COMMENT
NOTES ON THE DEATH OF SOCIALISM AND OTHER
MATTERS.
In his contribution to the fortieth anniversary issue of
Commentary,
Lionel Abel makes an interesting observation . He says
that it is possible to criticize the politics of a nation, but that to criticize
the nation makes no sense. Abel of course is right, unless we grant
any validity to such fundamental criticism of America and Western
Europe as is being made from a Marxist or socialist perspective, that
is, if one totally rejects democratic capitalism in favor of a socialist
vision of society. And this, indeed, has been the basis for the rejec–
tion of American and European society, though this rejection today
is largely unaware of its ideological sources. Nor does it seem to rec–
ognize that the Marxist and socialist outlooks are themselves ques–
tionable.
Kierkegaard once said that we begin to die the moment we are
born. This seems to be true also of the ideal of socialism, which be–
gan to be extinguished as soon as the Bolshevik revolution took place,
though many of us did not realize it until much later. Although there
is no way of proving that a socialist revolution in the future will not
produce a free and just society, neither is there any logical or histori–
cal ground for believing that it will. As Irving Howe has written re–
cently in
Dissent,
a belief in socialism is largely an act of faith and an
expression of the will to keep alive one's passion for social justice.
For not only has the Soviet Union betrayed its own revolution, it has
stymied or corrupted other independent socialist movements.
But there is another serious consideration - a practical rather
than theoretical one - that precludes the pursuit of socialist politics .
What I have in mind is the indifference to the fate of one's nation im–
plicit in the antinational outlook of Marxism and socialism. Perhaps
this position did not have serious consequences when no one country
was favored. But in the contest between America and Russia that oc–
cupies a central place in the politics of the world, to be indifferent to
America's fate is, at least objectively or unconsciously, to play into
the hands of the Soviet Union. Indeed, most people who are not un–
der the influence of some radical critique of capitalist society take for
granted that America and the West should be defended against either
right or left totalitarianism.
If
I seem to be dismissing the socialist dream too easily, as
though it were only a matter of political logic, it is because I am
countering the views of those who hold on to socialist beliefs without
