30
PARTISAN REVIEW
to these forty people gathered in the darkness between the sky and
the sea? At least this:-
We have not been so badly beaten, we are only defeated in the
immediate present. We have brought to the struggles of society a
maximum of consciousness and a will that was much superior to
our own strength. We have spoken in the name of the working
classes, whose aspirations and needs we have tried to make clear.
But they most often did not recognize them, could not understand
us, could not wake up to themselves, because in the depths of their
souls they were captives of the social machine. We all have behind
us a great number of faults and errors; the progress of thought
cannot be other than stumbling and vacillating. The first of these
is intolerance towards our own comrades, a fault springing from
that feeling of the possession of the truth which is at the bottom
of all strong convictions, and which is right and necessary-for we
do possess great truths-but which also tends to create inquisiton
and sectarians. Our salvation lies
in
a tolerant intransigeance
which recognizes in each other the right to error, that most human
of rights, and each other's right to
think otherwise,
the only right
that makes any sense of the word
liberty.
(I have thought and
I
have written this since 1920, when at Petrograd I saw the Russian
Marxists-then the purest, the most intelligent and the most virile
cohort of revolutionists history has as yet produced-striving
mightily to extirpate the "errors" around them, and thus already
creating inquisitors.) But this aside, we have been astonishingly
right. We have seen clearly and put down what we saw
in
our
insignificant little papers, while the statesmen were flounderins
about in a morass of disastrous imbecilities. We have foreseen and
glimpsed the human solutions to the problems engendered by
hi•
tory in movement. And we have known how to win, which must
never, never be forgotten. The Russians and Spaniards among us
have known what it is to take the world in your hands, make rail·
roads and factories go, defend bombarded cities, draw up plans of
production, and treat deposed masters according to their deserts.
We have seen the generals, the ministers, the financiers and the
archbishops smile ingratiatingly and tremble before us. No pre–
destination condemns us to be the victims of concentration camps
-and as for the prison-torturers, we know quite well how people
are put against a wall. Our experience will come in handy tomor·
