Marxism and the Times

The mighty, generally sapient, usually balanced New York Times got into a peck of Moscow trouble last week.

The trouble began when the Times's lean, sandy Will Lissner, a rewrite man who dabbles in economics on the side, took a long look into a quarterly called Science & Society. This is a small-circulating (4,000), intellectual organ which advertises itself as Marxist and hews to the Communist Party line.

Uneasy Reading. Featuring the lucubrations of the heaviest Stalinist intellectuals, Science & Society is a forbiddingly academic magazine to the general reader, but the Times's Lissner is somewhat more than a general reader. He probed through an abbreviated version of an article that had appeared last August in Moscow's Pod Znamenem Marxizma (Under the Banner of Marxism). From it he gathered: 1) that Russia now considers capitalism "progressive"; 2) that Marxist economics as taught in Russia is undergoing sweeping revisions rightward.

Rewriter Lissner put his discoveries in a column-&-a-half "news story." The Times, commenting editorially, found that the Soviet Union has been progressing toward "state capitalism," that "in some essential productive practices . . . Russia is today even more 'capitalistic' than the United States." The Times pointed out previous reversals of Soviet attitude, such as the recognition of the Italian monarchy. In the same edition Anne O'Hare McCormick was remarking the "odd paradox that the world continues to take an ideological view of the world."

Then came the Moscow and U.S. Communist reaction. The Communist Daily Worker crackled: ". . . the Times has placed on exhibit a case of abysmal ignorance or malicious distortion and crass falsification." Henry F. Mins Jr., a Science & Society contributor who had translated the article, declared that Lissner's report contained "many inaccuracies. . . . Not only are details incorrect; the total picture presented is misleading." Rejoined the Times: "We can only reply that the translator himself seems to have misconceived the article's real significance."

Three days later the Times's own Russian Correspondent Ralph Parker cabled that Moscow observers could discover no justification for the Times's opinion that a new doctrine had emerged. He reported the reaction of his Soviet sources: "Some . . . were angered . . . and suggested that, after some of their ideological enemies had failed to wipe out the Red Army with their pens, a campaign was now in progress to 'annihilate our socialism. . . .' "

By week's end, one solid accomplishment was reported. Editor Bernhard J. Stern of Science & Society said that heavy demand for its article had required a reprinting of the magazine's issue.

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