260
PARTISAN REVIEW
such that a new situation results in which what was formerly correct
is no longer so.
A man who doesn't use the medicine prescribed for him may become
very
ill;
if he rushes to take it in his weakened condition it may kill him.
He needs a new, perhaps a more bitter medicine. The failure of the
socialist and labor movement in 1914 to live up to the resolutions of the
Basle Congress narrowed and worsened the subsequent altern·atives it
faced. Its failure :to prevent the rise of Hitler to power, which was
not inevitable, created a situation in which the means that would once
have been able to stop him are no longer valid. New means must now
be found to insure at least the survival of the socialist movement. I
briefly outlined one course. What other practicable alternative is there?
Merian offers us faith, hope and prayer in words drawn from third-period
Stalinism set to a Trotskyist chant. "The difficulties of the socialist
movement", he tells us, "lie not so much in the realm of theory as in its
application." A remarkable theory as Merian interprets it! It is "valid"
but it has no successful applications except such as would bury the
socialist movement.
3.
It
is not true that I disregard the causes of the war and con·
sider only its consequences. The latter are relevant in deciding what
attitude socialist and labor parties should take towards it. Incidentally,
the criterion of consequences is the one Marx himself followed in decid·
ing which wars to support, although he believed that in his time the main
causes of
all
of them were rooted in Capitalism. The causes of the war,
as I indicated, are relevant to
"how
the war should be fought (in the
non-military sector) and the
kind
of peace that should
be
made." That
is why I urged the labor movement, while giving Roosevelt military
support, to differentiate itself from him politically and organize an
independent Labor Party.
4. Since I was not writing a
complete
program for such a party,
I do not see why I had to supply details on specific economic demands,
taxes, and prices-which vary from period to period-or on the treat·
ment of Negroes, Jews and other minorities. Nor do I see why I should
be
called on to discuss James Burnham or the problem of China. As distinct
from Merian, I have never attempted to say everything at once. Does
Merian mean to imply that I am opposed to the Negroes and to better
conditions for the workers? All that is lacking is the phrase "it is no
accident that Hook fails to mention ..." to make his polemical methods
comparable to those of the
Daily Worker.
In certain places they are
indistinguishable. The passage he quotes as evidence that I "openly
discourage the workers from pressing their economic demands" indicates
that I was urging the organization of an independent Labor Party not
as a
substitute
for economic demands but as an
additional
task, the main
political
task. Nor is the Catholic Church my "momentary ally"
any
more than the German-American Bund is his. The Moscow Trials
should have taught a Trotskyite to avoid the methods of political amalgam.
And like every humorless fanatic, he interprets my raillery as an irrev·
erance before historic necessity and as a personal insult to its prophets.
No
one could infer from his polemic that the incidence of my analysis wu
directed against uncritical support of Roosevelt by the labor movement.
