Never has James Burnham’s classic distinction between real and formal meaning been more strikingly illustrated than in the almost simultaneous speeches and resolutions the other day in Moscow and Peking: in Moscow, on the seventieth anniversary of the October Revolution; in Peking, for the 13th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party.
As Burnham well knew, the distinction exists in our Western world as well as in the special inverted world of Communism, but it takes a very different form there, and it is not easy for Western politicians and media people unversed in Marxist-Leninist thought to grasp what the message really is.
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