PARTISAN REVIEW
and the gilt-edged Soviet Field Marshals! There is not one of the
things for which Lenin stood which has not been abandoned in the
country where the "Internationale," no longer the national anthem,
only waits for the proper moment to be forbidden altogether.
Men suffer enough from the troubles of their own generation,
. but we often find
th~m
fighting about forms that have not existed
since their fathers' day. A hundred years ago, when the Communist
Manifesto was about to appear and when the struggle between
capitalism and the proletariat had been first realized, a republican
or royalist background was presupposed. It is clear that in our time,
behind the struggle between capitalists and proletarians, there has
begun to develop a reality of an entirely different kind. The great
importance of your books, in my view, lies in the fact that they try
to make this different reality apparent to us. But the real nature
of a world metamorphosis is not to be appreciated in a few days,
even in several years.
France is not divided today merely into capitalists and prole–
tarians. She has, in actuality, a proletarian minority (nine million),
a capitalist class whose legal basis has been vaporized, and a clan–
destine privileged class of middlemen which is valueless to the State
because it does not participate in the process of production. A black
market which lasts indefinitely is not a mere accident; it is also a
form of economy.
Furthermore, this form is in itself a symptom. When I examine
the economy of my country closely, I often think that I am in a
never-never land. Reestablishing an economy of active production
is far more urgent for us than the resolution of Marxist problems;
and the ghost of Karl Marx must have a good laugh when he notes
the economic basis of the career of these millionaire racketeers, who
are protected by the Communist party, as they were by the German
army of occupation-and will be by us, too, if we do not take care.
What Gaullism stands for, first of all, is the restoration of a
structure and vigor to France. \Ve do not guarantee that we will
succeed, but we are certain that our opponents will not.
We have declared, right from the beginning of our political
activity: "There is such a disparity between farm prices and indus–
trial prices in our country that even so prosperous a nation as the
United States could not survive in the face of it."
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