1
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Propositions and 8 Errors
Philip Rahv
I.
THEm
10 Pmpo•i<ic"' on
the
Wa,
(luly-Augu•< ;,.uo) my follow·
editors Greenberg and Macdonald seem to me to have put themselves into
a snug sectarian hole. Their dicta outline a position which I cannot adopt
as my own because I regard it as morally absolutist and as politically
representative of a kind of academic revolutionism which we should have
learned to discard long ago. Despite the shattering surprises of the past
two years, Greenberg and Macdonald are still sure they know all the
answers. But the answers turn out to be nothing more than the same old
orthodox recommendations. Again we read that the social revolution is
around the corner and that imperialism is tottering on the edge of the
abyss, and again we fail to recognize the world as we know it.
Speaking for no movement, no party, certainly not for the working
class, nor even for any influential grouping of intellectuals, the authors
of the
10 Propositions
nevertheless write as
if
they are backed up by
masses of people and if what has been happening is daily confirming
their prognosis. They refuse to see anything which does not fit into their
ap~calyptic
vision of a single cleansing and overpowering event which
will once and for all clear away the existing social system in Britain and
in America, administer the
coup de grace
to the Hitler regime, and forth·
with usher in socialism. A splendid program, to be sure, a program of
maximum beneficence, but unfortunately its proponents fail to outline
even the initial steps to its realization.
The fact is that by his swift conquests Hitler has removed one country
after another from the area of possible revolutionary action. Thus the
war has evolved in such a way as to exclude more and more the prospect
of a socialist way out from the catastrophe. Now we have reached the
btage where the war will either be won by the combined might of the
Anglo-American imperialism and Stalin's Red Army, or else it won't be
won at all; and the military defeat of Germany remains the indispensable
pre-condition of any progressive action in the future. Such calculations
naturally prove disappointing to Marxists accustomed to look forward to
this war as the final act in the drama of the class-struggle. But reality has
utterly belied this agreeable perspective.
The orthodox Marxists thought that the imperialists of both camps
will exhaust themselves and then they will take over. However, things
have turned out otherwise. The exhaustion of imperialist Poland did not
lead to any "taking over'' by the Left but to its immediate fall to the
Nazis; and the combined exhaustion and betrayal of France produced
identical results. There has been no stalemate; England hal' l'Urvived, but
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