In this world, things are complicated and are decided by many
factors. We should look at problems from different aspects, not
from just one alone. Only those who are subjective, one-sided and
superficial in their approach to problems will smugly issue orders or
directives the moment they arrive on the scene, without considering
the circumstances, without viewing things in their entirety (their
history and their present state as a whole) and without getting to
the essence of things (their nature and the internal relations between
one thing and another). Such people ar* bound to trip and
fall.
The man who thus insists on the need for political thinking is
not a democratic parliamentarian, but Mao Tse-tung in his
active period. He appeals in turn to Lenin's maxim: "In order
really to know an object, we must embrace, study, all its sides,
all its connections and 'mediations.'M1 Narrow-minded agreement
with nationalisms just because they use Marxist slogans
is not preferable to applauding the might of their opponents.
The fearful events which accompany the trend to a rationalized,
automated, totally managed world (including revolts
within the military or infiltrations into disputed territory and the
defense against these) are part of the power-bloc struggle in an
age when all sides have reached the same technological level.
The age tends to eliminate every vestige of even a relative autonomy
for the individual. Under liberalism the citizen could
within limits develop his own potentialities; his destiny was
within limits determined by his own activity. That all should
have this possibilty was what was meant by the demand for
freedom and justice. As society changes, however, an increase in
one of these two is usually matched by a decrease in the other;
the centralized regulation of life, the kind of administration
which plans every detail, the so-called strict rationalization
prove historically to be a compromise. During the National So-
- Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung, ed. by Stuart Schram
(New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1968).
cialist period u was aiready clear that totalitarian government
was not an accident but a symptom of the way society was
going. The perfecting of technology, the spread of commerce
and communication, the growth of population all drive society
towards stricter organization. Opposition, however despairing,
is itself co-opted into the very development it had hoped to
counteract. Nonetheless, to give voice to what one knows and
thereby perhaps to avert new terror remain the right of a man
who is still really alive
Not a few of the impulses which motivate me are related to
those of present-day youth- desire for a better life and the right
kind of society, unwillingness to adapt to the present order of
things. I also share their doubts about the educational value of
our schools, colleges, and universities The difference between
is has to do with the violence practiced by the young, which
plays into the hands of their otherwise impotent opponents An
open declaration that even a dubious democracy, for all its
defects, is always better than the dictatorship which would inevitably
result from a revolution today, seems to me necessary
for the sake of truth. Despite her adherence to the Russian Revolution,
Rosa Luxemburg, whom so many students venerate,
said fifty years ago that "the remedy which Trotsky and Lenin
have found, the elimination of democracy as such, is worse than
the disease it is supposed to cure."2 To protect, preserve, and,
where possible, extend the limited and ephemeral freedom of
the individual in the face of the growing threat to it is far more
urgent a task than to issue abstract denunciations of it or to
endanger it by actions that have no hope of success. In totalitarian
countries youth is struggling precisely for that autonomy
which is under permanent threat in nontotalitarian countries.
Whatever the reasons offered in justification, for the left to help
the advance of a totalitarian bureaucracy is a pseudorevolutionary
act, and for the right to support the tendency to terrorism
is a pseudoconservative act. As recent history proves, both
tendencies are really more closely related to each other than
- Rosa Luxemburg, The Russian Revolution/Leninism or Marxism?
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961),
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