24
PARTISAN REVIEW
use the word "people" rather than the word "workers" as their "basic
symbol of exhortation." At once several defenders of the Party Line
leaped up to expose the perils involved in such a shift of verbal al-
legiance. Burke was overwhelmed with arguments. Is not the symbol
of the
people
associatcd "with demagoguery of the most vicious sort?"
Did not Hitler use it to deceive thc masses? According to the German
playwright, Friedrich Wolf, this symbol was "an essential part of
the reformist approach" and resulted in the fascists taking power.
Joseph Freeman, in those days as revolutionary as the next func-
tionary, rose to instruct Burke in the elementary precepts of Marxism.
He very sensibly said that the symbol of the
people
belonged to the
epoch of the bourgeois revolution. "The word 'people,'" he con-
tinued, "then became a reactionary slogan-not
because of the
philosophy of myths, but because it concealed the reality, the actual
living antagonism between the social classes. . . ." (Freeman, in-
cidentally, was the only speaker in this debate who showed any under-
standing of what Burke was talking about. All the others attacked
him as if he were attempting to revise the Marxist theory of the role
of the working class in modern society, rather than suggesting a
change in the
technique
of propaganda. An adequate reply would
have analysed the relation of the verbal forms of propaganda to its
intrinsic meanings. Instead Burke was declared a heretic and bela-
bored with the big stick of the Party Line.)
But a few months later--in August, 1935, at the time of the 7th
Congress of the Comintern, to be precise-Burke was completely
vindicated. In fact, the Comintern vastly improved on Burke's "sym-
bolic" suggestions. Now it was no longer a question of changing a
key word of Communist propaganda but of throwing overboard the
whole theory of scientific socialism. And the second Writers' Con-
gress was accordingly saturated with the once dreaded symbolism of
the
people.
Within the short space of two years the "revolutionaries"
of 1935 had substituted the stars and stripes of New Deal Marxism
for "the red flag of the new materialism."
In the Call to the 1937 Congress the capitalist system, that
system which was so "rapidly crumbling before our eyes" in 1935,
was no longer referred to. Neither was revolutionary writing men-
tioned. If the first Call summoned writers to the struggle against
imperialist
war and fascism, the second contented itself with a
timorous meliorism designed not to offend well-paid scenario writers
and ancient contributors to
The Saturday Evening Post.
In the past
nothing short of the sovietization of "the literature of the whole
world" would do; today the gates of the dialectic have been thrown
wide open to any successful money writer.
