By Louis Fischer
Louis Fischer
is Moscow correspondent of the New York Nation.
COMMUNIST PURITANS
BY LOUIS FISCHER
The Soviet state is omnipotent and omnipresent. Bukharin, the arch-theorist, contends that this is a transitional phase in the development of Communism toward perfection. The Bolsheviks’ professed aim is the reductio ad administratum of the functions of the state; they would make government the traffic cop of the nation but not the all-pervading busybody and touch-everybody-everywhere which it is now in Russia. The transitional period, however, may last long. In default of a world revolution it may project itself beyond the present generation and even beyond the next. And in the meantime it is good Communist doctrine to maintain an Argus-eyed, Herculanean-clubbed state. The Soviet Government is alike an administrator, politician, statesman, merchant, manufacturer, banker, shipbuilder, newspaper publisher, school-teacher, and preacher.
Such a state is the highest expression of the anti-individualism of socialist philosophy. The single simian erectus is nothing; it is the class, the nation which counts.
The citizen lives for the state. Mind and muscle must ever be at its service. A Communist who is a loose liver is an anomaly. There is virtue even in a grain of asceticism and in “morality,” not, it is important to note, because luxury and license are sinful and lead to damnation and hell but because the excessive gratification of physical desires, be they for sex or for alcohol, and any over-indulgence of one’s selfish mental weaknesses reduce the energy and attention which the individual can offer to the state and to society.
The Bolsheviks do not believe in evolution in the realm of politics; they are revolutionists. Eighteenth and nineteenth-century liberalism tended toward the survival of the fittest. But the essence of the Russian revolution is the protection of the under dog, of the proletarian and peasant who, unaided, would not survive in the unequal struggle with the capitalist and landowner. The function of the Soviet state is to support the oppressed majority against the vested and acquired interests of the economically powerful minority.
The doctrine of the survival of the fittest, translated into every-day life, permits freedom of action, as little restraint as possible, the freest play for nature and human nature. Communist doctrine involves the negation of individual freedom; human nature is discounted in the socialist scale of weights and measures; laissez-faire is replaced by discipline, if need be, by force. Only once did the Communists reveal a liberal vein. It was in their treatment of conscientious objectors during the civil wars. Russia has many sects such as the Dukhobors who are opposed to violence on grounds of conscience. Though the Government was engaged in a death struggle, it respected these sentiments. But in all else, whenever its own interests have been at stake, the state has disregarded the wishes and inclinations of the human unit. Liberty of the individual is not as sacred an ikon as it is in the West. To give economic freedom to the mass is a nobler aim. Thus the Communists would explain and justify (but in my opinion this does not justify) the absence of a free press in Russia and the activities of the G. P. U.