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From International Socialist Review, Vol.23 No.1, Winter 1962, p.24.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Soviet Marxism
by Herbert Marcuse.
Random House, Inc. New York, N.Y.
Vintage Books paperback edition. 1961. 352 pp. $1.25.
This is Dr. Marcuse’s third contribution to the study of Marxist theory, and like Reason and Revolution and Eros and Civilization it is provocative reading, and to be recommended for those who will not be discouraged by the author’s highly academic style. Like his other books, Soviet Marxism is interesting reading, if only because of Marcuse’s conscious exposition and use of the dialectic method.
Dr. Marcuse, a Professor of Philosophy at Brandeis University, affirms again in this book his dedication to the principle of a socialist society in which work would become play and man would delight in the truly human use of his abilities to create free aesthetic society. Because the ideal of socialism has not become tarnished for him, Dr. Marcuse is able to offer a thorough critique of Soviet “Marxism” and Soviet “Socialism.” However, Marcuse is not a revolutionary. While he by no means accepts the Soviet claim that Russia has achieved socialism, he nevertheless does accept the bureaucracy’s justification of its foreign and domestic policies.
Marcuse discusses the Soviet bureaucracy’s propagandists distortions of Marxist theory which have made it into a state ideology which blatantly includes obvious lies; the fact that this bureaucracy holds state power and defends its own privileges while stifling freedom in Russia. He fully develops the implications of the theory of socialism in one country, even noting, as evidence that the bureaucracy is not following a revolutionary foreign policy, the fact that after the second world war the communist parties in Italy and France deliberately disarmed their members despite the fact that they were experiencing their greatest popular strength. He demonstrates that the theory of socialism in one country has implicit in it a loss of confidence in the revolutionary potential of the international working class; and a substitution of class collaboration and the power politics of international diplomacy for revolution. But Marcuse feels that the bureaucracy has represented the best interests of the Russian people. He too lacks confidence.
Marcuse fully accepts Russian foreign policy where it seeks conciliation with the West, because he feels that the East-West confrontation in the cold war has allowed the western nations to stabilize their economies by war spending and has further motivated European nations to accept US domination because of the need for unity against the “communist threat.” Because of this the western proletariat lacks class consciousness. Therefore the current situation is temporarily stabilized and the only dynamic for change will come with peaceful competition between the East and West. This will allow the Russian planned economy to outstrip the West and thus increase the attractive power of communism. Marcuse hopes that with the rising standard of living in Russia abuses will be corrected and the distance between the people and the bureaucracy will be lessened economically and politically.
This book was first published in 1958 but a preface written in October 1960 has been added to the current paperback edition. In the preface, Dr. Marcuse mentions that we daily face the threat of nuclear war but that since the alternative of a nuclear war is fundamentally irrational he is not including this possibility in his analysis. Along with excluding the threat of nuclear war from consideration, he seems to also have excluded quite a few recent events. He neglects to mention the Cuban revolution. He dismisses the China-Russia debate as a minor dispute over whether a hard or a soft line is most convincing to the West. He brushes aside the Hungarian revolution as being intolerable to the Soviet Bureaucracy because it was a wedge for capitalism and was based on an insufficiently industrialized economy (failing completely to see in the revolution and the uprisings throughout Eastern Europe an indication of the resurgence of the international proletariat) .
The book remains two-dimensional because Marcuse discusses capitalist war preparations only as a response to threat of Russian aggressive attitudes. He leaves it tacitly understood that Russia’s aggressive poses are basically defensive since Russia has had to defend itself from capitalist encirclement since its inception. He makes a point of the fact that war is not in the interest of either the Russian people or the bureaucracy. However since he sees capitalism as essentially stable in this period he misses, for one, the whole dynamic of the colonial revolutions which are driving the bourgeoisie into one war after another. He fails to comment on the Greek Civil War, the Korean war, the Algerian war, the Guatemalan war, the Indo-Chinese war to cite some examples from the period before the main part of this book was written. Because of these serious omissions, Marcuse is unprepared for the revolutionizing impact of the colonial revolutions on the Western proletariat as seen both in the Belgian general strike, where the bourgeoisie tried to compensate for their losses in the Congo by reducing welfare benefits, and in the rising militancy of the American Negroes.
But despite its faults, Soviet Marxism has a contribution to make in its clear presentation of the trends in Soviet thought and policy, which the bureaucracy prefers to keep hidden.
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Last updated on 21 May 2009