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PARTISAN REVIEW
itarianism was invoked to justify it and to create popular illusions con–
cerning its nature ana outcome. Mumford too denounces capitalism;
but in psychologizing it, iIi veiling its historical and social character
in moral categories, and in regarding it as almost socialist, he is able
to support it.
If
it includes both power states and service states, it
becomes right to support one's service state against the enemy's power
state.
To-day, when Marxists, liberals, fascists and Christians all con–
demn capitalism, Mumford's denunciation is not in itself crucial. It is
especially consoling to those who find capitalism intolerable, but the
overthrow of capitalism equally unpleasant. He assures them that
capitalism is dying and that the new society is already growing up
in
the form of garden cities, suburbs, new houses and superior stream–
lined machines, the very things by which the middle class measures
its own well-being. The field of revolution lies for him in the fixtures
of society, rather than in class relationships. By psychologizing the lat–
ter, he reinstates the unattached man of good will, who finds in his
spontaneous tastes and sympathies the test of political theories. By
treating capitalism as one vast slum or super-slum and the capitalists
as vicious or pathological elements, he implies that social work and
model resettlements are the effective instruments of change. In
his
fulsome announcements of pre-arranged social agenda, he is the ideal
chairman of the supernational and classless congress of men of good
will, a congress at which practical difficulties are evaded and the
drums of imperialist war playa humanitarian music.
