VARIETY
475
tionary movement in this country
is weak, but weakness of number
is no reason for yielding to a false
position which promises now, as
in the past, to bring us no nearer
to our goals.
Hook ridicules as fantastic the
idea that the English and French
workers could have demanded and
taken power for a really demo–
cratic struggle against fascism.
Yet he himself believes that in the
United States, where the workers
are much less organized and po–
litically conscious than in France
and England,
"complete military
victory over Hitler"
requires that
the workers take the leadership in
the conduct of the war and that
the war be fought "in a
total
democratic fashion" (his italics).
This judgment is obviously false.
Superiority of Allied industry and
arms over the Axis does not need
today the leadership of the work–
ers or total democracy; but it does
require the subservience of the
workers to the national imperialist
interest, it requires that the work–
ers should not strike or resist the
economic burdens that the war
places upon them.
If
I wrote that "the question of
political support of the war by the
left parties is at this date of no
practical significance for the mili–
tary outcome", it is because I was
convinced that the war had
reached a stage in which the mili–
tary victory of the Allies was un–
likely to be affected by revolu–
tionary anti-war agitation in the
United States. But for the eco–
nomic consequences of the war in
both the victorious and defeated
countries, the struggle for work–
ers' power, the constant exposure
of the imperialist aims, the defense
of the economic interests of the
workers, and the strengthening of
their international ties in a revo-
lutionary spirit, are certainly of
great practical significance. For
these ends, without which the
anticipated growth of reaction can–
not
be
checked or the radical move–
ment revived, the program of Hook
is completely inadequate and false.
He conceals the imperialist char–
acter of the war, he ties the pro–
posed labor party hand and foot
to the government by his Clemen–
ceau plan, and he chooses to
minimize or ignore the economic
needs of the workers. When he
tells us that he cannot concern
himself with economic
co~ditions,
since prices, taxes and wages are
by their nature unstable and there–
fore cannot be leading issues in a
program for a labor party during
the war, he betrays his opportun–
ism and shows the incompatibility
o~
his war position and socialist
arms.
The other matters in dispute be–
tween us are not irrelevant to our
dillerences on the war. The im–
portance Hook gives to the re–
ligious "failure of nerve" as an
essentially ideological problem,
and his method of amalgamating
with it the criticism of the war
flow from the assumptions behind
his war position. As a supporter
of democratic liberalism, he now
directs his attack chiefly against
two opponents: Leninism and the
remnants of feudalism, and dis–
covers that the greatest menace to
our culture comes from the meta–
physicians and the theologians,
not from capitalism itself and the
commercialization and official con–
trol of culture. The old polemic
of the bourgeoisie against feudal
ideas replaces the Marxist polemic
against capitalist society.
On the question of "class
truths", he misrepresents simul–
taneously Marx, the old Hook and
his present critic. None of us
