As
to Values and Facts: An Exchange
I.
Max Eastman to James T. Farrell
Dear Jim:
The paragraph in PARTISAN
REVIEW
for January-February in which
you dismiss me as a Philistine seems to have more than a personal signifi–
cance. I'd like to discuss it with you. It is a continuation of Dwight Mac·
donald's similarly offhand remark in the previous number that my essay
on
Socialism and Human Nature,
which he considers "downright silly," is
part of a general "swing back to bourgeois values." I think you both
adopt this papal tone because you dare not confront my arguments. More
accurately, you dare not confront your own knowledge of the facts.
There has been no change of values. Louis Corey, Louis Hacker,
Sidney Hook, John Dos Passos, James Burnham-the ones Macdonald
names-Alexander Harmine, Boris Souvarine, Max Nomad, to name three
more-what evidence is there that any one of these men has lost his devo–
tion to the cause of the exploited and the ideal of a democracy that shall
be more than political? What evidence that any of them lives a different
life-eats, works, sleeps, writes, speaks, amuses himself, spends his money
differently?
Alexander Barmine has well summed up, for brief quotation, what
is in the minds of all of them:
During the years since the Moscow trials of 1936-38 I have
spent many days and many sleepless nights thinking deeply about
the whole problem of our Russian revolution. I have tried my
best to see clearly to what result, after all these years of effort
and sacrifice, it has arrived.
Our idea of socialism rested upon two rna
j
or assmuptions:
that under a collectivizep economy production would rise very
much higher than it can under capitalism; and that the exploited
wage workers would get Lhe main benefit of this increased pro–
duction-until in the
lo~tg
run , exploitation should cease. The
Soviet economic system together with Stalin's totalitarian politi–
cal regime have disproven both these assumptions....
The collective ownership of the machinery has been a fail–
ure, and the working class, instead of gaining, has paid in in–
creased misery for this failure.... Private property in the means
of production is not a necessary basis for the exploitation of a
man by man-Stalin at least has taught us that!
Where is the change of values?
When I first took my political p_gsition in the old
Masses,
I described
it (April 1913) as "scientific idealism." In an editorial of March 1914, I
spoke of "the spirit of experimental science" as "the only new thing
among us," and explicitly disassociated myself from those to whom revo–
lution means "a love of the flavor of ideas of revolt, rather than a con-
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