Introduction by Kevin Coogan

“The Root Is Man” Then and Now

Marxism is the most profound expression of what has been the dominant theme in Western culture since the 18th century: the belief that the advance of science, with the resulting increase of man’s mastery over nature, is the climax of a historical pattern of Progress. If we have come to question this pattern, before we can find any new roads, we must first reject the magnificent system which Marx elaborated on its basis. A break with a whole cultural tradition is involved, and Marxism looms up as the last and greatest systematic defense of that tradition. (“The Root Is Man,” 1946)

The collapse of the Soviet Union ended a historical epoch that began with the storming of the Bastille. Today, history no longer absolves Fidel. The disintegration of the Marxist project has left the Left exhausted. Like it or not, the breakdown of Marxism, the unraveling of its scientific and moral claims, is a fact.

Marxism’s demise is not just the extinction of capitalism’s strongest ideological foe. Marxism was also one of the most profound intellectual expressions of the High Enlightenment belief in Science, Progress and Reason. Marxism’s crackup reveals(to those willing to look) gaping fault lines in the philosophical foundations of the modern age.

In the spring of 1946, Dwight Macdonald published “The Root Is Man” in politics, the journal he and his then-wife Nancy created after breaking with Partisan Review three years earlier. “The Root Is Man” is largely about the theories of one man: Karl Marx. Macdonald argues that any serious critique of Marxism must come to terms with Marxism’s origins in the European Enlightenment. Macdonald shows us the Victorian optimist in Marx, the would-be Charles Darwin who believed he had finally uncovered the evolutionary law of human history but whose system unwittingly articulated, as well as challenged, the desires and values of his own time. “The Root Is Man,” however, was not an exercize in armchair Marxicology or another obituary for a god that failed but a painful reexamination of views Macdonald had held for over a decade both as a Communist Party fellow traveller and later as a Trotskyist revolutionary.

Born in New York City in 1905 and educated at Phillips Exert and Yale, Dwight Macdonald entered radical politics in the early 1930’s as a fellow traveller of the American Communist Party. After Stalin’s famous Moscow trials, Macdonald broke with the CP and became a strong supporter of Leon Trotsky. In 1939, shortly after the signing of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, Macdonald joined the Socialist Workers Part (SWP), the American branch of Trotsky’s Fourth International.

Macdonald made it clear early on that he would be one troublesome Trot. When submitting his first article to the Trotskyist journal New International in July 1938, Macdonald enclosed a long letter to the editor attacking a previous contribution by Trotsky that defended the crushing of the Kronstadt soviet of sailors and workers in 1921. Macdonald thought Trotsky’s piece “disappointing and embarrassing.” In his letter Macdonald question a Bolshevik Party that “concentrates power in the hands of a small group of politicians so well insulated (by a hierarchical, bureaucratic, party apparatus) against pressure from the masses that they don’t respond to the needs of the masses until too late.” Despite dangers from the Right, “Are not the dangers of an airtight dictatorship, insulated against mass pressure, even greater?” The “Old Man” (Trotsky) was not amused. “Everyone has a natural right to be stupid,” Trotsky wrote in reply to Macdonald, “but beyond a certain point it becomes an intolerable privilege.” (This was later popularized into: “Every mans has a right to be stupid on occasion, but comrade Macdonald abuses it” — which was the way Macdonald always — and frequently — cited it.) James Cannon, Trotsky’s chief American lieutenant and SWP National Secretary, also knew trouble when he saw it. Cannon dubbed Macdonald “flighty Dwighty” and mocked him as the “very model” of a “political Alice in Wonderland.” In Memoirs of a Revolutionist, Macdonald mocked back:

Alice is presented in Carroll’s book as a normal and reasonable person who is constantly being amused, bewildered or distressed by the fantastic behavior and logic of the inhabitants of Wonderland....[In] the Trotskyist movement, I must confess I often felt like Alice.

In “The Root Is Man,” Macdonald was more biter: “Anyone who has been through the Trotskyist movement...as I have, knows that in respect to decent personal behavior, truthfulness, and respect for dissident opinion, the ‘comrades’ are generally much inferior to the average stockbroker.”

At the time Macdonald joined the SWP the situation inside the tiny sect was particularly savage. The SWP was racked by a series of fierce internal political debates; debates that would crucially influence “The Root Is Man.” Macdonald had been drawn to the Trotskyists precisely because of his reservations about the nature of Stalin’s Russia. Now the SWP was fissuring over the same basic question: What was the correct Marxist view of the Soviet Union?

On August 22, 1939, the foreign ministers of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed a non-aggression pact that stunned the world. One week later, Germany successfully invaded Poland. The USSR, in turn, seized large sections of Eastern Poland with the approval of the Nazis. In late 1939 the Soviet Union also launched its own “defensive” war against Finland.

The SWP majority argued that the Nazi-Soviet Pact did not change the Trotskyist view of the USSR as a degenerated workers’ state worthy of critical support. Trotsky saw Stalinism as a temporary distortion of the world revolution caused by backward economic and social conditions in Russia. Yet as long as the Soviet Union maintained a socialist economic base (the nationalized economy), Trotsky insisted that the USSR remained true to its revolutionary origins.

Throughout the 1930’s, Trotsky worried that the real threat to socialism stemmed not from Stalin but from Nicholai Bukharin, another Old Bolshevik who would be a major defendant at Stalin’s Moscow Trials. Bukharin strongly opposed Trotsky’s call for the forced industrialization of the USSR. Bukharin argued that the Soviet Union should return to some intermediate form of a market economy and not antagonize the country’s vast peasant population. Trotsky saw Bukharin as a stalking horse for a capitalist restoration of the USSR and feared Bukharin’s ideas would be used by “rightist” bureaucrats to justify dismantling the nationalized economy.

For Trotsky, Stalin was a centrist concerned only with the preservation of personal power. During times of world political stagnation, Stalinism tilted toward the capitalist-restorationist siren song of Bukharin inside the USSR and the appeasement of capitalist powers abroad. Yet, in times of revolutionary upheaval, the same Stalinist machine could either realign with Trotsky, the leading advocate of “permanent revolution,” or risk its own destruction in a new radical upsurge.

Stalin’s adoption of the Trotskyist Left Opposition call for the forced industrialization of the USSR (a policy that led to countless deaths, the destruction of agriculture and a virtual civil war in the country side) was, for Trotsky, objectively progressive because it strengthened the socialist economic base of the society. Stalin’s failure to advocate revolutionary class war, however, mirrored the backward nature of the Stalinist bureaucratic caste. To see Stalinism as a simultaneous reflection of both the progressive economic base of the USSR as well as Russia’s backward economic, cultural and political superstructure was, Trotsky argued, to think dialectically. Events like the Hitler-Stalin Pact, far from shaking Trotsky’s faith, only confirmed his view that the Soviet bureaucracy could make the most radical reversals in policy. Under the right historical circumstances, Stalin could turn around and adopt Trotsky’s policies easily as he embraced Hitler.

To the SWP minority, Trotsky’s defense of the USSR (no matter how brilliantly argued) was radically wrong. Instead of seeing the USSR as a degenerated workers’ state worthy of critical support, the minority argued that Stalin’s Russia had become a bureaucratic collectivist nightmare, a modern despotism of immense proportion drenched in blood. Trapped in this new, more brutal Ottoman Empire, ordinary workers enjoyed far less freedom than in the capitalist West. The fact that the USSR had a nationalized economy only meant that much more power for the Stalinist elite as it extended its totalitarian rule into all aspects of civil society.

Dwight Macdonald entered the SWP a firm supporter of the minority. Eager to join the fray but very much the new kid on the block, Macdonald complained:

I wrote three long articles for the “Internal Bulletin” [of the SWP] but, although I had no trouble getting printed in Fortune, Harper’s, The Nation, The New Yorker — or for the matter The New International — my manuscripts were monotonously rejected. The 800 members of the party, steeped in Marxicology, aged in the Bolshevik-Leninist wood, were a highly esoteric audience, while I was a highly esoteric writer. They were professionals, I was an amateur. (Macdonald, Memoirs of a Revolutionist)

Finally Macdonald did get published and Trotsky again took note. Macdonald’s article (which appeared shortly after the minority had broken from the SWP) included the sentence: “Only if we meet the stormy and terrible years ahead with both skepticism and devotion — skepticism toward all theories, governments and social systems; devotion to the revolutionary fight of the masses — only then can we justify ourselves as intellectuals.” Trotsky was enraged. Just a few weeks before he was murdered, the old lion roared back:

How can we work without a theory?... The whole article is scandalous and a party which can tolerate such a man is not serious... We can only develop a revolutionary devotion if we are sure it is rational and possible, and we cannot have such assurances without a working theory. He who propagates theoretical skepticism is a traitor. (Trotsky, “On the ‘Workers’ Party’”)

For Trotsky, theoretical skepticism was a more dangerous threat to Marxism than any Stalinist assassin. Marxism was the most advanced expression of Reason, the High Enlightenment’s ultimate tribunal for human action. Trotsky believed Marxism’s scientific method supplied a foundation for moral and political action far superior to abstract religious or bourgeois class morality.

Marxism, however, was a peculiar science. In science (at least the banal, bourgeois kind) anyone using as accepted method can reproduce the findings of others. Yet Marxism’s own history seemed guaranteed to encourage theoretical skepticism. For wasn’t Bukharin also a Marxist? (Indeed, Bukharin was considered the leading Bolshevik experts on Marxist economics.) And Kautsky? And Stalin? And what about the Mensheviks — weren’t they Marxists, too?

The key issue, of course, was not the denial of the usefulness of Marxist theory in giving profound insight into issues of history, culture, art and science. Instead, the debate centered on absolutist claims by various Marxists who wrapped their own subjective political decisions in the mantle of Marxist orthodoxy.

Like his Stalinist foes, Trotsky used appeals to the class basis of moral values and the supposed demands of historical necessity to defend acts otherwise hard to justify. After all, it was Trotsky (not Stalin) who as the major author of War Communism supported the drafting of workers into factories and the abolition of independent trade unions. It was Trotsky who helped create the gulag work camp system and it was Trotsky who had nothing but praise for the Bolshevik secret police when Social Revolutionary, Left Menshevik and Anarchist critics of Bolshevism were being brutally imprisoned, executed or forced into permanent exile. And it was Trotsky who encouraged Stalin’s disastrous forced industrialization of the Soviet Union. In his book The Breakdown (Volume Three of Main Currents of Marxism, Leszek Kolakowski argues that for Trotsky:

All “abstract” principles of good and bad, all universal rules of democracy, freedom, and cultural value were without significance within themselves: they were to be accepted or rejected as political expediency might dictate...for Trotsky there was no question of democracy as a form of government, or of civil liberties as a cultural value... To say that a thing was good or bad in itself, irrespective of political consequences, was tantamount to believing in God. It was meaningless to ask, for instance, whether it was right in itself to murder the children of one’s political opponents. It had been right (as Trotsky says everywhere) to kill the Tsar’s children, because it was politically justified. Why then was it wrong for Stalin to murder Trotsky’s children? Because Stalin did not represent the proletariat.

Trotsky defended such twists and turns by repeated appeals to dialectics and Marxist scientific method. Not surprisingly, the SWP opposition began to hammer away at Trotsky’s attempt to make himself the chosen interpreter of Marx’s method. In his essay “Science and Style,” James Burnham, then an NYU philosophy professor and the SWP minority’s leading theorist, challenged Trotsky:

...it is a direct falsehood to say that I, or any other member of the opposition, reject the Marxian theory of the state. We disagree with your interpretation and application of the Marxian theory of the state....Since when have we granted one individual the right of infallible interpretation?

As for Trotsky’s invocation of science, Burnham asked:

Does science, as you understand it, and the truths it demonstrates, have a name? What name? “Proletarian” science and “proletarian” truth?... You are on treacherous ground, Comrade Trotsky. The doctrine of “class truth” is the road of Plato’s Philosopher-Kings, of prophets and Popes and Stalins. For all of them, also, a man must be among the anointed in order to know the truth.

Trotsky immediately grasped the threat. In “An Open Letter to Comrade Burnham,” Trotsky’s answer to “Science and Style,” he warned:

The opposition leaders split sociology from dialectic materialism. They split politics from sociology....History becomes transformed into a series of exceptional incidents; politics becomes transformed into a series of improvisations. We have here, in the full sense of the term, the disintegration of Marxism, the disintegration of theoretical thought... (both “Science and Style” as well as “An Open Letter to Comrade Burnham” can be found in Pathfinder’s In Defense of Marxism.)

Trotsky’s argument was specious. The opposition did not deny the validity of trying to find continuity or development in history. Yet on a deeper level, Trotsky’s fears were justified. In essence, the opposition challenged Trotsky’s privileged position as interpreted of Marxist doxa. But if Marxism was an open method,rather than an exact science, specific political decisions could no longer be grounded on appeals to historical necessity since it was not clear that anyone could honestly claim to know that necessity in the same way science knows the exact distance between the earth and the moon.

Throughout the history of Marxism, personality cults have arisen both in tiny sects and vast nations to repress open claims to interpretation. As soon as such claims are advanced and the scientific mantle surrounding Marxism deconstructed, so too are the totalitarian structures of one-party rule, “objective truth” and heresy hunting that go hand-in-hand with them.

The painful truth about Trotsky was that he didn’t have the slightest philosophical (or moral) problem with the suppression of the Mensheviks or Anarchists. The Objective Demands of History justified all. now the evil genie of subjectivism and limits to knowledge (themes crucial to “The Root Is Man”) appeared inside the purest of Marxist sects. No wonder Trotsky feared the “disintegration of Marxism, the disintegration of theoretical thought....” Marxism as a system modeled after the paradigms of 19th century science was becoming unhinged; its truth claims relativized.

The minority challenge, however, went deeper. The SWP opposition also called into question orthodox Marxism’s emphasis on the economic base as the ultimate determinant of the political and cultural superstructure. by claiming that the base had been so subordinated to the superstructure that the USSR could no longer be defended as a workers’ state but opposed as a new, more horrible form of totalitarianism, the SWP minority denied the most fundamental fixed category of classic Marxist analysis.

After leaving the SWP in 1940, the minority renamed itself the Workers Party (best known as the Shachtmanites after their leader, Max Shachtman, who had been one of Trotsky’s top lieutenants). Besides Shachtman, the Workers Party had other outstanding members like C.L.R. James and Hal Draper. But the Workers party had also unwittingly debunked the very rationale of the vanguard party. James Burnham was one of the first to realize this. Almost immediately after splitting with the SWP, Burnham quit the Workers party and announced he had lost faith in Marxist dialectics.

Unlike Burnham, Macdonald remained a Workers Party supporter although he resigned from the sect because he was unwilling to follow party discipline and have his articles vetted by the leadership before publication. (At the time Macdonald was both a writer and editor of Partisan Review.) It would take the catastrophe of the second World War to further awaken the enlightened Marxist Macdonald from the security of his own dogmatic slumber.

Dwight Macdonald opposed American involvement in the Second World War. His opposition was rooter in the American Left’s anti-war tradition and, in particular, the Socialist Party’s resistance to U.S. involvement in World War I. Along with his comrades in the Workers Party, Macdonald called for a revolutionary uprising of workers both in Germany and the Allied powers to end the slaughter, a policy that echoed the famous Zimmerwald line of the Socialist International’s left opposition in World War I.

Macdonald’s anti-war stance also grew out of his understanding of the danger of the State. Sl thought dubbed “Burnham’s orphan” by Trotsky, James Burnham was Dwight Macdonald’s evil twin. For some time Burnham (along with a dubious Italian Trotskyist-turned-fascist named Bruno Rizzi) had been developing the theory that both Germany and Russia represented new, more advanced “bureaucratic collectivist” societies governed not by swashbuckling capitalist tycoons but rational managers; a new, more scientific elite of power mandarins. (After leaving the Workers Party, Burnham wrote a best seller called The Managerial Revolution predicting the rise of such bureaucracies throughout the world.)

Clearly Macdonald’s fears were justified. Yet the issue remained: Did one simply hope for a world revolutionary uprising while Hitler took over Europe? Macdonald and his fellow editors at Partisan Review bitterly disagreed. For Phillip Rahv and Sidney Hook the necessity of stopping Hitler overcame any reservations about joining sides in an “inter-imperialist war.”

By 1943 the disagreement had become so bitter that Dwight and Nancy Macdonald quit Partisan Review and launched their own journal, politics, the first issue of which appeared in February 1944. The Macdonalds financed politics from their own savings (which included Nancy’s trust fund), as well as from a gift of a thousand dollars from Margaret De Silver, the widow of the murdered Italian anarchist Carlo Tresca. Nancy Macdonald (who had been the business manager of Partisan Review took over the same job at politics.

Years later Macdonald would call his opposition to World War II a “creative mistake.” That “mistake” led to a series of brilliant essays on the war in politics that culminated in Macdonald’s classic 1945 piece, “The Responsibility of Peoples,” that opposed the idea of the collective responsibility of the German people for Nazism. Macdonald also wrote to save lives. He believed the Allied demand for the unconditional surrender of Germany, coupled with massive bombing raids against the German civilian population, only encouraged the Germans to fight harder by confirming Nazi propaganda about the Carthaginian peace Germany would be faced with should Hitler lose.

In “The Responsibility of Peoples,” Macdonald held up a mirror to the victorious Allies and asked:

If “they,” the German people, are responsible for the atrocious policies and actions of “their”...government, then “we,” the peoples of Russia, England, and America, must also take on a big load of responsibility.... In the present war, we have carried the saturation bombing of German cities to a point where “military objectives” are secondary to the incineration of suffocation of great numbers of civilians; we have betrayed the Polish underground fighters in Warsaw into the hands of the Nazis, have deported hundreds of thousands of Poles to slow-death camps in Siberia, and have taken by force a third of Poland’s territory; we have conducted a civil war against another ally, Greece, in order to restore a reactionary and unpopular monarch; we have starved those parts of Europe our armies have “liberated” almost as badly as the Nazis did...we have followed Nazi racist theories in segregating Negro soldiers in our military forces and in deporting from their homes on the West Coast to concentration camps in the interior tens of thousands of citizens who happened to be of Japanese ancestry; we have made ourselves the accomplice of the Maidanek butchers by refusing to permit more than a tiny trickle of the Jews of Europe to take refuge inside our borders; we have rule India brutally, imprisoning the people’s leaders, denying the most elementary of civil liberties, causing a famine last year in which hundreds of thousands perished; we have — But this is monstrous, you say? We, the people, didn’t do these things. They were done by a few political leaders and the majority of Americans, Englishmen and (perhaps — who knows?) Russians deplore them and favor quite different policies. Or if they don’t, then it is because they have not had a chance to become aware of the real issues and act on them.... Precisely. And the Germans could say the same thing.... It is a terrible fact, but it is a fact, that few people have the imagination or the moral sensitivity to get very excited about actions which they don’t participate in themselves (and hence about which they feel no personal responsibility). The scale and complexity of modern Governmental organization, and the concentration of political power are excluded from this participation. How Many votes did Roosevelt’s refugee policy cost him?... As the French say, to ask such questions is to answer them.

Concluding “The Responsibility of Peoples,” Macdonald wrote:

The common peoples of the world are coming to have less and less control over the policies of “their” governments, while at the same time they are being more and more closely identified with those governments.... not for many centuries have individuals been at once so powerless to influence what is done by the national collectivities to which they belong, and at the same time so generally held responsible for what is done by those collectivities.

With the development of the atomic bomb, Macdonald’s fear of the descent of the West into state barbarism and public powerlessness had been fully realized. One month after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Macdonald wrote in politics:

It seems fitting that The Bomb was not developed by any of the totalitarian powers, where the political atmosphere might at first glance seem to be more suited to it, but by the two “democracies,” the last major powers to continue to pay at least ideological respect to the humanitarian-democratic tradition. It also seems fitting that the heads of these governments, by the time The Bomb exploded, were not Roosevelt and Churchill, figures of a certain historical and personal stature, but Attlee and Truman, both colorless mediocrities. Average Men elevated to their positions by the mechanics of the system.

Some forty-five years before the “war” with Iraq, Macdonald noted:

All this emphasizes that perfect automatism, that absolute lack of human consciousness or aims which our society is rapidly achieving....The more common-place the personalities and senseless the institutions, the more grandiose the destruction. It is a Götterdäm-merung without the gods.

It took Macdonald two years to write “The Root Is Man.” The scope of the essay intimidated him. He also had other demands on his time such as writing, editing, proofreading and publishing politics.

Politics never had more than 5,000 subscribers. They were the first to read one of the most remarkable American intellectual journals of the twentieth century. Although this is not the place for a full evaluation of politics, one can get a sense of its uniqueness by listing some of its writers: Simone Weil, Albert Camus, Victor Serge, Georges Bataille, Jean-Paul Satre, Karl Jaspers, George Woodcock, Mary McCarthy, John Berryman, Robert Duncan, Paul Mattick, Bruno Bettleheim, George Padmore, Meyer Shapiro, Simone de Beauvoir, Paul Goodman, James Agee, Marshall McLuhan, Richard Hofstadter, Irving Howe, Nicola Chiaromonte, Lionel Abel, Andrea Caffi and C. Wright Mills.

There were four remarkable women in the politics circle. Most important was Nancy Macdonald who managed the journal’s business affairs while at the same time running various relief efforts to aid veterans of the Spanish Civil War and victims of Nazism. (The breakup of the Macdonalds’ marriage in 1949 would be a major factor in the decision to stop publishing politics.) Another organizer of politics, Mary McCarthy, was one of Macdonald’s closest allies in the libertarian left. (It was McCarthy who translated Simone Weil’s famous essay on Homer’s Iliad.) Hannah Arendt (while not writing for politics) became one of Macdonald’s most important co-conspirators. In the late 1960’s, Arendt would write the introduction to a reprint edition of the complete set of politics.

Yet the most powerful intellectual influence on the journal was Simone Weil, whose critique of violence and essay on Homer had been brought to Macdonald’s attention by Nicola Chiaromonte, a Spanish civil war vet, anti-Fascist exile, and one of Macdonald’s closest friends. Through Chiaromonte, the thought of Simone Weil was first introduces to America in the pages of politics.

Politics also covered such issues as the suppression of the Greek insurrection, the anti-French insurgency in Indochina, America’s refusal to aid the starving people of Europe, the question of the Soviet Union, the American civil rights struggle, the need for equal treatment of homosexuals, the ideas of Wilhelm Reich, attacks on mass culture as studies on Max Weber, de Tocqueville, Utopian Socialists like Charles Fourier and anarchists such as Proudhon and Godwin.

One could order from politics Anton Ciliga’s The Russian Enigma (which has a major impact on Macdonald), Alexander Berkman’s The ABC of Anarchism, Camillo Berneri’s Peter Kropotkin’s Federal Ideas, Jomo Kenyatta’s Kenya, Land of Conflicts, Leo Tolstoy’s The Slavery of our Times, George Woodcock’s New Life to the Land, Raymond Michelet’s African Empires and Civilizations, Oscar Wilde’s The Soul of Man Under Socialism and Rosa Luxemburg’s Letters from Prison.

Politics spoke to radicals who rejected both Stalin and Trotsky but who were equally intransigent in opposing capitalism. Politics was part of a larger anti-totalitarian anarchist, pacifist and independent Marxist milieu that existed in the late 1940’s before the pressures of the Cold War rigidified political discourse for years to come. Other anarchist journals like Resistance and Retort in America and George Woodcock’s Now in England echoed many of politics’ themes, as did two classic books of that time: Animal Farm and 1984, by politics fellow traveller George Orwell. Forums in New York around ideas politics discussed drew significant audiences. many of politics’ most active supporters were leftwing conscientious objectors influenced by Ghandi’s massive civil disobedience movement in India. It was out of this ferment that “The Root Is Man” emerged, the most famous essay in a series of critical pieces which appeared under the banner “New Roads in Politics.” This essay caused an immediate storm. One lengthy rebuttal by Irving Howe (then a Workers Party member who worked for Macdonald in the politics office) called “The Thirteenth Disciple” asked:

Where is one to begin in a reply to Macdonald? His forty page article is a grab-bag of modern confusionism; a pinch of Proudhon; a whiff of pacifism; a nod to existentialism; a bow to Wilhelm Reich, founder of the “psychology of the orgasm”; a few scrappings from the anarchists; a touch of philosophical idealism and a large debt to that illustrious thinker, Paul Goodman.

Years later, in A Margin of Hope, Howe had eased up a bit;

The Root Is Man...(is) in many ways the most poignant and authentic expression of the plight of those few intellectuals — Nicola Chiaromonte, Paul Goodman, Macdonald — who wished to disassociate themselves from the post-war turn to Realpolitik but could not find ways of transforming sentiments of rectitude and visions of utopia into a workable politics.

Yet reading “The Root Is Man” today is no mere exercise in nostalgia. Macdonald raised issues that, almost 50 years later, have become even more critical.

Macdonald’s assault on the scientific model of thinking echoed Frankfurt School critiques of instrumental reason. Macdonald, however, located Marxism itself in the general crisis of Enlightenment thought. For that alone, “The Root Is Man” is extraordinary.

Other crucial issues raised by Macdonald included the question of active resistance to unfettered growth and the need for economic decentralization coupled with political democracy. He also took up the question of reification, citing George Lukács (not a household name is 1946) to argue that, in the concept of alienation, Marxism made its most powerful critique of the human condition under capital. The issue of reification and the damaging effect of mass culture that so concerned Macdonald would appear again in the mid-60’s Situationist polemic against the “society of the spectacle” whose roots in dissident Western Marxism can be found in “The Root Is Man” and politics in general.

Above all, Macdonald was most concerned with the way we organize our daily political action. His insight into how mass socialist and communist parties reproduce the same deadening effect on the individual as other forms of bourgeois organization rings true today:

What is not so generally understood is that the traditional progressive approach, taking history as the starting-point and thinking in terms of mass political parties, bases itself on this same alienation of man which it thinks it is combating. It puts the individual in the same powerless, alienated role vis-à-vis the party or trade union as the manipulators of the modern State do, except that the slogans are different.... The brutal fact is that the man in the street everywhere is quite simply bored with socialism, as expounded by the Socialist, Stalinist, and Trotskyist epigones of Marx... Above all, he feels that there is no interest in it for him, as an individual human being — that he is as powerless and manipulated vis-à-vis his socialist mass-organization as he is towards his capitalist employers and their social and legal institutions.

As soon as “The Root Is Man” was published it came under immediate fire for denying the viability of class struggle. the other major criticism of “The Root Is Man” was its stress on absolute values transcending history. In fact, only two years after publication of his essay, Macdonald abandoned one of the absolutes he had endorsed (radical pacifism) in the wake of what he saw as Stalin’s threat to the West during the Berlin Crisis.

Along with the 1948 Berlin Crisis and the assassination of Gandhi that same year, the general threat of a new world war deeply depressed Macdonald and contributed to his marital breakup. Attempts by the politics network to organize groups in Europe and communes here also failed. Politics finally ceased publication in 1949. Macdonald’s fierce anti-communist and sense of doom as the radical movement fell apart led him into the ranks of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), a group supported by many leading anti-Stalinist left-intellectuals. Years later Macdonald would discover the CIA’s role in funding the CCF and its journals like Encounter.(See Appendix D for a further discussion of Macdonald and the CCF.)

While Macdonald throughout the 1950’s attacked McCarthyism, he focused more and more on the need to make a living both as a staff writer for The new Yorker and freelance journalist. Yet even during the dog days of the Eisenhower-Nixon era, Macdonald continued to give radical talks on campuses. One of his favorite themes was the relevance of anarchy. While Macdonald no longer considered the abolition of private property necessary, his take on anarchism (in Memoirs of a Revolutionist) is still striking:

It was odd that anarchism took no root in the thirties, considering (1) the American temperament, lawless and individualistic, (2) the American anarchist tradition, from Benjamin Tucker to the Wobblies, and (3) that anarchism gave a better answer to the real modern problem, the encroachment of the State, than did Marxism, which was revolutionary only about bourgeois private property (not a real issue anymore) and was thoroughly reactionary on the question of the State. But (3) also explains Marxism’s popularity (though it doesn’t justify it): while the centralized State is the chief danger now to freedom, it is also necessary to the operation of a mass society based on large-scale industry. Thus Marxism is “practical,” since it fits into the status quo — as in Soviet Russia — while anarchism is “impractical” because it threatens it. The revolutionary alternative to the status quo today is not collectivized property administered by a “workers’ state” whatever that means, but some kind of anarchist decentralization that will break up mass society into small communities where individuals can live together as variegated human beings instead of as impersonal units in the mass sum....Marxism glorifies “the masses” and endorses the State. Anarchism leads back to the individual and the community, which is “impractical” but necessary — that is to say, it is revolutionary.

In the mid-1950’s the thaw in Russia after Stalin’s death and the Twentieth Party Congress slowly rejuvenated Macdonald. Although he always remained a strong anti-communist, Macdonald no longer saw the USSR as a more advanced version of Hitler’s Germany. In 1960, Macdonald became active as a civil libertarian in the cases of Morton Sobell (a supposed member of the supposed Rosenberg spy ring) and Junius Scales, another Communist sent to prison under the Smith Act. Macdonald also became an early member of the New Left and spoke at the closing session of the first national convention of SDS in 1960. Meanwhile “The Root Is Man” was rediscovered by a new generation of activists. Macdonald’s critical support of student radicals culminated in his speaking at the “Counter Commencement” held at Columbia during the 1968 strike. Macdonald’s activism also led him to participate in a picket line outside the Waldorf-Astoria to protest the war in Vietnam. The year was 1963, a time when most Americans could not find Vietnam on a map. Later, in 1967, Macdonald played an important role (with Robert Lowell and Norman Mailer) in the first big peace march on the Pentagon. Macdonald’s radicalism was in striking contrast not just to National Review editor James Burnham but to Workers Party leader Max Shachtman who by this time had become a major behind-the-scenes advisor to the AFL-CIO on both domestic and foreign policy. At various demos, Macdonald would sometimes bump into young SWP activists who delighted in reminding the old factionalist that his current views were not so dissimilar to theirs. “Even a broken watch occasionally tells the right time,” Macdonald would grumble in response. Dwight Macdonald died in 1982.

Nietzsche defined nihilism as a situation where “everything is permitted,” and today we might add “for the right price.” Our time has also spawned a series of Jihads against the New World Order. There is now a frantic search for absolutes, foundational principles, a search which inspires religious fundamentalists of the Christian, Jewish, Hindu and Moslem variety as well as those who kill for an inscribed ethnic or national identity to build their racial Utopias. Contrasted to them are the efficient, orderly, passionless, non-smoking, technologically advanced killing machines of the West.

In just such a world it is long past time to rediscover individualist-centered radical thought from America’s rich tradition as well as thinkers as different as Fourier, Stirner, Kropotkin and Nietzsche. While the insights of Marxism must continue to inform our actions, we must also be aware of its glaring weaknesses. It is again time to take seriously the brilliant battle-cry that concludes Oscar Wilde’s The Soul of Man Under Socialism: “The new Individualism is the new Hellenism.”

Quoting Wilde is especially appropriate in concluding a discussion of “The Root Is Man” because Macdonald’s essay is also an attempt to reclaim the spirit of art itself, its values and legislative rights, and to explore the link between the aesthetic and moral sphere. Macdonald captures the necessity for a world that imagination, a renewed capacity to envision the world that makes the very idea of revolt meaningful. Although T.S. Elliot was a tremendous admirer of politics, Macdonald does not believe that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world: he does insist that if the oppressed are ever to rule themselves we must reignite the utopian spark that mass society relentlessly seeks to subvert, co-opt or destroy.

Of course the terminally hip will scorn any analysis that takes seriously such Philosophy 101 questions as “How Do We Live Today?” that so tortured Macdonald. But for me, “flighty Dwighty” Macdonald still speaks and no more brilliantly than in “The Root Is Man,” one of the great lost classics of American radicalism.

Kevin Coogan

THE ROOT IS MAN

To be radical is to grasp the matter by to root. Now the root for mankind is man himself. — Karl Marx(1844)

Shortly after the second world war began, Trotsky wrote a remarkable article entitled “The USSR in War” (see The New International, November 1939). It was and attempt to refute the theory that a new form of society had developed in the Soviet Union, one that was neither capitalist nor socialist (“degenerated workers’ state” in Trotsky’s phrase) but something quite distinct from either of the two classic alternatives. This theory of a “third alternative” had been foreshadowed in certain passages of Anton Ciliga’s The Russian Enigma (Paris, 1938) and had been developed in detail by a certain “Bruno R.” in La Bureaucratisation du Monde (Paris, 1939). The proponents of the new theory called it “bureaucratic collectivism.”

If this theory is correct, the consequences far the Marxist schema are obviously quite serious; and so Trotsky attempted to demonstrate its falsity. His article is remarkable because, with a boldness and a sense of intellectual responsibility not common among present-day Marxists, he ventured to draw the consequences for Marxism if indeed capitalism’s heir were to be bureaucratic collectivism. More, he even dared to set a “deadline” for the long-awaited world revolution.

“The second world war has begun,” he wrote. “It attests incontrovertibly to the fact that society can no longer live on the basis of capitalism. Thereby it subjects the proletariat to a new and perhaps decisive test.

“If this war provokes, as we firmly believe it will, a proletarian revolution, it must inevitably lead to the overthrow of the bureaucracy in the USSR and the regeneration of Soviet democracy on a far higher economic and cultural basis than in 1918. In the case, the question as to whether the Stalinist bureaucracy was a ‘class’ or a parasitic growth on the workers’ state will be automatically solved. To every single person it will become clear that in the process of this development of the world revolution, the Soviet bureaucracy was only an episodic relapse.

“If, however, it is conceded that the present war will provoke not revolution but a decline of the proletariat, then there remains another alternative: the further decay of monopoly capitalism, its further fusion with the State and the replacement of democracy wherever it still persists, by a totalitarian regime. The inability of the proletariat to take into its hands the leadership of society could actually lead to the growth of a new exploiting class from the Bonapartist fascist bureaucracy. This would be, according to all indications, a regime of decline, signalizing the eclipse of civilization....

“However onerous the second perspective may be, if the world proletariat should actually prove incapable of fulfilling the mission placed upon it by the course of development, nothing else would remain except openly to recognize that the socialist program based on the internal contradictions of capitalist society ended as Utopia. It is self-evident that a new minimum program would be required — for the defense of the interests of the slaves of the totalitarian bureaucratic society.”

The war is now ended, in unparalleled devastation, hunger, misery in Asia and Europe, in the shattering of the old class structure of Europe and the loosening of imperialist bonds in the colonies. Yet no revolution has succeeded anywhere, or even been attempted; the kind of defensive battle the EAM put up in Greece, however heroic, cannot be called a revolution. The “revolutionary opportunities” which we socialists expected to occur after this war have indeed materialized; but the masses have not taken advantage of them. Although the second world war has been far more destructive of the old order than was the first, the level both of mass consciousness and of socialist leadership is far lower that it was in 1917–20. Is it not striking, for example, that the entire European resistance movement has ebbed away without producing a single new political tendency, or a single leader of any stature?

The reasons for this decadence will be considered presently. The fact is what concerns us now. I think it is time for socialists to face the situation that actually exists instead of continuing to fix our eyes on a distant future in which History will bring us at last what we want. It is strange, by the way, that Marxists, who pride themselves on their realism, should habitually regard the Present as merely the mean entrance-hall to the spacious palace of the Future. For the entrance-hall seems to stretch out interminably; it may or may not lead to a palace; meanwhile, it is all the palace we have, and we must live in it. I think we shall live in it better and even find the way to the palace better (if there is a palace), if we try living in the present instead of in the Future. To begin with, let us face the fact that Trotsky’s deadline is here and that his revolution is not.

The Plan and Purpose of This Essay

If, writes Trotsky, the war provokes “not revolution but a decline of the proletariat” and if, consequently, Marxists must recognize that Bureaucratic Collectivism, not Socialism, is the historical successor to Capitalism, then: “nothing else would remain except openly to recognize that the socialist program, based on the internal contradictions of capitalist society, ended as a Utopia.”

This seems to me as accurate summary of the dilemma Marxists find themselves in today. For if one bases one’s socialist program on capitalist contradictions, and if those contradictions conduct one not to Socialism but the Bureaucratic Collectivism, then one has no real basis for socialism. Also, if one assumes that history has only one possible pattern, predictable in advance if one can discover society’s “laws of motion,” then the triumph of Bureaucratic Collectivism is Russia and its much greater strength (compared to Socialism) in other parts of the world today — these developments force one to conclude, with Trotsky, that totalitarianism is “the” future alternative to Capitalism. In this case, Trotsky’s “minimum program...for the defense of the interests of the slaves of totalitarian” society is all that can be logically attempted. Who is going to take any risks for, or even get very interested in such an uninspiring — however worthy — program, one that by definition can never go further than defense? Do not the Russian and German experiences, in fact, show that such a limited program is quite impossible under totalitarianism — that one must either go much farther, or not stir at all?

But why not, after all, base one’s socialism on what Trotsky contemptuously calls “Utopian” aspirations? Why not begin with what we living human beings want, what we think and feel is good? And then see how we can come closest to it — instead of looking to historical process for a justification of our socialism? It is the purpose of this article to show that a different approach may be made and must be made, one that denies the existence of any such rigid pattern to history as Marxism assumes, one that will start off from one’s own personal interests and feelings, working from the individual to society rather that the other way around. Above all, its ethical dynamic come from absolute and non-historical values, such as Truth and Justice, rather than from the course of history.

It is only fair to say right now that readers who expect either a new theoretical system to replace Marxism or some novel program of action will save themselves disappointment by not reading further. All I attempt here is to explain, as coherently as possible, why the Marxian approach to socialism no longer satisfies me, and to indicate the general direction in which I think a more fruitful approach may be made. Those looking for either Certainty or Directives will find little to interest them here.

This essay falls into two main parts.

Part I (“Marxism is Obsolete”), which follows immediately, argues that Marxism is no longer a reliable guide either to radical political action or to an understanding of modern politics. It proposes that the traditional distinction between “Left” and “Right” be replaced by a new “Progressive-Radical” division, showing the confusion that comes from trying to fit recent history into the old “Left-Right” pattern. And it attempts to show, in some detail, that Marx’s basic concepts, when they are applied to the contemporary world, are at best beside the point and at worst positively misleading (since their logic tends to justify the perfect tyranny of the USSR as against the imperfect democracy of the West).

Part II (“Toward a New Radicalism”) is an attempt to suggest an alternative to Marxism as a political approach for those profoundly dissatisfied with the status quo. It discusses the relationship between scientific method and value judgments, questions that “Idea of Progress” that has been the basis of Left-wing thought for almost two centuries, and tries to show why the “Radical” approach, based on moral feelings, is more valid today in both ethical and political terms than the “Progressive” approach, based on scientific method, that is still dominant among American intellectuals. It also suggests certain specific modes of political behavior and reaction that characterize this kind of Radicalism.

PART 1: MARXISM IS OBSOLETE

1. We Need a New Political Vocabulary

The first great victory of Bureaucratic Collectivism came in 1928, when Stalin finally drove Trotsky into exile and prepared, the following year, to initiate the First Five Year Plan. Between the French Revolution (1789) and 1928, political tendencies could fairly accurately be divided into “Right” and “Left.” But the terms of the struggle for human liberation shifted in 1928 — the shift had been in process long before then, of course, but 1928 may be taken as a convenient watershed. It was Trotsky’s failure to realize this that gave an increasingly unreal character to his handling of “the Russian question,” just as it is the continued blindness of liberals and socialists to this change that makes academic, if not worse, their present-day political behavior.

Let me try to define the 1789–1928 “Left” and “Right.”

The left comprised those who favored a change in social institutions which would make the distribution of income more equal (or completely equal) and would reduce class privileges (or do away with classes altogether). The central intellectual concept was the validity of the scientific method; the central moral concept was the dignity of Man and the individual’s right to liberty and a full personal development. Society was therefore conceived of as a means to an end: the happiness of the individual. There were important differences in method (as, reform v. revolution, liberalism v. class struggle) but on the above principles the Left was pretty much agreed.

The Right was made up of those who were either satisfied with the status quo (conservatives) or wanted it to become even more inegalitarian (reactionaries). In the name of Authority, the Right resisted change, and in the name of Tradition, it also, logically enough, opposed what had become the cultural motor of change: that willingness , common alike to Bentham and Marx, Jefferson and Kropotkin, to follow scientific inquiry wherever it led and to reshape institutions accordingly. Those of the Right thought in terms of an “organic” society, in which society is the end and the citizen the means. they justified inequalities of income and privilege by alleging an intrinsic inequality of individuals, both as to abilities and human worth.

This great dividing line has become increasingly nebulous with the rise of Nazism and Stalinism, both of which combine Left and Right elements in a bewildering way. Or, put differently, both the old Right and the old left have almost ceased to exist as historical realities, and their elements have been recombined in the dominant modern tendency: an inegalitarian and organic society in which the citizen is a means, not an end, and whose rulers are anti-traditional and scientifically minded. Change is accepted in principle — indeed, the unpleasant aspects of the present are justified precisely as the price that must be paid to insure a desirable future, whether it be Hitler’s domination of lesser races by the Nordics, or Stalin’s emancipation of the world working class, or our own liberals’ peaceful future world to be achieved through war. The whole idea of historical process, which a century ago was the badge of the Left, has become the most persuasive appeal of the apologists for the status quo.

In this Left-Right hybrid, the notion of Progress is central. A more accurate terminology might therefore be to reserve the term “Right” for such old-fashioned conservatives as Herbert Hoover and Winston Churchill and to drop the term “Left” entirely, replacing it with two words: “Progressive” and “Radical.”

By “Progressive” would be understood those who see the Present as an episode on the road to a better Future; those who think more in terms of historical process than of moral values; those who believe that the main trouble with the world is partly lack of scientific knowledge and partly the failure to apply to human affairs such knowledge as we do have; those who, above all, regard the increase of man’s mastery over nature as good is itself and see its use for bad ends, as atomic bombs, as a perversion. This definition, I think, covers fairly well the great bulk of what is still called the Left, from Communists (“Stalinists”)through reformist groups like our own New Dealers, the British Laborites, and the European Socialists, to small revolutionary groups like the Trotskyists.

“Radical” would apply to the as yet few individuals — mostly anarchists, conscientious objectors, and renegade Marxists like myself — who reject the concept of Progress, who judge things by their present meaning and effect, who think the ability of science to guide us in human affairs has been overrated and who therefore redress the balance by emphasizing the ethical aspect of politics. They, or rather we, think it is an open question whether the increase of man’s mastery over nature is good or bad in its actual effects on human life to date, and favor adjusting technology to man, even if it means — as may be the case — a technological regression, rather than adjusting man to technology. We do not, of course, “reject” scientific method, as is often charged, but rather think the scope within which it can yield fruitful results in narrower than is generally assumed today. And we feel that the firmest ground from which to struggle for that human liberation which was the goal of the old Left is the ground not of History but of those non-historical values (truth, justice, love, etc.) which Marx has made unfashionable among socialists.

The Progressive makes History the center of his ideology. The Radical puts Man there. The Progressive’s attitude is optimistic both about human nature (which he thinks is basically good, hence all that is needed is to change institutions so as to give this goodness a chance to work) and about the possibility of understanding history through scientific method. The Radical is, if not exactly pessimistic, at least more sensitive to the dual nature of man; he sees evil as well as good at the base of human nature; he is sceptical about the ability of science to explain things beyond a certain point; he is aware of the tragic element in man’s fate not only today but in any conceivable kind o society. The Progressive thinks in collective terms (the interests of Society or the Working Class); the Radical stresses the individual conscience and sensibility. The Progressive starts off from what actually is happening; the Radical starts off from what he wants to happen. The former must have the feeling that History is “on his side.” The latter goes along the road pointed out by his own individual conscience; if History is going his way, too, he is pleased; but he is quite stubborn about following “what ought to be” rather that “what is.”

Because its tragic, ethical and non-scientific emphasis corresponds partly with the old Right attitude, leading to criticisms of Progressive doctrine that often sound very much like those that used to be made from the Right, the Radical viewpoint causes a good deal of confusion today. it is sometimes called “objectively reactionary.” It would not be hard, however, to show the peculiar bedfellows, notably the Stalinists, the Progressives have today. For the fact is that both the Progressive and the radical attitudes, as here defined, cut across the old Left-Right dividing line, and in this sense both are confusing and even “objectively reactionary” if one continues to think in the old terms.

Another frequent allegation of the Progressives, especially those of the Marxian persuasion, is that the Radical viewpoint which politics frequently expresses is of necessity a religious one. If by “religious” is simply meant non-materialistic or non-scientific, then this is true. But if God and some kind of otherworldly order of reality is meant, then I don’t think it is true. The Radical viewpoint is certainly compatible with religion, as Progressivism is not; and such radicals as D. S. Savage and Will Herberg are religious-minded; but I personally see no necessary connection, nor am I conscious of any particular interest in religion myself.

I might add that the Radical approach, as I understand it at least, does not deny the importance and validity of science in its own proper sphere, or of historical, sociological and economic studies. Nor does it assert that the only reality is the individual and his conscience. It rather defines a sphere which is outside the reach of scientific investigation, and whose value judgment cannot be proved (though they can be demonstrated in appropriate and completely unscientific terms); this is the traditional sphere of art and morality. The Radical sees any movement like socialism which aspires towards an ethically superior kind of society as rooted in that sphere, however its growth may be shaped by historical process. This is the sphere of human, personal interests, and in this sense, the root is man.

The best of the Marxists today see no reason for the dissection of the old Left that is proposed here. They still hold fast to the classic Left faith in human liberation through scientific progress, while admitting that revisions of doctrine and refinements of method are necessary. This was my opinion until I began publishing politics. In “The Future of Democratic Values” (Partisan Review, July-August, 1943), I argued that Marxism, the heir of 18th century liberalism, was the only reliable guide to a democratic future; the experience of editing this magazine, however, and consequently being forced to follow the tragic events of the last two years in some detail, has slowly changed my mind. The difficulties lie much deeper, I now think, than is assumed by Progressives, and the crisis is much more serious. The brutality and irrationality of Western social institutions have reached a pitch which would have seemed incredible a short generation ago; our lives have come to be dominated by warfare of a ferocity and on a scale unprecedented in history; horrors have been committed by the governments of civilized nations which could hardly have been improved on by Attila: the extermination of the Jewish people by the Nazis; the vast forced-labor camps of the Soviet Union; our own saturation bombing of German cities and “atomization” of the residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is against this background that the present article is written; it is all this which has forced me to question beliefs I have long held.

2. The World We Live In

Let me demonstrate, by reference to recent events in various countries, how confusing the old categories of “Left” and “Right” have become, and how inadequate the Marxian schema. As we shall see, it is not just a matter of the working class revolution failing to materialize. The situation is far more complex, and far more discouraging. For the full bitterness of working class defeat is realized only in victory, a paradox illustrated in the twenties by the Bolsheviks and the German Social Democracy, and today by the British Labor Party.

The World through Marxist Spectacles

All over Europe the old bourgeois parties are much weaker than before the war, where they have not practically disappeared like the Radical Socialists in France. In Scandinavia, Holland, Belgium, Austria, Italy, and most of the other lesser European countries, the two great movements with a Marxian socialist ideology, the Communists and the reformist Socialists, dominate the political scene.

In France, two-thirds of the electorate is represented by the Communists and the Socialists, with the ambiguous “Christian socialist” MRP as the nearest thing left to a bourgeois group. The Bank of France has been nationalized (remember the “200 families”?) and further nationalizations are in prospect.

Great Britain (and the British Empire!) is ruled by a Labor Party based on the trade unions and explicitly socialist in its program; it was elected by a landslide majority last summer and has a constitutional expectation of holding power for the next five years. The Bank of England has been nationalized, and the party is committed to nationalizing steel, coal, power, the railroads and other basic industries.

In the defeated powers, Germany and Japan, the victors are expropriating the former ruling classes to great degree and breaking down the industrial structure on which that class rule was based; the logic of this forces the victors to tolerate the new growth of unions and left-wing parties which results from this weakening of the big bourgeois. (Cf. World War I, where the victors left intact Germany’s big capitalism, and in fact covertly supported it as a counterweight to “Bolshevism.”)

In Asia, the Chinese Communists retain their strength and are being admitted as a partner with the Kuomintang in a new “liberalized” regime; the Indonesian rebellion seems to be succeeding; the British have been forced by the gathering intensity of revolt in India to make the mot definite proposals to date for Indian freedom.

The Soviet Union is still a collective economy; it has emerged as the second most powerful nation in the world, and dominates directly all of Eastern Europe, from the Baltic to the Balkans, a vast area in which its puppet “people’s governments” have broken the power of the old bourgeoisie and divided up the big estates among the poor peasants.

The one great power in which the pre-war bourgeois order has survived more or less intact is the USA. Yet even here we see the unions holding much more of their wartime gains than was anticipated and strong enough to force the Federal Government to help them win postwar wage increases. We also see the State continuing to intervene in the economy, and the permanent acceptance, by the courts and by public opinion, of such social measures as the Wagner Act, the Wages & Hours law, Social Security, and Federal unemployment relief. (Cf. the aftermath of World War I: the Palmer “Red raids,” industry’s successful “Open Shop” campaign against the unions, the complete control of the government by big business.)

In short, from the standpoint of the kind of institutional changes Marxism stresses, the world should be closer to socialism today than ever before.

The World as It Is

Even to the most mechanical Marxist, the above picture will appear overdrawn. Yet this is the clearly absurd conclusion we reach if we simply follow the Marxist stress on institutional changes. I say “clearly absurd,” but the absurdity is apparent only in different degrees to the various groups on the Left: the Stalinists don’t see it at all, being wholly optimistic now that Russian collectivism is on the ascendant; the liberal weeklies are more sceptical, but on the whole see numerous “encouraging” features in these changes; the Socialists and Trotskyists are the most critical of all, but find consolation in such things as the British Labor Party victory and the strength shown by the CIO in the recent strikes. All of these groups are, in my opinion, too optimistic about the state of the world; and their optimism stems from the fact that they all share a common “progressive” viewpoint inherited mostly from Marx.

Those of us, however, who look at the human content rather that the historical form, who think in terms of values rather than of process, believe that socialism today is farther away than ever. War and the preparation of war has become the normal mode of existence of great nations. There is a general collapse of the old dreams of international brotherhood. Nationalism is constantly becoming more virulent, until even the persecuted minorities like the Negros and Jews are developing, in their despair, chauvinisms of their own. A sauve-qui-peut philosophy flourishes everywhere; everyone today is a two-bit realpolitiker. In this country and abroad, significant sections of the working class stood out against World War I, but the British and American labor movements were almost solidly behind World War II. The power of the State has never been greater the helplessness of the great mass of citizens never more extreme. All these sinister trends find their intense expression in the one great non-capitalist nation, the USSR, where science is worshiped and industrial production is God, where nationalism has reached a paranoiac pitch, where imperialistic policy is more aggressive then anywhere else on earth, where 180 million people live in a combination barracks and munitions plant over which floats the red banner of Marxian revolution.

If the present tendency of history works out its logic unchecked, then in the USSR we have the image of the future society. I do not know of a single party or movement of any size in the world today that is working to check this tendency in the only way I think it can be checked: through changing our present social structure in a libertarian socialist direction.

Nowhere is there visible a party of any size which even aspires — let alone has the power to do so — to shatter the institutions, beginning with the nation State, who blind workings are bringing on the next war. All we ave on the Left is still that banal and hopeless clash of two unsatisfactory alternatives: the totalitarian heirs of Bolshevism, and those sapless sons of ineffectual fathers, the liblabs and socialists.

The Step that Wasn’t There

It will not do to lay the chief blame for this collapse on Stalinist “betrayal” or even on the overwhelming amount of military force in the hands of the Big Three. What has happened is that the traditional aspirations which dominate Marxian ideology has implanted in the masses of Europe have come to coincide to a dangerous degree with the interests of their rulers, so that the tribunes of the people find themselves in the absurd and demoralizing position of demanding what will be granted anyway. They have no vocabulary with which to ask for the things what are today really in the interests of the oppressed — and which will not be granted from above.

The social systems of the victorious powers are developing a common tendency towards a planned, State-controlled economy which considers the citizen a cell in the social organism and thus at once the ward of the State, entitled to a job and to average living standards in exchange for his usefulness in production on the armed forces, and also the State’s docile instrument who could no more rebel than a cell could develop independently of the total organism. If this latter does happen, modern political theory agrees with biology in calling the result cancer, which must be cut out lest the organism die. The Organic State is directed towards one great end: to assert effectively against other competing States its own nationalistic interests, which mean preparation for World War III. All this is a matter of common knowledge in upper-class circles in the USA, the USSR and other big powers, although, for obvious reasons, it is not discussed in public.

Now, with such a society developing, what kind of demands do the tribunes of people put forth today? Do they proclaim a new Rights of Man? Do they turn pacifist, denounce war as the greatest of evils, insist on immediate disarmament, beginning with their own country, expose the fraudulent character if World War II? Do they agitate for greater freedom of the the press and opinion? Do they push toward decentralization of industry until its scale becomes human, regardless of the effects on munitions production? Do they take up arms against the growing powers of the State? Do they fight against the growth of nationalism?

These are, of course, rhetorical questions. The reformist movements like the British Labor Party and our own labor unions are apathetic on such issues. The Communists are not apathetic; they are intensely hostile. What kind of aims do both liblabs and Communists actually have? They want Full Production, Nationalization, Planning, and above all Security, of both the Social and National varieties. These is nothing in these demands incompatible with the interests of the ruling class in organizing a strong nation to compete militarily with other nations. There are antagonisms, it is true, sharp and sometimes bloody battles. But these clashes are on secondary issues; they do not affect the trend towards war and social regimentation. For the struggle is not over a new kind of society, but over who is to dominate the existing society, the Old Guard or the Tribunes of the People. It is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish the “Right” from the “Left” wing.

The reason for this confusion is basically simple: the historical process to which the Left has traditionally looked for progress in a desirable direction has been going on but the result is often not progress but the reverse. The liberals put their faith is social and economic reforms; these are being made, but often go hand in hand with moral barbarism. The Marxists looked to the expropriation of the bourgeois; this is taking place, but new and in many ways even more oppressive rulers are replacing the old ones. We are all in the position of a man going upstairs who thinks there is another step, and finds there is not. We are off balance. How far may be suggested by some random examples.

The failure of the British Labor Party to behave very differently from the Tories once it got into power has been described in politics already. (See the September and November, 1945, issues.) One tiny recent news item may be added: “London, March 7: Britain’s secret service will cost about $10,000,000 during the coming year, according to government civil estimates published today. This is five times more than was spent in 1939.”

Australia has had a 100% Labor government since 1943. All but 3 of the 19 cabinet ministers are former trade union officials. This government carries out a “White Australia” policy, i.e.,complete exclusion of all immigrants with brown, black, or yellow skins. It also complains that the reactionary General MacArthur is “too soft” on the defeated Japanese people.

The New Zealand government is also completely Labor, has been in office since 1935, and has put through a great deal of very “advanced” social legislation. It also bans all Asiatic immigrants.

in the first issue of politics, I called attention to what I called “the Bolivian Pattern”: the putsch by fascist-minded Army officers which overthrew the former conservative regime backed by native big business and the U.S. State Department. The revolutionaries were anti-USA, anti-capitalist...and anti-Semitic. When they took power, they shot one of the “big three” tin magnates, passed Bolivia’s first laws favoring the exploited Indian tin miners...and strengthened the Army. Currently in Argentina we see the pro-Nazi, dictatorial Army boss, Peron, leading a working class movement against the bourgeoisie, decreeing enormous wage advances, trampling on property rights, and getting himself overwhelmingly elected president in the first honest election in years. The opposing candidate, Tamborini, was backed by Argentine big business, the U.S. State Department...and The Nation.

A century and a half ago, France gave the world the Declaration of the Rights of Man. Last summer the dying act of the French resistance movement was the fiasco of the “Estates General of the French Renaissance,” a convention which rashly challenged comparison with the great Estates General of 1789. Out of it cam a “Proclamation and Oath” which merely mentioned in passing “equality of rights for all human beings,” devoting itself to those two great themes of modern Progressivism: patriotism and production. Quote: “The independence and prosperity of the nation, the conditions for its power, depend upon the unity of all Frenchmen, who must be linked by a common patriotic aspiration.... The Estates General proclaim: the people may remain master of their own destiny only if they become mobilized in a patriotic and enthusiastic spirit, making a determined effort to increase production. It is the sacred duty of each man and woman to protest against anything which could impede this effort.” This is not the Comite des Forges speaking, but the Communists and Socialists. These Leftists have fulfilled their sacred duty by protesting against...the freedom of the press. They are the ones who have insisted on making a government license a prerequisite of publication. If they reply that this is to prevent big business and former collaborationists from corrupting the press, one might ask why the Trotskyists and Anarchists have been denied licenses. When the Constituent Assembly opened debate on the preamble to the new Constitution, The New York Times reported (March 7, 1946): “The discussion appeared confused by reason of the fact that the moderates and members of the reactionary groups seemed to be defending the ‘immortal principles’ of the ‘illustrious ancestors’ of the 1789, while the extremists of the Left were demanding restrictions on some of those liberties championed for generations by the sons of the revolution.” The rewrite job on the Rights of Man, which eliminated free speech and such luxuries, was done by a commission composed only of Communists and Socialists. Copeau, a Resistance leader, “asserted that the rights of 1789 were typically bourgeois whereas the situation today required social protection and adaptation to a coming Marxist society.” The fight for a free press was led by old Edouard Herriot, leader of the almost defunct bourgeois party, the Radical Socialists, who made an eloquent speech which the Right applauded and the Left heard in a disapproving silence.

“Left” and “Right” in Two World Wars

It is revealing to compare Left-Right attitudes in World War I with those in World War II.

In World War I, these attitudes were consistent in themselves and cleanly opposed to each other. The Right was chauvinist — after all, as the ruling class, they felt it was their country — and favored the war for the simplest, most straightforward economic motives (competition, “merchants of death” — the complete absence of the latter phrase in World War II is significant). The bulk of the Left submitted to the “necessity” of the war, since it was unwilling to take a revolutionary anti-war stand, but its attitude was passive, rather shamefaced. Before the war, the Right was a militarist and favored a “forward” foreign policy, while the Left was pacifist and anti-imperialist. After the war, the Right pressed for a Carthaginian peace (or what passed for such in those innocent days) and emphasized the collective responsibility of the German people, while the Left tries to lighten reparations and to limit war guilt to the German ruling classes.

The situation in World War II was much more complex, because in the interim two phenomena had arisen which cut across the old alignments: the bureaucratic-collective dictatorships of Hitler and Stalin. The Franco-Anglo-American bourgeoisie had seen the Kaiser’s Germany as simply an imperialist competitor, but towards Hitler they had an ambivalent attitude. Insofar as he was a powerful competitor, they opposed him, but they supported him insofar as he had created an “orderly” society by liquidating his own Left and insofar as he seemed to be preparing for war against the USSR. Through Munich, indeed right up to Hitler’s attack on Poland and in some cases even later, the Right saw Hitler mainly as an ally against the Left, specifically against the USSR. They put up with his aggressions, therefore, and failed to arm against him. On the other hand, they didn’t trust him enough to join him in a war against Russia, as the Marxists (and Hitler) had supposed they would. They correctly saw that Nazism was something new (and dangerous to them), not just an extreme form of monopoly capitalism. So they were unable to act at all. The Left was also paralyzed by the cross-currents set up by these new phenomena which didn’t fit into the old Left-Right pattern. On the one hand, it opposed Hitler for the same reasons the Right favored him, and demanded “collective security” and a firm stand against Nazi aggression. At the same time, the disillusionment with World War I was still strong enough to make its general feeling about war negative; also, its whole tradition was anti-war.

When war came — after Stalin’s pact with Hitler had shown the political ambiguity of these new societies — it was the traditionally war-hating Left which was enthusiastic about the war, while the traditionally bellicose Right went into it with much the same reluctance the Left had shown in World War I, and for much the same reasons: they could see no way to avoid it, and yet they felt that their class interests would not be advanced by it. The Left, furthermore, was able to prosecute the war more effectively because the high degree of State control a modern war necessitates fitted in better with its ideology. So in this country, we see the Left, which in the early thirties had applauded the Nye Committee’s exposure of the “merchants of death,” becoming increasingly belligerent after Roosevelt’s Chicago speech (1937), while the Republican Right was almost solidly isolationist. The British Tories were the architects of Munich; it took the collaboration of the Labor Party to put real and real vigor and heart into the British war effort. In France, the contrast was even sharper. “Between the years 1933 and 1938,” writes Charles Micaud in his recent study, The French Right and Nazi Germany, “there took place a complete change in the foreign policy of the majority of the Right as well as in that of the Left: the nationalist Right began to preach pacifism, and the pacifist Left to urge Resistance. ‘The reversal of these attitudes,’ wrote M. Pierre Brossolete in L’Europe Nouvelle shortly before Munich, ‘has been of a prodigious suddenness.... And so it is today one can see the most serious organs of the Right speak of a “Leftist bellicism,” while the Left returns to the Right their old accusation of being “in the service of Germany.”’”

The same reversal may be observed in our own postwar policies. The Right favors a relatively “soft peace,” partly because it never believed in the war as an antifascist crusade, and partly because it hopes to make Germany a barrier to Russian advance; while the Left insists on the collective responsibility of the German people and presses for vengeance. The CIO, like the British TUC, has put on record its belief in the war guilt of the German people. It is Rightists like President Hutchins, of the University of Chicago, and Senator Wheeler, who expresses indignation at the extremes to which the victors are going in Germany; the Rightist Republican Senator Wherry makes speeches about our policy of starving Europe, especially Germany, which read like editorials from this magazine. It is the liberal Senator Kilgore who defends the use of German slave labor, and it is Mrs. Roosevelt who praises Louis Nizer’s racial tirade against Germans and minimizes the current starvation in Germany. The actual proposals for postwar Germany of the reactionary German-baiter, Vansittart, are positively humane compared with those of the New Dealer, Morgenthau (who recently joined the committee to feed the General Motors strikers), while the Leftist paper, P.M., has far outstripped the Hearst press in its hate-the-Germans-and-Japs campaign. On the other issue of peacetime conscription, it is the Right Republican Senator Taft who leads the fight against it, and the Republican floor leader in the House, Martin, who proposes an international agreement to abolish conscription everywhere; while the New Dealers, led by first Roosevelt and now Truman, line up behind the General Staff in favor of conscription.

3. The Question of Marxism

Both in culture and in politics, Marxism today exercises as extraordinary influence. In the “social sciences,” the historical-materialist approach first developed by Marx is widely accepted. (See, for example, my note on “The Revival of Political Economy” in politics for March 1944.) Many workers in these fields who would be horrified at the idea of being Marxist nonetheless think in the tradition he established — filtered down (and watered down) through more “respectable” thinkers, as, for example, Weber and Mannheim in sociology. As for the influence of Marxism in world politics today, I have already tried to show that in detail.

This strange flickering-up of Marxist concepts, at a time when Marx’s ethical aims are in ashes, is the afterglow of a great historical period that is going down in darkness. Marxism is the most profound expression of what has been the dominant theme in Western culture since the 18th century: the belief that the advance of science, with the resulting increase of man’s mastery over nature, is the climax of a historical pattern of Progress. If we have come to question this pattern, before we can find any new roads, we must first reject the magnificent system which Marx elaborated on its basis. A break with a whole cultural tradition is involved, and Marxism looms up as the last and greatest systematic defense of that tradition. We who reject Marxism are indebted to Marx for the very fact that the boldness and intellectual grandeur of his work make it possible for us to formulate more clearly our own position in the the process of distinguishing it from his; this is the service which and great thinker renders to his critics. I know of no better way to come to the heart of our modern dilemma than by showing the defects of the Marxian solution.

The Ambiguity of Marxism

Marxism is not simply, or even primarily, an interpretation of history. It is a guide to political action. The worst fate that can befall a philosophy of action is for it to become ambiguous. This is what has happened to Marxism. Its ambiguity stems from the fact that Marx’s ethical aims have not been realized — quite the contrary! — while the historical process by which he thought they would be realized has to a large extent worked out as he predicted it would. It is possible to reach opposite conclusions, on the basis of Marxism, about Soviet Russia, depending on whether one emphasizes Marx’s ethical values or his idea of the historical process. Since Marx himself made the process significant rather than the values, the Stalinists would seem to have a somewhat better claim to be the “real” Marxists than their more ethically-minded opponents. But the point is not which is “really” the Marxist view; the point is that each view may be maintained, on the basis of Marx’s thought, with a good deal of reason. There is an ambiguity here, fatal to a philosophy conceived as a basis for action, which was not apparent during Marx’s lifetime, when history seemed to be going his way, but which is all too clear now that history is going contrary to socialist values.

What Marx Wanted

Marx’s vision of a good society was essentially the same as that of the anarchists, the Utopian socialists, and the great 18th century liberals — also as that of those today whom I call “Radicals.” The same theme runs through his writings from beginning to end. The Communist Manifesto (1848): “an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.” Capital, Vol. I (1867): “a society in which the full and free development of every individual becomes the ruling principle...production by freely associated men.” The Critique of the Gotha Program (1875) gives us the most explicit and famous formulation:

“In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of individuals under division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor, from a means of life, has itself become the prime necessity of life; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-round development of the individual, and all the springs of cooperative wealth flow more abundantly — only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be fully left behind and society inscribe on its banners: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”

The political seal of this future society would be the elimination of all forms of coercion, i.e., the withering away of the State. Some critics of Marx, in particular certain anarchists whose sectarian intemperance matches that of certain Marxists, make him out an ideological apologist for the State. There is indeed a potential towards Statism in Marxism, but it lies not is Marx’s values, but, as I shall show presently, in his “historical” method of thinking about those values. From the splendid polemic against Hegel’s Philosophy of Law in 1844 to the Gotha Critique thirty years later, Marx consistently criticized Statism from the standpoint of human liberation. As a moralist, Marx viewed the individual as the End and society as the Means.

How He Thought It Would Come About

So much for Marx’s ethical aims. I think it needs no demonstration that such a society is farther off today than it was in Marx’s time. Now what about the way Marx conceived the historical process that would realize these aims? Two passages will give us the grand outlines:

“At a certain stage of their development, the material forms of production in society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or — what is but a legal expression for the same thing — with the property relations within which they had been at work before. From forms of development of the forces of production, these relations turn into their fetter. Then comes the period of social revolution. With the change of the economic foundation, the entire immense superstructure in more or less rapidly transformed....In broad outline we can designate the Asiatic, the ancient, the feudal, and the modern bourgeois methods of production as so many epochs in the progress of the economics formation of society. The bourgeois relations of production are the last antagonistic form of the social process of production — antagonistic not in the sense of individual antagonism, but of one arising from conditions surrounding the life of individuals in society. At the same time, the productive forces developing in the womb of bourgeois society create the material conditions for the solution of that antagonism. This social formation constitutes, therefore, the closing chapter of the prehistoric stage of human society.” (Marx’s Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.)

“Along with the constantly diminishing number of magnates of capital...grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this too grows the revolt of the working class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organized by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself. The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production.... Centralization of the means of production and socialization of labor at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.... The transformation of scattered private property, arising from individual labor, into capitalist private property is, naturally, a process incomparably more protracted, violent and difficult than the transformation of capitalistic private property, already practically resting on socialised production, into socialised property. In the former case, we had the expropriation of the mass of the people by a few usurpers; in the latter, we have the expropriation of a few usurpers by the mass of people.” (Capital, Vol. I.)

How It Really Is Coming About

Two aspects of the passages concern us here: (1) the assumption that there is a progressive evolution in history from worse to better; (2) the description of how the overthrow of capitalism, the final step in this evolution, would come about.

(1) The belief in Progress is central to Marx’s thought, although his more sophisticated followers today, for understandable reasons, say as little as possible about it. As I shall show later on, Marx’s concept of historical Progress has not only proved to be empirically false, but it has also been used by the Communists as an ideology to justify the most atrocious policies. So long as we are bemused by the will-o-the-wisp of Progress, we can never become truly radical, we can never make man the root.

(2) Marx predicted that the contradiction between the increasing productivity of industry and the forms of private property would “burst asunder” the capitalist “integument” and lead to “socialised property.” The agency that would accomplish this change would be the proletariat, lashed to the task by increasing misery and historically fitted for it by the fact that collectivism was to its interest as a class (and, so far as Marx ever states, to the interest of no other class). The result of the change would be a nonantagonistic form of social production in which, for the first time in history, the masses would expropriate “a few usurpers” instead of the other way around. As we have seen already in this article, private capitalism is indeed decaying and the bourgeois are being expropriated, but the agency is not the proletariat but rather a new political ruling class which is substituting its rule for the old ruling class in the time-honored way. The process on which Marx banked so heavily is being brought about from the top, not the bottom, and is directed toward nationalism and war. The result is not the liberation of the masses but their even more complete enslavement, not the coming of the Kingdom of Freedom but the creation of an even more crushing Kingdom of Necessity. The external process is working out, but the inner spirit is the reverse of what Marx expected.

The weakness of Marxism seems to me to be precisely its most distinctive contribution to socialist thinking: the expectation that external, materialistic factors (such as changes in class and property relationships) will bring about certain desired results with “iron necessity.” Ends, values, cannot safely be treated only as functions of materialistic factors but must be defined and communicated in their own terms. Even that concept of change, the essence of his dialectical method, which Marx thought was intrinsically progressive, has become ambiguous. One is attracted to his “critical and revolutionary” spirit which “lets nothing impose on it” — and yet one cannot but recall that the Nazis were revolutionaries in their own way, who considered nothing sacrosanct, who let nothing impose on them, and whose only principle was a willingness to change anything at any time. This problem of how one roots one’s values, which will be treated more extensively later on, seems to me to be the heart of “the question of Marxism.”

The Rock that Turned Out to Be Sand

When Marx concentrated his great intellectual powers on the economic process of capitalism, he thought he was building on a rock. In the preface to Capital he quotes approvingly from a Russian review: “The one thing which is of moment to Marx is to find the law of phenomena with whose investigation he is concerned.... This law once discovered, he investigates in detail the effects in which it manifests itself in social life. Consequently, Marx only troubles himself about one thing: to show, by rigid scientific investigation, the necessity of successive determinate orders of social conditions.... Marx treats the social movement as a process of natural history, governed by laws not only independent of human will, consciousness and intelligence, but rather on the contrary, determining that will, consciousness and intelligence.... The scientific value of such an inquiry lies in the disclosing of the special laws that regulate the origin, existence, development and death of a given social organism and its replacement by another and higher one.” The optimism of the 19th century, both about Progress and about the possibilities of scientific inquiry, is strikingly expressed here. Also the influence of Darwin’s evolutionary theory on Marx, with its reinforcement of the idea of Progress that had arisen in the 18th century and its emphasis on external environmental factors over human consciousness. In the same preface, Marx grandiosely writes of “the natural laws of capitalist production...working with iron necessity towards inevitable results.” The necessity has proved to be putty, the results quite evitable. The rock of Historical Process on which Marx built his house has turned out to be sand.

It is sometimes said in defense of Marx on this point that he did not predict the inevitable victory of socialism but rather said that the choice before mankind was either socialism or barbarism; and that today we are getting the latter. but what did “barbarism” mean to Marx? From the context of his whole thought, I venture to say it meant disorganization, chaos, a regression in the scientific-technological sphere — the sort of thing that took place after the fall of the Roman Empire. But what we see today is just the opposite: it is the very triumph of scientific organization of matter (and of men) that is the root of our trouble; and the greatest triumph of applied science in generations, the splitting of the atom, may bring us to utter destruction. Nor is there anything chaotic or disorganized about Soviet Russia, where ethical barbarism is nonetheless at its height.

How unlikely, furthermore, this alternative of “barbarism” appeared to be to Marx and Engels is evident in the slight attention they gave it. They threw it in, perhaps from scientific caution, perhaps to heighten the attractiveness of socialism, but they never bothered to define it, and it runs counter to the general optimistic spirit of their work. Marx spent most of his life investigating the “laws of motion” of capitalism; this investment was justified by his assumption that if he could show, as he did, that these were working to destroy capitalism, he had also demonstrated the “iron necessity” of socialism.

In the following three sections, I try to show that (1) the working class has “come of age” without advancing us towards socialism; (2) a great shift away from capitalism is taking place without advancing us towards socialism; (3) modern war, far from offering “revolutionary opportunities” for socialism, is creating new conditions which make the struggle for socialism even more difficult. This failure of history to take the anticipated course might not be fatal to some systems of political thought but it is so to Marxism, because that system is built not on ethical principles but on the historical process itself.

4. The Mirage of the Proletarian Revolution

It was to the working class that Marx looked to bring in a better society. And it is in that direction that his followers today still look, as a glance at the minute coverage of labor news in almost any Marxist organ will show. I think it is time for us to recognize that, although the working class is certainly an element in any reconstitution of society along more tolerable lines, it is not now, and possibly never was, the element Marx thought it was. The evidence for this is familiar, and most Marxists will admit almost every item in detail. They shrink, however, and understandably enough, from drawing the logical but unpleasant conclusions that follow. In my opinion, the weight that Marx attached to the proletariat was excessive economically in that the organization of the workers into unions has failed to develop into the broader kind of action Marx expected it to. And it was excessively politically is that neither the reformist nor the Bolshevik tactic has led to the hoped-for results.

Economic: the Unions

In the resolution on trade unions he drew up for the Geneva conference (1866) of the First International, Marx wrote that “while the immediate object” of trade unions is “confined to everyday necessities...to questions of wages and time of labor,” they must also broaden their objectives and “convince the world at large that their efforts, far from being narrow and selfish, aim at the emancipation of the downtrodden millions.” For, he continued: “If the trade unions are required for guerrilla fights between capital and labor, they are still more important as organized agencies for superseding the very system of wage labor.... They must now learn to act deliberately as organizing centers of the working class in the broad interest of its complete emancipation.” Engels wrote to Bebel in similar strain (March 18, 1875), describing the trade union as “the real organization of the proletariat, in which it carries on its daily struggles with capital, in which it trains itself, and which nowadays even amid the worst reaction — as in Paris at the present — can simply no longer be smashed.”

Engels was partially right: unions can no longer be “simply” smashed; they tend, indeed, to become ever stronger as capitalism matures. But this increasing strength has not led in any way to the “emancipation of the downtrodden millions.” In England the “new unionism” which began with the great dock strikes of 1889 led by socialists like Tim Mann and John Burns, and which the aged Engels hopefully saluted in the preface to the 1892 edition of The Condition of the British Working Class in 1844 — this movement towards industrial unionism of the most oppressed parts of the British proletariat laid the foundations for...the British Labor Party. In Germany, the debacle of the mighty Social-Democratic trade union movement, on which Marx and Engels placed their main hope for socialist leadership, hardly needs underlining here. Nor is it necessary to elaborate on the evolution — devolution, rather — of our own CIO, which ten years ago unionized the millions of industrial workers who form the backbone of the American working class, and which in that short space of time has recapitulated the history of European trade unionism, from the rebellious youth to bureaucratic senility.

Instead of broadening their objectives, as Marx expected them to, and aspiring finally to “the emancipation of the downtrodden millions,” unions have usually followed precisely the opposite course. At least, in the instances cited above, it is striking how in each case the early struggle to establish unions had an anti-capitalist character which more and more disappeared as time went on. The evolution has been at first into simple pressure groups fighting for labor’s interests against the rest of society (which does not by any means consist only of bankers in silk hats) and with an attitude of devil take the hindmost so long as “we get ours”; Lewis’ United Mine Workers and the old-line A.F. of L. unions are still in this stage. There is also a later stage, more typical of mature capitalism, which indeed involves the assumption of a broad social responsibility, but as an integral part of capitalism rather than a force for labor’s emancipation from capitalism. Industrialists often find it advantageous to have their work force controlled by a “responsible” union bureaucracy with whom they can deal on a “reasonable” basis — in England, for example, the employer himself often makes union membership a condition of employment. The State also finds unions of great value as agencies of control, especially in wartime. 