30
PARTISAN REVIEW
The interview ends. Magnin can think of no more objections.
And having served his turn as a foil in controversy-and such an
obliging foil !-he reverts to his role as Malraux's ideal observer in
the air forces.
Garcia's technocratic fancies need no very prolonged refutation.
Military technique, as we know, keeps pace with the development of
the productive technique; their mutual relation has not been altered
by the century and a half of material progress since the French revo-
lution. We know, also, who it is that runs the machines-and the
machine-guns-in our society; in fact, the workers are by definition
technicians without portfolio. And finally, if the proletarian leaders
cannot be expected "to become specialists by visitation," who, then,
organized that Red Army which Garcia cites with so much unction?
... No, it is not the Russian revolution that "complicates things" for
the Garcias. It is the
Spanish
revolution. In these cases a "savior of
the revolution" is always sought, who invariably turns out to be a
savior of the bourgeoisie. Garcia's imaginary caste of engineers is the
counterpart of Kerensky, who would have saved the Russian revolution
-for Kornilov; of Noske and Scheidemann, who saved the German
one-for Hitler. In Spain's case, some fine rhetorial apologia must be
made for the strategy by which, thanks to the Comintern, military
authority was lifted from the workers militias and restored to the
bourgeois state, fortifying that infirm institution and extirpating the
vital root of the revolution-and the "elite of technicians" makes as
good a
deus ex machina
as any. Now if we consult the record we find
that, in fact, no group in Loyalist Spain opposed a centralized anti-
fascist army. The militants split with the Stalinists over the question
of
control-whether
it should remain in the hands of the workers or
be restored to the bourgeois government. There existed no such benign
and disinterested fellowship of engineers as Malraux conjures up. It
was a question of the bourgeois government
or
the workers' organiza-
tions. Malraux's elite of technicians recalls the moral elite or revolu-
tionary priesthood which Silone proposed as a substitute for the
Marxist party, in
Bread and Wine.
Both ideas reflect, no doubt, the
failures of the Comintern, but where Silone's is candid and is directed
against
the bureaucracy and
towards
the masses, and illuminates as
with the flash of a great metaphor the moral and social bankruptcy
of Stalinism, Malraux's theory seems a euphemism which not only
plays into the hands of the party bureaucracy as against the masses,
but obscures the real alternatives in Spain, the real nature of the choice
that was made there.
Given its premises, we may expect
L'Epoir
to treat in much
