DAVID SIDORSKY
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cated that Marxist theory carried within itself the seeds of an antide–
mocratic approach to the question of political authority. Critical analy–
sis refuted both the Marxist and Leninist-Trotskyist thesis that the
political leadership within a capitalist democracy is nothing but the
executive committee for bourgeois class interests.
In
the anticommunist community, the debate over Trotskyism was
carried out primarily in the pages of
Partisan Review.
As the "dismal
decade" of the thirties neared its end, one of the central issues of that
debate was the legitimacy of American political action against Nazi Ger–
many at the risk of entry into a second World War.
In
terms of the Trot–
skyist analysis of that period, the struggle between the Western
democratic polities and Germany was interpreted as a struggle between
one oppressive domain of imperial, corporate capitalism in England and
the United States against another, more oppressive domain, which was
categorized as the decadent "last phase of capitalism," in Nazi Ger–
many.
In
this view, there was little to choose between these two forms
or phases of repressive capitalist society.
The argument that there was no essential moral difference between
American capitalism, despite its formal institutionalization of democra–
tic freedom, and the German capitalist regime, despite its restructuring
as the instrument of the National Workers' Socialist Party, was formu–
lated in a last pro-Trotskyist editorial in
Partisan Review.
This argu–
ment continued to be supported by the young Trotskyist literary critic,
Irving Howe, as well as in the pages of
Politics,
a breakaway from
Par–
tisan Review
founded by Dwight Macdonald . For Sidney Hook, as for
the changing view of
Partisan Review,
the struggle of the Second World
War was essentially between the imperfect societies of democratic free–
dom, which merited protection, and the evil polities of totalitarian
expansionism, which ought to be ended .
This contest between democratic freedom and totalitarianism has sig–
nificant implications for theoretical political philosophy. For Hook, it
indicated, in general terms, that contrary to Marxism, political institu–
tions are not simply epiphenomenal to an economic substructure.
Rather, the difference between the institutions of a free democratic soci–
ety and their totalitarian negation is far more important than the issue
of capitalist or socialist ownership of the means of production.
Within a few years after the Second World War, Hook defined the
struggle between the Soviet and Western blocs in its moral aspect as rep–
resenting a struggle between democracy and totalitarianism. Accord–
ingly, Hook's enlistment for the cause of democracy led to his
characterization as a "Cold War warrior."
