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PARTISAN REVIEW
The intellectual must not be deflected from his responsibility _by
inherited dogma. It is clear today that Marx's method was often
better than his own application of it. Experience is a better master
than any sacred text. The experience of a century has shown that
neither the capitalists nor the workers are so tough and purposeful
as Marx anticipated; that their mutual bewilderment and inertia
leave the way open for some other group to serve as the instrument
of change; that when the politician-manager-intellectual type--the
New Dealer- is intelligent and decisive, he can get society to move
just fast enough for it to escape breaking up under the weight of its
own contradictions; but that, when no one provides intellectual
leadership within the frame of gradualism, then the professional
revolutionist will fill the vacuum and establish a harder and more
ruthless regime than the decadent one he displaces; and that the
Communist revolutionist is winning out over the fascist and is today
in alliance with an expanding world power which will bring every
kind of external pressure to block the movement toward democratic
socialism.
These seem to me the actualities of the day.
If
their acceptance
means discarding Marx, let us by all means discard Marx. Too much
left-wing political "thinking" is a form of scholasticism. We must
make our own prognosis.
If
you say that the intellectual is a frail
reed upon which to lean, you are probably guilty of understate–
ment. But at least serious thinking
is
his job. Let him work at it for
a time. He is more likely to escape from his confusion than the
capitalist from his irresponsibility or the worker from his impotence.
Serious intellectual direction may give our politics a cogency and a
firmness which will maintain the equilibrium of forces and avert the
war with Russia.
If
we can avoid this war, if we can contain the
counter-revolution of the USSR within clearly marked limits, we
have a ·good chance to test the possibilities of a peaceful transition
into a not undemocratic socialism. But, if our leadership and de–
termination falter, neither democracy, socialism, nor anything else
will have any more of a future than Hiroshima or Nagasaki.
