A NEW KIND OF WAR
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-from opinions to ways of living. This would seem to result more
from the stark bigness of industrial organizations than from terror and
wrong ideology. It suggests that terror in Russia has a
special
role, and
that there are underlying similarities between the two countries which
have to do with factors more basic than political ideology and historical
accidents.
But of course important differences remain. The difficult thing is
to figure out which ones are temporary-no managerial ruling class is
as yet fully consolidated-and which are to be more long-lived. To
work the Russian-English analogy again: no matter how one feels
about the Victorian hypocrisy of the English rulers, the Moscow Trials
were a unique event in history. The technique of falsification, like
technique in so many other fields, has become historically incomparable
In
our day.
The issue is not merely organization and the controlled direction
of production, because that is inevitable; the issue for the world is
planned democratic control, or Soviet-type bureaucratic-terror control.
Since the purpose of the new war is to preserve the freedom inherent
in a democratic system, the time to fight for democratic planning is
now and the place is here.
We lose if we don't organize, and we lose if we don't organize on
democratic lines. The struggle against totalitarianism is not a simple
we-they combat.
It
is, most profoundly, a struggle against the condi–
tions of modern life--ours as well as theirs. The war begins at home.
For the ordinary person in both Russia and America, the main
thing in life is a job for an economic organization so big he doesn't
know where it begins or ends, which he controls by mass political ac–
tion or not at all. George Orwell's 1984 was not merely an image of the
future Soviet society.
It
was a nightmare common to all men in bureau–
cratized societies. We understood it, and it became a common image,
because it touched fears that had been generated by our own ex–
perience-not because it finally "explained" Communism to us. The
nightmare flows over into daylight reality wherever there is conformity
to the great impersonality, and whether or not this conformity is in–
duced by terror. Terror is only organized fear: there is a great deal
of fear in America, some of it organized and more of it still unorganized.
The difficult problem is to relate managerial control to state power
in each nation; but on the run, so to speak, since Russia is excessive
and we are immature in the use of state power. And the situation re–
mains fluid. When you talk about the state in Russia, you are talking
