will have to survive. We need more understanding,
less conviction.
Personally,
when I allow myself to speculate on
what lies beyond the mists of the p.resent, I hope for
something neither fascist nor Marxian in ideal. I
realize that these terms are vaguely inaccurate, that
both cover a great variety of human intentions, yet
everybody understands
that
fascism means the
authoritative control by a few wills of the form and
substance of social and political life, while Marxian
implies the orderly organization of all human ele-
ments in a common effort for the material and cul-
tural evolution of the mass; the one trusts blindly
to ferocious individualism,
the other to cooperative
effort, "the greatest good of the greatest number."
Both ideals were present
in the older American
tradition.
Quite possibly the solution lies in pre-
serving, not one but both ideals in the same struc-
ture!
Fascism,
benevolen:t or brutal,
has been ,tried
many times in the history of the world and has in-
variably resulted after a period in social detona-
tions. I am convinced it will again, whether in Italy,
or Germany,
or the United States. No one dictator
(and his followers) has ever been wise enough or
strong enough to play the role of destiny for human-
ity, for long. The Marxian formula has never, not
even in Russia, been pressed to its full, logical con-
clusions.
Can it be? That
is what the world is
curiously waiting to see. My fear for the Russian ex-
periment is that it may, under the pressure of success,
become too soon set in its mould, rather than plastic
and evolutionary.
Its accomplishment,
materially,
to
date has been the most valuable and spectacular out-
come of the World vVar-and the greatest lesson on
the large scale in what human society can accomplish
in self-direction when energized by determined wills.
Yet that accomplishment,
miraculous as it is, if
transferred literally and methodically to another en-
vironment,
such as ours, would result in something
too monstrous to be endured. In other words cultural
conditions determine desirable lines of development
rather than abstract theory. Russia needs a mechan-
ical, industrial
organization,
a materialistic drive;
while the United States is cursed with too exclusive
mechanization.
It would be a catastrophe for us in
the United States were we to press the industrial
pace of the past forty years; we should quickly be-
come a nation of robots with the robot mentality.
Our hope would seem to lie in a society with more
varied incentives and a more fluid distribution of the
products of our national
ingenuity and industry.
What will achieve for us such a desirable balance
between mind and matter can not be foretold with
any precision: we shall have to wait and see. With
no great enthusiasm for either a Marxian or a fascist
solution I cling to my early faith in the American
tradition,
in the so-called democratic process. If our
8
MATTHEW JOSEPHSON
segment of humanity,
with all its inherited advant-
ages, cannot find its way between the Scylla of
fascism and the Charybdis of communism,
another
human society will, in time. One does not vote one-
self, still less one's neighbor, into paradise, nor does
one at any time know where precisely paradise may
lie.
The evolutionary process still operates,
and it is
naive to take one's own efforts to alter it too serious-
ly.
To the Editors:
I hadn't at all meant to be rude about the sym-
posium on Marxism and Americanism.
I was going
to send in my few brief words. But having been seri-
ously ill nearly all of February,
I have just got up
out of bed and begun slowly to pick up where I left
off a month ago.
It must be too late now to put in my two cents.
In any case I would not have been able to write a
dissertation,
nor would I have wished to. You have
formulated the question very well, and I was glad
indeed to see it brought up in this form. It is all
perfectly simple to my mind: to introduce into and
pervade our society with the imperatives of Marx·
ism, we will have to adapt them most thoroughly to
our American environment,
our physical and moral
climate, and our historical traditions.
This is what
Marx and Engels clearly tell us to do, and this is
what the magnificent Bolsheviks did in Russia. This
is what is happening in Spain, etc., etc.
Marxism is a definite concept; hut "Americanism"
-Heaven preserve us-is any man's battle. M. Du-
hamel is a fool, and Bill Haywood" who was eel"
tainly not one, gripped only one side of America
(as it really is). The nearest to a crystallized pres·
entation of the original American idea or millenium
is defined in Beard's
Economic Origins of
J
effer.
sonian Democracy-the
free (petty bourgeois) citi·
zen's Republic of
ca.
1836
at its highest develop-
ment toward egalitarianism.
Corey in the first part
of his
Crisis of the Middle Class
also shrewdly, real·
istically defines this social order, following Parring·
ton. We cannot return to that order,
though the
pieces of its ideology still function, now treacherous-
ly, or now embraced by some faction with sincerity.
Against these outworn and abused democratic ideas
and institutions (yet living cunningly within their
"sheep's clothing," the wolf of capital) stand the
absolutes of the present capitalist system. Those who
hope for a new America,
a just social order must,
with their advanced sociological
concepts,
act as
solvents
of the old traditions and the present massive
forms and interests of oppression and exploitation
-act
in such wise that the majority of the people
APRIL,
1936
