OUR COUNTRY AND OUR CULTURE
577
passions that cannot be allayed by oil royalties or suppressed by
foreign guns.
It
would seem that the non-material forces are princi–
pally serving the opposition."
Still, one cannot behave as if the two main dangers of our time,
the triumph of Stalinism and the outbreak of a new war, are always
to be met with the same gesture of opposition. (Unfortunately, few
of the intellectuals agitated by the first danger are audible on the
second.) The power of Stalinism does not permit one to settle on
an isle of rectitude equidistant from both sides, for totalitarianism
is a social evil distinct from any we have known. Between the inade–
quate democracy of the capitalist world and the total repression of
the Stalinist world there is the difference between life, however
affiicted, and death. Veering and tacking as history compels him, the
to
socialist intellectual must try to defend democracy with some real–
ism while maintaining
his
independence from and opposition to
the status quo.
This stamt is'made all the more difficult by the fact that Marx–
ism itself is in 'crisis-though not, I think, because of the innumer–
able attacks that have recently been directed against it, many of
which are symptoms of the ignorance that flowers from a wish to be
au courant,
or of the guilt of former Stalinists whose rejections of
1952 are as shabby as their affirmations of 1932. The difficulty
with Marxism is internal, its failure to respond to the shocks of
recent history; mired in dreary piety and drearier "propaganda,"
the Marxist groups have been unable to confront events with the
imaginative boldness of their teachers.
Nonetheless, Marxism seems to me the best available method
for understanding and making history. Even at its most dogmatic,
it proposes a more realistic theory of society than the currently
popular liberalism which, in an age of catastrophe, fore,sees an
America blandly coasting through a series of New Deals and seems
never to consider that its talk of the "promise" of America might
be affected by-perhaps even the result of- the fact that 75 per cent
of our national budget is devoted to the military.
My political views, then, play a part in determining my re–
sponse to the questions put by the PR editors-just as, it should be
emphasized, it is the readiness of certain intellectuals to make their
peace or strike a truce with the status quo that impels them to willed
