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PARTISAN REVIEW
of all its liberties; so the Communists of the Third International, leav–
ing history to the dialectical demiurge, have acquiesced in the des–
potism of Stalin while he was uprooting Russian Marxism itself and
have been made the dupes of Soviet foreign policy to a point where
they have found it quite natural to be assuring American labor that it
could not afford to disregard a threat to American business inter–
ests in China.
Karl Marx, with his rigorous morality and his international
point of view, had tried to harness the primitive German Will to a
movement which should lead all humanity to prosperity, happiness
and freedom. But in so far as this movement involves under the
disguise of the Dialectic a semi-divine principle of History to which
it is possible to shift the human responsibility for thinking, for de–
ciding, for acting-and we are living at the present time in a period
of the decadence of Marxism-it lends itself to the repressions of
the tyrant. The parent stream of the old German Will which stayed
at home and remained patriotic became canalized as the philosophy
of German imperialism and ultimately of the Nazi movement. Both
the Russian and the German branches threw out all that had been
good in Christianity along with all that had been bad. The demiurge
of German idealism was never a God of love, nor did it recognize
human imperfection: it did not recommend humility for oneself or
charity toward one's fellows. Karl Marx, with his Old Testament
sternness, did nothing to humanize its workings. He desired that
humanity should be united and happy; but he put that off till the
achievement of the synthesis, and for the present he did not believe
in human brotherhood. He was closer than he could ever have
imagined to that imperialistic Germany he detested. After all, the
German Nazis, also--also, the agents of an historical mission-believe
that humanity will be happy and united when it is all Aryan and
all pro-Hitler.
What Marx and Engels were getting at, however, was something
which, though it may sometimes be played off the stage by the myth
of the Dialectic and though an insistence on the problems it raises
may seem
to~uce
·it to disintegration, came nevertheless in its day
as a point of view of revolutionary importance and which may still
be accepted as partly valid in our own. Let us dissociate it from the
Dialectic and try to state it in the most general form:
"The inhabitants of civilized countries, insofar as they have been
able to function as creative and rational beings, have been striving
after disciplines and designs which would bring order, beauty and
health into their lives; but so long as they continue to be divided
