Marx's theory, in Soviet practice, is both dangerous and in danger
Poland in the past year and a half has taught the world a lesson that is both stark and undeniable: as a means of organizing an economy and providing for the well-being of a citizenry, Communism is a failure.
The troubles that have brought the proud, highly civilized and immensely accomplished Poles near the brink of social chaos and economic collapse are both deeper in their origins and wider in their ramifications than the many problems that beset the industrialized democracies of the West. In Poland, the system is not just failing to perform properly — failure is built into the system. Communism stifles the best while rewarding, or at least exploiting, the worst in human nature. Imagination, initiative and man's natural inclination to improve his own lot have all been sacrificed to the abstract and deceptive goal of a common good that is actually neither common nor good. At the same time, the system seeks to make virtues out of man's less fortunate qualities, particularly his susceptibility to the corruption of power when he has it and to submissiveness when he does not.
The result is a society that perversely manages to combine contradictory vices: profligacy on the part of the collective and scarcity for the individual; draconian control and hopeless inefficiency; laziness and zealotry; cynicism and dogmatism; subservience and bullying. These excesses, shortcomings and defects have been institutionalized in ways that almost seem designed to produce the kind of disaster that the Poles now face.
Presiding over that disaster is an entity that calls itself the Polish United Workers' Party, a euphemism that the founders of the Communist Party adopted in 1948 after merging with (and subsequently engulfing) the Polish Socialist Party. Polish workers have been united, to be sure, but not behind the party. If anything, they are united behind their realization that the Communist system has not met, is not meeting and will probably never meet their basic needs. It does not deliver food to their tables, meaning to their jobs, happiness to their lives or hope for their futures in sufficient measure to justify further tolerance and obedience.
Hence the extraordinary challenge that Lech Walesa and Solidarity—the real Polish united workers' party—have represented not only to the Communist regime of their own country but to its prototype and master that watches, waits, worries and issues warnings from across the border in the Soviet Union. The Kremlin may still dismiss the Poles as indolent dreamers, but the whole world knows better. Even if their stubborn defiance ends tragically, the Poles have proved themselves tough, determined and courageous enough not to work for a system that does not work for them—and to work for something better.
The failure of Communism in Poland has been so spectacular that by rights it ought to be the beginning of the end of that system everywhere, including, eventually, in the U.S.S.R. President Ronald Reagan proclaimed in a speech at the University of Notre Dame last May: "The West won't contain Communism; it will transcend Communism. It won't bother to denounce it; it will dismiss it as some bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written."
Two weeks ago, when he expressed