8
PARTISAN REVIEW
when. But, judging from a significant change in Party propaganda
in the months immediately preceding the Pact, the chiefs at least
knew something was in the air. In the daily ritual anathemas of the
Daily
Worker,
Hitler and Mussolini began to yield their places of
honor to Chamberlain and Daladier. In any well-ordered bour–
geois household like the Third International, the butler may not
know exactly where--or how far-the master is going, but he
knows enough to pack the bags and call a cab.
For all their premonitions, however, the Party chiefs seem to
have been unprepared for the abruptness with which Stalin executed
his about-face. For weeks the ideological bedlam was something
extraordinary even for the Communist Party. In a single interview
given out by Browder there might he counted from three to five
mutually exclusive "explanations." For a while, the Party stood
firm
on two major political lines in sharp conflict with each other.
The stirring peals of anti-fascist unity of all men of good will con–
tinued to boom out, the Pact being presented as the bombshell that
shattered the Rome-Berlin-Tokio axis and the death-blow to Hitler–
ism, and the newborn war being supported with the same old ardor.
At the same time, a new note, reminiscent of the "Third Period"
days of ultra-revolutionism, began to be heard: this is an imperial–
ist war ... the Munichmen are the tools of finance capital ... the
Soviet Union is well out of the whole bloody mess.
Even in the Communist Party, such a state of confusion could
not safely be allowed to last very long. To the surprise of many
observers, the Party bureaucracy has chosen to stick by Moscow–
and Hitler-rather than to break away and continue to function
as the extreme left wing of the New Deal war machine. This choice
is of the utmost significance in estimating the nature of the Party
and its relation to the American scene.
If
the Party had cut loose
from the Comintern in favor of the New Deal, it would have meant
that its social base-both as to jobs for its bureaucrats and the real
inner life of the Party-had shifted to indigenous reformism of
the New Deal and American Labor Party variety. But, although
such a course would have enabled the Party to continue its rapid
growth of recent years and its friendly relations with the New Deal,
this course was not taken. Instead, the Party has clung to Moscow,
and is now denouncing the war and calling for peace at any price.
It has moulted almost its entire brilliant plumage of fellow travel-
