PARTISAN REVIEW
issues," must
be
the purest poetry, for it seems to
be
inhabited by no
actual individuals.
There are cited, I should have to note, a few facts. And here lies
x's claim to originality. In stimulating contrast to the reactionary capital–
ist
histories (which give 1903 as the date, and Lenin as the leader), he
tells us how the Bolshevik faction was formed, under Plekhanov, in
1898. "At the outbreak of World War I," we can learn,
~'fewer
than
20 percent of the people [of Russia] could read and write" (no doubt
"the outbreak of World War I" could be stretched to include 1897, the
base date selected by the Bolsheviks in order to make plausible their
literacy myth). In the United States, we find, "during the decade of
the twenties, private capital furnished for domestic expansion about
$28 billion of new capital annually" (reactionary capitalist economists
might suggest that
x,
if
he is talking about anything at all, has confused
the annual rate of total savings with the rate of new investment).
"There were no popular elections in Russia,"
x
informs us, "and
therefore Lenin preached extreme methods." He does not explain how
Lenin's party obtained its representation in the prerevolutionary Duma–
presumably, since there were no elections, the members were appointed
by the Czar. Even on the Truman Doctrine, which
x
so often belabors,
the date of inception
is
altered by a year from the 1947 figure that is
palmed off by the kept press. It hardly needs adding that, in
x's
history,
"the Chinese Communists are Chinese first and communist second," and
"pro-Chinese rather than pro-Russian." On the authority of an (un–
named) "representative of the National City Bank,"
x
assures us that
the Chinese Communists are "pretty much like the old Non-Partisan
Leaguers of North Dakota." With a triumphant contradiction, moreover,
x
almost qualifies as a dialectician, when he reveals that the methods
of Communism "were a carry-over from and a natural reaction to the
absolutism of Czarist Russia."
Toward World Peace,
however, was written not by
x,
but by Henry
Wallace, a very public figure, most prominent carrier of a very political
movement. All such comments as I have started to make on the literary
work of
x
are,
without
exception, inappropriate and irrelevant to the
analysis of this campaign document of this particular political movement.
The book, and Wallace himself, are minor episodes in the move–
ment. About the movement there
is
one, and just one observation of im–
portance: it is the pro-Soviet party in the United States. That is all.
There is nothing else.
The usual fallacy in political analysis
is
undersimplification. Since
it
is troublesome to face the extreme limitation of choice in politics,
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