41>0
PAUL
DELANY
Social Darwinism now being put forward by Professors Jensen, Shock–
ley, and Banfield. (In mass culture, the same message appears in films
like "The Godfather," "The French Cormection," etc.).
If
one
is
serious about changing the American system of govern–
ment, or others like it, the first step must surely be to wrest control of
the economic apparatus from its present owners, whether by revolu–
tionary seizure of power or by gradually replacing priva:te capitalism
with state ownership.
A
powerful communist or social democratic party
(as the case may be) would seem to
be
the indispensable agent of such
a transition. Unfortunately, the American Communist movement has
dwindled into small groupings of mutually hostile sects, nor have the
recent electoral successes of social democratic parties in Germany, Aus–
tralia, and elsewhere registered any impact on U.S. politics. The U.S.
remains unique among industrialized countries in having no mass party
of the left. Yet to build such a party here would be a monstrous task ;
one can understand the discouragement of so many radicals, and can
hardly blame them for making a separate peace - so long as they rec–
ognize
it as such, and refrain from claiming tha.t the revolution will come
about when everyone wears blue jeans and eats organic peanut butter.
In any case, a truly egalitarian and liberated post-industrial society, if
one
is
ever to be achieved, is far more likely to come
in
some technolo–
gically advanced but peripheral country than
in
the U.S. - a shambling
dinosaur that lacks even a comprehensive system of social security or
medical care. Meanwhile, Marcuse still tries to penetrate capitalism's
sturdy carapace with the rapier of Hegelian rationality, and proclaims
that "humanitarian and moral arguments . . . can and must become
central social forces"; such accents, in this era of Watergate and the
8-52, remind me of nothing so much as of Mr. Micawber's
cheerful
insistence that "something widely different from existing circumstaalces
will shortly turn up."
Paul Delany
