This article was originally printed on October 12, 1953
The spate of Congressional investigations, ostensibly intended to ferret out remnants of disloyalty in the schools and colleges, in the churches, and in the entertainment industries, are manifestations of an old tension between the business community of America and the so-called "intellectuals." The former has achieved formal political power for the first time in two decades and it seems intent on evening the score and venting its resentments against its critics of the past decades. The more unscrupulous and demagogic representatives of the Republican Party seek to do this by proving the critics to be involved, directly or indirectly, with the hated conspiracy all good men abhor. The temptation to embarrass the critics of a business civilization was strong, even for those who are not given to the arts of demagogy, for it is a fact that the critics were informed by various shades and versions of a dogma which, in its most consistent form, led to the sorry realities of Communist tyranny.
It is, of course, necessary in the interest of democratic justice and for the sake of our unity with the remainder of the free world, to resist unscrupulous efforts to obscure all shades and distinctions on the Left, and to prove every critic to be in either explicit or implicit connivance with a hated enemy. But it is also necessary for those of us who account ourselves among the critics to confess to the remarkable influence of the Marxist dogma on our viewpoints, even while we resist the efforts of the demagogues to identify every form of dissent with Communism.
The term "intellectuals" is somewhat vague, particularly in America; but it designates, however inexactly, the more articulate members of the community, more particularly those who are professionally or vocationally articulate, in church and school, in journalism and the arts. It is altogether healthy that these articulate members of the community should assume the task of criticism or should have had that task imposed on them by the criteria of their several disciplines, whether religious, academic or esthetic. It is as natural as it is inevitable that the so-called men of affairs, whether in business or government, should be inclined to be more complacent, whether because preoccupation with practical affairs prevents critical thinking or because their interest creates an ideological stake in the status quo, or because practical experience endows men with wisdom proving the tenets of the critics abstract and illusory. Since the latter factor is present in the attitudes of the business community, though in a minor role, it behooves those of us who were and are the critics of our civilization to confess to the power of an abstract dogma over our minds, even while we resist the unscrupulous efforts to relate every form of dissent with the extreme form of the dogma, or even with disloyalty.
The most obvious distinction in the interest of fairness is to note the rigorous resistance to Communism by Democratic Socialists in all nations. The attitudes of Norman Thomas in this country, of the late Ernst Reuter in Berlin, and Henri Spaak in Belgium and many others is sufficient refutation of the outrageous charge that a common Marxist dogma creates an affinity between Communism and Socialism. Socialism and Communism may be brothers; if so, they are, as the late Socialist leader Kurt Schumacher observed, like Cain and Abel. The common Marxist dogma not only failed to guarantee affinity with Communism, but it has not prevented Socialism from being a creative force, when it expressed itself in loyalty to and in the context of a democratic community. A large part of the free world is indebted to the Socialist movement for the establishment of justice. The efforts of our vigilantes to brand the movement with the mark of Cain therefore alienates our friends and seems to substantiate prejudices of their own about our life.
It must be admitted that the intellectuals, committed or uncommitted to Socialist parties, do not have as good a record of discernment as do the party leaders. Some of them, like the late Harold Laski, could not make up their minds whether to condemn Russia as a tyranny or to exalt her as the harbinger of a new culture. Mr. Laski was equally uncertain whether to extol our own nation as an open society or to condemn us as a capitalistic one. In a similar fashion, the Swedish social scientist, Gunnar Myrdal, despite his intimate relation with our culture, was prompted by the Marxist dogma to adopt a defeatist attitude toward our future. He was so sure our economy would collapse after the war that he persuaded Sweden to engage in a very unadvantageous trade agreement with Russia. The examples of Laski and Myrdal will remind us that intellectuals are more easily swayed by Marxist dogma than the workingmen who constitute the bulk of the Socialist movement and who, as Lenin confessed, would not rise unaided, above a "trade-union psychology." That is, they would reject utopian illusions and be content with proximate goals of justice.
In America the Marxist ideology had a surprisingly strong hold on the intellectualist critics of capitalism, despite the absence of a Socialist movement giving their ideas relevance. The "New Deal," a characteristically pragmatic effort to resolve the debate between classical economics and Marxism, was consciously or unconsciously dependent upon the thought of the late Lord Keynes. It fell under criticism of intellectuals prompted by obvious Marxist prejudices. But their Marxism was not consistent; it included every shade of opinion from open hospitality to Communism, to secret or open sympathy for the Communist cause.
Many of the intellectuals who were at first attracted by Communism were subsequently repelled by the realities of Communist politics, particularly as these revealed themselves in the purge trials of the early 30s, the Nazi-Soviet pact and the chicane of the Communist Party in the Spanish Civil War. A group of very distinguished intellectuals have left a record of their initial illusions and subsequent disillusion in the symposium The God That Failed: a moving revelation both of the spiritual and political confusions of our day and a proof that moral sensitivity and utopian longings were responsible for their attraction to Communism. The realities of Communist politics are in such vivid contrast to the moral motives for original allegiance that those converts who have not broken with Communism have become more and more pathetic in seeking to cover their mistaken loyalty with ever more implausible interpretations of present realities. Some have assumed an attitude of neutrality and "objectivity," pretending to be able to criticize both Soviet and American policies with equal severity and equal justification.
Of those who have renounced their Communist faith, some have, in the violence of their reaction, embraced the dogmas of the extreme right, thus exchanging creeds but not varying the spirit and temper of their approach to life's problems. A few have found profit or prestige as professional anti-Communists. Others—for example, the redoubtable young editor, James Wechsler, and the famous Mayor Reuter of Berlin—have expiated an earlier Communist loyalty by a rigorous anti-Communist, but thoroughly liberal, democratic faith. It is ironic that men who extricated themselves with least hurt to their spirit are now declared suspect by our vigilantes because they have not proved their repentance by adhesion to some dogma of the Right or by imitating its hysteria.
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