A Challenge to Communists
I
THE Seventh World Congress of the Communist International has finally discovered, after seven years of profound meditation and internecine squabbling in Moscow, that Russian Marxism has not the exclusive right to combat Fascism and other forms of reaction.
The Comintern now graciously admits that there are other parties, other forces, which are concerned with the preservation of human liberty, and even goes so far as to permit its adherents to coöperate with this ‘socialFascist,’ ‘petty bourgeois’ riffraff. A special Marxian dispensation now makes possible mixed political marriages for the purpose of presenting a united front to the common enemy. But, as in the case of actual mixed marriage between Catholic and Protestant, the doctrine of Marxist infallibility imposes certain reservations on the less dogmatic partner to the union. No Communist must abate one jot or tittle of his True Faith, and the offspring will automatically be claimed by the Marxist Church.
In other words, if reaction is defeated in any place, the result is wholly due to the farsighted policies of Karl the Omnipotent.
Once the Soviet Government found it both necessary and expedient not only to abandon the myth of worldwide revolution but to conclude agreements with the powers of capitalist darkness, further concessions were inevitable. But what are expedients and concessions in matters of international trade and defense become, in the realm of ideas, something more. They are acts of the utmost condescension to those of us who have been obliged for years to listen to arrogant denunciations by the Party dogmatists of every form of human activity, intellectual and political, artistic and economic, which does not conform to their own intransigent preconceptions. There was, it is true, a species of Communist limbo reserved for ‘ fellow travelers,’ who were deemed to hover between the hell of capitalism and the heaven of Russian Marxism. These penitents were treated with patronizing patience and encouraged to perform acts of selfmortification until, with the abnegation of all spirit of free inquiry, absolution was declared. It would seem that we are all (under certain circumstances) ‘fellow travelers’ now.
To the Communist Party in this country, those echoes of the echoes of Moscow, this decision of the Comintern to consort with unregenerate liberals and Socialists has been a bitter pill, an olive branch turned to wormwood, so to speak. Scared into an illusion of their own importance and of the imminent destruction of their party by hysterical Congressmen and professional Red-baiters, American Communists have unceasingly and unsparingly reviled and misrepresented every citizen and every party that differed from them as to the means of economic salvation in the United States. Imitating their Moscow masters, as usual, they have overlooked the interesting fact that a dictatorial and absolutist position, which may have been necessary to preserve the Bolshevik revolution from its enemies at home and abroad, has no justification whatsoever in this country.
If they ever counted the number of votes they have received, they might realize that the task of consolidating the American Communist revolution and of liquidating the opposition is one that lies so remotely in the future that it is more than premature to talk and act as if the proletariat were precariously in power — it is downright stupid. More, it is ludicrous to pronounce the anathemas and excommunications of a proletarian dictatorship which does not exist, when the ostensible purpose of the propaganda is to gain converts. These are the methods of intellectual thugs.
It is, however, hardly surprising that American Communism should behave as if it were a Soviet Government fighting for its life against White Russian invaders and international capitalism. It has no roots in this country; it lives, moves, and has its being in Moscow. Its postulates are all derived from European experience and its theories from those of a mid-Victorian German Hegelian, who could no more have foreseen the United States of to-day than could any other human being who lived between 1818 and 1883. As is well known, the last thing in this world that Marx anticipated was Russian Marxism. He very naturally regarded England, France, and particularly Germany, as the advanced industrial countries where his catastrophic view of history would be realized. In the Communist Manifesto of 1848 he actually wrote that the ‘bourgeois revolution in Germany will be but the prelude to an immediately following proletarian revolution,’ a statement which was as immediately disproved by the facts, and which has never been further from realization than at the present time.
Characteristically, Friedrich Engels also pointed to the ill-fated Paris Commune of 1871 as an example of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ and declared that ‘since 1789 Paris has been placed in such a position that no revolution could there break out without assuming a proletarian character,’ this despite the fact that the revolution in question resulted in the founding of the bourgeois Third Republic.
II
It is this doctrinaire quality in Marxism which makes those of us who are now elected to be ‘fellow travelers’ smile skeptically at the condescension of the Russian Marxists. It is they who are discovering their mistakes of tactics, with which we have been as long familiar as with their mistakes in matters of historical fact. It is, of course, exceedingly kind of them to concede that there are other parties with other means of combating reaction and obscurantism. Sooner or later they will discover that there are millions of people who resent a dictatorship of the proletariat as deeply as they resent a dictatorship of military bullies or plutocrats, people who put the interests of society as a whole above those of a class. American Communists, now that they have been instructed to collaborate with all parties combating Fascism, might do well to reflect on the realities of the Marxist situation today, as this will make it easier for them to see themselves as others see them. As a first step, since they are living in a democratic, bourgeois republic, they might consider the application of Marxism to American conditions.
They will notice at once that Marxism has never succeeded in any democratic country. German Socialism from the beginning was essentially Marxian, as was more than natural, but no revolution ever resulted in its establishment, and after the war the contribution of Russian Marxism to the cause of Socialism in Germany was to sabotage it, in the name of Moscow, until the triumph of Hitler was assured. Moscow and Versailles combined to do their bit for freedom in Central Europe! In England, where Marx lived for thirty-four years and where he founded the International in 1864, his Socialism made no impression on the British working classes. In 1881, H. M. Hyndman founded the Democratic Federation, later the Social Democratic Federation, which made Das Kapital its textbook throughout its entire existence, but it was the Fabian Society, not the handful of English Marxists, who gave England the only kind of Socialism the people would accept. Hyndman, incidentally, was violently opposed to Russian Marxism after the 1917 revolution. He claimed, as a free citizen, that he had as much right to interpret Marx as had Lenin or Trotsky.
In his early days, however, Hyndman and his followers were as dogmatic as only the evangelists of an inspired gospel can be. ‘Socialism,’ writes an historian of the movement, ‘as first preached to the English people by the Social Democrats, was as narrow, as bigoted, as exclusive as the strictest of Scotch religious sects. Das Kapital, Vol. I, was its Bible; and the thoughts and schemes of English Socialists were to be approved or condemned according as they could or could not be justified by a quoted text.’
It is evident that the English Marxists of the eighties proceeded in the manner to which our American Communists have accustomed us. The latter may well ask themselves if the pursuit of the same tactics may not lead to their eclipse and to the same fate as that of the Social Democratic Federation. The same author further describes the Marxian nightmare in words which very aptly apply to the hallucinations of American Communism : —
‘The whole world, outside the Socialist movement, was regarded as in a conspiracy of repression. Liberals (all capitalists), Tories (all landlords), the Churches (all hypocrites), the rich (all idlers), and the organized workers (all sycophants) were treated as if they fully understood and admitted the claims of the Socialists, and were determined for their own selfish ends to reject them at all cost.’
In the circumstances, which considerably resemble the circumstances in present-day America, there is no occasion for surprise that Fabian Socialism eclipsed Marxian Socialism in England. In view of the fact that much that was part of the Fabian programme fifty years ago is still regarded as highly revolutionary by our rugged individualists, it is not unreasonable to suggest that Fabian rather than Marxian tactics are the best guarantee against Fascism in the United States. It has been frequently pointed out, not exactly in the friendliest manner, that the spokesmen and adherents of Communism in this country are to a very large extent aliens or citizens of very recent date. Without falling back on the time-honored policy of ‘why don’t they go back where they came from,’ one can quite legitimately insist that it is rash, unintelligent, and provocative to view the problems of the United States exclusively from the vantage point of a Union Square soap box. Dialectical materialism takes no account of some of the fundamental factors in the composition of the American people.
Class consciousness, for example, is a thoroughly non-American concept, and the persistent effort to apply the term, in its European sense, to American conditions is merely to convince the majority that those who use it are aliens, and incurably so. It may deceive a handful of unhappy industrial workers, preferably in the larger cities, but the term means nothing to the overwhelming bulk of the population; and to traveled Americans, or impartial foreign observers, it is a monstrous travesty of the truth.
In Europe, even in republics like France or Switzerland, the existence of classes is an historical fact, and class consciousness has a real meaning, not only for one class but for all. America is a middle-class republic and was created as such, and the outstanding feature of the country is the existence of one great bourgeois class, to which everybody belongs, whether rich or poor. Some Americans have more money than others, but all hope to have as much as the next, not because a class privilege is thereby conferred upon them, but because the making of money is the one career open to all. Other careers, especially the disinterested service of the state, are disdained, as a rule. Money as the reward for individual enterprise, despite Marx’s theories, is the ideal of the majority of citizens and the reality behind the phrase ‘life, liberty, and happiness,’ in a country where ambition is offered no other satisfaction.
III
As countless observers have reported, including the eminently communistic Mr. John L. Spivak, even the depression has not convinced the average American that he is a desperate proletarian, who must either jump on the barricades or lapse forever into that station to which God has called him. He merely regards himself as out of luck temporarily, and he certainly has every right to feel instinctively that his plight, in a country such as this, is infinitely different from that of an unemployed miner in South Wales. Distress, unemployment, and starvation in a country with America’s resources, America’s history, America’s psychology, cannot be confused with the same phenomena in Europe, except, for purposes of Communist Party rhetoric. An unemployed American is an American citizen who happens to be out of a job; an unemployed Englishman is more usually than not a man who was always gratefully surprised when he had a job, and who is resigned to the thought that he may never again have one.
National history and psychology play a part apparently undreamt of in the philosophy of Union Square, and however useful it may be to Communist politicians to confuse the issue, as a matter of practical fact it is useless to address one’s self in a psychologically foreign language to the American people. In terms of dialectical materialism, as in terms of humanity, an underfed family is underfed, whether it be gazing at the device ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,’ witnessing the jubilee of George V, or yearning for a chicken in every pot, with Mr. Hoover. But these three differences correspond to three different fundamentals in the evolution of three different masses of humanity. To confuse them is not only ‘dialectically’ absurd, but it is the most, ignorant form of bad taste and bad tactics.
In other words, Russian-fed American Marxists had better find out what country they are living in, what are the normal reactions and sentiments of American citizens. The effort, for example, to drag in the fetish of the ‘white collar’ worker, whenever a nonmanual worker joins a trade-union, is merely an attempt to saddle America with a distinction of classes, known in England as the ‘black coat’ worker, which is patently at variance with American practice. Manual labor is not here the stigma of an inferior class, as it is in Europe, and nobody except a class-conscious, semi-alien American has ever noticed any tendency on the part of the citizens of this country to draw aside from a man in overalls because he is not ‘good enough’ for them to associate with.
On the contrary, one of the most charming and finest things in American democracy is the total absence of that kind of snobbery, on the one hand, and self-consciousness on the other. The traditional American phrase, ‘from shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations,’ embodies a point of view, based upon experience, which is far removed from the theories based upon a social order which has scarcely changed in two hundred years.
The economic interpretation of history is important, but it cannot be transplanted without a change. In Europe the ‘ idle rich ’ are a survival of a social hierarchy which, under various names, has been part of the scheme of life for centuries. They have been a target of denunciation, for that reason, by English Socialists. In America the rich are not idle, save for an infinitesimal minority of the population. They work or pretend to work, but they never put forward idleness in itself as an ideal.
In fact, what wealthy Americans have never learned is how to be usefully idle. This being a workingclass country, even those who could afford to do so refuse to stop working, thereby keeping many a person in need of employment out of a job. Nevertheless, they are denounced as if they were identical with the idle rich of Europe, whose families may never have made even the faintest pretense of working for generations. Rich Americans are on the defensive, exactly in proportion to their wealth. Rich Europeans are proud of their wealth and are protected by it, especially if they have not actually earned the money themselves. If one insists upon interpreting the history of a people economically, elementary common sense would indicate that these factors be taken into account. Is it possible that American Communists are afraid to face the fact that the most brutal capitalists are those who were themselves once ‘proletarians,’ although that is not exactly how they saw themselves when they started out to see what they could achieve in this land of opportunity?
Perhaps the most comically illuminating instance of that misunderstanding which passeth all understanding is the recent discovery by our American Marxists that, in addition to being the heirs to the only economic wisdom of the ages, they are also the torchbearers of the American Revolution. Here, again, we recently promoted ‘fellow travelers’ must demur. Fortunately, even Marx and Engels could claim no part in that historic event, so it is not exposed to such glosses as were bestowed upon the Paris Commune of 1871, or the German revolutionary movement of 1848. There was no question of the dictatorship of the proletariat in 1776, any more than there was in France in 1789. In both cases the objectives were simply defined and conceived by cultivated middle-class gentlemen, the difference being that the colonists were not exposed directly to the abuses which the French confronted and abolished. In each country the revolution attained its purpose, which was the establishment of a bourgeois republic and the abolition of a hereditary monarchy and other hereditary privileges. When such invaluable efforts at emancipation occur to-day, as in Spain, Moscow sneers derisively because the proletariat has not been glorified, and the sneers are dutifully echoed in Union Square.
If American citizens had been flogged into the ghettos or banished to Siberia by the Tsars, undoubtedly their outlook on life would be more class-conscious. If Jefferson or Hamilton had ever been beaten by an English nobleman’s lackeys, as Voltaire was beaten by the Duc de Rohan’s, obviously the direction and nature of the American Revolution would have been different. France and America disposed of that problem in the eighteenth century, but Russia had to wait until November 1917. As a preliminary step in the direction of this united front against Fascism, could Union Square and Moscow bring themselves to admit that the ‘ten days that shook the world’ shook Russia more than they shook us?
IV
In brief, Russian Marxism will have to overcome its condescension to liberal thought throughout the civilized world if there is to be any coalition against Hitlerite and Fascist obscurantism. The politicians of the Communist Party, of course, will have to continue to bait the Socialist Party and the American Federation of Labor, and to attribute the foulest motives to the mildly Fabian programme of President Roosevelt. That is the nature of political animals; they must have their fleas. But assuming that the Comintern is concerned about more than its own Bolshevik hide; that the Soviet Government has finally come to realize that the very civilization out of which its idealism was born, that the main objective of Marxian ideology, is being destroyed as much by Marxist intransigence as by Fascism in all its forms — what, on that assumption, is to be the degree of cooperation?
Not even the Daily Worker and the New Masses can expect everyone to stand by them while they devote their time to the defamation of every individual and every cause which has not been blessed by Stalin. Russian Marxism will have to understand that not since the Middle Ages has the civilized world been confronted by a sect which claimed to be in possession of the absolute Truth.
Mankind revolted against that absolutism and it will revolt again, but not with the assistance of absolutists, by whatever name they call themselves. The liberation of the human mind from dogmas has been the one achievement which justifies a belief in the progress of mankind. We are living in times when that progress seems more doubtful than it has seemed since the Renaissance. Liberty of thought is extinguished over the greater part of Europe, and, according to temperament and circumstance, men and nations are taking refuge in the most convenient dogma.
The Catholic Church was outraged when Luther nailed his theses to the door, the Holy Inquisition was convinced that Galileo was a blasphemous fool when he said: ‘But still, it moves.’ They refused to follow the ‘party line’ of their time, and subsequent history has amply justified them, as it has justified all those who have contributed in any way to the emancipation of man from dogmatic superstition. Russian Marxism will have to face innumerable Luthers and Galileos. There is no reason why Communism as interpreted in Russia should apply to conditions in other countries, especially in view of the fact that a semi-Asiatic, almost wholly illiterate country, two centuries behind Western Europe, can hardly be conceived of as competent to instruct a French or a Scottish Communist as to how exactly the Marxian Theory of Value can be made comprehensible to his own countrymen.
American Communists particularly are placed in a peculiar position. In every respect, except one, their country is the most remote from Russia, politically, historically, economically, industrially, and psychologically. But there is one point in common between the two countries: they are enormous in size, population, and resources, thereby differing from all other nations in Christendom. But, exactly where Russia is backward and deficient, America is advanced and developed, in education, intercommunication, industrial mechanization. Yet it is in America that Communism, like Socialism before it, has failed to evolve any non-European theory corresponding to the special needs and circumstances of American life. America has been spared many phases of European evolution and there is no reason why she should follow the pattern of the Old World. She has not done so up to now, save in the most superficial sense. It would be hard to imagine anything more alien to the American temperament than the totalitarian state. The United States is a powerful ally for all who are opposed to that form of government. But it has little use for doctrinaires and is traditionally pragmatic. Too many doses of Das Kapital, too many instructions from Moscow, too much class consciousness in Union Square — and Fascism will have the enthusiastic support of a bourgeois people.