COMMENT
175
tice in the first weeks of the war caused spontaneous street celebra–
tions with wine and song in Berlin, how the crowds in the Place de
la Concorde and in Trafalgar Square watched in silence ("grim
resolve," "calm determination" chirped the patriotic press hope–
fully) as the first regiments marched off to the trenches. Today the
masses are apathetic because they can accept neither of the two
alternatives offered them in the war-either Berlin-Rome-Moscow
or Paris-london-Washington. Tomorrow they may find a common
revolutionary destiny
in
that "Third Camp, whose interests lie with
neither of the two warring imperialist camps" which M. Mormiche
writes about in the
Paris Leuer
in this issue.
It
is in this direction
and not in a "lesser evil" acceptance of the Chamberlain System
that the most realistic hope for our civilization lies.
D.
M.
What Is Living and What Is Dead
We are well aware that in entering the controversy on what is
living and what is dead in Marxism we are literally taking our
ideological lives into our hands. Though the views we wish to
express are for the most part tentative rather than fixed, we do not
expect to have our say without running into a heavy crossfire. The
revisionists-who are now in the pink of condition, thriving as they
do on routs and defeats-will doubtless accuse us of treating the
Marxist "dogmas" much too tenderly, of being mere tyros, in fact,
in the game of cutting the old texts to pieces; while the diehards,
mistaking their doctrinal inflexibility for scientific rectitude, will
probably invoke the handy theory of "petty-bourgeois" class bias
to explain our stand. Nevertheless, having determined to draw
blood from both sides and not to flinch when our tum comes, here
goes-
It
is plain that the crisis in Marxism is primarily caused by
the fact that everywhere, including the Soviet Union, it is not the
social revolution but the counter-revolution which has triumphed.
For if science, as a French physicist once defined it, is "a rule of
action that succeeds," then certainly the credit of Marxism, which
has always insisted on being regarded as a science, is rapidly run·
ning short. Since the one big, and at that time seemingly con·
clusive, victory in Russia in 1917, the failure of the socialist cause
