478
PARTISAN REVIEW
In making rhetorical and emotional appeals the final ground of
social convictions, Wilson confuses the psychological conditions of
persuasion and the scientific validity of the statements which assert
the relative adequacy of means to ends and the appropriateness of
ends to means. The discovery that capitalism entails misery leads
the victims and those who sympathize with them to revalue the
capitalist forms which they have hitherto accepted as good. The
effects of capitalism and the revaluation may both be observed.
There is nothing necessarily irrational or mysterious in values, as
Wilson seems to believe.
He imagines that through his concept of "basic human rights"
as the foundation of Marxism it will be possible to overcome the
distressing amoralism of revolutionary tactics and the irreconcil·
ability of the ethical standards of opposed classes. It is true, as
Wilson says, that Marxists have given little thought to the theoreti·
cal problems of ethics, but his own attempts to indicate a solution
of the moral dilemmas of revolution, are much too vague to guide
one. The point at which Marxism differs crucially from modern
naturalistic writing on value (including Dewey, whose recent little
work,
Theory of Valuation,
far surpasses in clarity and sharpness
anything in Marxist literature) is in the deeper recognition of the
extent of the conflict of group interests and its bearing on the
estimation of plans for social change. (And this is precisely the
issue that moralistic critics of Marxism evade; they are silent about
the consequences of the admitted irreconcilability of class interests
for their own democratic programs.) Wilson has shown by apt
quotations that Marx and Engels, Lenin and Trotsky, were very
much aware of a conflict between the demands of the revolutionary
cause and the accepted morality. But such difficulties are the very
stuff of moral experience; we are always sacrificing one value to
another. The revolutionists reject an absolute moral law, for they
know how such a law, far from being universal in practice, is lim·
ited by time and place and the needs of a single group, and may
stand in the way of the achievement of new, more urgent ends.
Yet in defending their own actions, they sometimes appeal to
the morality of the clas3 they despise, or they invoke higher ends,
above classes. In doing so they recognize that, historically, certain
broad ends and guiding principles have emerged which are valued
by contending groups, though not equally promoted by them. Even
