PARTISAN REVIEW
Marxism, but it never was capable of redefining itself in terms of the
problems that Marx raised. Against Marxism there prevailed frivolity,
bad faith, and a suspect kind of eloquence and rhetoric.
But if the bourgeoisie has a "bad conscience," this does not imply
that the proletarian revolutionaries have a "good conscience." On the
contrary, while they have attacked the bourgeois worship of "eternal
values" and exposed them as a mystification, they have themselves
smuggled in those very values through the back door. The values by
which the bourgeoisie justifies its domination are denounced as historical
and relative by the critical efforts of the proletarian thinkers, but once
these values pass into the hands of the proletariat they suddenly become
authentic and universal. "Bourgeois truth is the truth of a class, at the
service of a class, i.e., falsehood; proletarian truth is also truth of a class
at the service of a class, but this class makes of it the 'true' truth, the
truth of science."
The proletarian revolution is assigned the task of finally realizing
philosophy, for so far philosophy only has served to justify unjust con–
ditions through the elaboration of ideals which served untruth:
In the first effort of the Marxist thinker, all values are reduced to their
historicity; they are treated as means of attack and defense of the contending
classes. Then in a second effort the proletarian values, and they alone, are
erected in intangible and unconditional glory on the summits toward which
humanity. marches; they become the supreme end of revolutionary practice.
They are no longer pure absolutes as in bourgeois thought but rather
"relative absolutes," absolutes of history: they have passed into the
service of the proletariat and are now above the proletariat which is
destined to realize them; they have become the supreme reference by
which all tactical impostures, all momentary iniquities can be justified.
While reading Thierry Maulnier's attack, one isn't always very
clear whether he is speaking of Marxism or of Stalinism, but this con–
fusion of the critics is hardly surprising
if
one reflects upon the all–
pervasive confusion on this subject in the French left. The well-known
leftist Catholic review
Esprit
(by no means a fellow-traveling organ),
recently devoted a whole issue (December 1947) to the danger of a
Gaullist neo-fascism while ignoring almost completely the danger of
Stalinist totalitarianism and, in fact, advocating an alliance with the
Stalinists against De Gaulle. Joseph Rovan, e.g., can write in this issue:
There is no Third Force in present-day politics. The eternal Third Force
lives in libraries and convents and dies on the scaffold. Present-day politics force
us to choose between fascism and revolution, between two kinds of violence,
between Gaullism with or without De Gaulle on the one hand, and common
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