BOOKS
A SPECTER HAUNTS MR. KRUTCH
WAS EUROPE
A
SUCCESS?
by Joseph Wood Krutch. Farrar
&
Rinehart, Inc.
$1.00.
It
would appear from this book, an augmented series of essays first
published in
The Nation,
that Mr. Krutch has been extremely harrassed
lately by finding himself surrounded by communists and communist ideas.
At every point , Mr. Krutch has felt the contaminating touch of communist
theory, until his soul has been filled with a gruesome fantasy of communism
that will not let him sleep; though it is hard to say that if he could
visualise the actual features of communism it would disturb him less.
Incidentally, his book, a blow struck against "the spectre haunting Europe,"
proves once more that serious criticism of communist thought is to be found
only in communist literature.
1.\-lr.
Krutch sees communist society ..as a Utopian dream conceived by
a 19th century economist named Marx; to him it is a night-product of
the Marxian personality against which Mr. Krutch, knowing little of
economics or history, has the duty of defending his own spirit. Now this
Communist Society of Mr. Krutch's Marx, being the cold structure of a
rationalist, all formulated in advance and outside of history, promises to
be inhabited by monstrous automata motivated by standardized mass–
reflexes and kept in subjection by a fanatical dictatorship whose sole aim
is to produce higher and higher factory-records. This image, in connection
with which all Mr. Krutch's arguments must be considered, recalls to his
horrified mind such things as medieval catholicism, Puritan morality, The
Society of Jesus, The Grand Inquisitor, a bee-hive, the Third Reich, in
fact anything associated with an abstract, inhuman, and rigid pattern of
existence.
If
by some unhappy miracle, the nightmare continues, this im–
possible, dead thing should come into existence, gone would be art, phil–
osophy, rhetoric, urbanity, and all the subtle delicacies of human relation–
ships which make life worth living; gone would be "the European heritage"
of "individuality, freedom, and the disinterested pursuit of knowledge";
vanished would be the "European" man whom it has required centuries of
human effort to develop-his place would be
t~ken
by a new creature, who,
whatever his virtues, would be a regrettable novelty, because he would be
a communist, that is, one who can neither think nor feel.
To correct people who hold such a notion of communism, it is not
enough to respond to particular objections. One must go back to the very
beginning and explain, with appropriate patience, that Krutch's image of
communist society and the contradictions suggested by such an image
could only exist in the mind of a non-communist; that Marxist-Leninist
communism, since it rests upon the reality of historical development, anti–
cipates, not some formulated social life "prophesied" in advance of the
event by Marx, Lenin or anyone else, but a society built by the working
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