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PARTISAN REVIEW
acceptance of the main direct theses of "Lenin's Heir": "That Trotsky
underestimated Stalin and that he did not understand the historical na–
ture of Stalinism-here I am in agreement with Burnham." Macdonald
is like the wife in Boccaccio who pops her young lover into a chest just as
her husband makes a surprise re-entry; and then, sitting on the lid of
the chest, launches for her good spouse's ears a blistering denunciation
of the neighbor wife's infidelities.
Macdonald vastly over-rates my public role when he joins
New
Masses
in warning against me as "dangerous" and a "public menace."
I confess that, in politics, he on his side has always seemed to me not at
all a menace, but a joke.
Ill. The Lions and the Foxes
WILLIAM PHILLIPS
JAMES BuRNHAM's drastic revaluation of Stalin's person and place
in history seems to have outraged most orthodox Marxists and peo–
ple committed to some rigid doctrine of revolutionary change.
They resent not only what they consider Burnham's inflation of
Stalin's stature, but, even more, his dismissal of the socialist idea as a
tragic and Utopian dream. And Macdonald's heated rejoinder to
Burnham in this issue may be taken as representing the reaction of
those radicals who will brook no revision of the moral and political
postulates of the revolutionary tradition.
Thus in the pieces by Burnham and Macdonald we see two
protagonists of the extreme. Burnham presents himself as the sceptic,
pessimist, debunker of illusions; Macdonald as the man of faith,
optimism, social virtue. The drama inherent in any such clash of ab–
solutes cannot be overlooked, and it must
b~
said that both Burnham
and Macdonald have used to the full the rhetorical possibilities of
the situation. Unfortunately, however, for those of us who are serious–
ly concerned with the fate of socialism
in
our time, the polemical
strategies employed on both sides have practically obscured the real
issues underlying the controversy. For one thing, Burnham has clothed
his scepticism in the somber tones of "reality," while Macdonald
