PARTISAN REVIEW
55
groups, chosen according to the most varied criteria, become a func–
tion of the power mechanism, which cannot exist without a deadly
enemy. In this way, the ruling class can quickly mobilize itself and
it~
resources to ward off any threat to its power.
6. The power monopoly must also dissolve all forms of social life
it has not decreed. Because social conflicts are not eliminated, they
find the most varied forms of expression, and even the most innocent
forms of social organization not under strict police supervision be–
come an opposition. Hence the tendency to "nationalize" all forms of
social life, to destroy all spontaneous social ties and substitute for
them compulsory pseudo-ties whose functions are negative and de–
structive, and which do not represent any interests other than those
of the ruling class. For as much as the system needs its enemies, it
fears all forms of organized opposition; it wants to have enemies
cnly of its own choosing and to fight these enemies on terms it
itself
selects. A despotism needs to instill fear in the people while simul–
t.meou ly depriving them of all means of organized resistance; and
one of its instruments is a criminal code worded so ambiguously as
to make the largest possible number of citizens feel they are crim–
inals, and to permit the police and the party to manipulate the law
arbitrarily.
7. The ruling apparatus is not free to grant rights to the citizen,
e,"en if it wanted to, because of the danger of self-destruction. Ex–
perience shows that democratic concessions lead only to ever greater
pressures that threaten the entire political order.
The e then are the arguments in support of the thesis that the
peculiarly socialist form of enslavement cannot be liquidated par–
tially
or reduced by gradual reforms, and must be destroyed totally
and all at once.
I think this thesis is untrue, and to advocate it is defeatist
rather than revolutionary. For it is never possible to define in advance
the limits of a social organization's elasticity, find past experience dQes
not indicate that the despotic model of socialism is absolutely rigid.
The rigidity of a system depends
in part
on the degree to which the
people living in it
are convinced of its rigidity.
The belief in
nonre–
formability
is based on the ideology of "all or nothing," characteristic
of
persons reared in the Marxist tradition, but unsupported by his-
