761.00/5–2950
The Ambassador in the Soviet Union (Kirk) to the Secretary of State
No. 669
The Withering Away of the State
In the Soviet Union, constant and prominent display is given to the slogan “Forward to Communism”. In terms of Marxian dialectics, this represents the unambiguous proclamation of faith in the ultimate goal of “full” Communism, of which the present “Socialist” stage is considered as a mere transitionary phenomenon. The difference between the two is enormous, and he would be a heretic who would fail to pay at least lip service to this most basic of Marxist postulates.
“Full” Communism is, of course, the term used to describe that state of affairs in which workers will receive sustenance, lodging and other essentials of everyday life without regard to their productivity, but rather in relation to their ascertained needs. But, more importantly, “full” Communism demands that the State itself shall have “withered away”, and with it all semblance of coercive police authority. To the Soviet worker, the victim of a speed-up system in industry and an all-pervasive police and thought-control policy in his everyday life, the very thought of “full” Communism must present itself as an entrancing mirage. Question periods at lectures in Moscow, attended by Western observers, serve to demonstrate the real interest of Soviet citizens in this aloof but promised goal, while the embarrassed reticence of the lecturers is indicative of the dilemma into which Marxist-Stalinist theoreticians find themselves, poised uncomfortably between the reality of the Stalinist police state and the nirvana of “full” Communism.
Grafted onto the absolutist traditional cultural pattern of the Great Russian, and with the addition of more than an admixture of the bureaucraticism inherent in today’s statecraft, the Soviet Union has made steady and unhesitating strides in exactly the opposite direction postulated by Karl Marx. Under the direction of the Georgian ex-Seminarist, Stalin, there has taken place a massive revival of Great-Russian chauvinism on a plane to be expected in an Asiatic nation just emerging from the cocoon of imperialist tutelage rather than from the self-proclaimed “most advanced” technocratic state.*
With the elimination of bourgeois “remnants”, and the creation of a modern industrial state, the student of Marx might expect a relaxation of control from above; the creation of new cadres of Bolshevik workers and peasants logically should lead to a diminution of pressure from the Party. In actual fact, of course, the reverse has been the [Page 1203] case. But, unless the proposed “correction”† of Das Kapital is more far-reaching than now seems likely (although, to the experienced “revisors of history” of the Kremlin almost no task is too great), continued obeisance must be paid to the doctrine of the final “withering away of the state”. This, of course, requires the creation of new bogeymen, or the continued utilization of already-existing ones. Thus, the doctrine of Capitalistic encirclement must be pushed at all costs (being brought up to date by grim visions of a rain of atomic or hydrogen bombs from desperate Capitalists envious of the high fortunes of the workers’ state), and bourgeois (or, in Central Asia, “feudal-beg”) “remnants” must be uprooted on suitable occasions.
For it is a fact without gainsay that the “withering away of the state” is an unimaginable contingency in the context of current Soviet practice. The steady growth of the Soviet and Party bureaucracies, itself a species of duplication, is exceeded in importance only by the wastage of man power on a scale unparalleled in modern history. The cult of the Messiah, itself foreign to original Marxist thought, is further evidence of the unlikelihood of any reversal of the tide. And the trend, most highly developed since 1945 directed towards the creation of a synthesis of Marxism with all the variegated branches of the social and physical sciences, bids fair to becoming one more stone in the Kremlin’s wall of monolithic orthodoxy, and, by that same token, one additional reason for the sempiternal maintenance and even enlargement of state apparatus.
Minister-Counselor