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PARTISAN REVIEW
organizing strikes in munitions plants, for -example-he would find such
activity incompatible with supporting the Chamberlain System as a "lesser
evil." And if he tried to achieve his praiseworthy ends by persuasion and
discussion, without withdrawing support from the Chamberlain-Churchill
System, he would find it a tedious process. The British ruling class will not
allow their properties to be socialized without a bitter armed struggle, and
clearly those who advocate support of the Chamberlain System (that is, of
the policies of the present ruling class) as a "lesser evif' to Hitlerism will
be unable to lead such a struggle.
As for why I don't think Mr. Spender's "lesser evif' policy would
result in anything except the
weakening
of resistance to fascism, the argu–
ments have been ofteri rehearsed in these pages. Enough here to point out
that this
tactic has
been tried out
in
every conceivable variety of situation
since
the
last war, from pre-Mussolini Italy to pre-Petain France, and
that
it
has,
with tiresome and terrible monotony, invariably resulted in
the
defeat of the liberal-capitalist and the victory of the reactionary-capitalist
forces. And, of course, in the involvement of the various workingclas1
organizations
in
the ruin of the bourgeois democratic institutions they
tried to defend. What happened in Spain between 1936 and 1939 is
the
classic example of the fatal results of compromising the revolutionary
struggle of the masses by giving political support to a democratic capital–
ist government as a "lesser evil" to fascism, and why Mr. Spender sternly
asks, "What about Spain?" I cannot comprehend.
A word about the historical parallel with Napoleon: it is true
that
Napoleon lost the war-just as Hitler may conceivably lose this war, or
another one ten years from now-but what is important is that the social
concepts of the French Revolution, which Napoleon's armies spread
through Europe, conquered the older concepts represented by Metternich
despite the military defeat of those armies. So, too, Hitler may go down,
but fascism will supplant democratic capitalism because it is, in
Mr.
Spender's words, "a more advanced stage of organization of capitalism
than democracy." The only alternative is revolutionary socialism.
Finally, I must say, quite honestly, that I see no immediate prospect
.
of socialism in America. But I do see, both here and abroad, in the coming
years the probability of more than one "revolutionary sitl.UJJion," as
the
present world order breaks down more and more completely. And I
think
we shall be able to take advantage of such future opportunities and prevent
them from merely leading to worldwide fascism, only if we recognize
clearly the realities of present-day society-however uncomfortable at
the
moment such a recognition may be--and only if the workingclass is not
compromised and disillusioned by following a leadership which
has
tied
its interests to the collapsing structure of capitalist democracy.
DWIGHT
MACDONALD
