PARTISAN REVIEW
a "revolution." The term "revolution," in Miss Kirchwey's honorific
use of it, is taken from the lexicon of old socialist theory in total
disregard of its original and classic meaning. In that meaning a
revolution was nothing if not a mighty release of political energy
on the part of the masses and the smashing of all the old and intol–
erable restraints and disabilities. Above all, a revolution meant the
taking hold of the machinery of power by the poor and exploited:
That is not what has happened
in
countries like Poland, Hungary,
and Rumania, where the revolution, in the technical.;;ense of a forced
transfer of power, was made not by the people but by policemen,
an exploit not envisaged even by the most aberrant planners of socialist
change. In all the puppet states it is not the workers who now dispose
of the governmental machinery and of the means of production but
solely the Communist Party bureaucracy, which, furthermc•re, is not
in itself an independent force.
It
is the agency of a foreign, that is, of
the Russian ruling class. Thus one set of masters has been replaced
by another,
far
more advanced in its demagogy and more ruthless
and efficient in its control of the masses. This is what liberalism has
come to in this country, that in the pages of a journal like
The Nation
the setting up of police states and the consequent political expropria–
tion of all classes, including the working class, is palmed off as the
fulfillment of the revolutionary ideal.
It is this sellout of liberalism that has now been going on for
many years that
has
prepared the ground for the rise of a politician
like Henry Wallace. The latter, combining
all
the wretched delusions
of liberalism in his own person and in his own right no mean promoter
of the mythical "economic democracy" of the East as against the dis–
dained political liberties of the West, is the most useful quisling that
Stalin has so far found in this country.
As
for his myth of "economic
democracy"
in
the East, in this respect he is surely no better and no
worse than Miss Kirchwey, who draws on the ideological fetishism of
economic forms to justify revolutions the aim of which is not to
liberate but to enslave mankind. Collaborationist liberalism has thus
fallen heir to the broken ideology of the Bolsheviks--an ideology
so degenerated that in Soviet Russia it
has
become an alibi for
mass-murder.
To my mind, there is no hope for democratic socialism unless
it frees itself of ideological prejudices and encrustations. Perhaps
528
