TWENTY-NINE
“MAY I begin,” McLeod asked rhetorically, “by discussing the argument of the sophisticated apologist? When I discover myself in a mood of assessment, I’m often struck by the number of brothers I once had, and how different are the roads we’ve taken. Yet of them all, the apologist is the only one who flourishes today. You might even say he has a vogue.
“This gentleman admits everything. He will agree that state capitalism is not to be confused with socialism; he will even grant, although his language will differ, that the new society is not without privilege. But, look, McLeod, he is always in a rush to tell me, it is time to take an accounting. And he will shake his head wisely. The revolution has failed to come. The proletariat has never gained political consciousness in sufficient degree. It is very doubtful they ever will. What is important, says the apologist, is that civilization be saved and human life not cease. The problem of our generation is not to make a revolution, nor is it to bewail standardization, militarization, and all the trends which you and I have found distasteful. We must agree, if we are historians, that equality has not existed since primitive man, and freedom has occurred only in the context of wealth and leisure. Probably that is the only way it may ever appear. It is a luxury, and equality is a dream. What we must accept today is, precisely, standardization, even the temporary abdication of the best in human potentiality. Periods like ours will pass. The problem for today is to end the crippling conflicts of the economic system. You see, McLeod, my mythical brother is always declaiming, you have never understood anything at all. Your problems are not the problems of the world. Bellies must be fed in Africa and for that production must follow a world plan. We have overestimated human nature. It is impossible for such a plan to provide the equality of socialism, but what matter? It’s the mass who must be fed and in an orderly fashion or the world is destroyed. Our problem is not to end exploitation but to resolve contradictions in the economic structure. Indeed, we may have been wrong all the time, and the bourgeoisie have been right. Man is only capable of founding societies based on privilege and inequality.
“As I have said,” McLeod went on, “the apologist admits everything. It is true, he tells me, there may be a war, but it is also true it may be avoided. You cannot know, McLeod. History is unpredictable. How can you say that war must come definitely? But even if it should come, there is no reason to suppose that everything is lost. We find moderation in everything, even in war, and after all, no matter what the cost, no matter how severe, one side finally will win and will control the world. Permanent peace will then be possible. The winners will administer the spoils of exploitation in a rational manner. Why shouldn’t they? All the contradictions will have been resolved.”
Hollingsworth seemed interested. “You know, if you don’t mind my saying so,” he interrupted, “I think that’s been very well put. I’m not a political fellow, although I’ve always considered myself sort of liberal, but it’s often occurred to me, if I think on those lines, that it’s real democracy if you can make the stupid people happy, cause if you’re not stupid you’re never happy anyway. Now, I know you’d say,” he murmured as McLeod began to frown, “that the stupid can’t be happy because they’re, if I may use your word, swindled, but it seems to me that people don’t mind being swindled if only they’re told the opposite. It’s when you tell them they’re being swindled that they can’t stand it.” Hollingsworth giggled. “You know, I’ve been talking too much.” A quick look at his watch. “I wonder if your remarks could be more brief?”
McLeod looked at Hollingsworth almost without recognition. His eyes knitted together to form a vertical line between, and with a sigh, as though to hew to the line of the argument were even more demanding upon himself than upon us, he reached into his pocket and withdrew a pack of small papers upon which he had scribbled some notes.
“The plausibility of the apologist’s argument depends upon a logic which is as attractive as it is superficial. Everything he said was complete nonsense.” This was worth a pause. “It may be noted that the apologist was an abstract conception. In life, since he claims to be a realist, he finds himself inevitably espousing the cause of one side or the other. He can hardly argue for both. Need I add that he hopes the bloc for which he pleads will win in the war which is to come. And if one asks him what will happen if the other side wins, he will answer: disaster, complete disaster. So, by adding two separate halves of the truth, one arrives at the conclusion.”
For the first time McLeod’s voice showed some animation. He remained still seated formally in his chair, hands before him on the table to examine the notes, his spectacles set resolutely upon his nose, but in completing the introduction he seemed to have purged his fatigue. “I need hardly depend, however, upon such legerdemain. I prefer to answer more fully. My political formulations are based on the thesis that war is inevitable, and I think it is reasonable to assert that if either of the two powers is unable to solve its economic problems without going to war, it must follow that war will come. But what if both of the Colossi suffer such contradictions? A fortiori, the inevitability of war receives its double guarantee.
“Proper analysis must be virtually exhaustive. I have been reminded that my time is not without limit and so I will confine my remarks to assertions. The situation of the bloc which may be called ‘monopoly capitalism’ is critical.” McLeod went on to repeat what I had already analyzed for myself. The productive capacity of monopoly had become so tremendous, its investment in machinery so great in comparison to the labor force it could exploit, that only the opening of the entire world market could solve its search for investment and profit even temporarily. “Those backward areas of the globe so necessary to monopoly cannot be lost,” McLeod droned. “Without them, monopoly cannot continue its operations on an adequate scale, without them there is no choice but to engage in the production of armaments or to suffer economic collapse. Yet those same backward regions, finding their own development to capitalism blocked by monopoly, whose interest it is to keep them retarded, are obliged to move at one historic bound from feudalism to state capitalism. Thus, half the world is now closed to monopoly, and the other half, still nominally in its possession, has moved a long way on the road to nationalization.
“The crisis of the major state capitalist power is even graver. Upon the mountains of rhetoric which have been deposited, it is not my intention to add more than a stone. I wish merely to underline the notion that socialism does not come about by an act of will. It should be axiomatic that, where conditions do not exist which make it possible to raise the standard of living, a socialist revolution can only degenerate into its opposite, and when the events of 1917 failed to induce similar proletarian uprisings in the countries of the West, the revolution was doomed. Surrounded by enemies, forced into the herculean labor of raising production by the bootstrap, all possibility for socialism was lost in the necessity for survival. The portion of the economy devoted to goods and services for the mass of people had to be limited. The more production which went into the creation of the tools, elements, and articles making possible further production, the less could be provided for human consumption. Such a project of expanding one’s industrial capacity has potential enrichment only if it is not necessary to continue it too long. For, mark you, the results. If benefits do not follow deprivation, the proletariat diminishes its rate of productivity. A man is capable of participating efficiently in the modern industrial process, with all its demands for skill, intelligence, and intense labor, only if there is a reward possible, to wit an adequate scale of living and the promise of an improved future. Deprived of the minimum of comfort and hope, workmanship must degenerate. Little balm for the laborer if factories swallow the earth, when they fail to provide him with creature comfort, and less balm for the bureaucrat when the failure to produce what is socially possible becomes increasingly more serious.
“Do you find this hard to follow, Leroy?” McLeod interjected suddenly. Hollingsworth answered by yawning in his face.
“Witness the problem the bureaucrats of state capitalism must face. If they are to retain their power and privilege, there is a limit beyond which they cannot depress the standard of living or they are left only with slave labor and the complete deterioration of their economy. Yet the working class can be neither coerced nor driven to begin to match the productivity of monopoly. Their morale is too low. Only the adrenalin of the last war with the incentive to fight against a foreign invader could solve that problem temporarily. Therefore, no matter how they suffered in that war, no matter how the mass may want peace, peace is impossible.
“The inescapable corollary is that state capitalism as a social organism has lost hope in its own ability to improve productivity. It must now depend upon seizing new countries, stripping them of their wealth, and converting their economy to war. In short, plunder. Alas for the project, this plunder is a flask which contains no bottom. The wealth newly acquired must be immediately converted into armament, the living standard fails to rise, and the process must be repeated. Thus, each bloc from its own necessity to survive prepares for war. The process is irreversible.
“It is a war fought by two different exploitative systems, a system vigorous in the fever of death, and another monstrous in the swelling of anemia. One doesn’t predict the time precisely, but regardless of the temporary flux of military situation, it is a war which ends as a conflict between two virtually identical forms of exploitation. State capitalism occupies the historical seat. The state, the sole exploiter capable of supporting the ultra war economy and the regimentation of the proletariat, absorbs monopoly either peaceably or by a short internal conflict. There is no alternative. The historical imperative is to reduce to the minimum the production of consumer goods in order to expand the critical needs for armament. Such a change occurs against the background of military losses and military destruction. To a people who depended upon commodities as the opium which gave meaning to their lives, the last of the luxuries is inexorably wiped from the board. Problems permitting of only a single solution follow upon this in quick order. More money than goods to buy, an inflation of vast proportions can be prevented only if wages are reduced and exploitation increased. The result is a diminishment of the will to work and a drop in the velocity of industrial performance. Discontent is everywhere. The first examples of random sabotage, motivated by no more than brute exasperation, begin to multiply. The police system which had been already expanded at the moment of entering the war, when hundreds of thousands of people politically suspect had to be found and imprisoned, now receives a new levy. The police are everywhere, within the unions, in the military, at the seats of government power; they have almost reached the point where they co-exist with all of society. State profit and state surveillance, state-enforced poverty and state-endowed wealth. The bureaucrat drives his limousine and he is the only one. Poor proletariat. Cheated still another time. They are fed the turnips their masters would have them become.”
McLeod was speaking in a mournful cadence, so slow, so spaced, so sad that emotion was betrayed by irony and he was almost mocking himself. Across the desk Hollingsworth sat in the perfect pose of boredom, one arm supporting the elbow of the other while with his free hand he picked languidly at his nose, much as if he lay upon a couch and plucked grapes from a bowl. Lannie seemed to have fallen asleep, or was she in coma? Her legs stretched out before her, breath rattled from her throat, and her eyes, pressed tightly closed, twitched with the anxiety of the hand that holds a lizard.
“Very well,” McLeod sighed. “The process takes surprisingly little time. Nations which come late to a new organization of society seldom take as long to trace the history of their predecessors. Moreover, the character of economic production must undergo so profound a change that little will remain of the bastard civilization we now possess. Consider it carefully. For the first time in history, the intent of society will be to produce wholly for death, and men will be kept alive merely to further that aim. Through the worst excesses and inequities of every culture which has preceded us, the natural function of economy was to produce for life. Even capitalism in its search for profit assumed automatically that life and profit were compatible. Perhaps a little less life and a little more profit, but nonetheless the body of man’s production served to keep him alive. In the advanced stages of state capitalism this natural function must be discarded. Hereafter the aim of society is no longer to keep its members alive, but quite the contrary, the question is how to dispose of them. With your permission”—a nod at Hollingsworth—“I should like to illustrate my remarks.”
“Do as you wish,” Hollingsworth said sullenly.
“The factor never to be forgotten is that the economic crisis is now permanent. If the parasitical layers of capitalism have been destroyed, they are replaced by the elephantiasis of the bureaucracy. From that moment the rate of production is never again capable of steady increase. The search begins for methods to stimulate it. State competition becomes substituted, and artificial campaigns between state corporations, accompanied by all the machinery of propaganda, make exhaustive efforts to match the requirements of armament. Piecework reappears. Such a process is narcotic. The injection must become progressively more intense, until the price for losing a competition becomes the neck of a bureaucrat. The first stage of cannibalism has been reached, and the bureaucracy finds itself obliged to dispose of the same personnel it needs so desperately. They are a class which comes to power at the very moment they are in the act of destroying themselves.”
Hollingsworth was giving his attention once more. There was a little sore at the corner of his mouth and his tongue came out to explore it, moistened the lesion and then wet his lips.
“You must realize,” McLeod said to him, “that these gentlemen are subject to the most extraordinary pressures. They dare not commit an action which is against the interests of the state, yet the interests of that body change constantly; they are terrified of the price for error and would content themselves with the minimum of initiative, yet extraordinary efforts are constantly demanded of them. They are not able to consider their own needs before their duty. There is a conflict between their desire for a private life and their public and party obligation. They function for the collectivity and the most terrible greeds for personal enrichment begin to torment them. Psychologically, the check must at last be paid. The bureaucrat becomes driven to express his personality through anti-social action.” Here, McLeod stopped, and he and Hollingsworth stared at one another, as if the one had said too much and the other had listened too long.
“I follow you, yes I do,” Hollingsworth whispered, his tongue worrying the lesion.
“They become obliged,” McLeod said hoarsely, resolved I thought to mutilate every retreat, “obliged to commit some act against the state. Its content matters not. It suffices only if it is illogical, unfounded, and disastrous for them. You see they have lost the sense of their own identity, and if it has been the state which began to devour them, they end by collaborating with the process.
“But let me waste no grief for those gentlemen. They are merely a parallel to the destruction between armies and within economies. War has become the only method of accumulation, and by the orchestration of patriotism’s mad opera that pace of manufacture which insists upon diminishing may be resuscitated for its brief time. Yet what is one to do? As the strength of the working class is progressively exhausted, the quality and the rate of work continue to diminish. No longer will any measures but the most drastic be effective. The armory of compulsion must be employed. Forced labor appears, and since even hell must have its stages, at the end of forced labor is the concentration camp.”
“The gas chamber,” Lannie said loudly. She might have been awakening from a dream.
“The concentration camp,” McLeod repeated. “And its mate, the secret city, where new weapons of more extraordinary capacity for destruction are developed. These phenomena accompany the most significant phenomenon of all—the degeneration of knowledge. In the past our collective understanding was limited only by the capacities of the human mind; now it is to be restricted by the social organism whose necessity is to maintain ignorance of the whole. Thus, millions will be destroyed in the concentration camps while a few miles away people will conduct the routine of their lives and know nothing but the suspicion of rumor.
“The techniques of the last war provide only a hint of what is to come. On a quasi-systematic basis an attempt was made to eliminate that portion of the population which was incapable of producing for the economy. But the lines were blurred by religious and political categories. As the next war progresses it will become even more impossible to maintain the luxury of non-producers. They will have become intolerable for society. The aged and the children will be killed, but such selection will serve as a beginning rather than an end. For the organ has been created, it is a part of the social structure, and may be dismantled no more than the state. If Moloch is not fed, the last stage of hell will vanish, and with it, the apparatus of hell. So, year by year, the useless millions are to be eliminated, until in the final crowning of contradiction, even the producers will go into the machine. Stability depends upon it.”
McLeod drew his breath. “War is permanent and the last argument of the apologist is no better than the first. If one bloc should vanquish the other, it will find itself almost totally impoverished. It will repeat at even a lower level the necessity to wage war which now besets the sole representative in the world today of state capitalism. Its impoverishment enormous, the winner will find it impossible to set up the rational exploitation which could solve his problems. Instead, he must exploit as extravagantly as he dares not only the vanquished but his former allies as well. His demands must be so great in relation to what is left that a new military situation develops before the last has ceased. The war begins again with a new alignment of forces, and to the accompaniment of famine and civil war, the deterioration continues until we are faced with mankind in barbary.”
“Is the speech over?” Hollingsworth cried.
“So you come soon to power,” McLeod said quietly, “but you have merely inherited the crisis, and yours is the profit of cancer.”
“Finish!” Hollingsworth commanded.
Like caps attached to the same cord, each detonation induced the next, until abruptly the air was clear. “I am obliged to discuss the perspective for socialism,” McLeod said in a slow voice. “It will take still a few more minutes and then I will be done.”
Hollingsworth hitched himself back in his seat. “I am not here to be insulted. Your remarks must be indirect.”
“There is a choice to reverse the process I have outlined. It occupies no prominence at present, and yet it is all we have. I speak of that body of ideas and that program which may loosely be called revolutionary socialism. It conceives of a society where the multitude own and control the means of production in opposition to what exists everywhere today. It holds the true conception of equality where each works according to his ability and each is supplied according to his needs. It views the end of exploitation and the beginning of justice. It is the antithesis of all I have predicted.
“But how may it come about? Here we arrive at what is the knot of history. We assumed for far too long that socialism was inevitable and the error has reduced us to impotence. Socialism is inevitable only if there will be a civilization. What we have never considered is the condition that there would not be. For socialism as I have remarked is not a passive rag to be cut to shape by the politician’s scissor. It depends upon the potentiality of the human, and that is an open question, impossible to determine philosophically. Well may it be that men in sufficient numbers and with sufficient passion and consciousness to create such a world will never exist. If they do not, however, then the human condition is incapable of alleviation, and we can only witness for a century at least and perhaps forever the disappearance of all we have created.
“I speak in the most abstract and general terms and that explains little. We face today a situation which is almost hopeless. The splinters and fragments of revolutionary socialism are scattered, shards of a black time, and the world proletariat, inert and in historic stupor, belongs almost completely to one bloc or the other. Beyond the horizon, in the most backward continent on earth, revolutionary ferments are breeding, and the pity is that they are already dominated by the representatives of state capitalism. With the war little is calculated to improve. It is likely that the degeneration of humanity will occur even more rapidly than the deterioration of the state, and by the time the Colossi will have butchered each other to the size of a hundred Lilliputs, it may not be considered probable that revolutionary socialism will play a prominent part in the civil wars to follow. Certainly the destruction of the greater portion of the productive capacity of the world will be an almost insurmountable problem. The hope is that the state deteriorates more rapidly than the people, and in counter to the fantastic atrocities and inequalities of state capitalism, there will remain in the masses strength and conviction to deal with it. Such a condition will produce, I believe, its revolutionary consciousness. If once within our time the locomotives of history were running, and in contrast to the ten years which passed like a day, there was the day which was the equivalent of ten years, then the Lenin of tomorrow may be presented with a century in an hour. It is my hope that a revolutionary determination, the like of which has never been seen before will sweep the earth, and these theses, difficult, recondite, and often incomprehensible, will match the experience of even the most inarticulate peasant, so that the socialist theorist will once again find language to reach the many.
“That there be theorists at such a time is of incalculable importance. The culture of a revolutionary socialist is not created in a day, and not too many of us will be alive. Yet there must be some to participate, for revolutions are the periods of history when individuals count most. It is not a question of a party now, nor recruiting drives, nor attempts to match the propaganda of the blast furnace with the light of our candle. It is the need to study, it is the obligation to influence those few we may, and if some nucleus of us rides out of the storm, we shall advance to the front of any revolutionary wave, for we alone shall have the experience and the insight so vital for the period. Then we shall be the only ones capable of occupying the historical stage.
“The problems we shall face. A specter will haunt us and fittingly so. The ghost of that other revolution will be always with us. For if we forget, if we ever suppose that the party or parties which form can answer everything, then our action and our suffering as well as the sacrifice and determination of millions of men and women may again be lost. There is no dogma we can carry with us, no legal machinery we can invoke. There are only two principles, freedom and equality, and without them we are nothing. The absence of the one involves obligatorily the corruption of the other, and this is the lesson which must be learned. There will be crises if we are resolute; there will be voices who speak who would be better silent, there will be idle machines and men who refuse to work, there will be disruption and inefficiency, but if the mass and we cannot surmount that, if we cannot find the means to guarantee the freedom of all and their equality, then the revolution shall be lost again, and the potentiality of man will not have proven equal to the challenge.
“But, if we succeed, what a period will follow! I am not a prophet dreaming of heaven, I do not assume that we leap at a bound from hell to Arcady. At last there will be, however, a soil in which man may play out his drama. It will be a time of the most extraordinary contrasts, a time of despair as well as of hope, a moment when each injustice which is ended may birth another, one we cannot conceive as yet. There is so little we know about ourselves, our historical life has been spent in battling nature and each other. This will be the opportunity to discover of what we are capable and what we shall never achieve. We may even learn if we can attain a rational life or if we are condemned to remain forever the most tragic of the animals. It will be the first time in history that man freed of hostile environment shall be able to discover his real dilemmas and real fulfillment if there is any. How I wish I could see the day. It would be so much more interesting than our own.”
He had come forward in his chair, his face animated. He had forgotten himself and where he was, and for an instant the future might have opened before him with its promise to a youth of spring, adventure, and reward. He blinked his eyes slowly, as if this image were the most difficult to capture and the most quickly lost.
Hollingsworth spoke with ferocity. “You indulge yourself. Hear, hear!” and he clapped his hands. “You’re an old man and you indulge yourself.”
McLeod’s speech ended. The lines came back to his face, the twitch regained its rhythm, and his voice grew dull. “I have been talking a long time,” he said in answer.
“A long time?” Hollingsworth was shrill. “You wasted a fellow’s patience. And for what? All that abuse. You talk about this high-and-mighty project, and then you talk about the next one. If I didn’t understand the value of politeness …” He cut himself short. “Would you say,” he asked in a penetrating voice, “that a fellow like yourself with all the things you’ve done, would you say that such a fellow isn’t a little tired?”
Apparently McLeod did not trust himself to speak. Slowly his head nodded forward and back.
“You think such a fellow is energetic enough to live through all he says is going to happen? And then at the end of it he’s going to make a big revolutionary spiel? You’re just like an old thing,” Hollingsworth said furiously. “Babble, babble, babble about how sweet it used to be. Only you make it the future.”
Stony fruit to stony palate, McLeod sucked upon his knuckle, resting motionless but for the action of his lips, so that he might have been a statue, the marble curved upon itself. Deprived of nourishment through the years it was only now his mouth could water.
“And if you ever did live to such a time,” Hollingsworth continued, “and the revolutionaries could get together, what would you do there? We checked up on you pretty thoroughly. You don’t have any contact with anybody now, and for good reason. Even those pieces of paper you write. You mail them anonymously to people you think might be interested. You’re ashamed of yourself,” Hollingsworth shouted. “You think you’re so superior, you still lock down on me. But I at least talk to you. Those wonderful revolutionaries of yours—why if what you say comes to pass, they won’t have anything to do with you. You’re beyond the pale. Don’t forget your record. Don’t ever forget that.”
“Nor will you let me,” McLeod said in a small voice. He removed his finger from his mouth and watched the light shining on the moistened skin. “It’s true,” he whispered. “What more do you want?”
“I want you to concede,” Hollingsworth said.
“But I told you I would.”
“Yes, and I know you. While you were talking you had the idea that maybe you wouldn’t. And with me a bargain is a bargain. I hold you to it.”
McLeod looked at his knuckle. “Is it to you, or to your department?”
“Oh, I’m ahead of you, don’t worry about that,” Hollingsworth said in the same furious tone. “Trying to frighten a fellow. You have the idea you can make a better deal at my office. Well, you can’t. I’m your best deal and . . you’re to give it to me.
“I concede,” McLeod sighed.
Lannie had begun to weep. “What are you doing?” she cried aloud, but I could not tell to whom she spoke.
“I suppose we must have a private conversation,” Hollingsworth said. “It’ll take time, won’t it?” McLeod nodded. “Well, I don’t mind so long as the bargain is kept.”
Much as if he were revolted to look at Lannie or at me, McLeod said quietly, “Lovett, I’ll have to ask you to leave the room.”
“I don’t want to leave,” I said. “You can’t give it to him.”
Now, he did look at me, and his eyes were blank. “Ah, but there’s not an alternative. You might as well go, Lovett.”
Lannie had finished weeping. Her eyes dry, her face stiff, she stood up slowly and drifted toward the door.
“Oh, go now, go, will you!” Hollingsworth exclaimed with irritation.
So we went, Lannie and I, stood looking at each other in the gloomy silence of the attic hall, and then separated, she to her room, and I to mine. Behind us in the room, the battle over, the casualties counted, terms were being drawn.
And it was I who felt the shame.