THE FUTURE OF SOCIALISM
513
Their handling of the masses was purely empirical, reduced to an old
elementary psychology which caused them to slip into the abyss of
facility, that is to say into a rigid doctrinairism, into a faith erected
on discord, and before long into a cult, at first semi-involuntary,
of the Leader. They conceived dialectical materialism as "a rigorous
conception of the world embracing nature and society.... " This
possession of the complete and absolute Truth made great men dog–
matic and mediocre men clerical. The official faith of the "Marxist"
State (what had Marx said about it?) condemned free inquiry, the
pluralism of hypotheses, individual opinion. This policy was hardest
on the man rebellious against official Truth and ·the authoritarian
paralysis of thought. Stalinism finally settled on a home-grown util–
itarian kind of investigation, upon statistics deliberately fabricated,
upon a uniform literature and upon the persecution of the psycho:
analysts. From the Marxism of the scientific spirit to a new obscuran–
tism established on repression and the Right of the State: the cycle
was complete. The drama of the old-line Bolsheviks' annihilation by
bloody purges was paralleled in intellectual life by tl1e massacre of
the Marxist-humanists by parvenus who refused to see the problems
and found only the elementary solutions of terror.
This
rapid decline of Bolshevism coincided with the weakening
of democratic socialism in western Europe. Some of the essential
elements of the socialist ideology had, little by little, infiltrated the
general mentality. It was impossible to write history any more without
assigning the highest importance to economic factors. No longer
could any government ignore workers' legislation or soda! planning.
In penetrating the very core of industrial civilization, socialism lost
its own identity. This fact would have been in its favor except for a
phenomenon which, precisely, its doctrine had not foreseen. The
greatest error of Marx and the Marxists had been that of eighteenth–
and nineteenth-century bourgeois optitnism. It consisted in predicting
a
development of industrial technique simultaneous with the devel–
opment of human mentality:
technology and "enlightenment," aware–
ness on the part of the working class, the advent of socialist morality.
But the techniques of production had a prodigious development, far
outstripping that of social organization and that of the average man.
Socialism delayed liberating the wage earner from this well-controlled
technology; industrial techniques, fallen into the hands of scheming
blackguards, fools, and reactionaries, became a mighty instrument of
bondage and destruction.
By producing much more with much less manual labor, modem
