18
PARTISAN REVIEW
there would be an enormous number of people with vested interests
who would like to hold on to certain things. That's normal, and
that's what democracy is. I think that in today's Soviet Union there is
only one thing that is real: the fight for democracy. This has to be
made very clear, because when people in the Soviet Union discuss
these things, they often don't talk about the practical means of doing
this. They don't say : "Okay, if we come to power, we will have a
pure capitalist market, or we'll have a social democracy ." They think
about what they
could
achieve . There were attempts in the Soviet
Union to create an independent labor movement, for example, even
before Solidarity in Poland . Most of those people are in labor camps
or mental hospitals, and others can't at the moment speak their
minds, although some information does get out. But such people
don't talk in these categories; these are categories acquired by emi–
gres to the West who start to think in the terms of the societies in
which they now live.
In Boston the day before yesterday, somebody asked us if it
were true that there is an independent peace movement in the Soviet
Union, and they mentioned some group in Cleveland that has corre–
sponded with a group in the Soviet Union, presumably, for peace
and for freezing nuclear weapons. For almost anybody from the So–
viet Union, this question is ridiculous because no influential peace
movement can exist openly in the Soviet Union for very long. You
don't have to be an emigre or a dissident to know this: everybody
knows that such a group, if it appeared, would immediately be
strangled. But when we come to this country we have to explain and
answer such questions, because, for some absurd reason, people
don't
know. Sometimes when we answer such questions we become angry,
because we figure that they don't
want
to know. Americans will never
understand, and probably the Communists will come and take over
soon, because they don't understand that they're actually strangling
their
own
government and that their influence on the Soviet govern–
ment is nil.
As for whether anything in Marx and Lenin is worth preserv–
ing, as I've already explained, this question is not necessarily worth
answering directly. But one thing is important: anything that was
good in Marxism and Leninism, in my opinion, and was worth pre–
serving, was said before Marx and Lenin. It was a part of the hu–
mane development of people. Those things are worth preserving.
But any contribution that Lenin himself made and did not acquire
from elsewhere, is not worth preserving.
