DISILLUSIONMENT AND PARTIAL ANSWERS
Much can be said against Dos Passos's approach, which
s~ems
to us narrow and unhistorical, offering no perspectives for the future.
What it suggests, though not quite explicitly, is that individual free–
dom and the productive capacity of modern economy are somehow
tied up for good with the techniques and incentives of capitalism.
If
that is true then it is really all up with us. For the trend the world
over is irresistibly away from private capitalism, and if freedom
and productivity depend on its survival then "the regime of the law
of the club that centers in the Soviet Union," as Dos Passos so aptly
calls it, will surely prevail. His mood, justified no doubt by the fate
of radicalism in our time, is that of defeat and pessimism. But there
are two kinds of pessimism-a cathartic pessimism which, in purging
us of our illusions, reanimates our thought and braces us for the .
tasks ahead, and a pessimism that brings on intellectual and political
prostration.
It
is the latter kind of pessimism that may well trap the
homeless radical mind into a realignment with used-up political
formulas and outworn social forces.
The perspective of a democratic socialism, that is, of a planned
and socialized economy combined with the fullest political and cultural
liberty, has by no means been annulled by historical events. On the
contrary, it is still the only possible perspective, despite its present
vulnerability in a world dominated by Soviet totalitarianism on the
one hand and American capitalism on the other. Of these two forces,
both hostile, the former is by far the more barbarous and deadly,
and for this reason the libertarian socialists have no alternative but
to direct their main struggle against it. In this struggle a strategic
alliance, chiefly in this country, with bourgeois democracy and to
a certain extent even with the bourgeoisie as a class (insofar as its
interests coincide, in however temporary a fashion, with those of
democracy) becomes unavoidable and in fact indispensable if the
struggle is not to be conducted in a quixotic and futile manner. At
this time the opportunity for free socialism arises principally out
of the conflict between its greater and lesser enemies. This lesser
enemy, namely American capitalism, is now plainly in no position to
bear down on the non-Communist left at home or abroad. A series
of imme.IJ5e blunders, mainly on the part of Roosevelt in his dealings
with the Soviet government, have put capitalism in so perilous a
situation that despite all fears and doubts it must extend its support
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