30
PARTISAN REVIEW
of moralists and idealists is to wish to attribute to the movement
principles which are alien and strange to it. The mistake of the
"vulgar" Marxists is to go no farther than the surface of the move–
ment, thus fragmenting reality by seeing spiritual activities as
simple reflexes of economic action. Finally, there is something
even worse than "vulgar" Marxism, and that is a certain "tactical
morality" of the Stalinists, who, while still believing that Justice,
the Dignity of Man, and Truth are petty-bourgeois illusions, have
ended up by taking them into their vocabulary "to help in the
struggle against fascism"! A stupid Machiavellianism which isn't
worth thirty cents!
Socialism does not need to lie in order to give itself a moral–
ity. Its moral content lies in its insistence that man comes before
nature and industrial technique, and in its demand for a society
where this primacy of the
human
shall be assured.
Socialism
is
not
technocracy, but rather anthropocracy.
The distinction of Marx is
that he demonstrated that such a revolution, from technocracy to
anthropocracy, has been made historically possible (not inevitable,
· for nothing is inevitable) by the development of capitalist society,
and that this revolution would be, in our epoch, in harmony also
with the requirements of technological progress.
