22
PARTISAN REVIEW
obvious that Fascism, being itself a symptom of the crisis of modem
civilization, has been unable to eliminate the fundamental causes of
that crisis. Nevertheless the old conflicts between parties and classes,
which were chiefly nourished on the struggle between rival political
and economic programs, have been swept aside and put on an entirely
different plane by fascism, the chief item in the propaganda and
ideology of which is not a concrete program but a nebulous mythol–
ogy, expressed in symbols and fetishes of race and nation and accom–
panied by immediate aims of an unbridled demagogic nature. Al–
though a political movement, Fascism succeeded from the first in
avoiding the arena of struggle on which its opponents took their stand.
On the latter it would easily have been beaten. Instead, without oppo–
sing program to program, without pledging itself to this or that or–
ganization of the state or of society, it successfully applied itself to dis–
crediting politics in general and political parties and programs in
particular, thus reviving and transferring to the despised political
scene many pre-logical and a-logical relics of primitive mentality
which were slumbering in the masses and which the progress of civil–
ization had covered with a thin exterior varnish without touching their
deeper roots. This great political gamble on the most turbid psychol–
ogical forces inherent in mass-man succeeded all the more easily be–
cause, as all the evidence shows, it was not the result of deliberate cal–
culation on the part of the leaders, who were themselves far too much
in the grip of irrational feelings to
be
aware of them.
PROFESSOR
·PicKUP
What you consider to be relics of primitive mentality, Mr. Cynic,
in reality constitute the inexhaustible source and fountain-head of
mankind's religious feelings. There is no doubt in my mind that the
wretched end of European Socialism was due to its vulgar materialist
doctrines and its failure to acknowledge the noblest faculty of the
human mind.
THOMAS THE CYNIC
Perhaps we shall discuss religion another time, professor.
As
for
Socialism, it was not a metaphysical but a very real and concrete de–
feat that it suffered, and the real political significance of the victory
of Fascist mysticism over Socialist "materialism" can be seen when
one considers that it has resulted in the apparent elimination of a
number of vital problems which Socialism, for good or evil, repre–
sented and their substitution by vague phrases and "states of mind."
Those
proble~,
however, were not arbitrary; they were not invented
by the Socialists out of thin air, and hence they remain the funda–
mental factors underlying the general crisis of our time and, of
course, powerfully influence Fascism itself, the only way of getting
