THE DOUBLE CRISIS
their operations, fire a worker, or fix a sales price according to their
own inclination.
The French middle class has .always held it an article of faith
that money should first be saved up, and then passed on to the
children. But what
is
the good of savings which are always threatened
by devaluation? Workers believed that nationalization would free
them from the condition of their class. They no longer believe it.
Finally, the revolutionist has been disillusioned by the discovery that
the working class in revolt in any nation no longer counts on the
support of the international proletariat, as the nineteenth century
supposed, but on the Red Army.
It
is really not absurd to describe Europe as suffering from a
breakdown of conscience, not unrelated to the breakdown which
marked the end of Roman paganism. The European has a bad con–
science: he no longer feels easy about either
his
privileges or his
colonies. It is obviously false to think that Russia provides an exam–
ple of a classless society; rather it
is
a country where the privileged
classes judge their privileges to be legitimate. Bear in mind that there
are only two countries in the world where privileges are accepted as
legitimate: the U.S.S.R. and the United States. This is in part due
to the recent origin of these two countries, and in part to the fact
that in both of them there is still a relation between privilege and
social utility.
After inventing optimism while she was conquering the world,
Europe loses this optimism, with its faith in progress, as she grows
weaker. You and the Russians inherit, while Europe vacillates be–
tween an ideology which would call for her resurrection and several
others which excuse her death pangs.
Burnham:
You describe a reality in terms of which many of
the present institutional forms of French society are not so much
inadequate as irrelevant. It does not seem likely that a solution can
be found by the methods of the present government or of any
similar government.
New parliamentary combinations, speeches about balancing the
budget while passing bills that increase the deficit, new taxes that
are evaded and new price levels that are laughed at on the black
market, demagogy for the peasants, and rhetoric against the Com-
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