PARTISAN REVIEW
than that, an extreme disequilibrium of prices that destroys all
natural relations among the various branches of the economy. Food
and clothing are impossibly expensive, while rents and bus fares are
impossibly cheap. There is no white bread, and in Paris there is
no milk and almost no butter: the "scissors" have opened, as Trotsky
described the process, and the cities are divided from the country.
The official extremes of economic regimentation are counterbalanced
by the wild freedom of the black market.
There is no stability in the various governments that are thrown
up by the changing parliamentary combinations. There is neither
clarity nor firmness in foreign policy. Every group, party and union
and association, acts and speaks for itself, as if it were independent
of the rest. The houses and apartments are cold, with their rooms
shut off from each other. The streets in the evening, which used to
be filled with people and light when I was last here, sixteen years
ago, are dark and nearly empty. There seems to be going on a process
Gf dissolution into what the political theorists of the eighteenth cen–
tury would have called "a state of nature": the nation, the state,
is withering, and the people are falling back into private associations
and merely individual lives.
I have been reminded of a documentary movie that I saw re–
cently. It showed a strange species of crab at the point in its devel–
opment when it must totally rid itself of its old shell in order to grow
the new shell without which it cannot live. The process was painful
in the extreme, tortuous, slow, and in fact grotesque. The old shell
was dead, but it clung nevertheless to the living flesh at a thousand
points. Finally, when at last the attachments were broken, there
came the most dangerous moment of all, when the old armor was
gone and the new not yet gained, and the crab stood alone, exposed
to all its enemies on the sea floor.
Malraux:
These are clearly times of change, of metamorphosis.
But, in contrast to our forebears, we are aware that the change is
taking place. We are troubled, however, because we cannot grasp
its nature.
While French capitalists and businessmen keep on assuring us
that economic factors are decisive, they are nevertheless subject to
political dictation in everything they do. They can no longer finance
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