Reflections on the Failure of Socialism by Max Eastman

Author:Max Eastman [Eastman, Max]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 978-1-57246-092-8
Published: 2016-12-11T16:00:00+00:00

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[1] The lines are from the preface to my poem, “Lot’s Wife.”

[2] “Disillusionment and Partial Answers” in Partisan Review for May 1948.

[3] The Road to Serfdom, pp. 88 and 92.

WHAT TO CALL YOURSELF

Chapter Six

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Although it seems sad that intelligent creatures can be so childish, I believe that the wish to be called radical and regarded as belonging to “the Left” is a further cause of the treachery to civilization of many liberals. It is not concrete goods or values they are defending, but a name, and a status corresponding to it, in the hierarchy of political emotions. They fail to realize, or do not wish to, a fact which Thucydides remarked upon two thousand years ago: that in times of revolutionary upheaval words are forced to change their meanings.[1] In discussing this, and other more bloody violences committed by revolutionists, Thucydides lays the worst blame upon “men who entered the struggle not in a class, but in a party spirit.” The remark is peculiarly relevant in our times because the first and most fundamental violence against language committed by the Marxian revolutionists was to make class mean party. Marx with his cryptic remark that “philosophers” instead of understanding the world ought to change it, and Lenin with his more lucid assertion that the workers can not of themselves arrive at a socialist consciousness, it has to be brought to them by “bourgeois intellectuals,” prepared the ground for this operation. The term “working class” was detached from the actual workers and attached to a party of believers in the Marxian theory about what the workers were going to do. This innocent-looking maneuver set the style for such etymological atrocities as calling it “liberation” when the Red Army marches in and arrests, jails, rapes, deports or shoots 30 per cent of a nation’s population, and pinning upon the resulting perfect tyranny the name of “People’s Democracy.” These crude tricks of demagogues can with a trifle of ingenuity be seen through. But they are only an artful exaggeration of natural tendencies that are more slow-moving, more subtle, and more dangerous to the life of truth. The word “left” has, over the last hundred years, gone through a change quite as complete as that suffered by “liberation” and “democracy” between Lenin’s arrival at the Finland Station and Stalin’s extension of power to Eastern Europe and Asia. In its beginnings, in the democratic revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this word designated the people and groups who stood for the individual and his liberties as against the “constituted authorities.” In the French National Assembly of 1789, the nobles still commanded enough respect to receive places of honor at the right of the speaker, and the radicals naturally drew off as far as possible to the other side. Seats in the center remained for those having temperate views and emotions. In many European parliaments the precedent thus established was continued, and a distinction which had been specific and ceremonial became universal and political.

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