Tony Smith’s Thinking like a Communist: State and Legitimacy in the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba (Norton, $16.95) is a brilliantly original study of the “laws of motion” of Communist thought, how they have shaped history during the past hundred years, and what they portend for the future. Professor Smith’s chief concerns are to explain the inexorable combination of Marxist-Leninist ideology and the single-party dictatorial state, which has characterized every Communist regime since 1917, and to assess the likelihood of their dissociation—someplace, sometime—in the future. Despite the wide disparity of cultures upon which Communist states have superimposed themselves, and despite the transformations in Communist thinking that are now going on, Communist politics everywhere are ultimately circumscribed by their “laws of motion”; so that it is only by an understanding of these “laws” that speculation upon the future of international, polycentric Communism can even be hazarded.
“Marxism-Leninism,” Lenin declared, “is all-powerful because it is true.” That “truth,” however, derives less from empirically verifiable ideas than from its formal structure of belief. Nevertheless:
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