LOOKING FORWARD TO LOOKING BACKWARD
21
service state, when it protects property or makes war, it is a power
state. But from which of these functions can we best deduce the
response of the "democratic" state, with all its service departments, to
strikes, crises and wars? Mumford considers the power state something
abnormal and perverse and the service state as proper to society itself;
but he fails to observe that if "irrationality and obsessive mythologies"
are inherent in the power state as such, the Nazi state has also in–
creased its service functions. Just as his service state has grown out
of his power state, we have now the example o(fascism growing out
of that republican Germany which is for him the highest example of
the service state in modern times.
It
is trivial to identify, as he does,
the emergence of the Nazis from this biotechnic paradise of healthy"
orgartically inclined Germans with atavism and pathological traits.
Such a view disregards the class tensions, the precarious life of re–
publican Germany, and the fortunes of German capital during the
world crisis. On the whole, Mumford tends to confuse not only the
particular state functions and the social order, but also the state and
the governmental regime. Hence his peculiar metaphors of disease
and insanity to characterize the evils of the modern state, as if these
evils were mal-functionings of society, weaknesses of a single infected
organ, rather than results of the structure as a whole.
If
he has ac–
cepted from radical critics the analysis of imperialism as an economic
and political outgrowth of capitalism, he also speaks of it as if it were
best understood and dealt with psychologically. Race doctrines are
dismissed as "crazy dreams," to be treated as "definitely pathological,"
like the imperialist desire "to fill out the national boundaries." The
educational correctives of this "wanton mythology" are the rational
regionalist'S facts, the unity of mankind. The present division of world
empires he regards, with the have-not ambassadors, as an "intolerable
anachronism."
There is in Mumford's book a core of sound and familiar obser–
vations: the development of capitalism does indeed entail a more and
more thorough socialization of production and interdependence of
functions; the state forms more and more "service" departments; and
modern economy in its world character transcends political boundaries.
But in abstracting these facts from the structure of capitalist society,
in neglecting their historical incidence, he lifts them out of the field
of class relations in which their reactionary or socialist outcome will be
largely determined.
The Basic Communist.
Mumford seems in places to accept the
socialist and communist goals, but is careful to qualify them by hon–
orable, apotropaic adjectives ("humanitarian socialism," "basic com–
munism," "cooperative communism"), as if to distinguish his own
ideals from the unhumallitarian, superficial and uncooperative Marxist
