194
PARTISAN REVIEW
the deepest moral urges and liberating doctrines of humanity as stra–
tegies of enslavement. No wonder that for Burnham Sta.J.m's "great-
• ness" not only becomes indistinguishable from that of Marx or Lenin,
but also acquires a historic finality that reduces all radical opposi-–
tion to Stalin to sheer day-dreaming.
2.
When we come to Macdonald's piece, we move into another
realm, a realm of socialist piety, rectitude and evangelism:
If
Burn–
ham sees the political foxes at the helm of history, Macdonald putts
his faith in the revolutionary lions. And it cannot
be
denied that
Macdonald's values are more attractive-and more consoling.
But Macdonald's position is more of a moral stance than the
result of a political analysis- a kind of inspirational propaganda that
might be valuable for sustaining revolutionary enthusiasm in a
period when a Marxist movement
is
flourishing and there is wide–
spread agreement on its basic doctrines. At
th~
present time, however,
when the left is reeling from defeats and confusions, it seems to me to
be politically irresponsible to substitute revolutionary pep-talks, as
Macdonald does, for the task of reconciling the great promise of the
socialist movement with its uninterrupted failure. What Macdonald
has mostly been doing in the last years has been
to
push the
mil–
lenium ahead: each time the socialist movement is crushed or fails
to show its head, Macdonald blames the capitalists, the Stalinists, or
the social democrats, or the liberals, assuring us that the revolution
will materialize in the next crisis. The effect of such an attitude
cannot be other than to lull to sleep those who already believe that
socialism
is
just around the corner, and to make the socialist belief
utterly Utopian and not a little ridiculous to those who are not con–
vinced of its imminence.
Thus Macdonald's article
is
not much more than an attempt to
"show up" Burnham from the standpoint of revolutionary socialism.
Not that I disagree with much that Macdonald says, but what he says
is largely a reiteration of the time-worn truths of. socialist theory. This,
of course, is not an uncommon procedure in radical polemics, but in
Macdonald's case his lively journalism serves to conceal the lack of
political content. What, for example,
is
the content of
his
reply to
Burnham? Macdonald points to some contradictions in Burnham's
argument (and introduces a few of his own) ; he throws his entire
arsenal of abuse at Burnham; and he assures us, once more, of his
own revolutionary ardor. But most of the larger issues are evaded:
