The grand illusion
Christopher Booker
Mr Graham Greene was recently suggesting in these columns (Letters, 14 February) that the Soviet Union's attempts to `Russify' its far-flung empire, and to suppress local national consciousness through the , enforced imposition of Russian as the universal imperial language, were only equivalent to the imposition of English as the lingua franca of the British Empire. Whether or not this was somehow meant to justify the Soviet policy of 'ethnocide' Mr Greene did not explain (just as he overlooked the rather important irony that the present Soviet empire is formally dedicated to the elimination of 'imperialism'). Nevertheless, lurking behind Mr Greene's proposition is a sound general principle: that in considering the apparent peculiarities of the Soviet System it is always advisable to think twice as to whether those characteristics we mock do not pertain to our own system as well.
A particularly vivid example of failure to Practice this 'mote and beam' principle was in evidence on BBC2 a few weeks ago, in a remarkable film of the British attempt in 1937 to 'pacify' the unruly tribes of Waziristan, on the North West Frontier. As the film Showed British troops blowing up native Villages and machine gunning tribesmen from the air, the veteran officer who Provided a studio commentary seemed blithely unaware of any parallels between What he and his colleagues were doing 40 Years ago, and what the Soviet Union is now up to only a few miles to the west. But it is by no means only in terms of the past that such uncomfortable parallels may be discerned between our two systems, and I say this as a natural extension of my remarks last week on the 26th Communist Party Congress just ended in Moscow. I argued in that article that the Congress (and Mr Brezhnev's gloomy opening speech in Particular) marked a historic landmark in the development of Soviet Communism, because they represented the moment when, after 60 years, the Communist System has at last been brought face to face With one of its most fundamental contradictions. Communism is a materialistic pseudo-religion, based on the promise (and Indeed premise) that, under 'Scientific Socialism', things are getting better all the time, as the Soviet Union evolves towards some distant perfect society. Yet in the past f ew. years, the Soviet economy has so Obviously been breaking down that the Party is, for the first time since 1917, having to face up to the possibility that things are not automatically going to get better — and thIS IS Producing a combination of economic and ideological crisis unique in Soviet experience. However it is all very well to say smugly that the Soviet leaders are at last having to pay the price for having fallen for a half-baked pseudo-religion which promises indefinite economic growth as its central article of belief; and that now that belief is seriously in question, or being shown up under such constraints as diminishing energy reserves as highly dubious, then we can expect all sorts of disintegrative pressures to come to a head, such as nationalism, the disaffection of the working class and the even further alienation of the intellectuals (as we have already seen in Poland).
But one cannot help reflecting to what extent these things are also relevant to our own present curious plight in the West. It is true that the Soviet system has formalised and institutionalised the 'religion' of unlimited economic growth in a way that seems to us in the West almost hubristic — and that it is stuck with a system of economic management which more than ever in the past year or two has shown itself unable to deliver the goods. But are we not in the West stuck with precisely the same underlying assumption — and is it not possible that we too are being brought up against at least some of the same constraints, notably the dwindling supply of new energy reserves, which could equally make a mockery of our own implied 'growth religion'?
The extent to which belief in a steady amelioration of life has become the dominant 'myth our society lives by (as a natural concomitant of the religion of Progress) has become so much part of our mental furniture that we do not always recognise just how deep it runs. It is the one thing which ultimately unites all our political parties, from Mrs Thatcher to the Militant Tendency, certainly including the Social Democrats along the way. They may differ in their prescriptions as to how we shall reach the Promised Land. We are at present faced by an economic recession unparalleled since the Thirties (at least in part brought on by the soaring price of energy). But sooner or later, Mrs Thatcher, Tony Berm and Dr Owen all agree, we shall climb out of this abnormal phase (by whatever means) and the great growth escalator will once again resume its measured climb towards those mysterious 'sunlit uplands'.
It was hard not to be struck last Saturday by the curious similarity between two speeches reported on different pages of The Times, On the front page, Mrs Thatcher was saying in her speech at Georgetown University that the Eighties were going to be a time of 'slow growth', when rises in living standards were going to be 'hard earped'. We were going to have to 'cut our coat according to our cloth'. White on the very same day, as Michael Binyon reported from Moscow, the new Soviet premier Mr Tikhonov had been telling the Party Congress that 'the good life might be round the corner for the Soviet consumer, but only on condition that he works considerably harder and more productively than he has done so far'. Much greater efficiency was required; 'a significant cutback in waste';• less overmanning of machinery; thorough change in all directions, including' 'the remoulding of the very psychology of managerial staff'.
The parallels between Mrs Thatcher's philosophy and that of those naughty Soviets are much closer than she might sometimes wish to be reminded. In fact what unites East and West these days is in many ways much more important than what divides them. Both great systems, Socialism and 'Consumer Capitalism', are creaking very badly. Both are faced by the increasing constraint of energy costs. Both are being subtly sabotaged by the extent to which machinery and the inhuman processes of mass-production have 'alienated' millions of workers from any real pleasure in, or commitment to, their work. Both are fundamentally stuck with the same materialist ideology, that the highest end of man is to produce and to consume. It is true that SC) far the Western way has been much more efficient in discharging these aims than the Soviet system. But as we look round at the present state of our Western economies, with Britain's production running at the same level as 14 years ago, we cannot be too confident, What happens if somehow the magic escalator does not resume its steady upward climb, if the wonderful growth of the past 30 years turns out not to have been a law of nature, but merely a freakish phase produced by cheap oil and a particularly dramatic series of technological advances which cannot be repeated? Would we then not be essentially in precisely the same position as the USSR — stuck with an ideology which promises that things will get better all the time, and the reality of a system which can no longer deliver the goods?
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