UNITED STATES AND THE COMMUNIST WORLD
83
The United States has taken steps in this direction itself in the “New Deal”
of Franklin Roosevelt and the “Great Society” of Lyndon B. Johnson, al-
though the concept of free enterprise modified by social welfare legislation
(Walter Lippmann’s “agenda of liberalism”) has been propagandized,
rather than the goal of eventual social ownership of all productive property.
American conservatives, it is true, stigmatize these programs as “creeping
communism.” The major opposition, however, has been to the revolutionary
methods of Lenin and Stalin in Russia and of Mao in China. It is to be noted
that this opposition has existed, not only in the western capitalist countries,
but in less degree in the unaligned countries and in the communist countries
themselves, as witnessed by Khruschev's criticism of Stalin’s “cult of per-
sonality” after the latter’s death in 1953, and by the opposition to Mao,
countered by the “red guard” movement, in China in 1966-67.
Adherence to a philosophy of revolutionary violence, and its practice
internally and externally, has generally waned as time has passed after the
inception of a revolution, and conservative opposition to revolutionary tac-
tics has increased. In 1967 the Chinese revolution was 18 years old, the
Soviet 50 years old, the French 178 years old, the American 191 years old,
and the British 277 years old. As Nehru once said in New York, comparing
the United States and Russia from a neutralist point of view, the major dif-
ference is the length of time since their respective revolutions. As time
passes revolutionary enthusiasm subsides, more time is allowed for the
achievement of revolutionary ideas, even ultimate achievement becomes
limited to less than the entire human race,1 and greater Aexibilty of inter-
pretation, called “revisionism” by the “fundamentalists,” becomes permis-
sible. It has been pointed out that every successful revolution must have a
bible sufficiently large and ambiguous to have texts capable of sustaining
any policy which the exigencies of the occasion seem to make expedient.
The Old Testament, for example, gives support both to beating swords into
plowshares and beating plowshares into swords,5 and Marxism supports
both the “dictatorship of the proletariat” and the “withering away of the
state.”
This latitude of ideological interpretation permits, as Sorokin has pointed
out,c a convergence of practices under capitalism and communism, partic-
ularly in the practices of the United States and the Soviet Union, as their
basic technologies become similar. To the same effect an editorial in the
Houston Post of November 17, 1966 reads:
There is a deep gulf between theory and reality. . . . It is not surprising that
Communism as it actually exists in the world today is a far cry from that en-
visioned by Marx. And there is just about as great a difference between capital-
istic theory and fact. It is not beyond the realm of possibilities that, if the advo-
cates of the Communist and capitalistic ideologies can keep from blowing each