22
PARTISAN REVIEW
must have been affected by a grain of truth which I had handed him,
one covered over by the boomin2: of the sentimental bass-drum in the
hands of his lusty comrade, Philippe Henriot.
The explanations that followed were more revealing still. One emi·
nent and esteemed writer wrote to me:
"If
the victory goes to what you
call the Right, it will only be in\ so far as the Right, as in the case of
Mussolini or of Hitler, finds support in the people, with Draconian
measures being taken for the first time against unemployment, and with
syndcalism left free in essence, being merely kept separate from politics.
Otherwise, it will be you who triumph, and that will be so much the
worse for
us."
The straightforward allusion to Mussolini and Hitler is in itself
significant, but what follows tends to clarify what has gone before:
"The thing that you lack is an acquaintance with that enormous
class to which I belong, where my roots are, and which, given over to
ruin or despair, is now about to furnish a new proletariat, not so well
organized as the other, and, it must be added, not so resigned to its lot,
but adalJted to privation and to misery. To come down to particular
instances, there is X--, for example, or Y--'s daughers, now clerking
in a bookstore or selling
~hoes-it's
a come-down for nearly every one of
them."
I pass over the hallucinatory evidence of misery represented
by
clerking in a bookstore or selling shoes.
If
you take what my correspon·
dent has to say concerning the "come-down" of the middle classes and
compare those workers' syndicates which, under Hitler or Mussolini, are
kept separate from politics,
you will readily perceive that his desire is for
the middle class to take over the direction of the government, subordi·
nating the interests of the workers to its own interests, and all this
for
purely economic reasons.
In other words, the bourgeois class, financed
by capitalism, intends to preserve its full powers and, what is more, to
consolidate those powers with regard to the working class,· all with the
best of intentions, no doubt; but we all know what the home of good in·
tentions is.
From this moment forth, I could no longer in all decency deny the
factual existence of the class-struggle. H this were not so, why shouid
my correspondent and others like him shed so many tears over young
ladies employed in bookstores, while worrying so little over the frightful
wretchedness of a vast portion of the proletariat, a wretchedness of which
he, undoubtedly, is ignorant,
but which he does not care to know anything
