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PARTISAN REVIEW
her continental allies have all suffered total defeat. Now Russia is next,
and if Stalin fails to stem the invasion it won't be a Trotskyite but Hitler's
Gauleiter who will be installed in the Kremlin.
Actually, Greenberg and Macdonald's ideas a1e just as Utopian
a~
the ideas propagated in England by people like Harold Laski and Francis
Williams, who appeal to the British capitalists to abdicate, to commit
social and political suicide, so as to build up the morale of the anti-fascist
peoples and give the war a "creative meaning." Laski and Williams look
to the Churchill government to execute and supervise this "revolution by
consent." Now one must really possess an ultra-metaphysical faith in the
goodness of human nature to adopt such a program! For if anything can
he learned from historical experience, it is surely this: that no ruling
class hesitates to put its class interests above its national interests. The
conduct in this war of the bourgeois strata in France is the perfect con–
firmation of this insight into class-behavior. There is no reason to doubt
that if it were not for the promise, of American aid the British conserva–
tives would have long ago forced a negotiated peace with Hitler. American
intervention is the only brand of "socialism" those people want and under–
stand-it is Churchill's "socialism" and, I am afraid, Bevin's and Mor–
rison's too. And at that, looking at it strictly from their point of view, it
is by no means such a bad substitute.
No, declare the extremists, democratic capitalism will never do away
with itself in order to speed the day of victory; hence it must be over–
thrown, and this is the only way to win tlie war. Well, all one can say in
reply is that if this is true then the war is as good as lost. For consider
this: since they concede-tactily at least-the futility of counting on an
internal upheaval against the Hitler regime so long as the Nazi armies
have not been defeated, they have perforce narrowed down their revolu–
tionary expectations to the two democracies. But these are precisely the
countries where the working class is least schooled in independent politi–
cal traditions and where reformism is the sole norm of labor action.
Economic conditions in America and the relations between the social
classes being what they are, is it not sheer romanticism to believe that
basic revolutionary changes are likely to occur here in the near future?
And, remember, we are not speaking of a revolution anytime, sometime,
but right now, not later, at any rate, than within the next two or three
years, before the situation is irretrievably lost through a definitive Hitler
victory.
Revolutions, however, are not made to facilitate a fight against a
distant enemy--especially not when a good part of the population, as in
this country, holds that this fight is none of their concern-but only when
the masses are convinced that there is absolutely no other way out from
the impasse .in which they find themselves. Moreover, even such a con–
viction will in itself come to nothing unless the top-sections of society are
at the same time thrown into a iltate of confusion and the armed forcea
