Documents of Modern Political Thought, ed. T.E. Utley and J. Stuart Maclure

[p035] Why No New Ideas? Documents of Modern Political Thought, ed. T. E. Utley and J. Stuart Maclure (Cambridge University Press, 22s. 6d.) THESE extracts from the authentic texts of various schools of political Philosophy will be of limited, though definite, value to university tutors and students, as well as to those 32 January-February 1958 who conduct political education among working men and — women. Following Oakeshott (whose neo-Tory opportunism has re- placed the reformist opportunism of Laski at the London School of Economics), are grouped political ideas into five schools. These are: representative democracy, communism, catholicism, fascism and protestantism. Obviously current fashion has influenced not only the whole plan of the book but the selections themselves. The material on communism starts well, with the’ Com- munist Manifesto’ and pieces from ‘Capital’ and ‘Anti- Diihring’, and from Lenin. Thereafter it sadly falls off. In their introductory note the editors justify the inclusion ot Lenin’s ‘Two Tactics of Social-Democracy’, written in 1905. They do not seem to know that Lenin’s ‘April Theses’ and his whole activity in 1917 constitute a fundamental advance on his 1905 position, in the direction of Trotsky’s ‘theory of permanent revolution’. While Lenin in 1905 was still thinking ‘that the proletariat would lead a purely bourgeois revolution, Trotsky had already in that period, charted the road the 1917 revolution was actually to take. ‘Results and Prospects’ argued that the proletariat would itself carry through the democratic tasks, through the agency of soviet power, which the bour- geoisie was already too belated to achieve. The Marxist position could have been much better put by extracts from Lenin’s 1917 writings or from Trotsky’s ‘Permanent Revolu- tion’ or ‘History of the Russian Revolution’. Recently out-dated fashion may also be the explanation why the editors take as good coin what the Stalinists said about themselves. We find here Stalin’s apology of 1939 for the failure of the bureaucracy to wither away (‘capitalist encirclement’), confusing symptoms with causes. We find Khrushchev’s wishful thinking about ‘peaceful competition of social systems’ and ‘transforming Parliament from an organ of bourgeois democracy into a genuine instrument of the people’s will’. This is presented as good Marxism. How we miss a good extract—there are hundredso available—on the role of soviets as the mass organizations for taking and administering political power in a socialist revolution as the Bolsheviks conceived it. The great Henri Pirenne, historian of the Middle Ages, said of the years of the decline of feudalism (1300-1450): ‘Every- where the world was in labour, but it produced only abortive births.’ In this collection we have scholasticism, and no new ideas. The only ideas which could not have been included in such a collection thirty years ago express confusion, Gespair and the limited objective of keeping things from getting any worse for the existing social order. R. SHERWOOD Sterile Economies