TWO TEARS OF PROGRESS
By the time of the second Congress the miracle had already
been performed whereby culture had been released from its class
moorings and transformed into a pure endowment of democracy.
When the tiny opposition at the Congress asked some embarrassing
questions concerning this matter, the answer was that it is improper
to propagate the Marxist point of view at a united front gathering.
But in reality there was no trace of a united front. The overwhelming
majority of delegates were either Communists or sympathizers of
Communism. The name of the united front was lent to a meeting
conducted under the exclusive control of one political party.
Listening to the speeches one got the impression that the interna-
tional class struggle, bag and baggage, had been exported to one
country: Spain. And even there it was held strictly to account and
told to behave itself-it was a duel between fascism and democracy
and no more. Here in the United States all we had to do was to
encourage trade unionism and defend what we already possess,name-
ly, our bountiful bourgeois democracy. On these foundations we shall
build a "great" American culture. Naturally, no one on the Left
denies the need of defending the democratic rights of the masses. But
to lead writers to abandon their revolutionary direction for the sake
of defending the bourgeois democratic order-which Lenin called "a
paradise for the rich and a snare and a trap and deception for the
exploited, for the poor" -is nothing less than betrayal. The Stalinists
have converted anti-fascism into the latest rationale for defending
the status quo; and it was precisely the sharp dichotomy they have
set up between capitalism and fascism that formed the political basis
of the second Writers' Congress. In literature this can only mean
the artificial revival of values that have been historically transcended
and a thousand times deflated.
The ritual phrases of the People's Front were used at the
second Congress purely as a means of emotional incitement. The
Stalinist literary politicians follow the classic models of their chiefs,
which is always to assume exactly what you have to prove. No
analysis was offered of the People's Front either as a theoretical
formulation or as an actual experience in several European countries.
There were many dramatic descriptions of the heroism of the Spanish
people, but no serious discussion of the fundamental politics of the
Spanish situation as exemplified in the mutual relations of the social
classes or the perspectives of the war. The danger of fascism is
tremendous; it must be fought. Yes,
but how?
Their reply is always
on tap: the People's Front, "the union of all progressive forces."
Nowthe point is that the word "progressive" is like the word "beauti-
fuL" But the criteria of physical beauty are relatively simple; to
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