People who read these reflections may wonder how I arrived at the understanding that socialism has failed. I am describing the whole experience in another book, but here a brief glance at the intellectual road I traveled may be helpful. It has not been so winding a road as some may think.

I stated the aim of my political activities in two articles in the Masses in 1916: not to reform men, or even primarily reform the world, but to “make all men as free to live and realize the world as it is possible for them to be.” In this the years have brought no change.

In those same articles I dismissed Marx’s philosophic system, his idea that socialism is historically necessary, as “a rationalization of his wish,” and declared: “We must alter and remodel what he wrote, and make of it and of what else our recent science offers, a doctrine that shall clearly have the nature of hypothesis.”

The hypothesis, as I conceived it, was that by intensifying the working class struggle, and pursuing it to victory either at the polls or in a revolution, we could “socialize the means of production,” and thus extend democracy from politics into economics. That, I thought, would give every man a chance to build a life in his own chosen way. It would “liberate the proletariat and therewith all society,” to use a Marxian formula that I liked to quote.

To me, in short, socialism was not a philosophy of history, or of life—much less a religion—but a large-scale social-scientific experiment. I came to it by a process of thought rather than feeling. I had no personal envies or resentments; I was happily circumstanced and wisely brought up; I thought of myself as free. I wanted to extend that freedom to all men; I wanted to see a society without distinctions of caste, class, race, money-power—without exploitation, without the “wage system.” I knew this could not be brought about by preaching; I had observed the effects of preaching. I was captivated by the idea that it might be brought about by self-interested struggle on the part of those most deprived under the present system. Thus the class struggle as a method was the very center of my socialist belief. The articles quoted above were entitled “Towards Liberty, The Method of Progress,” and they were meant to be the first chapters of a book.

It was juvenile of me to imagine that humanity as a whole, especially by splitting itself into two halves, could turn a whole period of history into a scientific experiment. Science requires a scientist, or at least an engineer, and the engineer in this case would have to have dictatorial power. But that thought, if it entered my mind, I managed to elude. I worked out a socialism of my own which enabled me to take an independent position on many concrete questions: feminism, population-control, peace and war. Both the doctrine of class morals and the propaganda of class hate I rejected. I could think freely on such questions because my socialism was not a mystical cure-all, but merely a plan which I considered practical for solving the one specific problem of making freedom more general and democracy more democratic.

Although I was a member of the Socialist Party, the magazines I edited from 1912 to 1922, the Masses and the Liberator, were arrantly independent, and I was pretty regularly flayed alive by the party officials for some heresy or other. It was usually a revolutionary heresy. I was decidedly at the red end of the party spectrum. Still it wasn’t always the reformists as against the revolutionists that I attacked. As often it was the dogmatism of both. Naturally in my attempt to make Marxism over into an experimental science, I waged a continual war on the bigotry, the cant, the know-it-allism, of the party priesthood. This I think distinguished the policy of the old Masses[1] and the Liberator as much as their militant insistence on the class struggle. I was always close friends with the I.W.W., and on good terms even with the anarchists, although I lectured them on their childish innocence of the concept of method. I was not afraid, either, of the word liberal with a small l, although I had my own definition of it. “A liberal mind,” I wrote in the Masses for September 1917, “is a mind that is able to imagine itself believing anything. It is the only mind that is capable of judging beliefs, or that can hold strongly without bigotry to a belief of its own.”

When the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia in October 1917, shocking the whole world of progressive and even moderate socialist opinion, I backed them to the limit in the Liberator. I raised the money to send John Reed to Russia, and published his articles that grew into the famous book, Ten Days That Shook the World. I was about the only “red” still out of jail in those violent days, and my magazine was for a time the sole source of unbewildered information about what was happening in Russia. Its circulation reached a peak of sixty thousand.

When Lenin’s pamphlet called in English “The Soviets at Work” was published—the same that won Whittaker Chambers to communism—I was enraptured. The monumental practicality, the resolute factualness, of Lenin’s mind, combined as almost never before with a glowing regard for poor and oppressed people, anxiety over their freedom, devotion to the idea of their entrance into power, swept me off my feet. I still think it one of the noblest—and now saddest—of political documents. It convinced me that Lenin’s mind was experimental. In every line he seemed to realize my ideal of a scientific revolutionist. I greeted him in two articles in the Liberator as “a Statesman of a New Order,” and dedicated myself with no doctrinal reservations to the defense of his principles of action and his Soviet regime.

Attacking those who accused him of dogmatism, I exclaimed: “I have never seen a sign in any speech or writing of Lenin that he regarded the Marxian theory as anything more than a scientific hypothesis in process of verification.”

There were few translations from Russian in those days. I had to go to Russia and learn the language before I found out that Lenin was a true believer in the Marxian mystique. He was, to be sure, more high-handed with its postulates than any other believer—much more so than Trotsky. He had the trick, as Karl Radek once remarked to me, of “deciding a question on the basis of the facts and then fixing it up with the theory afterward.” He also had Hegel’s notion of “dialectic logic” to help him with this trick. I did not know enough then to distinguish between the limited freedom dispensed to the faithful by this ingenious notion, and the complete freedom of a mind dealing only with facts, purposes, and plans of action. I gave my heart to Lenin more completely than I have to any other leader, and fought for the Bolsheviks on the battlefield of American opinion with all the influence my voice and magazine possessed. From the October revolution until Baron Wrangel was swept out of the Crimea, I was engaged in a civil war, and my socialist convictions grew hard and firm. It took a long time after that, a steady and merciless bombardment of hostile and unanswerable facts, to unsettle them.

Still I was far enough from fanatical when I sailed for Russia in 1922 to remark to my friends that I was “going over to find out whether what I have been saying is true.” I arrived in September, in time to learn a little Russian before I attended the fourth congress of the Third International. I was not a delegate and had no official status, but the Liberator was well enough known so that I was hospitably received as a guest. Later on, Trotsky, who consented to cooperate with me on a biographical portrait, gave me a portentous document bearing his signature and the seal of the Red Army, asking everybody in Russia to receive me cordially and attend to my needs. I traveled wherever I wanted to with that document, and saw whatever I asked to see.

I traveled at the height of the swift recovery that followed the adoption of the New Economic Policy, and I experienced Soviet life at its best. Although surprised and shocked by some features of the experiment, I found ground for great hope also. Only one thing seemed to me calamitously bad. That was the bigotry and Byzantine scholasticism which had grown up around the sacred scriptures of Marxism. Hegel, Marx, Engels, Plekhanov, Lenin—these men’s books contained for the Bolsheviks the last word of human knowledge. They were not science, they were revelation. Nothing remained for living thinkers to do but apply them, gloss them, dispute about them, expatiate on them, find in them the germs of every new thought or thing that came into the world. Instead of liberating the mind of man, the Bolshevik Revolution locked it into a state’s prison tighter than ever before. No flight of thought was conceivable, no poetic promenade even, no sneak through the doors or peep out of a window in this pre-Darwinian dungeon called Dialectic Materialism. No one in the western world has any idea of the degree to which Soviet minds are closed and sealed tight against any idea but the premises and conclusions of this antique system of wishful thinking. So far as concerns the advance of human understanding, the Soviet Union is a gigantic roadblock, armed, fortified, and defended by indoctrinated automatons made out of flesh, blood, and brains in the robot-factories they call schools.

I felt this barbarous thing more keenly than any other disappointment in the land of my dreams. I was sure it contained the seeds of priest rule and police rule. Any state religion, as all the great liberals have pointed out, is death to human freedom. The separation of church and state is one of the main measures of protection against tyranny. But the Marxian religion makes this separation impossible, for its creed is politics; its church is the state. There is no hope within its dogmas of any evolution toward the free society it promises.

For these reasons, instead of writing the travel stories expected of me about “Life under the Soviets,” I went into the reading room of the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow and got down to work on my old unfinished partial torso of a book, “Towards Liberty, the Method of Progress.” Although not deceived that anybody would pay prompt attention to me, I thought it my duty to the revolution to attack this roadblock, this prodigy of obtuseness parading as ultimate wisdom, in the only way it could be attacked, by an unanswerable demonstration of the conflict between Marxism and scientific method.

I stayed a year and nine months in Russia, and put in a major part of my time learning Russian and reading, mostly in that language, the essential literature on which the actions of the Bolsheviks were based. Leaving Russia in June 1924, I spent the next three years in western Europe, where I finished a book on the subject and named it Marx and Lenin, the Science of Revolution. It was published in London in 1926. The Anglo-Saxon world had so little interest then in Marxian theory that I had to advance the money for its publication. But Albert and Charles Boni bought sheets and published it a year later in New York. La Nouvelle Revue Française published a French translation the following year. My money investment was well repaid. But my success in undermining the roadblock in Russia was not conspicuous. The copy I sent to the Marx-Engels Institute was returned by the Post Office marked: “Denied admission by the Department of Publications.” The only murmur to come out of Russia was from the great scientist, Ivan Pavlov, who surprised me with a letter in his own hand sent fearlessly through the mail: “I endorse completely your criticism of the philosophical foundation of Marxism.” And he added this contribution to my painfully slow recovery from socialism: “There isn’t any science of revolution, and there won’t be for a long time. There is only a groping of the life force, partly guided empirically, of those who have a much-embracing and strong common sense. Our Bolshevik Revolution, with its details so disastrous to our intellectual and moral development, I consider an anachronism which (of this I am convinced) will repeat itself in this form never and nowhere in the civilized world. Such is my deepest understanding of these matters.”

In that book I wrote as a believer in the Soviet system, and I still imputed to Lenin a stride forward, however unconscious, toward the attitude of experimental science, calling him by contrast with his more orthodox opponents an “engineer of revolution.” There was a great deal of truth in this, but I still managed to elude its implications. I thought it was a wonderful and hopeful thing that Lenin had succeeded, by basing himself on the Marxian analysis of class forces, in throwing a net over the whole of Russian society, and gathering the power into his hands and that of a party dedicated to building socialism.

This theoretic conception stood firm in my mind, even though I had seen before leaving Russia what I now believe to be its direct and normal consequence: the usurpation of power by a tyrant having no honest instinct for the liberties of men. I had not only seen, but very carefully studied the plot by which Stalin made himself master after Lenin’s death. Resides studying his maneuvers, I attended the party congress of May 1924, at which his open attack was launched and Trotsky’s prestige in the party destroyed. Behind the scenes at that congress Trotsky told me in whispers the drift and essential details of the suppressed document called “Lenin’s Testament.” I was leaving Russia in a few days, and I spent those days gathering, with his encouragement, what further documents I needed to expose the plot and explain it. To do this I laid aside my work on Marxism, and wrote the little book called Since Lenin Died, which remains, I think, an authentic source for the history of the conflict about leadership which followed Lenin’s death.

In the evolution of my socialist opinions that book marked a rather modest step. My conclusion was only a caution to revolutionists in other countries against accepting in the name of Leninism “the international authority of a group against whom Lenin’s dying words were a warning, and who have preserved that authority by suppressing the essential texts of Lenin.” Fourteen years would pass before I was able to see in that group, not only an enemy of Lenin’s plans, but a result of the revolution as conceived and engineered by him.

I had said enough in my two books, however, to ostracize me completely from the official communist movement. When I came home from Europe in 1927 most of my old political friends refused to speak to me on the street. I was a traitor, a renegade, a pariah, a veritable untouchable, so far as the communists were concerned. And as the bitterness mounted, this mood spread to the radical, and even in some degree to the liberal, intelligentsia as a whole. To get rid of my facts, I was of course promptly and indelibly labeled “Trotskyist,” although I neither agreed with Trotsky’s Marxism, nor ever shared the delusion that he might become the successful leader of a party. That the policies of Lenin and the original aims of the Bolsheviks were defended by Trotsky was made unmistakably clear in my little book, and will be unmistakably clear in history, I believe, if honest history survives. But my loyalty was not to any leader or group. My loyalty was still to the working class, to the idea of progress through class struggle. In principle I was merely supplying the international working class and its leaders with information essential to the intelligent conduct of the struggle.

With the same purpose I translated and published in 1928 the suppressed program and documents of the exiled Left Opposition of the Russian Communist party, calling the book The Real Situation in Russia. As the text was theirs rather than mine, I gave the royalties to a small branch of the Trotskyist Opposition which had by that time been formed in America. This added to a growing impression that I was a personal follower of Trotsky, although my private thoughts about his failure to outmaneuver Stalin were anything but those of a follower.[2] It was always Lenin’s policies, and the truth about what was happening in Russia, that I was defending. My translation of Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution was made with admiration but not endorsement. To me that book is the supreme and most compelling application of the Marxian metaphysics to history, far outdoing the similar efforts of Marx himself. But I think it will be the last. No giant will ever again drive facts into those forms at such an expense of intellectual power.

A book which marks a longer step in my own development, emotional if not intellectual, was my Artists in Uniform, written in 1932–33, and published in 1934. There I described the hideous dictatorship in literature and the fine arts set up under Stalin’s knout, and the obsequious infantilism of Americans like Mike Gold, Joe Freeman, Bob Minor, Hugo Geliert, Maurice Becker, William Gropper, my ex-colleagues on the Liberator, who of their own free will kneeled down to it. No one who had believed in the socialist revolution as a liberation of spirit, as we all in those days so loudly did, could with intellectual honor pretend that this was it or any step in the direction of it. I did not pull any punches in that book, but I still spoke as a revolutionary socialist, a non-party old Bolshevik. I said in my introduction:

“I am on the side of the Soviets and the proletarian class struggle. But I think that critical truth-speaking is an element of that struggle essential to its success . . . The efforts toward socialist construction in the Soviet Union must inevitably serve the world movement in some sense as a guide. These efforts should not be followed, however, as a seamstress follows a pattern, but as a scientist repeats an experiment, progressively correcting the errors and perfecting the successful strokes.”

Those were, I think, my last published words as a defender of the Soviet Union. It is not easy to set dates in such a matter. “Who can determine when it is that the scales in the balance of opinion begin to turn, and what was a greater probability in behalf of a belief becomes a positive doubt against it?” Cardinal Newman asks the question in his Apologia, and I must say that with all the documents I have in hand, I can not be exact as to the moment when I abandoned my attitude of “loyal to the Soviet Union but opposed to the Stalin leadership,” and decided that thanks to that leadership the hope of socialism in Russia was dead. I only know that during the year 1933 those positive doubts grew so strong that I abandoned my pro-Soviet lectures, and remained silent for about two years. In the spring of 1936, I wrote an essay, “The End of Socialism in Russia,” which was published in Harper’s Magazine, January 1937, and afterward by Little, Brown & Company as a book. “To my mind there is not a hope left for the classless society in present-day Russia,” I said in that book. But I still regarded Stalin’s totalitarian dictatorship as an enemy, rather than a result, of the policies of Lenin.

It took me another two years to arrive at the knowledge that Lenin’s methods—or in other words bolshevik Marxism—were to blame. This further slow step in my enlightenment was recorded in another book, published in 1940, and called Stalin’s Russia and the Crisis in Socialism.

“I now think,” I wrote in that book, “that this brilliant device for engineering a seizure of power, invented by Lenin with a super-democratic purpose, has shown itself to be in fatal conflict with the purpose. I think that an armed seizure of power by a highly organized minority party, whether in the name of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, the Glory of Rome, the Supremacy of the Nordics, or any other slogan that may be invented, and no matter how ingeniously integrated with the masses of the population, will normally lead to the totalitarian state. ‘Totalitarian state’ is merely the modern name for tyranny. It is tyranny with up-to-date technique. And the essence of that technique is a reverse use of the very thing upon whose forward action Lenin ultimately relied, the machinery of public education.”

This change of opinion invalidated much that I had said in the second part of my book, Marx and Lenin, the Science of Revolution. Moreover I had learned a great deal more about Marxism since that book was published in 1926. Its demonstration of the unscientific, and indeed superstitious, character of Marx’s whole mode of thought seemed more and more important as the battle between the Soviets and western civilization developed. It was my main contribution to the battle, and I wrote it over again as maturely and carefully as I know how. With the title Marxism Is It Science, it was published in the autumn of that same year, 1940.

Even then, although rejecting Lenin’s system of party control, I had not decided that “the socialist hypothesis” was disproven. That decision, or the inner force to confront that fact, arrived in the following year. And in this case I do remember the precise moment. At a cocktail party given by Freda Utley—I think for her friend Bertrand Russell—during a conversation about some last and most significantly dreadful news that had come out of Russia, she suddenly asked me:

“Aside from these Russian developments, do you still believe in the socialist idea?”

I said, “No.”

Although I had never said this to myself, the answer came from the depths of my heart and mind. It seemed perfectly clear, once the question was boldly put, that if the socialist hypothesis were valid in general, some tiny shred of the benefits promised by it would have appeared when the Russian capitalists were expropriated and production taken over by the state, no matter how untoward the circumstances. By that time everything in Russia was worse from the standpoint of socialist ideals than it had been under the regime of the Tsar. I did not need any additional experiments such as that in Nazi Germany, or in England, or the obvious drift in other countries, to convince me. I was sure that the whole idea of extending freedom, or justice, or equality, or any other civilized value, to the lower classes through common ownership of the means of production was a delusive dream, a bubble that had taken over a century to burst.

I have never had any hesitations or regrets about the decision—only about the unconscionably long time it took me to reach it. When I am denounced as a turncoat by the true believers it does indeed bring a blush to my cheek, but only because it took me so long to turn my coat. I sadly regret the precious twenty years I spent muddling and messing around with this idea, which with enough mental clarity and moral force I might have seen through when I went to Russia in 1922.

This present book contains my principal conclusions, or the principal things I have learned politically, since making that decision. I imagine some of its readers will echo the remark of Upton Sinclair in a recent letter, that I have merely “gone from one extreme to the other.” I think, on the contrary, that the step is shorter from hard-headed class-struggle socialism to a firm defense of the free-market economy than to the old wishful notion of a highminded slide into utopia. It is a straighter step to take. The struggle is still for freedom; the main facts are still economic; the arch-enemy is still the soft-headed idealist who refuses to face facts.

My essay-chapters have been written at different times, and not always with a definite sequence in mind, but I think they follow each other in an acceptable order. I have to thank the New Leader, the Freeman, the Reader’s Digest, and the Saturday Evening Post for publishing some of them, or parts of them, in advance.

Max Eastman

January 1955

[1] I use the word “old” to distinguish the Masses from the New Masses, a magazine founded years later by a totally different group of people, and which, under the control of the Communist party, developed a policy contrary in almost every detail to what the Masses and the Liberator stood for. I have discussed this more fully in Enjoyment of Living, p. 415.

[2] They are described in the chapter, “Great in Time of Storm,” of my book, Heroes I Have Known.

Part One

BOTH HOPES ARE FALSE Chapter One Almost everyone who cares earnestly about freedom is aroused against the Communists. But it is not only the Communists, it is in a more subtle way the Socialists who are blocking the efforts of the free world to recover its poise and its once-firm resistance to tyranny. In Italy, by voting with the Communists, they ousted De Gasperi’s strong and wise government, and they are keeping his successors weak through the menace of similar action. In France, by refusing hearty collaboration with “capitalist” parties, they have made it impossible to form any stable government at all, producing just that chaos which the Communists desire. In Germany, after doing their best to oust Adenauer and his brilliant Minister of Economics, Ludwig Erhard, who accomplished almost single-handed “the miracle of German recovery,” they are as this is written opposing his plan of rearmament, which offers the sole hope of effective West European resistance to an invading Communist army. In England they made a recovery like that of Germany impossible; their government recognized Communist China; and they are pushing to confirm for all time the Communists’ hold on the impregnable land mass, or planetary fortress, of Eurasia. In Norway they have produced the closest imitation of an authoritarian state to be found this side of the iron curtain. In America we seem remote from all this, but it is only because the Socialists in large numbers have abandoned the party label, adopting the Fabian policy of infiltration in other groups. Norman Thomas has withdrawn from the party executive and no longer functions as a political leader. Maynard Krueger, once candidate for Vice President on the Socialist ticket, resigned from the party, explaining that he did so not because his beliefs had changed, but because he thought devout American Socialists should associate themselves with the “liberal-labor coalition inside and just outside the Democratic party.” This liberal-labor coalition has already transformed the Democratic party from an organ of Jeffersonian resistance to centralized power into the recognized advocate of increasing state control. It played a major part in the follies of Yalta, Teheran, Potsdam, and the China Story, which gave away well-nigh half the world to the Communists. Thus in America as elsewhere it is the socialist ideal, as surely as the communist implementation of it, that is working against freedom. To thoughtful Americans Lenin’s notion that a tiny group of detached zealots calling themselves the vanguard of the working class, after seizing the power and “smashing the bourgeois state,” could establish a dictatorship of the proletariat—or any dictatorship but their own—has grown to seem preposterous. And the belief that such a dictatorship, having taken charge of the economy of a country, could lead the way to a classless society in which all men would be free and equal, is getting difficult even to remember. When remembered it is seen to be what it is—a dangerous fairy tale. But we are still beguiled by this other fairy tale: that a large group of liberal-minded reformers, not pretending to be a class, not seizing the power but creeping into it, not smashing the state but bending it to their will, can take charge of the economy and approximate a free and equal society. This second notion is really more utopian than the first. The bolshevik scheme at least designated a social force which was to carry the process through. It looked scientific to say that the working class, once the existing order was smashed, would conduct the economy without paying tribute to capital, and a classless society would thus result from the natural instincts of men. The belief that such a millennium could be brought into being by “some combination of lawyers, business and labor managers, politicians and intellectuals,” is hard to take seriously. And yet as Lenin s pseudo-scientific dream-hope evaporates, this more pure and perfect fantasy tends to take its place. The phrase I quoted is from an essay contributed by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., to a symposium on “The Future of Socialism,” in the Partisan Review for May-June 1947. In that essay Mr. Schlesinger defined socialism in orthodox terms as “ownership by the state of all significant means of production,” and declared it “quite practicable . . . as a long term proposition.” He has said contrary things both before and since, and it appears that these words did not express a clear or firmly held opinion.[1] But that makes them all the better illustrate the danger I am speaking of. For it is not the copper-riveted old-time believers in Marxian theory that we in America have to fear. Those old-timers, although calling themselves democratic, still give lip-service to the Marxian doctrine of progress through increasing class division. They do not seem to me really to believe in it any longer; in the present state of class relations in this country such a belief would require feats of mental gymnastics for which even Marx did not prepare them. But their formal adherence to this and the rest of the Marxian mystique isolates them in America. Their fairy tale is not plausible enough to be dangerous. It is the bureaucratic socializers—if I may devise that label for the champions of a lawyer-manager-politician-intellectual revolution—who constitute a real and subtle threat to America’s democracy. It is their dream that is moving into focus as that of Lenin grows dim. The assumption common to these two dreams is that society can be made more free and equal, and incidentally more orderly and prosperous, by a state apparatus which takes charge of the economy, and runs it according to a plan. And this assumption, though alluringly plausible, does not happen to be true. A state apparatus which plans and runs the business of a country must have the authority of a business executive. And that is the authority to tell all those active in the business where to go and what to do, and if they are insubordinate put them out. It must be an authoritarian state apparatus. It may not want to be, but the economy will go haywire if it is not. That much was foreseen by many cool-headed wise men during the hundred-odd years since the idea of a “socialized” economy was broached. But the world was young, and the young can not be told—they have to learn by experience. (I was among the least willing to be told.) However, the actual experience of state-run economies, popping up one after another in the last thirty-five years, should be enough, it seems to me, to bring home this simple fact to the most exuberant. It is a fact which you can hardly fail to realize if you watch the operation of any big factory, or bank, or department store, or any place of business where a large number of people are at work. There has to be a boss, and his authority within the business has to be recognized, and when not recognized, enforced. Moreover, if the business is vast and complex, his authority has to be continuous. You cannot lift him out of his chair every little while, tear up his plans, and stick in somebody else with a different idea of what should be done or how it should be done. The very concept of a plan implies continuity of control. Thus the idea that a periodic election of the boss and managing personnel is consistent with a planned national economy is lacking both in logic and imagination—you need only define the word “plan,” or present a plan to your mind’s eye. The thing is conceivable perhaps in a small enterprise, but where would you be if the nation’s entire wealth production and distribution were a single business? Even supposing elections could be genuine when those in office controlled all the jobs in the country. Suppose they were genuine—you might as well explode a bomb under the economy as hold an election. The phony elections in totalitarian countries, the ballots with only one party and one list of candidates, are not the mere tricks of a cynical dictator—they are intrinsic to a state-planned economy. Either phony elections or no elections at all—that is what thoroughgoing socialism will mean, no matter who brings it in—hard-headed Bolsheviks, soft-headed Social Democrats, or genteel liberals. Even now, with government handling only a third of our national income, it took the most popular candidate since George Washington to defeat the party in power. Even he could not carry in a Congress heartily in opposition. How could you unseat an administration with every enterprise and every wage and salary in the country in its direct control? Not only private self-interest would prevent it, and that would be a force like gravitation, but public prudence also—patriotism! “Don’t change horses in midstream,” we say. But we’d be in mid-stream all the time with the entire livelihood of the nation dependent upon an unfulfilled plan in the hands of those in office. “Don’t rock the boat” would be the eternal slogan, the gist of political morals. That these morals would have to be enforced by the criminal law is as certain as that mankind is man. [1] The whole passage about how this “long term proposition” might be achieved reads as follows: “Its gradual advance might well preserve order and law, keep enough internal checks and discontinuities to guarantee a measure of freedom, and evolve new and real forms for the expression of democracy. The active agents in effecting the transition will probably be, not the working class, but some combination of lawyers, business and labor managers, politicians and intellectuals, in the manner of the first New Deal, or of the labor government in Britain.” Mr. Schlesinger was quite savagely angry at me for quoting this passage correctly when the present essay was published in the New Leader (June 1952). He thought I should have known that he did not mean what he said. “In order to chime with the purposes of the symposium,” he explained, “I chose to write as if ‘democratic socialism’ and ‘mixed economy’ were the same. I made a mistake in so doing, as Mr. Eastman’s confusion suggests. . . . . I am tired of Max Eastman and his present conviction that liberty resides in the immunity of private business from government control. I wish he would grow up . . .” My “confusion” consisted in not having read Mr. Schlesinger’s book, The Age of Jackson (1945), in which he “explicitly rejected the theory of socialism,” nor yet The Vital Center (1949), in which he “explained his rejection of socialism at length.” I was indeed guilty of this confusion, but I have it now clear in my head that it was only during an interlude in 1947—a strange interlude, I must say—that Mr. Schlesinger came out explicitly for “ownership by the state of all significant means of production,” meaning thereby a “mixed economy.”

FREEDOM AND THE PLANNED ECONOMY Chapter Two A false and undeliberated conception of what man is lies at the bottom, I think, of the whole bubble-castle of socialist theory. Although few seem to realize it, Marxism rests on the romantic notion of Rousseau that nature endows men with the qualities necessary to a free, equal, fraternal, family-like living together, and our sole problem is to fix up the external conditions. All Marx did about this with his dialectic philosophy was to change the tenses in the romance: Nature will endow men with these qualities as soon as the conditions are fixed up. Because of his stress upon economic conditions, Marx is commonly credited with the cynical opinion that economic self-interest is dominant in human nature. Marx was far from a cynic about human nature. He believed that human nature is a function of the economic conditions, completely variable and capable of operating, once these conditions are “ripe,” on the divinely rational and benign principle: “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” It was to protect this optimistic dogma about human nature that the Stalin government felt obliged to stamp out the true science of genetics. According to that science, traits acquired during the lifetime of an organism are not appreciably transmitted in heredity. Only by selective breeding, whether artificial or natural, can profound changes be made in the nature of any species. While men’s acquired characters may, and undoubtedly do, change with changing economic (and other) conditions, the underlying traits of human nature remain the same. There is little doubt that the Marxian bigots in the Kremlin were moved by this consideration in liquidating the world-famous geneticist, Avilov, and supporting the charlatan, Lysenko, in popularizing a belief in the wholesale heredity of acquired characteristics. Without such belief, the whole Marxian myth that economic evolution will bring us to the millennium falls to the ground.[1] Once we have abandoned this myth, we can give heed to the real contribution of Karl Marx: his sense of the great part played by economic relations in determining political and cultural ways of life. His own sagacity will conduct us, then, to a genuinely scientific study of the economic foundations of political freedom. This study has been made by various economists of the “neo-liberal” school—Wilhelm Roepke, F. A. Hayek, Ludwig von Mises and others. Taking human nature as it functions in average life, they have shown that the competitive market and the price system are the basis of whatever real political freedom exists, or can be imagined to exist, where there is an elaborate division of labor. I am not an economist, but I have watched with some care the destinies of these men’s earnest writings. There has been no answer, and I don’t see how there can be an answer, to their assertion that mankind is confronted with a choice between two and only two business systems—a choice which involves the fate of democratic civilization. We can choose a system in which the amount and kind of goods produced is determined by the impersonal mechanism of the market, issuing its decrees in the form of fluctuating prices. Or we can choose a system in which this is determined by commands issuing from a personal authority backed by armed force. You cannot dodge this issue by talking about a “mixed economy.” The economy is inevitably mixed; nobody in his right mind proposes a total abandonment of government enterprise. You can not dodge it by insisting the state must regulate the market or intervene in its operations. If carefully defined, that statement is obvious. The question is whether the economy is mixed to the point of destroying the essential directing function of the market, whether the regulations are a substitute for the market or a framework within which it shall operate, whether intervention is compatible or incompatible with the general control of the economy by the whole people as consumers of goods. That is the difference between collectivism and the market economy. That is the alternative with which mankind is confronted. You can not dodge it, or pray it away, or hide it from yourself with smokescreens of ideas. It is a fact, not an idea. We have to choose. And the choice is between freedom and tyranny. There is no conflict between freedom so conditioned and a humane regard on the part of the state for people who fail utterly in the competitive struggle. No one need starve, no one need be destitute, in order to preserve the sovereignty of the market. The principle of collective responsibility for those actually in want can be maintained without violating the principle of competition. But we need no longer deceive ourselves that liberty in a human world is compatible with economic equality. Liberty means absence of external restraint. To democrats, it meant absence of arbitrary governmental restraint, and was to a degree synonymous with equality before the law. But to the Socialists it meant absence of all governmental restraint, and also of those more subtle restraints imposed by a minority who own the land and the wealth-producing machinery. Who, in the absence of these restraints, is going to impose equality? What is to bring it about that men, once granted leave to behave as they please, will behave as though the whole human race were a loving family? We have to make up our minds, if we are going to defend this free world against an oncreeping totalitarian state control, whether, in fact, our primary interest is in freedom from state control, or in an attempt at economic equality enforced by a controlling state. We have to accept such inequalities as are presumed by, and result from, economic competition. Equality apart, however, there is something vitally democratic, as well as impersonal, in the control exercised by the market. When a man buys something on a free market, he is casting his vote as a citizen of the national economy. He is making a choice which, by influencing prices, will enter into the decision as to how, and toward what ends, the economy shall be conducted. His choice may be outweighed by others who buy more; that is inevitably true. But in placing the major economic decisions in the hands of the whole people as consumers, recording these decisions automatically through the mechanism of price, the market makes freedom possible in a complex industrial society. It is the only thing that makes it possible. Strangely enough Marx himself as a historian was the first to perceive this. Looking backward, he observed that all our freedoms had evolved together with, and in dependence upon, private capitalism with its free competitive market. Had he been a man of science instead of a mystic believer in the inevitability of a millennium, he might have guessed at what is so clearly obvious now: that this dependence of other freedoms upon the free market extends into the future also. It is a brief step indeed from Marxism—once the Hegelian wishful thinking is weeded out of it—to such a passage as this from Wilhelm Roepke: “It is hardly forgivable naïveté to believe that a state can be all-powerful in the economic sphere without also being autocratic in the political and intellectual domain and vice versa. . . . It therefore makes no sense to reject collectivism politically, if one does not at the same time propose a decidedly non-socialist solution of the problems of economic and social reform. If we are not in earnest with this relentless logic, we have vainly gone through a unique and costly historical object-lesson.” The failure of the Social Democrats, and still more in America of the “left” liberals, to learn this lesson is now a major threat to freedom in the western world.[2] I am not sure it is always a failure to learn. I think a good number of these Fabians and crypto-socialists—a new breed to which political expediency under the New Deal gave rise—have a suspicion that freedom will go down the drain. Travers Clement, one of the old-timers, has explicitly proposed hauling down the watchwords: “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,” and running up: “Cradle-to-grave Security, Full Employment and Sixty Million Jobs.”[3] It was no accident of old age that both Sidney and Beatrice Webb and their brilliant colleague and co-evangelist in Fabian socialism, Bernard Shaw, ended their careers as loyal defenders of the most complete and ruthless tyranny mankind has known. However, our American creepers toward socialism are most of them less bold and forthright than that. Often they don’t even know where they are creeping. They see with the tail of an eye that political liberty is incompatible with economic subjection, but they refuse to look straight in the face of this fact. They refuse to learn the lesson that the history of these last thirty years has been spread out on the table, it almost seems, to teach them. They remain indecisive, equivocal—lured by the idea of security, orderly production, and universal welfare under a planning state, yet not quite ready to renounce in behalf of it those rights and liberties of the individual which stand or fall with the free market economy. An ironical truth is that these socializers will not achieve security, orderly production, or the prosperity that makes universal welfare possible, by sacrificing freedom. They will be duped and defeated on all fronts. For me that also is proven by the history of the last three decades. But that is not the theme of this chapter. Its theme is that our progress in democracy is endangered by democratic enthusiasts who imagine that they can preserve freedom politically while hacking away at its economic foundations. More even than the fellow travelers with their vicarious flair for violent revolution, or the Communists with their courageous belief in it, these piously aspiring reformers are undermining our hopes. Yearning to do good and obsessed by the power of the state to do it, relieved by this power of their age-old feeling of futility, they are destroying in the name of social welfare the foundations of freedom. Arthur Koestler warned us some years ago against the “men of good will with strong frustrations and feeble brains, the wishful thinkers and idealistic moral cowards, the fellow-travelers of the death train.” We have accepted his warning. At least we have learned the meaning of the word fellow traveler, and are no longer falling in droves for these unlovely accomplices of the tyrant. We must arm our minds now against the less obvious, the more strong and plausible and patriotic enemies of freedom, the advocates of a state-planned economy. They are not on the train and have no thought of getting on, but they are laying the tracks along which another death train will travel. [1] I pointed out this vital conflict between Marxism and modern science in my early book Marx and Lenin, the Science of Revolution in 1925, anticipating by twenty years—although far indeed from expecting—the physical liquidation of the scientists. The passage will be found unchanged in Marxism Is It Science (pp. 267–8–9). The question of Marxism and the present conception of man is more fully discussed in my last chapter: “Socialism and Human Nature.” [2] Sadly enough, the Social Democrats, though trained in “economic interpretation,” are least of all able to learn this lesson. Even those emerging from their imprisonment in Marxian dogma take the wrong road. They reject what was sagacious and scientific about the master, his insistence on the importance of economic relations, and cling to his wishful dream, contradicted by all we now know about economics, of freedom under the planning state. Instead of going forward from their pseudo-scientific socialism to an expert, modern attempt to create a better society, they shrink back, clinging to a word and an emotion, into an attitude hardly distinguishable from that of the utopian socialists whom Marx superseded. [3] In the New Leader for August 4, 1945, answering my argument that democratic socialism is impossible.

THE REAL GUARANTEE OF FREEDOM Chapter Three One of the unconscious mistakes of Socialists was to imagine that there is a beatific end, or any end at all, to human history. In the Utopians this was excusable, for they were naively setting out to build an earthly paradise for man, and the idea could hardly occur to them that, once it was built, there was anything to do but live in it. When Marx breezed in, however, with his great brag of being realistic and hard-headed, telling us that ideals were unnecessary, the material universe is going “upward” eternally and the next stage after capitalism is bound to be socialism, it does seem odd that nobody asked: What comes after that? Hegel has been smiled at for bringing the grand march of the Divine Idea in history to a sort of destination in the “practical and political condition existing in Prussia in 1821.” Marx never joined in this smile. Marx scoffed at the Divine Idea, but took the grand march in history with monumental seriousness. The absurdity of stopping a locomotive universe at the precise point where his revolutionary ideals were realized never occurred to him. Wishful thinking is too instinctive, especially among German philosophers, and Marx was too arrogantly adept at it. But if we are going to be seriously realistic, we’ll have to make clear to ourselves that there is no end to the human journey. In our millennium well have to be content if things are “going well,” and not ask them to exist fixedly, as heaven does, in a state of perfection. Another mistake of the Socialists was to imagine that there might be brotherly peace in a free society—a settlement, that is, of all head-on conflicts of interest, all caste and class struggles. That might happen in heaven, but on earth men will always divide into groups with conflicting interests. As civilization advances they will divide into more groups perhaps, but not less keenly opposed. The task of the social idealist is not to suppress these groupings, or try to reconcile them, but to keep them in a state of equilibrium—never to let any one get out of hand. Our liberties depend upon the success of this effort. Only where every powerful group needs freedom for itself in order to compete with others can society as a whole be free. Freedom is the name of the arena in which various social forces contend. Libertarians used to tell us that “the love of freedom is the strongest of political motives,” but recent events have taught us the extravagance of this opinion. The “herd-instinct” and the yearning for paternal authority are often as strong. Indeed the tendency of men to gang up under a leader and submit to his will is of all political traits the best attested by history. It has been so shockingly exemplified in modern times that only a somnambulist could ignore it in trying to build, or defend, a free society. His first concern should be to make sure that no one gang or group—neither the proletariat, nor the capitalists, nor the landowners, nor the bankers, nor the army, nor the church, nor the government itself—shall have exclusive power. This truth was apprehended by Plato and Aristotle, who preferred a “mixed constitution” in which a monarch, an aristocracy, and a popular assembly divide the power. For modern times it was formulated by the Italian, Gaetano Mosca, whose concept of an equilibrium of social forces seems actually to define the sole basis on which freedom can flourish.[1] Marx, of course, was untouched by such ideas. Marx was not a scientist thinking out the forms of a new society in which men might be happy, but a prophet announcing a millennium to follow the day of doom for the kingdoms of this world. In sane good sense we radicals should have been thankful that, when the bourgeoisie displaced the feudal lords, a new class of proletarians was born, capable of sufficient organization to stand permanently against the bourgeoisie. We should count it a great folly in the advocates of proletarian revolution that they had in mind no other group, which, in the post-revolutionary society, might perform this indispensable function. “Permanent Class Struggle” would have been a wiser slogan than “Conquest of Power by the Working Class.” For the idea that the victory of any one social force, whether you call it class, or vanguard of a class, or party, or executive committee, or politburo, or what you call it, could produce a “society of the free and equal,” is the most fatal of Marxism’s political mistakes. “Permanent Class Struggle” has, in fact, been the motto, or tacit assumption, of the American worker. And the American worker is far more sophisticated than the European, if only because he was too lazy to do his homework on Das Kapital. His mind is clear of a whole tangle of antique, animistic, and disproven notions. “Permanent Class Struggle” was also the program Trotsky proposed to his followers in case the proletariat should not rise in victorious revolution at the end of World War Two. In a startling pronouncement, which his followers have been careful not to remember, Trotsky said: “If [at the conclusion of this war] the world proletariat should actually prove incapable of fulfilling the mission placed upon it by the course of development, nothing would remain except openly to recognize that the socialist program based on the internal contradictions of capitalist society ended as a utopia. It is self-evident that a new minimum program would be required—for the defense of the slaves of the totalitarian bureaucratic society.”[2] For me there is a sorrowful irony in the fact that Trotsky, with whom I fought daylong over this question of Marxism versus experimental science, should have to confess from the grave that his beloved doctrine has been proven false by an experiment, and one that he himself had decided was crucial. The date he set for a showdown is ten years past, and the proletariat has dismally failed to fulfill its “mission.” He believed, to be sure, that political democracy as well as socialism was doomed by this failure, but he could hardly postpone his “minimum program” until its doom was accomplished. He must needs have launched before now that struggle of permanent loyalty to the underprivileged which was all he had left. He would have to humble his mind still more than that, however, if he wished to pursue in a world undistorted by Marxian superstition the ideal of a free society. He would have to recognize that other basic conflicts of interest, not just that between capital and labor, must be regarded as permanent. He would have to abandon that identification of self with the working class—a sentimental pretense not hard for an honest mind to abandon—and recognize that the champion of freedom stands somewhat apart from all social conflicts. His duty to plunge in on one side or the other is conditioned by time and circumstance. The sole fixed aim is to maintain an equilibrium—never to let any one force gain overwhelming power. This will apply as much to the trade-union bureaucracy—and conceivably even to the trade-unions themselves—as to the bosses of industry and money. No man with his eyes open can fail to see that in the United States the power of the captains of organized labor is growing to a point where it should be regarded as a potential threat to freedom. Even the once-individualistic farmers have organized a pressure group that may have to be leashed, or balanced off, in the cause of a free republic. It is an old question how much the course of history can be influenced by thoughts in the minds of men. Certainly it can be influenced in behalf of freedom only if thinking men learn to shift their attack from one threatening concentration of power to another. They will have to learn to change their aims—and what is more difficult, their allies—as the conditions change. Though this will be hard for Marxists to learn, it is only a complete growing to maturity of that “flexibility” which was so prized by Lenin, and so brilliantly exemplified by him. Lenin called his rare gift “dialectic thinking,” and imagined that it flowed from a belief that the material world is evolving toward his ideals in a zigzag fashion. Each thing turns someday into its opposite, the two are reconciled someday in a “higher unity,” which again someday turns into its opposite, and so on forever—or at least until the believer gets where he wants to go. This supra-logical contraption is needful only to a man who has read his purpose into the evolution of the external world. He is tied by that act to the objective process unless he conceives the world as going forward by a series of intrinsically unpredictable sideways jumps. In short, the notion of dialectic enables the believer to escape in practical action from the rigidity that his theoretical faith imposes. That is its sole value to Marxists. Lenin was more accurate than he knew when he cried: “Flexibility of conception, flexibility to the point of the identity of opposites—that is the essence of the dialectic.”[3] To a mind aware that history is not an escalator, and that no one knows where the objective facts are leading, flexibility is inculcated by the mere fact of change. It requires no metaphysical hocus-pocus to justify it. And it is attainable to a degree that Lenin, with his fixed faith in a millennium to be reached by “resolving the contradictions in capitalism,” never imagined. I can see no course open to the disillusioned Marxist who remains loyal to his original ideals but to attain that genuinely scientific flexibility. He will have to make one further reduction in his Marxian pride, however. He will have to recognize that in the dream world in which they conducted their famous sparring match, the anarchists had as important a piece of wisdom in their keeping as the Marxists had. For one of the social forces which must be held in leash if the libertarian equilibrium is to be maintained is the political government. The anarchist idea that the state is the sole enemy, and that once the state is overthrown men will live instinctively in cooperative freedom, was childish indeed. It was a good deal more simply and lucidly childish than the imposing intellectual structure with which Marx tried to read his youthful passions into history. But when the balance is struck it will be found that Bakunin’s criticism of the Marxists, and that of the less famous Russian Machaisky, were as valid as Marxism. The state occupies a special position in society because it has a monopoly of armed force, but that only makes it more vital that it should not be sacrosanct. Not only must the power of the government be limited by law if the citizens are to be free—that too was known to Plato and Aristotle—but it must be limited by other powers. It must be regarded as but one of those social forces upon whose equilibrium a free society depends. When the state overgrows itself, the attitude of the anarchists becomes, within sensible limits, relevant and right; just as when the bankers swell up and presume to run a country, the attitude of the Marxists, barring their claim to universal truth, is right. The last forty years of American history provide an excellent example of the manner in which developing facts demand flexibility in the fighter for freedom. During twenty of those years the fight was against something which may, for purposes of convenience, be called “Wall Street” or “Big Business.” Nobody who engaged in the struggle to unionize the steel workers, or in the strike against the Rockefeller interests centering in Trinidad, Colorado, or who backed the Industrial Relations Commission of 1913–15, or the congressional investigation that called old J. P. Morgan on the carpet, need feel that his efforts were wasted. They were directed against the main enemy of freedom. But that enemy has been defeated and the battle won. Around 1930 the United States government began telling the financiers and captains of industry, instead of asking them, what to do. I was informed by one of the biggest of these captains that the change occurred in the presidency of Herbert Hoover. He related to me how, at the beginning of the crisis of 1929, Hoover summoned to the White House the heads of fifteen or sixteen dominant industrial and financial institutions, and while they sat listening respectfully, told them that in spite of the break in the stock market, which would indicate a contrary policy, he wanted them to continue their expenditures for expansion and increased business. To use my informant’s words as well as I can remember them: “We filed out obediently and went home and did what he told us to. And that night I made a note among my private papers, ‘This day marked a turning point in the history of the United States.’” The changing power-relations indicated in that meeting were carried to completion in the ensuing twenty years. The labor unions, or their officialdom at least, rose to the position of a major social force. In alliance with them the government took over the power from “Wall Street” or “Big Business” or the “Economic Royalists.” Stuart Chase, a pretty sharp-eyed referee in these battles, announced the victory in 1942. “Big Business,” he said, which “dominated the official government, both federal and local, in the 1920’s,” has, since the depression “retired to the sidelines, and in some cases to the doghouse.” The talk about “voracious bankers, outrageous profits, Sixty Families, greedy imperialists, wicked tycoons [is] on the futile side, if not approaching pure nonsense.” The class struggle doctrine has been twisted by “the march of history” into “a hopeless wreckage.”[4] These lines, besides describing the facts with not too much exaggeration, expressed a general conviction among what Chase calls “socialist liberals.” But neither he nor they realized what this meant, or should mean, to those interested in a free society. Instead of seeing and defining the new menace of overgrown power, ensconced now in Washington, not Wall Street, they went right on fighting the defeated enemy and boosting the victorious power. “The American community must submit to government and discipline if it is going to survive,” Chase said. “There is no path to the nineteenth century and the old frontier.” In war and peace we must have a “strong government,” “a strong executive arm.” “As a people we had better start tomorrow morning identifying the federal government at Washington with ourselves . . .” This disaster need never have happened, had there been a general understanding of the conditions of freedom. The best of the “socialist liberals” are leading us in the direction of the slave state only because they have the idea of a fixed destination, and don’t know where else to find it. Nothing is fixed; there is no destination. The task is to keep pace with history. The ideal is not peace but balanced conflict. Detached idealists of freedom should regard themselves as a mobile force in defense of the social equilibrium. Their aim at all times should be to prevent the domination of society by any one organized idea or power. [1] His book in the English translation is entitled, unfortunately, I think, The Ruling Class. It should be the Political or Governing Class. [2] The New International, November 1939. [3] “Thoughts on the Dialectic While Reading Hegel,” Leninsky Sbornik V, IX, p. 71. [4] My quotations from Chase are from an article in The Progressive for October 12, 1952, “The Hour Gets Later and Later,” and from “The War of Words,” published almost simultaneously in Common Sense.

REPLACEMENT FOR THE DREAM WE LOST Chapter Four It was natural that idealistic people who had ceased to believe in heaven should think up some bright hope for humanity on earth. That, I think, more than any objection to “capitalism,” accounts for the spread of the socialist dream, especially in Anglo-Saxon countries. During the nineteenth century, “capitalism” so-called raised the real wage of the British worker 400 per cent; the average real wage of the American worker rose, between 1840 and 1951, from eighteen to eighty-six cents an hour. A good fairy could hardly have worked faster. Of course it was not “capitalism” that did this; an abstract noun can’t do anything. It was just the spontaneous way of producing wealth with elaborate machinery and a high division of labor. The word “capitalism” was invented by socialists for the express purpose of discrediting this natural behavior, and apart from the contrast with their dream it has no precise application. We should talk more wisely if we dropped this facile abstraction altogether, and made clear in each case what, specifically, we are talking about. Especially we should invite down to brass tacks anyone who tells us “capitalism is doomed.” That sonorous maxim is an intellectual scarecrow set up by socialists to frighten those who have wakened from their dream and are trying to find the way home to reality. It is just the same dream turned inside out. Even George Orwell, who depicted so brilliantly the horrors of what he called “oligarchical collectivism,” was deceived by this maneuver. He was on the road home, but found these solemn words in his mouth: “Capitalism itself has manifestly no future.” Meaningless words! And so he turned back, and died gazing at the dream, now mournfully dubious on the far horizon, that some other kind of collectivism besides oligarchical might come to be. “I can’t see any other hopeful objective,” was the extent of his enthusiasm for the cause.[1] It is not easy to let go of an idea around which one has organized a lifeful of emotions. On all sides one can see the lax yet still grasping logic of minds that once had a firm and flourishing hold on socialist belief. They are mainly concerned now to save face with their own pride. Somehow to keep the word and the feeling after the plan is abandoned—that inwardly is their problem. It was tackled long ago by Georges Sorel with his doctrine of the “social myth”—an idea not valid, but necessary to set the masses in motion. Then came Hendrik de Mann with his discovery that “the present motive, not the future goal, is the essential.” And now Sidney Hook finds “the day-by-day struggle for human decency and a better social order . . . more important than the ‘ultimate’ victory of a total program.” Norman Thomas, in his rather pathetic Democratic Socialism, A New Appraisal (1953), throws overboard everything that gave distinct meaning to the word socialism, but continues to drive along in the old bandwagon with the name printed on it in large letters. “Socialism will do this. . . .” “Socialism will do that. . . .” he prophesies, naming a variety of moderate reforms, forgetting that according to his new appraisal socialism is nothing but a collective name for these same moderate reforms. Ethically, to be sure, it is something more—a society in which the spirit of mutual aid predominates over that of competition—but how does that differ from what he preached as a Christian minister before his conversion to socialism? Another scheme for backing part way out of the real meaning of socialism is to bring it all down to supporting the cooperatives—a good thing to support, for they by-pass the state. But to be socialist, the cooperatives must aim to comprise the whole national economy, and in that case they would not by-pass, but be the state. “The blending of parliament and the cooperative union of Manchester must take place!” cried Ramsay MacDonald in a debate with Hilaire Belloc in the days when socialism meant socialism. Today everybody is hedging. Even the British Labor party has in the last four years been drifting rather than driving toward socialism. Nationalization was distinctly played down in the election campaign of 1951. Herbert Morrison, speaking as a party leader in a keynote broadcast, said: “We [and the Conservatives] believe in quite different economic systems. We believe in full employment and the planning necessary for it. The Conservatives do not.” G. D. H. Cole, the ardent Chairman of the Fabian Society, wrote in 1949: “The administration of the few industries that have already been transferred to public management is not yet so satisfactory as to encourage a general adventure into industrial socialization until the difficulties have been straightened out, and more decentralization and more workers’ participation in their affairs effectively introduced.” In the days of genuine socialist belief, nationalization and socialization were almost interchangeable terms. Today “socialization of the nationalized industries has become a popular slogan among British socialists.”[2] The New Fabian Essays (1952) compare with the old as the knitting of a tired grandmother with the sprouting of a plant. Three of them, as Clement Attlee concedes in a preface, “deal with the problem of making democracy effective in a society where managerial autocracy is an increasing danger.” With that danger increasing, the zeal for a “gradual approach to socialism” is naturally in sad decline. The wonderful merits of gradualness are no longer so obvious. It is better to be courageously humble about this and admit frankly that socialism was a mistake. An hypothesis proven false, I call it for my own pride’s sake. But whatever we call it, let’s get it out of the way of our minds. We have the task of thinking out modes of dedication to a brighter future for mankind that will not lead into the deepest pit of darkness. One thing we might do is to narrow the scope without tainting the quality of our idealism—narrow it, I mean, both in time and space. Perhaps it is a little grandiose to undertake to mold all history and a whole planet on the lines of our ideal. Perhaps we are slightly infatuated these days with globalism and historicism. I think in the future a good many people who were, or might have been socialists, are going to take a neighborhood for the scene of their effort, or some single measure of assured benefit to mankind for its scope. And I am not sure they won’t be the happiest, as well as the most useful, of these idealists—provided they can avoid the prying and authoritarian self-righteousness of the professional do-gooder. Real progress is piecemeal, and perhaps it would move faster if each community, or each generation, were to bite off a relatively small piece. Alexander Herzen remarked a century ago (as though foreseeing the Bolshevik debacle): “A goal endlessly remote is not a goal, if you please, but a hoax. The goal must be nearer. The goal for each generation is itself.” However, such wisdom is no substitute for the dream of a future paradise on earth. We have a right to dream. We have a right to make a big try. Only our dream must not be inconsistent with present measures that we can see in a shorter perspective are good. We must make sure that while we think we are marshaling mankind for a “leap from the Kingdom of Necessity into the Kingdom of Freedom,” we are not actually leading him down the old well-paved road to serfdom. In short, if we are going to dream, let’s dream in the right direction. Taking human nature as it is, and accepting the indubitable necessity of private property and a competitive market if men are to be free, what should be the leading feature of a fair and true society? Here I am afraid that, besides lowering our banners, we shall have to creep back somewhat ignominiously into our belligerent past, and confess that one of our most triumphed-over opponents was right. Indeed I do not know any argument in opposition written during the high tide of socialist propaganda more precisely right than Hilaire Belloc’s The Servile State. His prophecies have an accuracy that seems almost uncanny when you reflect that they were published in 1912—so long before two world wars reminded us what men are really made of. He asserts categorically, as though he had lived through it, that “at its first inception all Collectivist Reform is necessarily deflected and evolves, in the place of what it had intended, a new thing: a society wherein the owners remain few and wherein the proletarian mass accept a security at the expense of servitude.” And he repeats as the kernel of his thesis: “The Capitalist state breeds a Collectivist theory which in action produces something entirely different from Collectivism: to wit, the Servile State.” Although collectivist theory was far from popular at that time, Belloc was aware that the transition to collectivism was going to appear more “practical,” and therefore be easier of achievement than the attainment of real blessedness in what he called the Distributive State. He was not an optimist about the Distributive State, but he was categorically sure that no third alternative exists. “A society like ours, disliking the name of ‘slavery’ and avoiding a direct and conscious re-establishment of the slave status, will necessarily contemplate the reform of its ill-distributed ownership on one of two models. The first is the negation of private property and the establishment of what is called Collectivism: that is, the management of production by the political officers of the community. The second is the wider distribution of property until that institution shall become the mark of the whole state, and until free citizens are normally found to be possessors of land or capital, or both.” There is a radical ideal here, and a crisp and simple logic, that should give light—if their eyes can still stand it—to those semi-ex-socialists now blindly groping their way out of the maze of Marxian theory and emotion. I can add nothing to it, except my customary reminder that the basic error in the whole century-long blunder has been a crude and foolish conception, or no-conception, of human nature. The socialist idea was dreamed up by intellectual and radical-minded people, who constitute a very small and not typical section of the human race. You might almost describe the socialist movement as an effort of the intelligentsia to put over their tastes and interests upon the masses of mankind. I remember how when I traveled in Russia in 1922, long before I had waked, or knew I was waking, from the socialist dream, a certain thought kept intruding itself into my mind. These millions of poor peasants whose fate so wrings the heart of Lenin have only two major joy-giving interests outside their bodies and their homes: the market and the church. And Lenin, devoting his life selflessly to their happiness, has no program but to deprive them of these two institutions. That is not quite the way to go about the business of making other people happy. We Socialists were, I think, profoundly wrong to ignore the depth and generality of the drive toward property, and therefore exchange of property, in man. Walt Whitman was profoundly wrong when he said in his famous hymn of praise to the animals: “Not one is demented with the mania of owning things.” Ownership is not a mania, but a robust instinct extending far and wide in the animal kingdom. Even the birds stake out with their songs an area that belongs to them, attacking fiercely any intruder upon it. Less lyrical beasts serve notice by depositing distinctive odors on the boundaries of their domain. People who keep watch dogs can hardly deny the range and ferocity of the proprietary instinct. It was fully developed even among the nomads with their tents of different sizes. For settled and civilized man, there can never be a paradise, I fear, or even a sane and peaceful habitat, where this deep wish is unsatisfied. It has been neglected in utopias because their authors were guided rather by the Christian evangel of sainthood than by a study of the needs of average men. It is not easy in America, where mass production has crowded people into vast industrial cities, to imagine each citizen as a landed proprietor! The dream is easier in Switzerland where factories are scattered through the country and average industrial workers quite normally own a home and a plot of ground. There is plenty of land here, however, and good reason, if only in the atom bomb, for scattering factories through the country. I see no reason why this more enchanting aspect of the distributive state should be ultimately and forever unattainable. And that free American citizens should normally be found possessors of capital, or property in the means of production, seems to me not only possible, but, granted two conditions are met, in the long run probable. One of those conditions is that the idea of collective ownership, and all the distortions of fact which it produced in the minds of democratic idealists, be heartily abandoned. Most vicious of those distortions is the belief that “capitalism” imposes an “increasing misery” upon the working class. It is not enough to recognize, as all now do, that this Marxian prediction which rested on nothing but Hegelian dialectic, was false. We must recognize that the extreme opposite is true. Though it led off with the new-fashioned sufferings described by Marx in Das Kapital—not greater in degree, but different in kind from what had preceded—the market economy he thundered against has, in its full development, lifted the toiling masses of mankind to levels of life never dreamed of in all past history. It is only the habit of comparing reality with perfection instead of with what is possible, a habit proper to juveniles and fanatics, that blinds us to this. Whether or not it is true, as Von Mises asserts, that “capitalism . . . deproletarianizes all strata of society,”[3] it is at least true that it makes possible their deproletarianization. Let us suppose that the rate of increase in real wages mentioned in my first paragraph continued for another hundred years. And let us suppose that throughout that new hundred years the radical idealists replaced their old zeal for collective ownership with as burning a zeal for universal individual ownership. Is it fantastic to imagine that they might bring on the day when “free citizens are normally found to be possessors of land or capital or both?” They would not at least, because infatuated with perfection, abandon the road of the general rise of income which makes such a thing possible. They would be dreaming in the right direction.[4] In my opinion, however, no dreams whatever, and no plans even for a slightly better society than we have, will be realized unless the rise in wealth production is matched by a decline in the production of people. We shall have to go back farther than Belloc, we who have broken with socialism in the radical way we espoused it. We shall have to go back to Malthus, who perceived before socialism was born, the basic fact which foils all dreams of a just and generous society. There are too many people in the world; their number, when conditions are favorable, increases too fast. One of the worst effects of the Marxian religion of salvation by economics was that it swept this biological truth out of the minds of reformers and revolutionists alike. It belongs at the top of humanity’s agenda.[5] There are many truths in this book which I have been lamentably slow to discover, but this I am happy to say is not one of them. From the beginning of my days as an agitator for socialism I warned of the priority of this problem. At the height of the exaltation of belief caused in me by the Bolshevik Revolution and a first glimpse of the writings of Lenin, I wrote: “In Lenin’s discussion of means for increasing the productivity of labor, I miss a reference to the means of decreasing, and intelligently controlling, the production of people. . . . The socialist movement will surely before long awake to the enormity of the population problem, and I can not but wish the awakening might be now, and in Russia, where the tendencies of the movement in the immediate future are to be crystallized.”[6] I was deceived about Russia. I was deceived about Lenin. I was deceived about the socialist movement. It never did awake to the importance of this problem. Such problems lie outside the universe of discourse in which socialism draws breath. As I have awakened from socialism, however, the problem has loomed steadily larger to me, and I must say, darker. It has been lightened in recent years by the anxious attention that has been drawn to it both among political scientists and among those engaged in physiological research. The Report on “The Determinants and Consequences of Population Trends,” published by the United Nations on May 3, 1954, was a grim reminder of what is in store for us if we do not confront it. A great hearty and worldwide campaign of education might, it seems to me, after a long time, reverse the fatal trend of the statistics. Next to defending the free market, that seems to me the most important task that one still actuated by the wish for a more ideal society and still radical—radical enough to tear up the blueprints and begin over—could undertake. More goods and fewer people is the slogan I should like to see carried at the head of humanity’s march into the future. [1] The quotations are from an article on “The Future of Socialism” in Partisan Review, July-August 1947. [2] See “Socialism and the British Labor Party” by Leon D. Epstein in the Political Science Quarterly for December 1951. [3] Human Action, p. 665. [4] The identical dream, by the way, is proposed as an immediate political program by the German-Swiss economist, Wilhelm Roepke. “If there exists such a thing as a ‘social’ right,” he says in Civitas Humana (p. 257 of the French edition), “it is the right to property. And nothing better illustrates the confusion of our epoch than the fact that up to now no government, no party, has inscribed this device on its banner. If they think it would not be a success, we believe they are profoundly mistaken.” [5] In a book called The Road to Abundance, which I helped a chemical genius, Dr. Jacob Rosin, to write, the opinion is advanced that synthetic chemistry, or rather physico-chemistry, can solve all man’s problems, including this one of population, by making him independent of both plant and mine. It is an exciting book with vitally important things to say. But I have my reservations about it—especially on this population problem which, even if all Dr. Rosin’s other prophetic visions came true, would only be postponed. [6] The Liberator, October 1918.

THE DELINQUENT LIBERALS Chapter Five Those who cling to socialism often say that we who have let go are suffering from shock at the murderous outcome of Lenin’s seizure of power in a backward country. Having never backed Lenin, they are immune to this hysterical reaction and are calmly awaiting the emergence of socialism in its proper time and place. It is true that the horrendous results of Lenin’s experiment in state control—and no less Hitler’s—have influenced our judgment. They have reminded us of certain hard facts of human history that in our infatuation with an ideal we had forgotten. And who will deny that the reminder has caused painful emotion? Who will pretend that, having watched at the cradle of a “society of the free and equal,” and seen rise out of it the most absolute and bloody tyranny that history has known, he did not experience a devastatingly sad surprise? I must testify, however, that I was more surprised and saddened by the reaction to that tyranny of liberal minds in free countries than by the tyranny itself. I had never looked for purposive intelligence to our American liberals and humanitarian reformers. Although socially in the old days the line between us was not firmly drawn, we were separated emotionally and intellectually by my belief in progress through working class struggle. Kidding the New Republic of Herbert Croly and Walter Lippmann from a class-struggle point-of-view was one of my pleasant pastimes as a socialist editor. The Survey and Villard’s Nation I liked better, but I thought of them too as theoretical opponents. I called the editors and adherents of these papers “soft-headed idealists,” by which I meant people who use their minds to mitigate the subjective impact of unpleasant facts instead of defining the facts with a view to drastic action. Mind’s task is not to blur the real With mimic tints from an ideal, But change one into the other by an act.[1] There occurred no change in my feeling on this subject when I abandoned the idea of proletarian revolution. I still think the worst enemy of human hope is not brute facts, but men of brains who will not face them. For that reason I had no high expectations of the liberal intelligentsia when it came to acknowledging that the “revolution of our times,” as so far conceived and conducted, is, has been, and will be, a failure. I never dreamed, however, that they could sink to the depths of maudlin self-deception and perfectly abject treason to truth, freedom, justice, and mercy that many of them have reached in regard to the Russian debacle. That has indeed profoundly, and more than any other shock, whether emotional or intellectual, disabused me of the dream of liberty under a socialist state. If these supposedly elevated and detached minds, free of any dread, of any pressure, of any compulsion to choose except between truth and their own mental comfort, can not recognize absolute horror, the absolute degradation of man, the end of science, art, law, human aspiration, and civilized morals, when these arrive in a far country, what will they be worth when the pressure is put upon them at home? They will be worth nothing except to those dark powers which will most certainly undertake to convert state-owned property into an instrument of exploitation beside which the reign of private capital will seem to have been, in truth, a golden age of freedom and equality for all. To that much emotional shock I plead guilty. But I do not want to leave it there. Many of these delinquent liberals were my friends in past years despite our differences, and I find myself continually puzzling over the problem of their motivation. Why have they betrayed themselves? Why do they promote the interests of a regime under which even they, traitors to democracy though they are, would be shot for half-heartedness, or permitted to die of starvation in a slave camp for having in the past believed, or thought they believed, in freedom? Up to the Bolshevik Revolution it is not hard to understand what happened to them. The old liberal movement grew out of the struggle against absolutism and feudal oppression. The freedom fought for in that struggle included free trade as a matter of course. But free trade and the industrial revolution soon raised the general wealth so high that idealists began to worry about the living conditions of the poor. Those living conditions were not, in the general average, worse than they had been. The change was in the attitude of civic-minded people toward them. It is not too much to say, as the canny Norwegian, Trygve Hoff, does, that a social conscience was born of this great rise in wealth production. The first sensible step toward bettering the general condition of the poor would obviously have been to increase still more the production of wealth. Then if the pangs of the social conscience had kept pace with this increase all might have been well. What these pangs did was to run way ahead of the increase in wealth. People were attacking the businessman and demanding a better distribution of profits long before such distribution would have made any appreciable difference in the general condition of the poor. As wealth production increased, this state of pained conscience among liberals—themselves businessmen often enough—increased much faster. So fast that their zeal for liberty was gradually replaced by a zeal for a more equal distribution of wealth. Their liberalism became almost indistinguishable from humanitarianism. And this change of mind and mood among liberals was certainly not retarded by Marx’s doctrinaire announcement that their interest in freedom had been a fake all along: capitalist profits, not human rights, had been the goal of their struggle against absolutism; their great revolution had been “bourgeois,” not democratic. They still talked the language of liberty—so also did Marx—but their dominant drive was toward a more even-handed distribution of the unheard-of wealth that, under a regime dominated by the idea of liberty, had been piling up. The culmination of this change was, in England, the decline of the Liberal party, the seeping away of its membership into the Labor party with its promise to expropriate the capitalists, and in the United States the transformation of the old liberal press into organs of the New Deal—the government of settlement workers become militant, not in the cause of freedom, but in the battle against “economic royalists.” The whole development is summed up in the contrast between Benjamin Franklins: “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety,” and Harold Laski’s: “Those who know the normal life of the poor . . . will realize well enough that, without economic security, liberty is not worth having.” This much, then, must be said in defense of the delinquent liberals. The edge of their passion for freedom had been growing blunter for decades before the rise of totalitarianism put their loyalties to a test. It is not only freedom that they betray, however, in apologizing for the Soviet tyranny, or pussyfooting about it, or blackening America so savagely that Russia shines in unspoken contrast. They are betraying civilization itself. They are lending a hand in the destruction of its basic values, promoting a return march in every phase of human progress. Reinstitution of slavery, revival of torture, star chamber proceedings, execution without trial, disruption of families, deportation of nations, massacre of communities, corruption of science, art, philosophy, history, tearing down of the standards of truth, justice, mercy, the dignity and the rights of man—even his right to martyrdom—everything that had been won in the long struggle up from savagery and barbarism. How shall I account for this depraved behavior—for that is how it appears to me—on the part of friends and colleagues who were once dedicated to an effort to make society more just and merciful, more truth-perceiving, more “free and equal” than it was? They shield themselves from facts, I suppose, by a biased selection of the books and newspapers to read. Many violent conflicts of opinion come down to a difference in reading matter. And this is especially so in the case of Soviet communism, for it has been put over with a campaign of All-Russian and International Lying whose extent, skill, efficiency, and consecration is almost harder to believe in than the truth it conceals. Indeed the distinction between truth and the exact fabrications handed down for propagation by the heads of the world party in the Kremlin has disappeared very largely from the minds of its members. Until one has grasped this phenomenon in its full proportions, and learned to distinguish the sincere truth-teller from the sincere lie-teller, it is not easy to be hard-headed about Soviet communism. That too may be advanced in defense of the delinquent liberals—they are the victims of a swindle which nothing in past history had prepared them to detect. A great many of them, however, are not deceived, but are swallowing the horrors of life under the Soviets with open eyes and a kind of staring gulp that is more like madness than a mistake. In the effort with their soft heads to be hard they have gone out of the world of reasoned discussion altogether. Again I will take the late Harold Laski as an example. No anti-communist has more candidly and crushingly described the blotting out of civilized values and all free ways of life by the Russian Soviet state than he did; and yet no pro-communist has more vigorously defended that state, or brought more intellectual authority to its support. There must be, I suppose, in all the delinquent liberals, a repressed conflict between the impulse to speak those truths that are important to man’s civilized survival and the more compelling thirst for a comfortable opinion. In Laski, because of some strange and perhaps bumptious quirk in his nature, this conflict was not repressed, but was naively or insolently blared forth. I met him for the last time in a debate on the “Town Meeting of the Air” September 19, 1946. Knowing about this conflict in his soul, I brought with me, typed out in condensed form, the passage from his Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time in which he most eloquently describes the horrors of life under the Soviet communist regime. In the course of the debate, I made a remark about the crimes of the Russian Communists, and Laski replied: “It’s no part of my case that Russia hasn’t committed crime and been guilty of grave blunders and committed inconceivable follies; so has the United States, and so has Great Britain.” In answer, I said: “I’m going to read you from Laski’s own book some of the crimes that have been committed in the Soviet Union, and you see if any of them have been committed in the United States or England.” I then read this passage from Laski’s book, or as much of it as I could crowd into the time granted me. “Despite the pledges of the Constitution of 1936, there is no freedom of speech, except for Stalin’s adherents, no freedom of the press or assembly. Everyone knows that the elections are a farce; no candidatures are possible which reject the party line, and even the ballot-papers for them read like a hymn to Stalin. Freedom of movement is gravely restricted. Contact with foreigners is looked upon with suspicion. There is arbitrary arrest; there is long imprisonment and execution without trial. Citizens can not travel abroad without the permission of the government. Most political offences are tried in secret; there is no writ of habeas corpus, no right to subpoena witnesses, no right to a professional defence. The death-penalty may be imposed for injury to, or theft of, collective property; and even ‘teasing, mocking, or persecuting’ a shock-worker may, under Article 58 of the Criminal Code, become ‘wrecking,’ and so punishable with death.” The moderator interrupted me and asked Laski: “Do you care to comment?” And Laski, spreading his hands in a gesture which my friends in the audience described as sickly, answered: “No.” Laski did have, of course, a scheme for convincing himself that in a nation so chained and trampled by power-lustful and unbridled masters of the state, the Revolution of Our Time is bringing to birth a new age of freedom and humane reform. He accomplished it by opposing the words “economic” and “political” as though they designated things happening on different planets. While the above listed horrors filled the sphere called politics, the sphere called economics, he asked us to believe, was brimming with sweetness and light. I quote, also with condensation, from the same book: “In the narrow economic sphere, there is a more genuine basis for economic freedom for the masses in the Soviet Union than they have elsewhere previously enjoyed . . . Millions, in every field and factory, help to make the conditions under which they live. There are the effective beginnings of constitutional government in industry. The rules of an enterprise are not made at the discretion of an employer who owns it, but are genuinely the outcome of a real discussion in which men and management participate . . . Care for the health, sanitation, and safety of the workers in field and factory has been established at a pace which would have been unthinkable in any capitalist society. . . . The administration of justice (political offences apart) . . . is on a level superior to that of most other countries. . . . Bench and bar alike have a more active and sustained interest in the improvement of legal procedure than anyone has displayed in Europe since Jeremy Bentham.” It is obvious that no man thinking about concrete facts could put these two passages into the same book and chapter. How can it be that in a country where “there is no right of habeas corpus, no right to subpoena witnesses, no right to a professional defence,” nevertheless “the administration of justice (political offences apart) is on a level superior to that of most other countries”? What jocular Deity brings it about that while death may be the penalty for teasing another worker, nevertheless “care for the health, safety and sanitation of the workers” outruns all previous norms? How does it come to pass that where “elections are a farce, freedom of movement is restricted, there is arbitrary arrest, imprisonment and execution without trial,” nevertheless “there are the effective beginnings of constitutional government in industry . . . and millions help to make the conditions under which they live”? Would these millions not be more likely, in a real world, to establish the beginnings of constitutional government by making the rules under which they can be dragged out and shot? That this artificial division of society into two halves, political and economic, in which opposite things are taking place, should have been put before us with obeisances to “Marxism,” was a prodigy of intellectual acrobatics. Marx might be said to have spent his life trying to forestall this shallow dichotomy. But Marx or no Marx, any man of hard sense knows that the Russian people are not being subjected to those hideous political repressions for their own good. It is not to bring in the Kingdom of Heaven that the masters of the state have locked the population in this toothed vise. I dwell upon this unreal notion of Laski’s because I think it exposes in a raw and yet elaborated form what has happened in the minds of many of the pro-Soviet liberals. They are not totally blind to the monstrous things that have happened in Russia, but they have reasoned their way to a point of tranquil acquiescence by means of this nonsense about political versus economic. This too, then, must be said in behalf of the delinquent liberals: they had a rationalization, a cerebral alibi, so to speak, for their crime of treason against civilization. They managed to draw the whole thing up into their heads where it did not seem so bad. It is significant that while the pro-communist liberals apologize for the political enslavement of the Russian people on the ground that they are economically free, the pro-socialist liberals make an opposite use of the same artificial distinction. They tell us that economic enslavement will not deprive us of our real freedom, which is political. Philip Rahv in the Partisan Review, defending the British socialist regime against the assertion of Dos Passos that “personal liberty has been contracted in Great Britain,” said: “The evidence cited by Dos Passos shows that the contraction he speaks of has occurred solely in the economic sphere. Socialists, however, do not consider the right to buy and sell as one pleases to be a significant part of the heritage of freedom.”[2] Stuart Chase took the same line in defending a state-planned society, and to them both Friedrich Hayek made the obvious and conclusive answer: “Economic control is not merely control of a sector of human life which can be separated from the rest; it is the control of the means for all our ends.”[3] It hardly requires a Marx or a Hayek, however, to reveal the unreality of this dichotomy. It is clear to all who possess “the faculty to imagine that which they know.” And I often think that the lack of this faculty or habit, so justly praised by Shelley in his Defense of Poetry, is one of the main causes of the delinquency of the liberals. They are predominantly intellectual—and are not intellectuals in general, even when originally moved by sympathy, strangely heartless and conscienceless through the very fact that they make a habit of abstract thinking? A phrase like “workers and peasants,” or “kulaks,” or “prison camps,” or “execution without trial,” becomes a bloodless pawn which they move about on the cerebral blueprint of a schemed-out world with as little sense of the human hearts and bodies designated by it as though they were playing a game of chess. This enables them to go on c