BOOKS
77
Revolution
is successful. As a serious study of, in the words of its modest
.;ubtitle, "What Is Happening in the World,''
it
boils down to a number
of broad statements organised into a plausible enough structure, but
UD·
~upported
by data and floating in an ether of formal logic far above any
historical context.
These are sweeping charges. I shall try to justify them.
In
his letter in a recent issue, Victor Serge commented on Burnham's
"sudden and amazing abandonment" of Marxism. The most extraordinary
instance of this occurs on pages 44-5 of the hook. Here Burnham states,
without any qualifications, that (I) the fact that the revolution broke out
first in the backward country of Russia was "contrary to the opinion of
all socialist theoreticians prior to 1917," and (2) that once the revolution
luzd
taken place in Russia, "the leaders of the revolution itself" expected
it to develop steadily towards socialism. That is really shameful! Leon
Trotsky, Burnham's own leader and teacher for five years, in his long
study, "Prospects of a Labor Dictatorship," written in 1906, argued in
great detail against precisely these two conceptions. • The most charitable
explanation is that Burnham is suffering from that "cultural amnesia"
which Philip Rahv described in this magazine two years ago, a mental
disease which has been spreading like wildfire among our intelligentsia
since then, and in which the victim, as the result of some great shock,
simply
cannot recall
the most elementary truths from his past experience.
THE
Before examining Burnham's major thesis, I want to go into
METHOD
his method a bit, since it is in its method that I think the rt)ot
of the book's failure lies. Burnham's procedure in this hook
seems to me to violate at least four requirements of a scientific approach
in
its field: precision and consistency in defining terms; the critical use of
data; rela'tion of concepts to a
historical
rather than a
formal-logical
con·
text; caution in making sweeping claims and predictions.
There is a passage on p. 260 which shows up in concentrated form
most of these methodological weaknesses. "In the 1936 elections," he
writes, "probably three-quarters or more of the bona fide capitalists were
against Roosevelt. In 1940 the figure must have been above 90%.•.. The
simplest explanation which can cover the facts is here, as always, the best.
This
explanation is merely that the capitalists oppose the New Deal be-
*This is available
in
English in
Our Revolution
published by Holt in 1918. Rele–
Ytnt passages are:
(l)
"The industry of the United States is far more advanced than
the
industry of Russia, while the political role of the Russian workingmen, their inftu.
eace
on the political life of their country, the possibilities of their influence on world
politics in the near future, are incomparably greater than those of the American pro·
letariat.•.. You can reassure yourself by saying that social conditions in Russia are
not
yet
ripe for a Socialist order, and you can overlook the fact ·that, once master of
the
situation, the workingclass would be compelled ... to organize national economy
under the management of the state." (2) "Without direct political aid from the Euro·
pean proletariat the workingclass of Russia will not be able to retain its power and to
him
its temporary supremacy into a permanent Socialist dictatorship." Trotsky wrote
thia
in
1906. I wonder how Burnham's book will read in 1952.
