PARTISAN REVIEW
53
What are the main features of Soviet socialism which are thought
to resist a partial, gradual, evolutionary "humanization" of the sys–
tem?
1. What is commonly called "democratization" is felt to be in–
conceivable within the system. This is so because despotism and the
monopoly of production, investment, employment, and distribution go
hand in hand. The ruling oligarchy is the sole employer and admin–
istrator of the means of production. Thus, any step toward demo–
cratization is a
partial dispossession
of the ruling class which, though
not the legal owner of the means of production, has all the rights
and privileges of one.
It
presents no danger to the party to permit
workers to discuss details of their jobs, or committees appointed by
the party to discuss details of economic policy. For all decisions are
made by the ruling apparatus; and control of the news media keeps
differences of opinion from becoming a form of social pressure. Hence
any attempts by economists to introduce reforms that would weaken
the monopoly of the ruling apparatus must fail.
2. The natural tendency of the system is to reduce the role of
experts, particularly in economic, cultural, and social matters. Experts
are barely tolerated, and only as advisors without the right to make
decisions, and are replaced, whenever possible, by politically servile
people. That is why incompetence, bungling, and opportunism are
built into the mechanism of rule and cannot be regarded as tem–
porary defects. The mechanism prevents purely technical criteria
from playing any role.
3. Freedom of information - an indispensable condition for
the smooth functioning of the economy, education, and culture - is
clearly inconceivable in a system which would die once such freedom
existed. Equally inconceivable is any prospect of freedom of in–
formation even for insiders, with the facts doled out in doses ap–
propriate to their position in the hierarchy. However they might
clamor for information for their own use, members of the ruling
apparatus are bound to be misinformed, and victimized by their own
lies. Stalin coped with unfavorable statistics by murdering the statis–
ticians and derived his knowledge of life on collective farms from
films. True, this kind of travesty is no longer the rule, but this does
not alter the fact that the misinformation of rulers is built into the
system. Since the suppliers of information, or misinformation, for
