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P
A R
T
I S
,A N
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E V I EW
thought of by the editors of
PARTISAN REVIEW
as unaffiliated Leftists
were at one time Communists or Communist sympathizers, for Com–
munism swept through a whole generation with devastating effect.
What these Leftists have in common, however, is not the fact that
they are ex-Communists but rather certain attitudes that made them
susceptible to Communism in the first place. That is, they are united
in their profound dissatisfaction with existing society, in their realiza–
tion that not only the intellectuals but
all
classes of people suffer from
.. the defects of the social order, in their adherence to conceptions of the
good life that have been evolved in the course of mankind's six thou–
sand years of experience with civilization, and in their sense of per–
sonal responsibility for present and future. On some such basis a group
of unaffiliated Leftists, some of whom continue to call themselves so–
cialists and some of whom do not, can be clearly distinguished.
This kind of Leftism rests ultimately on a conception of what is
right and what is wrong. The superficial Victorian idea of morality
has been so thoroughly overhauled by anthropology, psychology, and
Marxian economics and history that the very word is discredited, but
you only have to pick up any piece of Left propaganda, from the
Manifesto
to the latest election leaflet of either the Communists or the
Socialists, to see how dependent Leftists have been and are on a moral
appeal. The strength of socialism-in the most comprehensive sense
of1the term- has always been a moral strength. It has not only de–
nounced the oppressors as immoral; it has buoyed up the morale–
significant word-of the oppressed by saying, "The right is on your
side."
Yet Marx's skepticism about the moral appeal has its justification.
The bourgeois revolutionaries talked with the most pious fervor about
moral standards, but when they had won the economic and political
advantages they were seeking, many of them were able to forget that
their moral aims had not been realized. The formulation and certainly
the application of moral standards, Marx saw, were bound to be in–
fluenced by self-interest and class-interest. But instead of trying to
discover how material interests and ideas of right and wrong inter–
acted, he based his theories on class-interest while remaining in prac–
tice an indignantly moral man and appealing to the morality of his
contemporaries.
One of the principal tasks for unaffiliated Leftists today is the
rehabilitation of morality. Marx is by no means solely responsible for
our moral confusion, but his guilt is large. While availing himself of
all the moral prestige that utopian socialism, the bourgeois revolution ,
