MUKERJI: I tend to be sensitive on the point since we joined
the Federation somewhat belatedly.
SLADE: That's the Asian Empire. And there they believe, and
have long believed, that individual man is nothing--an ant
in a colony--the state is everything, a sole reason for
existence. The state--
WRIGHT: Which exists only in the minds of individual men.
SLADE: Ye-es.... For them the state takes the place of God,
of reason, of ethics, of--Oh, it's be-all and end-all, so
far as an individualist like myself can understand their
doctrine. A hundred years ago this empire was two great
states; they had the same doctrine then but called it by a
less honest name, communism, derived from certain naive
social theories of about a hundred years earlier--
SPEARMAN: Naive?
SLADE: Before I went in for engineering, sir, I majored in
history at McGill. With the help of a great deal of coffee,
I even read _Das Kapital_. It is not logical even from its
own dogmatic premises. Incidentally I think it can still be
found in secondhand bookstores.
SPEARMAN: As a matter of fact, when I left Earth, it was
quite readily available in up-to-date editions from the
Collectivist Press.
SLADE: Oh. Yes, I dare say it was.... Well, Kamon, about a
hundred years ago those two Asian states, still paying lip
service to the--debatable doctrine of communism
(satisfactory, Mr. Spearman?)--attacked each other in a long
war, making use of recently discovered atomic weapons as
well as man-made pestilence and other devices. It was not
actually a doctrinal war, but simply a power struggle
between two tyrannies. It was hideous, incredibly
destructive, and the only saving thing about it was that it
prevented them from visiting the same disaster on the rest
of the world. Neither side won, of course; a few decades
later a new dictator--a little one-eyed zealot from
Mongolia--inherited the desolation and built on the ruins a
new monolithic state, which still exists.
AREK: But what actually was this theory--this communism?
SLADE: Oh, the theory. Originally an appeal to the
dispossessed. In the nineteenth century and earlier there
were masses of poor, widespread suffering and injustice, too
much economic and political power in the hands of a few, who
abused their power with stupidity and cruelty. Marx and
other theorists imagined, or said they imagined, that the
situation could be remedied by reversal--give power to the
dispossessed (the proletariat, as they called them) and
injustice would right itself. Why they imagined that the
proletariat was any more fitted to rule than its
oppressors--why they supposed it would not abuse power quite
as viciously--they never bothered to explain. Naturally the
realists among them weren't concerned with any Utopian
outcome: they simply saw the doctrine as a means to personal
power for themselves and used it accordingly. The first
important one of these was a furious little man named Lenin.
He may have believed his own theories for a while--there
seems to have been some short-lived experimentation with the
contradictions of actual communism when he first won power
in Russia--but absolute power corrupts absolutely, as
somebody said. The foundations of an old-new despotism were
well established before he died--and was unofficially
deified and kept in a glass case for the consolation of the
atheist faithful. Matter of fact, Arek, a good many things
in Earth history would make a cat laugh.... The actual cure
for the ugly situation that existed turned out to be a
gradual economic leveling combined with the (very slow and
difficult) growth of representative government--so that
there would be no swollen fortunes, no severe poverty, and
no heavy concentrations of unchecked political power. But
that was most undramatic procedure: it needed the work of
centuries. No bloody revolution could ever achieve such an
end, nor could any other evil means ever bring it any
nearer. In the Federation we begin to have--an approximation
of it. The Asian Empire is merely despotism, old and stale,
old as the Pharaohs, committed to the policy of violence and
carrying the burden of slavery under modern names: the
natural product of fanatic doctrine after the power-hungry
have taken it over and made use of it.
SPEARMAN: Jenga's empire is not collectivism. It is a
perversion of it.