Is Marxism Irrelevant?

The Conscience of the Revolution: Communist Opposition in Soviet Russia, by Robert Vincent Daniels. Harvard, $10.00

The Unfinished Revolution: An Essay on the Sources of Influence of Marxism and Communism, by Adam B. Ulam. Random House, $5.00 These books, which can be usefully read together, are two important additions to the library on Communism. Daniels, who has an excellent command of the sources, describes the main fights within the Communist Party up to approximately 1930, with a short survey of the purges during the mid-thirties; he also deals briefly with Khrushchev’s speech of February 1956. He does not come up with any startling new discoveries, but he is readable and instructive, and displays good sense about some of the unsolved Party mysteries, such as the question of whether in 1918 Lenin really had no choice but surrender to the Germans. Daniels’ “political classification” by means of geometry shows, not so surprisingly, that if the sweep from extreme Right to extreme Left were depicted by a circle, Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany were very close to one another. They might have been 330 degrees apart, but if we move counter-clock-wise, their distance was merely 30 degrees. I am not sure that the author really explains why the opposition within the Communist Party failed, but I agree when he says that “the revolution was corroded from within by the methods adopted in pursuit of the goal. … It was the destiny of Communism for the means to displace the ends and become ends in themselves.” According to him, the historical and material conditions of Russia made “the goals of socialism chimerical.” Undoubtedly. The more important point is, however, that socialism is chimerical under all conditions.

SP

About the Author

Stefan T. Possony

Featured Tags

The Conscience of the Revolution: Communist Opposition in Soviet Russia, by Robert Vincent Daniels. Harvard, $10.00

The Unfinished Revolution: An Essay on the Sources of Influence of Marxism and Communism, by Adam B. Ulam. Random House, $5.00 These books, which can be usefully read together, are two important additions to the library on Communism. Daniels, who has an excellent command of the sources, describes the main fights within the Communist Party up to approximately 1930, with a short survey of the purges during the mid-thirties; he also deals briefly with Khrushchev’s speech of February 1956. He does not come up with any startling new discoveries, but he is readable and instructive, and displays good sense about some of the unsolved Party mysteries, such as the question of whether in 1918 Lenin really had no choice but surrender to the Germans. Daniels’ “political classification” by means of geometry shows, not so surprisingly, that if the sweep from extreme Right to extreme Left were depicted by a circle, Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany were very close to one another. They might have been 330 degrees apart, but if we move counter-clock-wise, their distance was merely 30 degrees. I am not sure that the author really explains why the opposition within the Communist Party failed, but I agree when he says that “the revolution was corroded from within by the methods adopted in pursuit of the goal. … It was the destiny of Communism for the means to displace the ends and become ends in themselves.” According to him, the historical and material conditions of Russia made “the goals of socialism chimerical.” Undoubtedly. The more important point is, however, that socialism is chimerical under all conditions.