What Workers Get out of Communism

By LANCE MORROW

As the stolidly relentless vehicle of Marxism lumbers through history toward the light, its honored cargo has always been a rather dense abstraction called "the proletariat." But Karl Marx never lavished much bourgeois sentimentality on the proletariat in person, on real workers as individuals. In their private correspondence, Marx and Engels even referred to them as "stupid asses."

In Poland this summer, the real workers have taken a little revenge on Marx and Communism's vulgar pretensions to inevitability, on the regressive hoodoo of the All-Daddy state. They have knocked a hole in the wall, climbed outside their totalistic system and marched angrily around it demanding things. That is very embarrassing. It is also, communistically speaking, impossible. It is a little like the old Second City comedy routine in which Ahab thunderously demands, "Hast seen the white whale?" and the other ship's captain calls back, "Yeah. We killed him yesterday." What happens now to the metaphysical plot, to the primordial story? Communism, after all, loses ideological face if the workers, the stars of Marx's historical drama, step so radically out of their assigned role and indict the system that is their supposed salvation. The Polish workers have given the Communist Manifesto's "Workers of the world, unite!" a dimension of irony that the Politburo over in Moscow is incapable of savoring. Communism is supposed to be the solution; the Poles say it is part of the problem.

For years, only those encumbered by ignorance or a wistfully doctrinaire need to believe have invested either hope or credibility in the Workers' Paradise as it has taken shape in the world. Many, it is true, are still attracted by the ideals of Marxism--by its promise of egalitarianism and social justice. The appeal is especially forceful in the Third World, where capitalism is usually implicated emotionally with colonialism and where some form of socialism seems the surest road to justice. But on the whole, those farthest away from the thwarting and soul-wrecking little details of the Workers' State are the ones most inclined to be eloquently sentimental about it, or at least to make excuses for it. Almost every university faculty in the West has members who call themselves Marxists; in contrast to a couple of decades ago, it is now generally safe and chic to wear the label like a blue work shirt under a tweed jacket. Many defend their faith by arguing that, as Chesterton said of Christianity, real Marxism has not failed because it has never been tried.

Communism promises everything to the proletariat. The great theoretical Marxist engine, after all, repairs the dread alienation of "heartless" capitalism by restoring the means of production to the workers. Well, as the Polish emigre writer Leszek Kolakowski, an apostate Marxist, has said, that "has been the greatest fantasy of our century." Observes TIME Correspondent David Aikman, who has covered Eastern Europe extensively: "It is exceedingly hard to find anyone there, and especially in Poland, who believes the official mythology that states run by Communist parties are actually operated for the benefit of the workers. Party officials will sometimes try to keep a straight face when explaining why workers are so much better off in socialist societies, but they do not really believe it themselves. After a sympathetic wink or a good-natured 'Come on, now,' they will let you understand that they are simply passing on the obligatory line." The solemn Communist theology about workers controlling the means of production is contemptuously dismissed for what it is: a rationale for political dictatorship.

No one can say he was not warned. Lenin wrote in 1920:

"The scientific concept of the dictatorship [of the proletariat] means nothing other than unlimited government unrestrained by any laws or any absolute rules and supporting itself directly by force." Marx said that after a Communist revolution, the state would wither away. Wrong; it has grown and overgrown, with a bureaucratic luxuriance.

The operating procedures of Marxist states usually follow a depressing logic. Marxism, with its incomparably oafish legerdemain, softens up the sanity by explaining that failure is success, and otherwise fulfilling George Orwell's expectations. The revolutionary "vanguard" clearing the way for the dictatorship of the proletariat develops into a "New Class" of privileged party officials and bureaucrats. The system runs by what the Soviets call blat-- influence, clout, corruption. A new minority rule sets in. If it is not the dark, satanic will of Stalin, it has little to do with workers' wishes either. Although members of the ruling elite may have come originally from proletarian families, that connection becomes more remote as the entrenchment proceeds. Amid scarcities of everything (meat, soap, housing, humor, intelligence), the new class buys its provisions with discreet complacency at its own quietly exclusive stores. The mass of work ers stand in their interminable lines or else buy on the flourishing black market. Liberties and other items of bourgeois individualism get crushed under the great rattling treads of His tory, clanking ineluctably toward the Red dawn; on closer inspection the path begins to look merely like the drearily familiar tracks of dictatorship, regressing toward the darkness. For a system dedicated to creating millennial happiness for the workers, Communism has a great deal of proletarian inconvenience and misery to answer for.

The Communist states have been too long straddling a dangerous moral fault line; they may be due in the 1980s for seis mic upheavals.

Faced with the people's restlessness and the discrepancy be tween a dogmatic Marxian approach to economics and the evident reality, some Communist states have become surprisingly experimental-- heretical even. In some of their demands, the workers of Gdansk were asking only for what their comrades in Hungary gained years ago. Yugoslavia practices a renegade Communism that allows for certain capitalist trappings.

Even Mao's successors in China have tacitly acknowledged their failures to solve the problems of the proletariat.

Any retreat from the old dogmatism is welcome, any hint of improvisation. "Gray is all theory," wrote Goethe, "but green is the golden tree of life." That, weirdly enough, was one of Le nin's favorite quotations. The striking Polish workers seem a lit tle farther than he from theory and a little closer to the green tree. In one sense they are behaving in a purely Marxian fash ion: proletarians rising up against the oppressors who contra the means of production. They have very far to go. The strikers now seem oddly like 19th century workers in Western Europe and the U.S. in the first stages of unionism. But perhaps there is hope. As Marx himself wrote in 1875, "The emancipation of Poland is one of the conditions for the emancipation of the working class of all Europe."

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