254
PARTISAN REVIEW
efficiency of his government during the last war; and his management
of the war required no fundamental break with the interests of the ruling
group or change in their war aims. But the Clemenceau thesis is
an
excellent counterpart of Hook's whole political program, which contains
nothing of specifically working·class demands. He openly discourages
the workers from pressing their economic demands, which are
the
elementary grounds of class resistance and defense. ("Today the great
labor organizations and their political allies, instead of concentrating
mainly on time and a half for all overtime over forty hours and similar
measures, ought to build an independent political bloc, outside of
the
major existing parties".) His program for this labor party, which he
also calls the "progressive bloc", is even less radical than the Popular
Front in its exclusion of economic demands. This war·time Labor Party
is completely indifferent to the immense burden of taxation and high
prices that falls mainly on the workers. It has nothing to say about
the treatment of Negroes. In the light of this pretension to a genuinely
socialist workers program, it is ludicrous to read that his new party is
to be founded on class interests.
"If
it was unintelligent to believe, as
it
was, that politics is
only
an expression of conflicting class interests, for
in every civilized community there are some interests that are common,
it
is just as unintelligent to believe that it can be understood without
assigning to class interests great weight." The weight that Hook assigns
to the interests of the American working class may be gauged from the
program of his labor party.
The question of political support of the war by the left parties is at
this date of no practical significance for the military outcome. But
the
analysis of the causes and consequences is vitally important for guiding
the masses in the political crises that are bound to arise from the war
here and abroad. The program of Hook, which ignores the causes of the
war, which commits a labor party to the primary function of ensuring
the military efficiency of the war, which subordinates to this end
the
economic interests of the workers, which attacks the incompetence of the
government but conceals its imperialist designs, must in the long run
weaken the movement for socialism. How can a "progressive bloc"
with the patriotic program outlined by Hook change overnight at
the
end of the war into a party capable of uncompromising struggle and
lead the masses to political power against all the bait and psuedo·socialiat
promises of the bourgeois parties? I shall quote Hook himself on this
point: "a socialist and labor movement which ideologically disa11111
itself when it cooperates with its opponents for a specific task, may find
itself terribly disadvantaged after a purely military victory. What is
worse, it may find the world in such a state that it may become necessary
to put down another Hitler in twenty years." I believe that his conception
of the war and his program for a labor party are just such a psychological
disarmament, to say the least. In the future, as in the past, the real
leaders of socialism will be those who have firmly and repeatedly
told the truth about the nature of the war and have fought for the
economic needs of the workers and thereby prepared them for the strug·
gles that will come.
