"What Is Fascism?"
-
The Discussion Continued
1. A Letter /r&m Victor Serge
Sirs:
I read with lively interest the articles by James Burnham and Dwight
Macdonald in the May-June issue of PARTISAN REVIEW. The following
notes on them may be of interest to your readers.
l.
All the criticism of Marxism in Burnham's article seems to me to be
beside the point: insofar as it is accurate, it applies to that 'vulgar Marx–
ism' of the ignorant and simpleminded who are inevitably numerous in
any large movement.
It
overlooks completely the enormous contributions
made by Marxism to the history of our times. Where are the forecasts and
the projects of the authors of the Versailles Treaty or of the Dawes Plan?
But the International Socialist Congress of Basle clearly foretold the first
world war; the Russians demonstrated a hundred times that Versailles
Europe was not viable; Lenin forecast' "the second round of world wars
and revolutions" even before the illusions of prosperity and rationalization
of the twenties; finally, in writing about events in Russia, China, Germany,
the Marxists have given us such far-sighted works as Lenin's
The Road
to
Power,
Trotsky's writings on the Chinese Revolution of 1927, on the Ger–
man situation in 1933, on the development of the Russian Revolution.
On the other hand, Burnham's sudden and amazing abandonment of
the Marxist method leads him, despite an extremely realistic point of view,
to commit some gross errors in perspective both as to the past and as to
the future. It is historically false to say that the Russian Revolution was
a 'managerial' revolution. That is to distort the facts so as to make them
fit into a new theoretical schema. It is the peasant masses which, in 1917,
backing up with an immense and victorious
/acquerie
the mutiny of a
great part of the army (a peasant army, aroused by workingclass agita·
tors) and the workers' insurrection in the capital cities (enlightened by
certain socialist intellectuals whose prodigious merit it was to raise to the
level of consciousness a movement which was produced independently of
them)-these are the forces which gave the victory to the Bolsheviks.
The
technicians, administrators, intellectuals and other 'managers' oppose this
revolution, and fight it for years. Furthermore, Burnham's theory amounts
to a false justification of the Russian Thermidor, which it makes
the
organic result of the preceding revolution. Once more, it does violence to
the facts. The opposition between the regimes of Lenin and of Stalin, of
1917-1927 and of 1928-1941, is attested by the scope of the black terror
which physically exterminated the generation of October '17. Economi-
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