EASTMAN VS. FARRELL
205
own emotional and intellectual life which had been organized around
the means.
That is the only way I can explain the fantastic inventions with which
some of you justify yourselves in continuing the struggle on the old
terms. The notion put forward in Macdonald's and Greenberg's "Ten
Propositions on the War," that the working class can take over all power
and productive property in America during the war by a "mass revolu·
tion," and nevertheless without "especially violent struggle" and with
"political democracy" in the outcome, has about as much to do with the
realities around us as a virgin birth of Christ made blissful by the twilight
sleep. It is on a par with
Jim
Cannon's recent discovery that a victorious
revolution of the kind envisaged by Leon Trotsky will in the United States
"with absolute certainty" affirm freedom of speech, press, assembly, and
religion. (Poor Trotsky!) The revival in
Modern Socialism
of De Leon's
idea of a revolutionary party which will abdicate in favor of the working
class economic organs after the p6wer is seized, has the same pathos. Who
or what is going to make it abdicate? The Ghost of Daniel De Leon?
Under present conditions, any one of these proposals, if taken seri·
ously in action, would lead straight into the totalitarian tyranny. They
serve only to protect you in a familiar state of mind and feeling.
Not much more than a year ago,
Jim,
you remarJced to me that a dic–
tatorial party would inevitably seize the power in any revolutionary
upheaval. In a subsequent conversation on the same theme, you said: "It
makes one hesitate to summon the workers to revolution." These were
momentary remarks and of course not binding upon you, but they indi·
cate what things you had to shut your eyes to before emerging with. this
bland excommunication of me as a Philistine.
It
is the first time I have
been called a Philistine by a member of the National Academy, and at the
risk of seeming immodest I am going to dwell upon it a little. You accom–
plish my excommunication with six edicts or annunciations.
l.
"The Philistines are coming together."
By this dictum you associate me with the moralistic and valetudi–
narian aesthetic of Van Wyck Brooks and his recent reactionary attack on
science and literary adventure-an attitude to the refutation of which I
have devoted no less than six books. Since Brooks attacks me with acid in
the very book in which his discourse was printed, the assertion that we
are "coming together" would seem, in ordinary conscience, to demand
proof. Your proof is that Macdonald brought our names into the same
list in a similarly casual obiter dictum about a "swing back to bourgeois
values" in the article you are discussing.
2. These Philistines who are coming together "wail for a Weltan–
schauung." "They are disturbed because they do not see sufficient faith
in
their fellow men. Max Eastman declares that his contemporaries lack
faith in democracy."
Aside from the arbitrary linking of my name with that of Van Wyck
Brooks, your sole ground for the assertion that I wail for a Weltan·