PARTISAN REVIEW
63
and more likely to disintegrate through cliquishness, but it is in itself
a symptom of the withering away of the system it serves. A system
that is not defended selflessly by anyone is a system condemned -
I
quote from Victor Serge's book about the Czarist Okhrana, though
no policeman will believe this until he loses his power. Despotic so–
cialism dies the slow death described by Hegel; it only seems to be
intact, while drowning slowly in boredom and inertia, relieved only
by a universal fear in which everyone is afraid of everyone else, with
fear expressing itself in aggression. The loss of the "idea" is, for such
a system, a loss of raison d'etre.
As
an illustration, let us recall cer–
tain rhetorical changes: Stalin was always talking about "freedom"
while his empire was full of torture and murder; today, when mur–
der has ceased, the very sound of the word "freedom" brings the
whole police apparatus to attention. Such old-fashioned words as
"freedom," "independence," "law," "justice," "truth" are a threat
to bureaucratic tyranny. (The international communist movement,
the very idea of communism, has ceased to exist.) Everything valu–
able and permanent in the culture is created despite the system.
It is probable that, given a free choice, a majority of Polish
workers and intellectuals would declare themselves for socialism, as
I
do - that is, for a sovereign national organism in which society
controls the use and development of the means of production, the
distribution of national wealth, and the administrative and political
apparatus; for an organism which allows freedom of information,
political pluralism, the multiformity of social wealth, respect for
truth, competence and the public interest, freedom of professional
organization, fredom from the arbitrariness of the political police,
and which has a criminal code whose aim is to protect society from
antisocial behavior and not to make criminals out of the entire citi–
zenry.
The degree to which the development of such a society is possi–
ble depends, in large measure, though not exclusively, on the faith
that society has in the possibility of attaining it. What society is .de–
pends
in part
on what it thinks it is. Hence social changes do not
spring from material conditions alone, they require a conscious belief
in their possibility. Thus, in the despotic socialist countries those who
can be the carriers of hope are, at the same time, the initiators of a
movement which makes that hope real.
