Homage to a Bitch Goddess

THE UNFINISHED REVOLUTION (1917-1967) by Isaac Deutscher. 115 pages. Oxford University. $3.75.

The Russian Revolution of 1917 is 50 years old, and it is tempting to say that never have so many been disillusioned by so few about so much. The small band of revolutionaries who seized power in Russia achieved a momentous transformation of their country and of the world. Perhaps even more extraordinary are the changes in the nature of Communism itself that took place during that half-century. The vision of the great socialist Utopia collapsed first under bloody totalitarianism, was eroded further by a crude Russian imperialism, and is reeling today before the counterattack of nationalist sentiment and pragmatic economics.

Yet the heady and passionate concept of the international socialist revolution is difficult for some men to give up. Isaac Deutscher is one of those who seem to have taken to it as others take to wine and women. He still carries a torch for the Russian Revolution as the guiding light of future world history. A Polish-born Communist, expelled from the party in 1932 for political deviation, Deutscher is now a Britain-based historian and widely considered one of the leading experts on Communism. His three-volume study of Trotsky (The Prophet Armed, The Prophet Unarmed, The Prophet Outcast) is an outstanding biography of that tragic revolutionary. But Deutscher is clearly also his own ideologue, surveying the Russian Revolution for his own romantic needs. This book offers a particularly revealing insight into the thinking style of an intellectual heretic who nevertheless remains a devout Marxist.

Third Act Coming. To Deutscher, the events of 1917 were but the first act of a continuing international revolutionary happening; the second act was the Chinese Communist takeover of 1948; and the curtain is about to rise on the third. The Russian Revolution really consisted of two revolutions, proletarian and bourgeois, merged into one. The proletariat was represented by the collective-minded industrial urban workers; the bourgeoisie, by economically individualistic peasants. The industrial workers were, of course, the revolutionary elite, "the chief agent of socialism." But in the famines and civil wars that raged into the 1920s, this industrial flower was cut down; the Russian workers who had manned the barricades "physically and politically faded out." On the other hand, despite famine and purges, the bourgeois peasantry "survived in the tangible realities of rural life [and] the socialist revolution was like a phantom suspended in a void."

Supposedly acting as trustee "until such time as a new working class would come into being," the Bolshevik bureaucracy established a dictatorship that was proletarian in name only. Eventually, this rule of a single faction turned into the single rule of its chief, the autocratic and despotic Stalin. He pursued a policy of Russian nationalism rather than international socialism--which was one reason for his quarrel with Trotsky. Stalin stymied the Chinese attempts at revolution in the 1920s by forcing the Chinese Communists to submit to Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang, to discourage agrarian revolts, and finally, in 1927, to disarm the insurgent workers in the cities. Writes Deutscher: "In this way, the first great, victorious proletarian uprising in Asia, the Commune of Shanghai, was suppressed."

What Stalin was trying to do, for purely Russian national interests, was to bring about, at least temporarily, peaceful coexistence with the West by demonstrating that he was not interested in fomenting revolution beyond Russia's traditional sphere of influence. Deutscher's retelling of this familiar episode adds nothing new, but it provides an indispensable backdrop to later Russian exercises in peaceful coexistence, and to the present Sino-Soviet conflict.

Mao as Trustee. After World War II, it was impossible to hold China back. But since the suppression of the Shanghai commune had eliminated the workers' elite, Deutscher sees an obvious parallel with Russia. Mao, like Stalin, became the single trustee and guardian of a dismembered proletariat. And, like Stalin, he became afflicted with poisonous national egoism.

China today claims to be the champion of revolutionary purity, but to Deutscher, the conflict is a rivalry between two fiercely nationalistic powers. And the domestic unrest in both countries, he believes, is caused by a re-emerging working class claiming its rightful position of revolutionary supremacy; "the conflict between the bourgeois and the socialist aspects of the revolution is still unresolved."

Although it has become fashionable for some Western liberal economists to speak of an eventual convergence of values between socialism and capitalism, Deutscher argues that so far the only convergence has been in the Marxist direction. In Galbraithian terms, he cites "the deepening divorce of management from property," the increasingly elaborate division of labor within and be tween corporations, the withering away of the market and laissez faire, the growing economic pull of the state and of planning--all these are parts of the traditional "embryo of socialism within the womb of capitalism."

Myth v. Reality. Persuasive though he sounds, the fabric of Deutscher's interpretation is thin and full of holes. He is right in accusing nationalism of subverting international revolution; yet it must be remembered that Communism also constantly tries to subvert and take over nationalistic movements, and often succeeds. His insistence on making the industrial working class the driving force behind any modern revolution often leaves him grasping for threads. After all, revolutions have been far more frequently led by bourgeois intellectuals. And the notion that today's workers in Russia and China are demanding their rightful revolutionary place appears particularly quaint; what they are increasingly demanding is a consumer's place in the sun. Finally, what Deutscher regards as embryonic socialism in modern capitalism is not necessarily socialism at all, but the consequence of modern technology and the organization it requires.

Deutscher, now 60, obviously remains caught up in his love affair with the bitch goddess of the left--international socialist revolution. And even though his love has not only been wed but ravaged by all sorts of adventurers, he still regards her as essentially pure, as innocent as she seemed when she first appeared before him in his youth. It is, he believes, her captors who are to blame. But in so often allowing emotion to obscure fact, myth to overwhelm reality, he only proves once more, alas, that no bourgeois gentleman can be as sentimental as a doctrinaire proletarian revolutionary.

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