8
PARTISAN REVIEW
that the peculiar function of the intellectuals is to idealize imperialist
wars when they come and to debunk them after they are over. This
procedure is safe and respectable. It permits you to defend the estab–
lished order when it needs defence most and to play the revolutionary
when it is too late to make revolutions.
It is not the intellectuals, however, who declare wars. Such fateful
decisions are taken by the dominant class in response to its material in–
terests. And as this class differs from the intelligentsia in respect to
power, so it differs in respect to stability. The motives of the bour–
geoisie are consistent and intelligible, and so are the motives of the
proletariat. Possessor and dispossessed thus generate between them two
social programs that are mutually exclusive. Individuals may deviate,
but as a political grouping, the intellectuals, reflecting as they do ma–
terial interests only at second hand, vibrate nervously between the
principal antagonists. Unable to make up their minds, they persuade
themselves that this very inability is the proof of their objectivity. Yet
in the end-as the hour of trial approaches-they
do
make up their
mind. They decide in favor of the side which holds the preponderant
power. The fact is that the intellectuals in America as well as in the
other countries of democratic imperialism have already made their de–
cision. Most of them have taken their stand with capitalism.
Let us look at the record of the intellectual Left in America dur–
ing the past ten years. Surprised by the economic crisis of the early
30's, large numbers of artists and writers discovered politics. Some
adopted agrarianism or social credit; a few went fascist. But the great
majority expressed themselves in favor of Marxism; openiy supporting
the Comintem, which at that time was playing a revolutionary game,
they advertised widely their irrevocable break with capitalism.
Is it necessary to document this point? From the prolific evidence
we select one item, a pamphlet called "Culture and the Crisis" issued
during the 1932 elections by the Professional Groups for Foster and
Ford. This statement was among the first manifestoes of the newly
radicalized depression intelligentsia. Its signers were scornful of re–
formist schemes and parties. Short of revolutionary reconstruction,
they saw no hope for society. "To insist on democracy as the answer
to
fascis~,"
they wrote, "is to oppose air to bullets"; Roosevelt and
the Democratic Party they dismissed as the "demagogic face of Re–
publicanism." Among the intransigents who indorsed this statement
were Granville Hicks and Sidney Hook, Lewis Corey and Malcolm
Cowley, Isidor Schneider and John Dos Passos, Edmund Wilson and
Kyle Crichton, Waldo Frank, Matthew Josephson, Sherwood Ander–
son, Frederick L. Schumann, Robert Cantwell, Ella Winter, etc. In
view of the hostilities of our latter days, this juxtaposition of personali-
