Convergence: The Uncertain Meeting of East and West

The only choice is either bourgeois or socialist ideology. There is no middle course.

--Lenin

SHOULD Lenin be taken at his word?

Some Western political theorists and even a few Russians think not, and in defense of their belief they have propagated what has become known as the convergence theory. In essence, the theory proposes that capitalism and Communism--driven by the irresistible scientific and technological forces that control modern industrial states--will eventually coalesce into a new form of society, blending the personal freedom and profit motive of Western democracies with the Communist system's government control of the economy.

Convergence prophets argue that the theory has universal application, but contend that it applies particularly to the United States and Russia. Despite their manifest differences, both nations are post-industrial powers grappling with the problems of advanced technology. According to the convergence theory, Moscow and Washington should meet some day at the omega point somewhere on the outskirts of Belgrade, the capital of a nation that has--so far, successfully --introduced elements of capitalism into a doctrinally Marxist society.

Perhaps the most dramatic endorsement of the convergence theory has come from behind the Iron Curtain. In a 10,000-word essay that was widely but illicitly circulated in Russia before being smuggled out to the West in 1968, the distinguished Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov held that the only hope for world peace was a rapprochement between the socialist and capitalist systems. Suggesting that Sakharov's clandestine ideas still have a certain appeal for Russian intellectuals, another Soviet physicist, Pyotr Kapitsa, gave an oblique endorsement to convergence while on a tour last fall of U.S. universities. "There should not be one multiplication table for Russians and another for Americans," he told a Washington press conference. "I believe that a bringing together of the two systems is correct."

Major Heresy

Kapitsa's approval of the Sakharov thesis was a trifle ambiguous, and with good reason: convergence is regarded by Soviet ideologues as a major heresy. In essence, the theory is a variation on a Marxist theme--namely, that economic developments govern political and social evolution. But it challenges the conviction of Soviet orthodoxy that Communism alone is the road to human development. After publication of his essay in the West, Sakharov was dismissed as chief consultant to the state committee for nuclear energy, and hardly a month goes by without a denunciation of convergence appearing in the Soviet press.

The convergence theory has only recently become the hope of a few Russian thinkers; the idea if not the term has been a persistent but chimerical dream in the West for decades. During World War II, when the Soviet Union was cast as an ally of Western democracies, convergence was widely propagated by a pair of emigre Russian sociologists, Nikolai Timasheff of Fordham and the late Pitirim Sorokin of Harvard. Both professors theorized that the Soviet Union would eventually develop into a less repressive and more democratic society as it progressed economically.

More recently, convergence has been taken up with considerable enthusiasm by economists--notably the Dutch Nobel prizewinner Jan Tinbergen and Harvard's John Kenneth Galbraith. In The New Industrial State, Galbraith states with his customary elan that technology has an imperative all its own. On the Russian side, advanced industrialization will inevitably lead to greater intellectual curiosity and freedom; in the U.S., it will inexorably lead to more planning and centralized economic controls.

Industrialization v. Ideology

The convergence theory rests on three basic assumptions. One is that industrialization by necessity leads to urbanization and a common culture with uniformities in skills, techniques, organizations and even problems--like the alienation of factory workers from jobs and machines. Because workers and managers in Gary, Ind., and Magnitogorsk perform similar tasks, the argument goes, they tend to develop similar ways of life. The second premise is that industrialization leads to increased diversity and complexity in a society --to a pluralistic condition that overrides all ideologies. The third is that industrialization creates affluence, which undermines political discipline and ideological conformity.

In some areas, especially economics, there is evidence that the U.S. and Russia have a great deal more in common today than they did a generation ago. America now accepts a degree of "socialism," bureaucratic regulation and welfare statism that would have been considered unthinkable not so long ago. The large corporations that dominate the U.S. economy often resemble branches of government far more than they do textbook examples of free-enterprise capitalism.

Since Stalin, Russia has been subjected to a rising tide of consumer expectations, which party planners have periodically had to acknowledge by modifying priorities. In order to make its economy work better, the Soviet government has reluctantly undertaken certain quasi-capitalist reforms. Russia's current five-year plan, for example, provides some managerial incentives and gives individual factories greater freedom from centralized planning.

Despite the surface similarities of Russia and the U.S., critics of convergence answer that economic factors have never played a dominant role in the evolution of societies. Recent history suggests that industrialization and economic progress are compatible with liberty or tyranny, and do not necessarily override cultural or political differences between nations. Witness, for example, parliamentary Britain and autocratic Germany at the turn of the century, or Detroit in the Roosevelt era and Essen under Hitler. The postwar economic progress of Japan has undoubtedly contributed to the viability of its democratic political system; but East Germany, the most technologically advanced of any Eastern European nation, has achieved economic success under the most rigid and doctrinaire of Communist tyrannies.

The convergence theory, in the words of Kremlinologist Bertram Wolfe, is "vulgar Marxism." It posits a fundamentalist belief in economic determinism that Marx himself would probably have disavowed. It ignores or underrates the role played by traditions, value systems and even national characteristics in deciding the future of societies. The concepts that people have of national characteristics, of course, are often mere caricatures, but they generally contain some truth, of a subtler variety than meets the eye. The American devotion to individualism and freedom can be exaggerated; yet the Lockean principles of individual liberty and ordered freedom that underlie the U.S. Constitution and indeed U.S. society are related to the American character and the American ideal. The line leading from the czars to Stalin to the Kremlin's present rulers is by no means straight. Still, it is no accident that the Russians--for whom a ruling father-figure rather than the individual is the central symbol in the national mystique--have a history of autocracy.

In the limited sense that capitalist societies are heading inexorably for more state planning and control and that socialist ones must inevitably allow for more decentralization, the convergence theory is true. It may well be that both Russia and the U.S. will come still closer to sharing a common economic model. But broad, perhaps unbridgeable differences will remain, particularly over the philosophic questions of the dreams and goals of the two societies.

Orthodoxy in Tatters

Especially among the young there is always a tendency to extol opposites. Just as many American youths seem to yearn for the collective, nonmaterialistic life, many young people in Communist countries seem to admire some (but by no means all) of the individualism and the material benefits of Western society. Today, Communism is splintered, Marxian orthodoxy in tatters. Nevertheless, the Communist view of man still has a powerful and self-perpetuating hold in those societies where it has become part of the culture--and it is still a vast distance removed from anything that American society would accept in the foreseeable future. The definitions of "bourgeois" and "socialist" ideologies have changed over the years--and no doubt will continue to change--but in the long run Lenin may well prove to be right.

The future is always problematical, but the weight of evidence suggests that Communist and non-Communist societies will continue to develop on separate but parallel tracks. Fortunately, though, basic differences no longer imply the inevitability of a cataclysmic showdown. The pragmatics of survival may well be the one respect in which the U.S. and Soviet Russia are really meeting. That may be a more helpful and hopeful prospect than the euphoric vision of convergence.

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