10
PARTISAN REVIEW
disorientation of thought and the decay of its morality. The effects
of
this process are now palpable. On all sides today human beings art
emptying themselves of individuality, finding it safer to become
tools.
No matter what question is asked, the stooge raises his hand. Liter·
ature, for example, after the bohemian roar of the twenties and the
"proletarian" gnashing of teeth of the early thirties, is gradually sub–
siding into the gentility of accomodation. It would seem that for an
intellectual it is far less pernicious to be indifferent to politics than to
lose himself in its labyrinths.
Never have so many
fas cinating
terms from the
obsolete
pas~
to borrow a phrase of Lenin's, been forced back into our consciousne&<;
as at present. We had assumed that all the justifications for supporting
a war for "democracy" had been exploded by the experience of the
living generations of men. Nevertheless the intellectuals are again
rushing to staff the propaganda-agencies of the war-makers. The
exigencies of imperialist rivalry makes a new world war inevitable,
especially since, with the degeneration of the Comintern, the threat
of
revolutionary action has been definitely withdrawn. Is it the
busin~
of the radical intellectual to take sides in this contest of national im·
perialisms? It is true that fascism is "infinitely worse" than democratic
capitalism. What reason, however, is there to believe that democratic
capitalism can conduct a major war without at the same time co–
ordinating its human and industrial resources along fascist lines?
And who will annihilate the potential German revolution, if not the
French and British imperialists-once they have removed Hitler. The
quarrel between the advocates of collective security and the isola·
tionists is essentially a quarrel within the ruling class. Collective
security is the formula of those who want to go to war at once, but
the isolationists are equally committed to uphold bourgeois interests.
The war, even if the "democrats" win, will not solve a single funda–
mental problem of society. The new Versailles, which all the devout
essays and speeches of the intellectuals will fail to avert, will prepare
the ground for forms of social retrogression even more frightful than
fascism--if such are imaginable. To assent to the war plans of one's
own ruling class means to assent to "civil peace" at home-the
Union
Sacree-which
the politics of the class struggle defines as "the highest
form of the conspiracy of the rulers against the ruled." And this is the
"future" for which Stalinism and liberalism demand of us that we
abandon the principles of classic Marxism, its knowledge and foresight.
Their demands must be rejected. Only unalterable opposition to cap·
italism, only the utilization of the imperialist war for revolutionary
ends, opens any prospects to humanity and its culture.
