a nation-state. To what extent has the Soviet
Union, nevertheless, done just this? And, if so, how and why has
such a transformation taken place?
From time to time hard-working American professors rediscover
the above-described internationalist basis of communist theory, and
are profoundly shocked by their discovery. They are then apt to
proclaim that they have unearthed a dastardly conspiracy to conquer
the world. This, for example, is the attitude of mind exhibited by
Professor Elliot R. Goodman in his recent book
The Soviet Design for
a World State
(Oxford University Press, 1960). The Professor's
erudition seems only matched by his lack of insight into the nature
of the contemporary world situation. He produces a hundred quota–
tions to demonstrate what anyone who has ever read Marx or Lenin
knows already, namely that communism is an international creed,
which regards the nation-state as something to be transcended. So
far as that is concerned we shall be inclined to reply "so what?"
