Thinking the unthinkable.

Thinking the Unthinkable

STRANGE THINGS appear to be happening within the Communist world. Taking a long view, there exists a pattern of things happening toward the end of a century, as the world enters the fin de siecle. As wise Heraclitus said: "The law of things is that all things change." The ground shifted in England in the 1980s. There was a trembling of the veil as perceptive spirits peered ahead: Kipling's "Recessional," Conrad's Heart of Darkness. In the 1780s the West saw the onset of an age of revolutions, in the 1680s a shift toward rationalism and secularism. Elizabeth I died in 1603, bringing to an end the Elizabethan religious "compromise."

The Communist idea, or system of ideas, grew up amidst many other nineteenth-century protests against nineteenth-century capitalism. Surrounding the Communist formulators, Marx and Engels, were a host of half-forgotten anarchists and a rich variety of socialists, as well as communitarian utopian thinkers like William Morris. The Soviet regime came to power in 1917 chiefly because of the Russian defeat at the hands of the Germans and the refusal of either the Czar or the elected premier, Kerensky, to pull out of the war. Shortly, under Bolshevik auspices, Lenin and his heirs would descend upon what amounted to a politically and militarily conquered nation.

Practically all of Marx's philosophical, historical, and economic ideas had been exploded by experts by about 1910. Edmund Wilson, no expert, nevertheless had to throw up his hands hald-way through writing Axel's Castle (1913), deciding that Marxist theory was obscurantist and false: the famous Dialectic was "mysticism"; the historical predictions and "iron" economic laws just did not work out. When Sidney Hook--unlike Wilson an expert on Marxism--tried to synthesize Marx and John Dewey, every time he got near an acceptable philosophical formulation Dewey was in and Marx was out.

Now those readers who can remember or even imagine the period immediately following World War II will recall how powerful the Communist idea seemed to be at the time. Koestler had published Darkness at Noon in 1941, but the book had its real vogue after the war, with Stalin looming over a prostrate Europe; the Communist idea was so potent that it seemed credible that an innocent Rubashov willingly sacrificed himself to protect the Revolution. (Actually, Bukharin, upon whom Rubashov was modeled, was tortured and murdered.) In Malraux's Man's Hope, the Revolution is man's hope. In Chambers's Witness, this ex-Communist believes that in leaving the Party he has joined the losing side, the West. In 1984, O'Brien and the Party are all-powerful, and the entire world is totalitarian. In The God That Failed--the God!--a number of prominent intellectuals described how, with some reluctance, they had rejected Communism.

Well, the great Communist parties of the post-war period, in France, in Italy, and (underground) in Spain, are virtually out of business. Felipe Gonzalez in Spain and Francois Mitterrand in France are not even socialists any more, and solid conservatives are in power in England and Germany.

Which leaves us with the Soviet Union and China, the vast Communist pillars. Recent material indicates that the USSR is in terrible economic shape, far worse than CIA estimates had indicated--that, in fact, it is in the process of becoming a Third World nation in terms of productivity, per-capita income, life expectancy, infant mortality, declining individual weight and height, and other indices. The bureaucratized "command" economic system has been a disaster.

We remain skeptical about the ultimate outcome of what Gorbachev is doing, but he is certainly attempting something. But reform, to be effective, would mean abandoning, gradually or suddenly, the key institutions of Soviet centralized management, which are strangling the economy--abandoning, in other words, Communism. The odds against his effecting radical change are enormous, but it is not wise or realistic to interpret his every move and statement as a ruse to fool the United States.

In China, Deng Xiaoping, who accompanied Mao on the Long March, began a somewhat analogous process of dismantling the Maoist state: bringing in new leadership, experimenting with enterprise and investment, trading quietly but heavily with Taiwan. All of this could be reversed, but it is wise not to bet that it will be. Change often acquires its own momentum.

There are signs around the edges that the Soviet empire in the Third World is beginning to shred. The Red Army is moving in the wrong direction in Afghanistan. How long can Gorbachev, with his economy, continue to shell out $3 million per day to Cuba, $1 billion per year to Angola? Ortega, as we go to press, appears to be making significant concessions to the Contras, at least on paper.

There may be nothing to all of this. The official Soviet line has not changed, and it would be reckless to weaken our defense establishment, or to alter our assumption that the Soviet Union intends to pursue its long struggle for the world. On the other hand, it would be foolish to exclude the possibility that the above tendencies may be significant. NR has always opposed Communism as unworkable--doomed, based on terror, at odds with human nature. Maybe the "politics of reality," as we sometimes define conservatism, is now working out within Communism. Too bad Orwell, Koestler, Chambers, and the rest are not around to call the score, as the "God" may, now, really be failing conclusively.