Kulturbolschewismus Is Here
Dwight Macdonald
IN
THE PERIOD
of reaction we are living through, it is peculiarly
unfortunate that, as Dos Passos remarks in the introduction to his
latest book, "Americans as a people notably lack a sense of his·
tory." For the modem intellectual needs a sixth sense if he is to
survive-the historical sense. Confronted by .a frustrating histori–
cal situation-the breakdown of the political, social and cultural
values of the bourgeois order, and the simultaneous impotence of
any progressive revolutionary force to sweep clear the debris-our
intellectuals have for the .most part either tried to find their way
back to the long discred.ited values of the bourgeoisie, or else have
begun to move towards a totalitarian "solution." But for the values
they instinctively want to preserve, both roads lead to historical
dead-ends.
The swing back to bourgeois values has been up to now much
the stronger. It has caught up almost all the old intellectual leaders
of the left wing. Lewis Corey, whom we once looked to as the out–
standing Marxist economist, has discovered "the industrial capi·
talist virtues-however imperfectly realized-of pr-oduction for
welfare, democracy and peace"
(Nation,
May 19, 1941). Louis
M. Hacker, once the "coming" Marxist historian, has also discov–
ered the virtues of "industrial" as against "finance" capitalism
(as Hitler did years ago) and now regards Rockefeller as "a great
industrial innovator" who "conformed to the pattern of the enter–
priser of classical economics"
(Nation,
Dec. 7, 1940). Sidney
Hook, once the leading Marxist philosopher, has swung away from
Marx towards John Dewey and celebrates all kinds of extremely
vague beauties in capitalist bourgeois democracy
(New Leader,
passim.). John Dos Passos, the "irresponsible" chronicler of the
last war, flies to England, fittingly accompanied by Thornton
Wilder, to help the bellicose P.E.N. Club win this one. Max East·
man, the hero of the old
Masses
trial, the gay rebel, the original
American Trotskyite, writes war propaganda and publishes an
