10
PARTISAN REVIEW
awakening from their illusions, are in the position of that band of refu–
gees from the Sudeten districts who, as the New York
Times
reported,
set out in the last train for Prague only to discover that the cars had
gone into reverse and were rushing them back to the Nazis. But the
Czech crisis will have accomplished something for us if it shatters the
gospel of reformism and compels the labor movement to return to a
policy of class struggle. The Comintern in particular has suffered
a defeat unmatched in the long record of its disasters. It is left now
without a program, its ultimate dissolution prefigured in the frantic
improvisations and desperate guerilla shifts to which it has been re–
duced. While the crumbling of the Comintern represents the frustra–
tion of proletarian hopes, still it removes one of the causes of this
frustration. In the intellectual sphere it promises to put an end to the
People's Front regime of ambiguity in politics and literature alike.
When the giant squid ceases to churn and roil the waters of contro–
versy, it will no longer be so difficult to distinguish friends from ene–
mies. Once the interests of the mind are no longer confused with the
interests of the Soviet bureaucrats, it may again be possible to define
political differences without mystification and to revive the original
meaning of the socialist doctrine.
COMMUNIST
COMEDY
John Strachey's last book, we thought, had its
comic side, but the refusal of the State Depart-
ment to allow him to enter the United States is
almost pure comedy. We say 'almost' because any such arbitrary cen–
sorship on the grounds of alleged radicalism has serious implications
for all Left-wing groups. Although we think that what Mr. Strachey
had to say to the American people was false and dangerous, we are
still more convinced it was bad policy to prevent them, by force, from
hearing his message if they wanted to do so. But in itself, the Strachey
affair conforms perfectly to Bergson's well-known definition of the
eric as "something mechanical [here, the State Department] en–
crusted on the living"-the C. P. line has at least this quality of life: it
is constantly changing. For several years now the C. P. has been open–
ly renouncing its revolutionary aims, openly supporting the New Deal
and sabotaging radical movements against the New Deal. But the
Party's desperate efforts to make itself respectable have made prac–
tically no impression on bourgeois politicians, who continue to think of
"Communists" in terms of bombs and whiskers. Thus when the C. P.
in New York withdrew its own candidate for governor and substituted
Governor Lehman on its ticket, the Governor promptly repudiated
