58
PARTISAN REVIEW
comes from a man who lists the class struggle below imperialist war and
gang warfare. To him "war, like a neurosis, is the destructive solution of
an unbearable tension and conflict between organic impulses and the code
and circumstances that keep (lne from satisfying them." Until we rise
to the level of Mr. Mumford's private brand of organic culture "war
will probably remain the constant shadow of the machine: the wars of
national armies, the wars of gangs, the wars of classes."
Twelve years ago Mr. :Mumford wrote a book on Utopias. As a man
devoted to science and rational thinking, one would think, he would have
gone far beyond the dreamers he portrayed. \Ve would expect that he
would have stopper! dreaming of "what we need before we can build
Jerusalem in any green and pleasant land." But that is exactly what he
does. He constructs a sociological fairy-tale that is as naive as it is
irritating to anyone who is aware of the world we live in. He is for a
system of "basic communism" which in recent times "was first seriously
proposed by Edward Bellamy." His system is nothing more than an
extension to "the community as a whole" of the principle of "the small
fixed income." Mr. Mumford even descends to' the ievel of argument to
point out that "no capitalist talks about this system as one that demoralizes
or undermines the self-respect of those who are so supported; indeed, the
small incomes have been an obvious help in the arts and sciences to their
recipients."
Des.pite his obvious ignorance of social forces, and his inadequate
understanding of science and technology, Mr. l'vlumford does not hesitate
to describe in thirty pages most of the features of his kind of middle–
class paradise. Mankind
will
come to his heavenly city not through fol–
lowing "the particular nineteenth century ideology, the messianic absolu–
tism, and the narrowly militaristic tactics to which the official com–
munist parties usually cling, but through the extension of the present
system of "communized" police and fire services, baths, lodging houses,
ferry services, etc.
It
must be obvious by now that Mr. Mumford's most grievous errors
and his ridiculous antics are due to his failure to recognize .the realities
of the class struggle. This leads him dangerously close to the intellectual
paranoia of Spengler whom he has attacked with so much eloquence. Both
live in dream worlds: Spengler in a world of aristocratic he-men
j
Mum–
ford in a world where men love flowers and pictures anu are interested
in garden cities. Mr. Mumford should know better. He has studied
Edward Bellamy's reactionary theories but does no better than repeat
with small variations, Bellamy's mistakes.
If
Mr. Mumford really wants to rid the world of monopoly, waste,
and social inequality, he is taking the wrong road.
It
is
to
the interests
of the ruling class that middle-class intellectuals go in for exercises in
wish fulfillment, rather than join with the working class in an open
struggle against the capitalists. Every capitalist will forgive Mr. Mum–
ford his feeling of intellectual superiority, if he will remain content with
proposing housing schemes that will always be plausible and never possible
