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apparently were ready to be indoctrinated.
I, myself, once became a victim of the prevailing notion that Marxism
was a substitute for knowledge of any field, when I wrote a piece on the
principle of indeterminacy in physics for one of the Party publications.
Sidney Hook, with whom I was taking graduate courses in philosophy,
said the effort was amateurish and that I should stick to literary matters.
The intellectual poverty of the Communists seems to have spread to
the entire radical movement, for the general intellectual level even among
individuals and organizations who were critical of the Party was also low.
Yet the theoretical contributions of these early periods are overestimated
by Diggins, Wald, and Wilcox. Thus V. F. Calverton, the editor of the
dissident
Marxist Quarterly,
who, however much he might be praised in
Wilcox's biography for not toeing the Communist line, was distinguished
mostly for his idea of American "exceptionalism," which meant simply
that Marxism was to be applied in this country less mechanically and with
more attention to native traditions. The Lovestonites, one of the principal
opposition movements to the Stalinists, also subscribed to a theory of
American exceptionalism, and the Trotskyites spent much of their time
exposing the lies in Stalinist history and quibbling over Marxist doctrine.
Max Eastman, another dissident, and a fairly conventional and rather
superficial literary critic, was exposed by Sidney Hook in a series of
polemics about the dialectic and other fundamentals of Marxism, as not
being a very complex thinker. One exception was John Dewey, but he
admitted little knowledge of Marxism and was considered a leftist mosdy
because of his association with Sidney Hook. Even Hook, one of the few
first-rate minds on the left in the very early thirties, took part in some of
the hair-splitting Marxist debates, before he broke completely with the
Party around 1934. The provincialism of both the official left and some of
its critics was highlighted by the contrasting range and depth of the
contributions in
Partisan Review
after it started to come out in 1937 as an
independent, anti-Communist journal.
I've often wondered why so many remained in the fold, after I and
my colleague Philip Rahv broke with the Communists. It was not easy, as
we were vilifed and shunned. We were called imperialists, reactionaries,
literary snakes, and banned from some publications -like
The Nation
-
for
which we had been writing, and also blacklisted in other places. To be
sure, the nineties are not the thirties or the sixties. The left is not Stalinist
today. But many extreme notions and movements owe their credibility to
the idea that they are part of the continuity of the radical tradition - and
to the persistent hunger for ideology. No doubt, many of its supporters
also are tied by friendships , jobs, and intellectual habits.
W. P.
