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PARTISAN REVIEW
the defeats by the native governments and the betrayals by the leaders
of the left parties.
Contrary to the prophecies made in 1940, the victories of Hitler
have not brought about a stable fascist regime in France.
If
one is to
be established finally, it will require the deceptive assurances and back·
ing of the democratic nations. The conquest of France radicalized the
French people, revived their political will and prepared them for new
struggles. Even if victorious, Hitler cannot organize Europe on a
fascist plan. Nor will the victory of the Allies do away with the con·
ditions that made fascism and the war inevitable. Whether the Nazis or
the capitalist democracies win, the war will mean the further ruin of
Europe and misery to millions of victims. When Hook tells us in
his
article that capitalism does not wish to solve its problems scientifically,
he implies the same thing: that neither the victors nor the vanquished
will be able to make a lasting order out of this chaos. The war has
aggravated everywhere the conflicts of the pre·war period and made
clearer than before the inhuman, destructive, chaotic character of the
existing order. Neither Hitler nor Churchill nor Roosevelt has any
illusions about the stability of capitalism in Europe and the colonies,
no matter who wins the war,
it
is of the utmost urgency for them to
forestall or divert any reawakening of the workers to independent action.
Reactionaries throughout Europe are forced to speak in the name of
socialism, or at least against capitalism, if they wish to attract the masses.
Hook is able to arrive at his "simple piece of wisdom" only by
abstracting the war from its causes and consequences. How the world
will be redivided by the victors, how the war will affect economic rela·
tions, the imperialist rivalries and the movements for socialism and
colonial freedom, on all this he is silent. He attacks liberals for assum·
ing that an Allied victory will solve all problems by reminding them
that the conflicts of interest between nations and classes will continue after
the war, but he ignores the fact that they continue during the war and
are transformed in violence by the war itself.
His reasoning is essentially no different from Kautsky's in support
of the Kaiser in 1914. Kautsky argued then that a victory of the Czar
would mean the crushing of the German labor movement, the most ad·
vanced toward socialism in Europe, while the Czar's defeat would help
to bring about a revolution in Russia. In spite of Kautsky's good will
to the Russian revolution and the correctness of his prediction about
the internal effects of the Czar's defeat, Lenin denounced his arguments
as
a betrayal of socialism, and I believe that Hook shares this opinion.
Neither Lenin nor Kautsky could foresee in 1914 the military outcome of
the war, but Lenin alone was right in predicting from the beginning that
the war would not resolve the conflicts that had caused it, but would make
them more acute than ever, that it would bring immense misery to the
people of the whole European continent, and that its chief results
would be revolutionary convulsions and a redivision of the world
in
favor of the victorious powers. He was able to reach these judgments
of the consequences of the war because of his theory of its causes, even
though the latter did not enable him to prevent the war or to anticipate
the military outcome. And he defined it as the whole duty of a socialist
