I must name it in order to clear away all possible misunder-
standing. I learned long ago that my devotion to the value
of life and my humble part in man's destiny meant war on
the capitalist system. I learned a little later that this negative
must be completed by positive loyalty to a class into which
I was not born, the sole class with the recreative energies
and the will to continue mankind's present evolution, the
class in which the undifferentiated potencies of man as a
whole have not been corrupted and which yet by the nature
of its work is in touch with modern thought and modern
technics: the class of the workers. Finally, after long deli-
beration, I have concluded that the best way to enact the
political phase of my convictions' is to support (despite differ-
ences between us of attitude and definition) the Party which
is creating the Soviet Union-the Party which in the United
States is in the van of the first strong revolutionary move-
ment .since Negro slavery was abolished: the Communist
Party.
Some of you, I know, have come the same way as I; others
have arrived at other political conclusions. Yet, with a few
notable exceptions, none of us have done enough; we have
not, as writers, given the full measure of our contribution in
this hour of history in which (to quote the last words of an
old book of mine-) "creation is revolution." This deficiency
of the writers, of the consciously revolutionary writers in
great part, is at least one of the causes of the delay in the
birth of the new world-a delay whose continuance threatens
us of the West with that alternative to birth: the death
already so menacingly near in Germany and Italy.
The revolutionary hour in which we live is but the present
phase of the process, centuries old anJ destined to outlast
almost the memory ~f economic conflict, whereby man (not a
privileged, exploiting class, but man as a whole) will emerge
into a conscious culture; even as the child at a certain phy-
siologic stage must become adult or go down into degenera-
tion. The key of the present phase of the long process is
economic; therefore the importance of the class struggle and
the imperative of entering it on the side of the workers. But
the process itself, now as ever, is organic. By which I mean
that
the whole of man,
heart and mind, subtlest sense and
deepest intuition, as well as belly and loin, must partake of
it-or it miscarries.
The orthodox revolutionary creeds, which are the technic
of the transition of this crucial hour, do not comprehend the
whole man. They stress, rightly, the aspects of mass social-
economic action. They slight other parts of man: the in-
tuitive, the intimate, the personal which leads to the cosmic
-phases which are the concern of the creative writer. But
since the process of man's growth must at all times be en-
tire, these phases too must enter the revolutionary move-
ment. Since they iag, blame not the political leaders but the
writers. Since in consequence even the immediate economic
aspect of the whole process lags, and threatens to miscarry,
again blame (at least in part) the writers.
Excluding the hordes of parasites and pedlars who dare
call themselves "writers" only in a world where illiteracy
thinks it can "read," we might divide our writers into two
groups. The first stress the sensuous, the individual;
strive
• Our Ilmtrica,
1919.
PARTISAN REVIEW AND ANVIL
perhaps after the mystic; ignore utterly the masses ot men,
and that vast region of each man's life involved in economic
forces. The other group, often recruited or converted from
the first, in the enthusiasm perhaps of their discovery of the
social-economic factor limit themselves to it or at least permit
their awareness of the intimate, infinite dimensions of human
life to become dulled. Their work, like the first group's, is
inorganic. And what is worse, the great Cause-man's
re-
birth-to which they are devoted continues, because of them,
deprived of elements needed to make it whole and to make
it live.
Of course, the values of the creative writer, as I have
named them, are of the very stuff of the Revolution, which
indeed is the expression, in terms of urgent human need, of
just these values. At the heart of socialism and communism,
bequeathed to it direct by Romantics like Rousseau who
saved it from the contradictory theological impedimenta of
the Church, lies a view of men and of man which the de-
generate humanisms of the eighteenth century and the sec-
tarian Protestant
creeds had abandoned. It is the view of
human history as one organic body, growing by tragic effort
towards consciousness and justice; it is the view of the in-
dividual (insofar as he is
real)
as an integer of this body,
so that the health of the whole and the health of every part
are one; it is the view of universal meaning as inherent in
material behavior, and therefore of society, becoming by its
actions the immanent presence of timeless value. This view,
which I call
the organic
view, is implicit in every major
artist, however dissident may be his intellectual convictions.
It runs with infallible continuity from the Egyptian sculptors
and the Hebrew Prophets through the Patrists, through the
builders of the Gothic,
through the great sixteenth and
seventeenth century founders of modern science, through the
systems of Spinoza and Hegel-ineluctably
leading to the
historical-prophetic vision of Karl Marx.
But in the eighteenth century, there had grown strong a
counter-current
in the thought of Europe. So successful was
the conquest of facts about material bodies, the capture of
their movements in the laws of mechanics, that certain men,
hungry like all men for simplifications, cut down the organic
humanisms of Erasmus and Rabelais, the organic rational-
isms of Spinoza and Newton, to a dogmatic empiricism of
the five-senses. Theirs was a "universe" containing every-
thing that moved by mechanical law--everything,
that is,
except man. And the victories of applied science were so
great that these shallow empiricists swelled in prestige; while
the organic view grew enfeebled, being confined to artists
with no "scientific" magic to win them credence, to mystics
overburdened with theologies that contradicted their intui-
tions, and to simple men and simple women with no in-
tellectual weapons.
The nineteenth century, of course, brought giants who, in
philosophy, literature and the sciences, revived the organic
view. In Marx, who belongs to his century's great tradition,
the organic view of man is fundamental,
and is implicit as
in perhaps no other modern thinker except Spinoza and
Goethe. But this shallow empiricism was in the air. Marx,.
over-anxious to attack theological creeds and theological meta- .
physics, at times fell into the use of easy terms borrowed
15
