30
PARTISAN REVIEW
Let me try to state this explanation of why the dominant forces in
every capitalist state are so obviously turning against culture. We believe
that this is happening because the capitalist system no longer makes sense.
It has become profoundly irrational. Could .anything be a more perfect
epitome of this irrationality, for example, than the most widespread of all
the contemporary phenomena of capitalism, namely, destitution in the
midst of plenty. It we sought a text-book: example of unreason, what
more perfect one could we find than, for example, the recent econom:o
activities of the American government, such as the burning of the wheat,
the ploughing-in of the cotton, the slaughtering of hogs, at a time when,
according to the last official figures, no less than 22,600,000 American
citizens are existing in destitution upon public funds.
These are the more striking and also, I fear, the more haclrneyed
examples of capitalist irrationality. But in fac;t they are in essence no
more irrational than is the familiar and universal co-existence of
unem~
ployment and destitution. What can reason make of the idea that men
cannot work because their needs are unsatisfied, and that their needs are
unsatisfied because they cannot work? As Frederick Engels put it many
years ago in the tersest description of capitalist civilization that has ever
been written, "The producers have nothing to consume, because there are
no consumers."
Well, then, if these are the characteristics of ·present-day capitalism,
what is more natural than that the representatives of such a system should
make war upon every manifestation of human culture and reason? For
their system simply doesn't bear. thinking about. Its whole prestige, its
whole hold over men's minds is endangered from the very moment that
anyone thinks or writes clearly and ·reasonably about it. The human
mind revolts against a system of this degree of irrationality; and the revolt
of a man's mind is the beginning of the revolt of the whole man.
It was the semi-Fascist government of Japan which invented a new
crime, the crime of thinking dangerous thoughts. It has been left to the
fully Fascist government of capitalist Germany to carry this tendency to
its legal conclusion. The German Nazis have realized that for capitalism
all
thoughts are dangerous thoughts.
If
capitalism is to be maintained it
is urgently necessary that all plain, clear, logical thinking should be des–
troyed. Hence the Nazis' sustained attack on every form of cerebration,
hence their desperate attempt to destroy the whole cultural heritage of
Europ·e, hence their explicit propaganda against reason and in favor of
blood-thinking and instinct, which are, of course, only elaborate names
for not thinking at all.
Being an English writer I feel a need to point out that literature ·
a part of human thought and human reason. Thi& must seem strange
ti
