DISILLUSIONMENT AND PARTIAL ANSWERS
compensation or solace to us,
has been
compelled
to
adopt a policy
of the lesser evil, and one that carries far greater
risks
than ours.
Still, in grasping this opportunity it
is
imperative that we shun any
alignment with capitalism apart from the immediate need and that
we do not fall in with its flattering idea of itself as the system alone
compatible with the practice of democracy.
Now
Dos
Passos
is
apparently unable to evaluate the present
relation of forces in terms of the struggle against Stalinism. Instead he
engages in what seem to us
to
be purely speculative analogies
be–
tween the "socialized economies" of Soviet Russia and Great Britain,
finding that "in its ultimate implications British socialism
is
turning
out
to
be not so very different from the Russian brand." That
is
an
inexcusably loose statement, for
in
Russia the economy
is
ruled by
the arbitrary power of a dictatorship whereas in England it
is
managed
by a representative and fully democratic government. Dos Passos
claims that "personal liberty has been contracted in Great Britain,"
when actually the structure of political freedom
is
wholly intact. The
evidence cited by Dos Passos shows that the contraction he speaks of
has occurred solely in the economic sphere. Socialists, however, do
not consider the right to buy and sell as one pleases to
be
a signifi–
cant part of the heritage of freedom. Since it is not that sort of con–
traction that set us against Soviet Communism, it is even less likely
that it
will
set us against the effort of the British Labourites.
The policies of the Labour government are indeed open to
criticism, but scarcely for the reasons Dos Passos is able to summon.
Insofar as that government has not learned the lesson of interna–
tionalism and
is
trying to establish socialism in one country, its effort
is bound to fail. It has long been known that the framework of the
nation-state is too narrow for a socialist economy.
As
not a few
economists have demonstrated, the frantic drive for export markets,
even
if
successful, offers no solution to the British problem, since
it
cannot conceivably lead to a rise in the standard of living. The
equalization of poverty, undertaken by the Labour government, is a
good thing in itself, but after all the task of socialists is to organize
not poverty but abundance; and abundance can be attained only
through a radical extension of the area of planning and production,
in other words, through a federation of European states. Only such
a federation or union would make possible a rational division of labor
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