-THE DISCUSSION CONTINUED
419
cally, it is proved by the changed conditions of the workers: the lowering
of real wages (15% to 30% as compared to 1926).
Burnham is no happier in his predictions about the immediate
future. His article appeared in May; his purely theoretical explanation
of the Nazi·Soviet Pact is already belied by the end of June. The Russo–
German war that he
saw
developing later, in the era of collectivist sys–
tems, after the victory of Germany over England-this has already hurst
out, showing that mortal incompatibility between Nazism and Stalinism
which Marxists have long understood.
Far from refuting Marxist thought-serious thought, and not vulgar
or reduced, as is often the case, to doctrinaire phrases-the events of the
last years have strikingly confirmed it. From the beginning of the Rus–
sian revolution, the Marxists called on to direct it recognise the impossi–
bility of installing a socialist regime in a great agrarian country (even
though capitalism has collapsed). They see no solution for Russia and
for Europe .except in the socialisation of Germany, the only country which
seems ripe for socialism; they conceive of industrialized Germany and
agrarian Russia, united in a socialist federation, as the workshop of the
social renewal of Eurasia. This great project falls through twice: when
the Berlin uprisings are put down and when Tukachevsky is defeated
under the walls of Warsaw by Weygand-Pilsudski. The victory of Marx–
ism in either instance would have guided Europe onto an entirely new
path, rendered Stalinism impossible (since it is the result of the isolation
of Russia and the weakness of her industry) , and made impossible the
armament race and the present war.... Granted the tenuity of such his–
torical hypotheses, it remains true that the school of thought which con–
ceived them and the will which made them weapons on the battlefield
have shown a power which is not, in principle, invalidated by defeat.
(Today, a Galileo would perhaps be shot; he would he no less in the
right for that. I admit that social history is a vaguer subject, hut on the
other hand our own will plays more of a necessary part in it.)
The concept of class struggle explains the history of the last twenty
years with a luminous exactitude, which is to say that it is intelligible only
in the light of Marxism.
It
is Marxism alone which allows us to under–
stand the defeat of socialism in Europe. And it is in Marxist terms that
Burnham indicates very well, in outline, the cause of socialism's defeat:
the weakening of the social position of the workingclass. We must add a
certain virulent growth of class consciousness on the part of the reaction–
aries (an access of consciousness which, however, ends up in a certain
blindness.... ) ... Isn't the history of the last twenty years largely
summed up in Foch's exclamation in 1918: "Better Ludendorf than Lieh–
knecht!" What Foch sowed, Weygand reaped. The German hankers who
said to themselves: "Better Nazism than Bolshevism!" have been served
in the same way. Such judgments expose both the clarity and the blindness
of reactionary class consciousness. (So, too, in another context, when
Stalin expands in smiles because Rihbentrop has come to clasp his hand:
