Chapter I: Poe at Last (4)

This is Germany today: who doubts that with variations it may be America tomorrow? that it may be any capitalistic country where the Jew, _in his present_, is a minority factor in a desperate middle class and _in his past_ a reminder of the liberal culture of the Western world, against which that desperate class is in revolt?

b.

Now for the final questions: How can the Jew survive in the modern world, _and why should he survive_? To answer clearly, I must first state some of the reasons why he survived in the past. And since the kaleidoscope of Jewish generations is so great, I take the latest period of undisputed Jewish health: the Middle Ages (which lasted for the Jews until the eighteenth century), when the Jews lived, harmonious and whole, within a Europe of violent divisions, and often savagely hostile.

1. Jewry’s strict unity of ideal and conduct made the community,
although small and surrounded, an efficient body. All its energy was
conserved for itself and applied functionally for survival; whereas in
a greater community where value and deed are divided, there is
conflict, loss of energy, disease.

2. In Judaism, both ideally and actively, there was no separation
between man and group. Although infiltrations from Alexandrian and
Platonized Egypt corrupted the ancient Hebrew knowledge that there is
no personal immortality, this superstition of a surviving individual
soul (the deepest cause of the failure of European cultures) was never
strong against the healthy Jewish unification of individual and
commune. Therefore, medieval Jewry had no destructive egoism—no “great
men”—to mislead it for discordant personal ends. (The egoistic leader
battens on the accumulated egoisms of his rabble.) In Jewry, the
leaders were as organic to the commune as an eye or a brain to the
body. Moreover, these leaders were not soldiers, not megalomaniacs of
fame and money: they were the seers and the thinkers. Here, then, was
a social body whose eyes and brain literally led it—in contrast to our
modern world in which the eye and the brain often appear to be
discards or decorations.

3. Jewry had, despite theological and cultural differences, a deep
community of values with Christian cultural leaders. These recognized
the worth of the Jewish ethic; the beauty of the Jews’ concept of
Godhead as immanent in human action. The best in Christian Europe at
all times respected, and often learned from, the “hated” Jews. And
during the ages when the church was strong, it had enough influence to
defend the Jews against extremities of persecution.

4. Through these times, _Jewry had an economic function_. Its
activities in international commerce, banking, exchange, and in the
practical sciences of communication and of navigation, did a necessary
work in feudal Europe. And this allied Jewry with the struggling
middle class—the burghers who were to inherit and transform feudal
Europe. Without this function and the alliance with a rising economic
class, Jewry’s inner harmony of action could not have saved it. For
there would have been lacking a harmony of function within the larger
body of the Gentile world.

To return, now, to our time; the Jew obviously can survive, if the immutable essence of the Jewish social organism can somehow be transformed to function in the modern world. And obviously, the Jew should survive, if this essential Jewish nature still has a part to play before mankind. These questions are the subject for a book—which I shall write, if I live long enough. Here, I can but sketch my answer.

The Jewish principle of value-in-Being, of God and social justice, of the _enactment_ of value by individual and group, did not exist _in vacuo_. It existed within a matrix. And this matrix was the agrarian economic-cultural world—a world so basally static that the eighteenth-century Galician Jew shared it, fundamentally unchanged, with Amos and Isaiah. So long as the matrix held, the Jew could follow the commandments of his prophets _as interpreted by twenty centuries of fathers_.

We may now see why the Jewish organism broke in the impact with the modern world. Modern industrialism destroyed the simple, paternalistic economy under which the Jewish commune _approximated_ social justice. And modern thought and science corroded the theologic-ethic form under which the Jew knew God. To survive, the Jewish principle must be transfigured into modern terms. Judaism must embrace an again workable program approximating social justice: and that means the unequivocal destruction of the unjust anarchy called industrial capitalism. And Judaism must redefine what it has always meant—or meant to mean—by God.

Now, let the reader answer: Is the principle of social justice needed today? And that _Man_ may live, must there be, not an anthill system, but a living social form that nurtures the inward need of every human being to create and to share his inward vision and value? If your answer is Yes, then there is need in the world of what has been, for nearly thirty hundred years, the Jewish principle. And as if history urged that this cardinal dual need of the world may yet be the peculiar business of the Jewish people (there have always been, in all nations, saintly and isolated men who lived and died for it, as greatly as any Jew), the need stands most forcibly answered in the work of two Jews—Jews of a “new remnant,” Marx and Spinoza.

I place Marx first, because in the perspective of function he comes first—although Spinoza lived two centuries before him and profoundly influenced his thinking. Marx, from the Jewish premise of history as an organism evolving toward “good,” has given to the industrial world a realistic logic and a technique of social justice. Time, of course, has amended or refuted many details of his plan; yet it is nonetheless categorical that every man who wants to _enact_ social justice in the modern world must be a Marxist in spirit although he may reject certain Marxist dogmas. The modern Jew, if he is to exist, must interpret Marx as a prophet as surely as his forebears interpreted Moses and Isaiah. Marx (despite chronology) comes before Spinoza, because the social discord is a disease immediately threatening the survival of civilized mankind; and because collective consciousness comes before mature self-consciousness. Marx without Spinoza is an imperative, immediate, primitive first step in action. Spinoza, without Marx, remains an abstract philosophy, removed from possible action.

But as Marx is the man who most surely projected the prophetic aspiration of social justice into a workable modern program, Spinoza is the prophet who has completed the purifying of the knowledge of God into the God of inwardness, of substance and of action. If Marx carries on Moses and Ezra, Spinoza carries on Isaiah and Jesus. It is he who has best established the organic being of God _in_ matter and in human thought; who has made rational the ancient mystic intuition that the cosmic dwells within the man in so far as the man grows self-conscious. By giving value to matter in a form acceptable to the age of science, Spinoza will crown the work of Marx, who gives reality to a program of social justice in the age of machines.

Now, it may be that Spinoza and Marx are the swan song of Jewry: the final message of a great people before its ultimate death. It may be that the work of unifying and enacting their contributions shall fall to other peoples. There is a Soviet Union in the world, and China, and the two Americas; from such virgin soil may come the fulfillment of the prophets. I do not know. But I do know that, if the Jew is to survive as an organic group, he must enact his modern prophets as his fathers (after rejecting them, also) enacted the prophets of Scripture. And I conclude by broadly sketching what the modern Jewish way of living must be.

To begin with (for, I repeat—in the field of action, Marx comes before Spinoza), the Jew must renounce loyalty to the exploiting class. Without that, all his “service” is a “vain oblation.” Today, as twenty-six centuries ago, the word of the prophet is true:

Bring no more vain oblations;
It is an offering of abomination unto Me;
New moon and sabbath, the holding of convocations—
I cannot endure iniquity along with solemn assembly....
Cease to do evil;
Learn to do well;
Seek justice....

“_Learn_ to do well!” In our industrial world, this means active allegiance to the class whose historic function it is to abolish economic exploitation—the base of social injustice and of war—by doing away with economic classes altogether. This new allegiance will not be easy; since the Jews for centuries have been forced to earn their bread within the middle class, it will have the value, by itself, of a religious conversion. But this new loyalty as a group does not mean that the Jew will be submerged in the working class or in any proletarian body like the communists. He must fight for the workers (and the farmer and the intellectual, too, are workers), help them with his brain and body; but he may be detached from them, at least at present, because of his particular stewardship of values—“the realm of God,” in each man, with which the harried and hungry worker has not had time to grow familiar.

The revolutionary proletariat cannot trouble about God. There are good functional reasons for the atheism of most Marxists. The word “God” has been monopolized so long by the apologists of the class of exploitation: theologians, philosophers, poets! To detach (as Spinoza did) the reality in God from all the accumulated lies is a problem that calls for subtlety beyond the present anguished state of the masses; for energy that the masses and their immediate leaders _cannot spare_ from the day’s struggle. It is unhistorical to expect the active revolutionist of our time to do more than reject the false “God” of the churches and the synagogues. Yet the true experience of God must not die even in the heat of revolutionary battle. The first Marxist ends cannot be won and man be raised from animal penury and fear into the human stage of security and leisure unless the individual finds life good: and this can be only through the Spinozistic sense of God. The experience of the divine in mortal life must be preserved. Wherefore, there is need today of a people, scattered through the nations, that know and nurture the experience of God. By the tradition of ages, by their ancient prophets and their modern thinkers, the Jews have inherited the challenge and the _right_ to be such a people.

This Jewish “remnant”—and only the remnant, through the ages, has preserved the Jew—will be loyal to the class of social revolution; but through its consciousness of God it will be still separate, and must remain so. It will understand the functional “atheism” of many simple-minded revolutionists, and not demand that it be understood in return. The God in man will be the still secret treasure it must lovingly preserve against the day when men, free of fear and hunger, learn to look within themselves where God is. Thus, the Jews will still be a peculiar people. And they will be subject to the dislike and distrust of the zealot for whom the word “God” is anathema; although it was in the name of God that his values of social justice and individual dignity were preserved and prepared, through the barbaric ages.

Now, a majority cannot rise to so high a challenge of rebirth. Bankers, merchants, lawyers, professional men and politicians, even artisans and mechanics among the Jews, will not yield their old allegiance to the middle class, although that class turns (as it is turning!) against them. And these will disappear in the general human welter, as Jews have disappeared in Assyria, Babylon, Alexandria and Rome. But what a magnificent remnant there may be! The teacher, the doctor, the engineer, the clear-eyed man of commerce who knows and hates the rottenness of capitalist commerce, the Jewish worker and the student—above all, the Jewish student! Already, these are on the side of the productive class that alone holds the energy to remake the world. Already, they accept Marx. Let them fulfill this knowledge with devotion to the inward value—the God whom Spinoza has explored in man and in matter—and there will be again, in the world, a Jewish remnant!

Persecution? It is already here, even in America; and as the capitalistic era shrinks, darkens and despairs, it will grow worse. The lesson of Hitler, in offering the Jew as the traditional scapegoat for the accumulated rage of a bewildered people, is bound to be learned; already we have our little Hitlers, profiteers of suffering stupidity and blindness. The Jewish people are going to suffer. And for those who are individually and innocently hurt, and who know not why, there can be no soothing words. Before their anguish, we can only bow our heads, humbly, as they enact the world-old mystery of pain. But at least, for the conscious Jew, the real Jew, there will again be reason for Jewishness, reason to bear his persecution; and comrades to help him bear it. And if individual Jews die, their death will be in the cause of humane life; no man can ask a higher guerdon. And the history of the Jews will hearten them with knowledge, that when a people is ready to be persecuted and to die for a good cause, the cause lives—and the people.

_Postscript_:

This article, which appeared in “The New Republic” in 1933 and was
reprinted in many journals, is itself an abbreviated form of an essay
published in French by “Europe,” of Paris, and in Spanish by “Sur,” of
Buenos Aires. I have used it here, rather than the longer version,
because both are a project or programmatic abstract of the essay I
must someday write, in which all the terms of my argument will be more
fully and fundamentally defined. Recent attacks on socialism and
communism by prominent Jews—rich men, shallow, slavish, scared, of the
kind I have described, or by truckling labor leaders, make the writing
of this essay an imperative duty.

I trust it is clear in my conclusion about the possible leadership
of a Jewish “remnant” in our recreative task, that I have not
mentioned the like necessary role of a Christian “remnant,” only
because this paper deals specifically with the Jews. That the
prophetic-revolutionary strain is not dead in the American
Protestant churches is proved by the labors of such men as Reinhold
Niebuhr—one of the truly creative minds of America.

3. FROM MANY MESSAGES TO MANY PEOPLE

_i. War Is with Us Now
To the First United States Congress Against War, Held in New York, 1933_

Two thousand delegates from every part of the country, and of every shade of progressive opinion, are meeting in New York in a Congress Against War. A most laudable enterprise; and a most needed. For war threatens the world; and with war, civilization, still staggering from the blows of the last conflict, may definitely founder. The crisis is immediate and tragic. But no congress of good men can avert it. All that this congress can do is to bring men’s consciousness to focus upon the present danger; and to raise men’s consciousness to the pitch of intensity where it becomes action.

Before everything else, we must become aware that _war is already here_! The political and economic setup of the modern nations IS war. Battles on land and sea, millions of lives destroyed, cities and fields laid waste, are but a concentrated form of the jungle anarchy that is called “government” in the metropolis, that is called “diplomacy” in the embassies, that is called “business” in factories, mills, mines and markets.

So long as we have nations playing the lone game of power and aggression, or banding together like packs of wolves in “alliance” against other nations, we have war—_war in peace_. And all the congresses of the world will not prevail against the inevitable, periodic outbreak of this constant war into pitched battles.

So long as we have a social system within each nation that divides the citizens into classes whose economic basis is exploiter and exploited; a social system in which success means power gained at the expense of others and enjoyed to the exclusion of others, we have war—_civil war_ in peace, within each nation. The small ruling class is brutalized by its success in enslaving others; the large classes are brutalized by their slavery—brutalized the more if they are not conscious of enslavement. In such a social system (and all the “planned economics” of capitalism can only make it more dangerous by disguising it), it is inevitable that the state and the nation will reflect, on a large scale, the jungle spirit of individual men. It is inevitable that the jungle greed of such a state and nation will come into conflict with the greed of other nations where the same system prevails. It is inevitable that this _normal_ state of conflict shall break out, from time to time, in formal warfare.

But our present condition of war is even deeper! So long as war prevails in the internal economic structure of each nation, it will prevail as well in the internal psychic structure of the men and women who constitute the nation. A society that is a rationalized jungle of greed and violence, encourages the lust for individual power in all men and women and atrophies the social instinct in all men and women. The members of such a society war upon each other in their individual lives: and each individual soul is itself the seat of warfare. Of course, such divided men band together in gangs, classes, nations, to make war upon other gangs, classes, nations.

War has been the constant condition of what we call civilization. War between individuals, war between classes, war between peoples—each seeking profit and power at the expense of others. But there is a new factor in the situation of today.

Modern science has made war deadlier than it has ever been: so that war now threatens—not only persons and individual nations, but all mankind. And this new factor of science, by its potentiality of large-scale production and co-operation, has also made the old systems of exploitation and rivalry no longer needed.

This is the crucial state of the world—its mortal danger and its hope. War, as never before, is a menace to human survival. And war (military, economic, social war) has been made unnecessary, as never before, by our modern mastery of means of production, distribution, communication, whereby it is feasible today _for all men_ to live in plenty and with leisure, without enslaving or exploiting others.

The United States Congress Against War represents a good impulse. But men’s protest against war is not a new event in the so-called Christian world. It has been futile, throughout the ages, _because war was organic in men’s way of living_. Similarly, this congress will not pass the limits of “good intentions” unless it writes down formally in its record that the abolition of war means revolution. Fundamental revolution. Revolution in the social structure of the nations, and revolution in the souls of men and women.

_ii. To the Students of Cuba_
(_April, 1931_)

I am following with deep emotion your struggle to renovate—indeed to re-create—the life of Cuba. I am poignantly aware of the terrible dilemma that confronts you. Your government is the slave of irresponsible financial interests of the United States, and of the State Department at Washington which with cynical hypocrisy is launched on a deliberate campaign to imperialize the entire Caribbean. If your prostitute government remains in office, Cuba will continue to be a “factory” for American investments, a “factory” protected by no laws such as limit exploitation on American soil; since you Cubans are not citizens of the United States and your political “independence” more and more is coming to mean the privilege of our exploiters to work in your country with a ruthless irresponsibility which they would not dare to display in their own. Yet, if you overthrow this government, it may mean the landing of American marines in Havana and the swift setting up of a new rule which will be the replica of Machado’s—the other horn of the dilemma!

What can you do? What can a citizen of the United States urge you to do? In a way I am ashamed to speak to you, ashamed to mention my own sorrow and my shame, as a native of the oppressor country, who is helpless to help you. Men like myself in the United States are powerless. There is no enlightened public opinion here with any _punch_ to it. Most of our good will is Platonic, in the bad sense of the word. And who, here, is interested in a _students’_ revolutionary movement? Our intellectuals, as a body, have lost contact with the spiritual, the _human_ source of art; our student groups are too pampered and too infantile to get excited over anything but football.[14] You are alone in your fight, alone with the student bodies and the workers of other Hispano-American countries who, for the most part, are as dispossessed as you. You are alone with the truth!

Yet I can say to you: Go on! If for no other reason, _go on because only then will you be happy_. Do not let so-called practical affairs and worldly wisdom compromise your ideal. Look at the men who have made these “necessary compromises”: the successful men, the rulers of the world. See what ugly, misshapen, miserable men they are. Look well at the “practical” men, and do not go the hideous way which they have gone, and of which the ignoble shambles of the modern world is the result. Even if you are imprisoned, even if you are shot down (as some of you have been), you must have the satisfaction of knowing that you are living the sole way that makes life tolerable. The enemies who have sold themselves for dollars are not happy; the indifferent ones, in Cuba, in the United States, who follow opportunism—for success, for pleasure, for power—are not happy. They must drug themselves with ever more success, more pleasure, more power, lest they awake to the intolerableness of their way of living. And that is why they hate you: because you are the constant revealers to themselves of their own nullity. They must deny their nullity; and by a common psychologic mechanism they do so by denying _you_ who make them cognizant of it.

I cannot promise you success in your present endeavor to free Cuba and to bring Cuba to real independence. It would be false to promise it. _You_ may not succeed in actually overthrowing the hideous anarchy of which men like Machado are mere minor servants. So to do requires more than your good will; it requires method, technique and long hard work. But this triumphant method can come only from such will as yours. Before you achieve it, perhaps you individually will be crushed, since the ordered anarchy and greed of the modern world _has_ method. But even if this is so—this worst which must be bravely envisaged, it makes no difference in what you must do, not merely from a sense of duty, but in order to be happy! You must go on struggling to free and to reorganize your country; knowing that that labor is its own reward; that the man who gives his life for freedom, by that fact is alive and is free.

You know that your problem as Cubans struggling for independence is not apart from that of most of the other nations of America Hispana. Yet you are divided from your allies, not alone by mountains and deserts and seas, but by proud persistent nationalisms, by differences of race and culture—the differences of Indian, Negro, mestizo, criollo. You are all rich in plunder, and the imperialist power feeds on it the better by exciting the disunities between you. But you are profoundly gifted peoples; your resources of the spirit are as great as the resources of your lands—greater, surely, than the difficulties inherited from your historic pasts. You will help yourselves and one another, synchronously, by deeper self-understanding. For brothers who fulfill themselves achieve thereby not homogeneity, but harmony. Without harmony, both your lands and your cultures would be taken from you. But you are already far on the way to achieving this organic unity among you, in cultural terms and in terms of political aspiration.

The imperialist power exploits you and incites you to fratricidal war, because it has allies within your borders: your own capitalists and their servants, the politicians. If you effectively fight the domestic enemy, the foreign enemy will at last be helpless against you, even as he was helpless against revolutionary Russia. I know that your task is more complex than was Russia’s, because you are not politically united. But, essentially, it is one problem.

And it is our problem, too. We in the United States fight the same foe as you. This, when we attain a conscious intelligentsia and a conscious working class, will serve to unite us.

Only from the platform of War Against Capitalism can you effectively meet your national problem. For your foe is only superficially an alien government; more deeply it is the capitalist power with its twin heads: the Machados at home, the armed Dollar abroad. Most deeply, it is the ignorance of all the people—in Cuba, in America Hispana, in the United States.

Students of Cuba, you have come out into the clear air of action; you have created leaders for yourselves, and a program. You are blessed in this. I find myself almost envying you, rather than pitying you despite your anguish and your struggles. My heart and my mind are with you. If I could feel that my word warmed you in the slightest degree, heartened your perseverance, it would be for me an inexpressible joy, who am alone here in this great country—alone, and unable to act for and with men like you who stand for everything I cherish.

NOTE: _This is one of many messages by the author clandestinely
introduced, printed in pamphlet form, and distributed, in
Latin-American countries under brutal dictatorships. It has been
re-Englished from the Spanish text._

_iii. The Touchstone_
_on the anniversary of the October Revolution, 1935_

More than ever, in this day of spiritual and social confusion, the attitude of men toward Soviet Russia is a touchstone of the quality of their good will. By this criterion three large groups stand forth.

There are, first, the enemies of the Soviet Union: and these are the souls whose true love, despite all their fine words of God and Man and Freedom, is for their pocket-books. Their real nature is manifest in their leaders, archetypes of human ugliness and degeneration—the Hearsts, the Hitlers, the Hoovers. A second group consists of the “liberals,” the “socialists,” the idealistic “revolutionaries” who are so busy deploring the mistakes and injustices committed in the Soviet Union that they have no time to understand or to defend it. These are men (when they are sincere) so infatuated with their own private notion of what truth and justice should look like that the spectacle of a great nation, heroically serving truth and justice with the humble tools of humble human nature, leaves them cold. Essentially, these are men devoted to their own egos: men whose professional love for mankind masks a childish and shallow and ill-tempered self-adoration.

The third group consists of those who know that in the Soviet Union a people is dedicated to the task for which in all ages the inspired few—the prophets and the poets—have given their lives: the task of founding upon earth, at last, a culture not of slaves but of men, a society of universal justice, in which human truths shall be sought and expressed by the common and communal life of all men and women. They know that this people consists not of gods, but of humans. They know that this people must meet and overcome, in their great undertaking, the obstacles of a hostile world and, no less, the obstacles of their own enslaved past and of their faulty natures as human beings. They know that the labor of the Soviet Union is the more precious because it is the work of humble men and women, subject to trial and error; and that those who reject this labor because of its failures and imperfections are at heart cowards. They know that if the dark years, in which we have lived since the Great War, shall appear in the perspective of history as the time of a great Dawning, the reason is the light that has come since 1917 from Russia.

These sincere men and women, today more than ever, while the clouds of aggressive ignorance and ill will gather upon the world, must declare their devotion to the Cause of the Soviet Union.

_iv. To Romain Rolland on His Seventieth Birthday_

Your seventieth birthday comes at a time when France holds in her hands the immediate destiny of the Western world. The result of the struggle for power in France between the elements of reaction typified by the Croix de Feu, which are the forces of death, and the elements of re-creation typified by the Front Uni, which are the forces of life, may well determine the result, at least as it affects those still living, of the same struggle throughout the Occident. If France fails, Great Britain fails; the sinister forces in the United States, emboldened by a century of capitalist anarchy, may sweep America into the same disaster. If France fails, Western man may fail: a period of overwhelming darkness may intervene for us all, before that future time when our progeny once again takes up the Torch, held aloft meanwhile—who knows for how long?—by the Soviet Union and perhaps by certain parts of China, India, America Hispana that prove inaccessible to fascist armies.

In this crucial scene of mankind, as so often in the past, France plays a leading role. And we, who celebrate your seventieth birthday, Romain Rolland, perforce look upon you as the symbol of our hope in your great country. You are a great man, a great _person_, Romain Rolland, because you are a symbol; because a world spirit speaks _through_ you. At this hour of crisis and of celebration, for many in my country, you incarnate the genius which for eight centuries has sustained French culture.

This genius is a kind of “common sense,” rare alas!—both individually and collectively rare. It is “common” only as essence, as the universal, is common. It is compounded of a ruthless clarity in meeting the Real and in relating its parts together; of an invincible courage in following whither the Real leads at whatever sacrifice of individual peace and comfort; and of a creative vision in so mastering the facts that they may ever more closely conform with man’s intuition of his dignity and destiny.

As I look about me at the world in which I have now lived for over forty years, meeting men of all qualities of mind and temperament and talent, I am appalled at the rarity of this “common sense”; and I am no longer amazed at the cruel and dolorous pass to which the world has come. Men of genius in the usual sense of the word are not rare; nor men of physical courage, nor men of imagination. But terribly rare is the man who, capable of knowing the truth, continues to serve the truth beyond the point at which such service begins to make him suffer; terribly rare is the man of imagination who, finding that he can sell his gifts at high price unto the prostitutes and exploiters who rule the world, elects still to give his gifts into the hands of his humble brothers; terribly rare is the man who, possessing courage, does not get drunk with it and lose his control of reality, finding it easier to move armies or mobs than to master his own ego.

Men of this rare “common sense” will, perhaps, someday be more common; this, then, will be a different world. But until that time of maturity arrives, these men are historic. You are one of them, Romain Rolland. In you, there is no break between conviction and action; between recognition of the truth and every word and deed within your power to fulfill it; between the responsibility you feel for your dignity as an heir of Man and the responsibility you feel for your dignity as a servant of men. Ten years ago, I called you a _whole man_, Romain Rolland. I cannot improve this term, today. The whole man is he who possesses this common sense I speak of.

I pray that France may duly celebrate the seventieth birthday of her great son and heir to those intellectual and ethical qualities which have made France great. If she does so, it will have to be by her actions. France knows where the truth lies: will she have the common sense to serve it? She knows that truth lies first of all in fearless realization of the collective economic freedom which can alone make _true_ those principles of _Egalité_, _Fraternité_, _Liberté_, which now for a hundred years she has flaunted on all her public buildings. To this end, the people of France must grimly sever from their loyalty to _La Patrie_ those greeds and inertias and self-indulgences of class which are the germs of fascism and of death. The hour has come when France must accomplish the promise of her great tradition to herself and to the world. She must mature into realization. It will hurt, it will be heroic. But if France fails now, she goes down; she commits that suicide of the spirit which ever precedes decomposition of the body.

Great nations mirror their powers and their vision in the lives of their great men. Let France, today, look to herself by looking to you, Romain Rolland. Let her study the clear progress of your thought from the humanitarian idealism of your bourgeois youth, through the trial of war which schooled you to find the truth in _facts_, and to the strong revolutionary realism which is your deed, today. What France sees, in studying you, let her understand to be the symbol of her own ineluctable course, if she would continue to be France.

... This prayer to France, this challenge to France, this confidence in France, is my way, Romain Rolland, of celebrating your seventieth birthday.

_January, 1936_

NOTE: _This letter, before publication, was read at the great mass
meeting held in the Paris Trocadéro, on Romain Rolland’s birthday._

_v. To the Premier of France_

Dear Léon Blum: I presume to address you in this personal form because you are more than the head of a French government, you are more than leader of the People’s Front of the French nation: historic circumstance has made you arbiter of the present destiny of Europe, perhaps of us all. To fulfill your role, only a true man can suffice. And it is to the man that I am speaking.

All the world knows just what is happening in Spain. The Spanish people last February by a great majority chose a government of their own—somewhat similar to the one you are now leading. Having created a government of their own, they proceeded by means moderate and legal to create a Spain of their own. And as their program began to take effect, the enemies of the people of Spain, they who hate the people because they exploit them and because their privilege depends on the continued degradation of the people, took arms against the nation. Alone, these reactionaries would have failed, for they had almost a whole nation against them. Even with the trained mercenaries of the army, with the resources of vested property and vested superstition, they would have failed. But there were allies at hand—groups of the same kind, some in power and in possession of their respective countries, dealers in falsehood and blood, manipulators of ignorance and confusion. With the military and economic aid of these enemies of the Spanish people, and of their own peoples, Spain is being invaded, Spain’s democracy is being crushed, the world is being forced to stand by day after day while the machines manned by mercenaries and by the lusters after power destroy the naked body of a nation.

Léon Blum, this is no civil war of Spain; this is the conquest of the Spanish people by an armed international class to whom the destruction of life in the defense of property is an everyday routine. This class knows no frontiers. Its henchmen, called Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, the Tories of Great Britain and America, may mouth national slogans, but they are of one brotherhood, they adore one Baal and one Mammon. Was the conquest of Ethiopia a civil war? Plenty of African troops fought with Mussolini against the Negus who to them was a local exploiter less desirable perhaps than the Italian. But who fights against the loyalists in Spain? A military caste traditionally removed from sympathy with the people, a clerical caste trained to submission to the powers that be, all the dupes and victims of these castes—in other words, the forces, whether in Spain, in Italy, in France or in Britain, who are the sworn enemies of you, your party and your allies.

This is not a civil war in Spain; this is the civil war of Europe. This is a war of attempted conquest, Léon Blum, waged by all the elements you have devoted your life to combat against all the values you hold dear. It is your war, Léon Blum; it is our war.

The fascists of Italy and Germany know this. They know that the fascists of Spain are fighting _their_ battle of conquest. Therefore they are giving aid to their own kind. And the reactionaries of Japan, the United States, of every nation where money or privilege is in power, by the force of credits and propaganda are helping the men of their own stamp in Spain in order that their machines may prevail against a defense of mere human flesh and blood.

This, Léon Blum, is the war in which you have declared that France must remain neutral.

In all Europe there are three governments that can claim with validity to represent the interests of the entire people. They are Spain, which is fighting for life; your government, and the Soviet Union. The U.S.S.R., far removed from the immediate scene of battle and menaced by the two most aggressive militarist states of the world, Germany and Japan, cannot act alone; cannot act at all without regard to the decision of its sole ally, the French Republic. If the Soviet Union made legal its overwhelming sympathy for the Spanish nation as against your neutrality pact, you, Léon Blum, would fall; the People’s Front of France would fall; there would be chaos in France to match Spain’s, and perhaps a similar fascist uprising.

What does this mean, Léon Blum? It means that yours is the decision. In all Europe, France alone can act; France by the unified nature of its government and by the immediate threat to it both east and south, must act.

The world knows where your heart lies in this struggle. We know that if you could purchase victory for Spain with your life, you would gladly give your life. We know that what holds you back is the refusal of the British government to join you, is the criminal leadership of English Labor, is—in a word—your fear of war waged against the lives of your people by the united fascists. Yes, that is the superiority of the fascists over men and women of the democracies. The fascists, despising life, readily risk it; despising the lives of others, readily mislead and destroy them; whereas at the Left are they who hesitate because they think, because they feel, because they are more wholly human.

But, Léon Blum, it is a true saying: He who hesitates is lost. There is another old saying: He who loses his life shall find it. The words originally had a supernatural meaning. We can give to them a modern, psychological, rational form. We can say: “He who through fear of losing what he values dares not run risks is sure to lose what he values.” You fear war if you aid the Spanish people; you fear to alienate Britain; you fear to provoke the enemy who are giving aid to their factions by every means in their power. And your fear is helping the enemy; your fear is making more hopeless the cause of the people not only in Spain but in Germany and Italy, who need encouragement to rise against their executioners. Your fear is making more assured the position of the fascists when at last, made mad by their successes, they choose to unleash their war against you. Your fear—if need be—to risk war now is making war inevitable; and meantime your hesitancy and caution are throwing to the fascists the first battles.

Léon Blum, we who in everything human know ourselves superior to the fascists must equal them in daring and in resolution. Otherwise, our hatred of war and love of humanity will defeat us and deliver the world to the war makers. There are times when the best strategy is to get one’s eye on the goal and to move toward it. This is the strategy of the fascists, and it has been victorious in Ethiopia, on the Rhine and elsewhere. It is a strategy not every nation is able to pursue. Britain is too divided to pursue it. France has the power, the perspective, the government—and the incentive!—to pursue it.

Already the aid of the fascists to their kind in Spain, while France rigidly and solitarily remains neutral, is demoralizing the masses of all countries. They say to themselves, in England, in France, in Brazil, in the United States: “The fascists help their gangs; we leave our people to be massacred and their cities to be bombed.” The masses do not understand that the U.S.S.R. must act with France, must uphold _your_ hand, Léon Blum. None of us understands what holds you back. Your “neutrality” is breaking the heart and spirit of the peoples, everywhere, who soon or late must fight _your_ battle.

If I have presumed to address this letter to you, Léon Blum, it is because I know that my anguish is that of millions before the tragedy of Spain; and that my expectation of your leadership is that of millions everywhere—not excluding those in Italy and Germany—who cannot act alone, but who are waiting to follow.

We implore you: Recognize the facts in Spain. Recognize that _there is no neutrality_ in this irrepressible conflict between the two possible futures of mankind—the way forward to human dignity, the way backward to slavery. Open the frontiers of France for aid to the legitimate government of Spain before it is too late! Help them with food, guns, planes, credit, and above all with the moral force that will be theirs when they know that the French are their comrades. If you do this, at once, you will be doing merely what one legitimate government should do for another; you will be doing merely what the fascists, the world over, are doing for their conspirators in Spain.

If you do less than this, Léon Blum, you are betraying what your country represents, what your People’s Front gave you the mandate to perform. You will be betraying mankind.

_October, 1936_

_vi. Values of the Revolutionary Writer_

(_This address was read at the first session of the American Writers
Congress held in New York in April, 1935._)

1. _Definitions_

The world stands at the crossways. It goes forward into the socialist order, or human culture, not as we know it but as we aspire to create it, will perish. I do not say the way forward is certain. The life of man is at issue; and with man the alternatives are present, at all times, of life or of death. They are present now. But this is certain. To agonize within the present system, to refuse to get clear by the social revolution of the working classes, means the plunge of Western man into a darkness to which his productive and his intellectual forces, if they continue uncontrolled, must doom him: a darkness from which even the intimations of light that have made our present, will have vanished. This makes clear that the cause of the socialist society is not, finally, a political-economic problem: it is a cultural problem: it is _the_ human problem.

I propose to show the specific value, in this crisis, of the literary work of art—not as a chorus of revolutionary politics, not as an echo to action: but as _an autonomous kind of action_. I propose to show that above all in America today, owing to our peculiar cultural conditions, the revolutionary writer must not be a “fellow traveler”: that his art must be co-ordinate with, not subordinate to, the political-economic aspects of the re-creation of mankind.

This requires some definition of history and of literary art (for we are engaged in making history). Fortunately, I may point to the historic sense of mankind, implicit in Marx, as of a body which, like all organic life, evolves by reason of inward assimilations of an objective world from which it wins sustenance and on which it reacts—all according to a pattern which is the nature of the organism: a pattern which in man is capable of great variations chiefly through the process of what, vaguely, we call consciousness.

The part of consciousness, or if you prefer, of _experience_, in historic evolution is important for us because it leads straight to the social function of art. The work of art is a means (among other things) for extending, deepening, our experience of relationship with life as this organic whole. The feeling of intimate kinship with any part of the objective world is what we mean by beauty. As this relationship expands to an inclusive social form, it is what we mean by culture. The basic social function of art is _so to condition men that they will, as a social body, be the medium for the actions of growth and change required by their needs_. These social actions, to be healthy, must be performed within the true experience of _the whole of life involved_—and the conveying, the naturalizing, of this experience is the especial function of art.

I will make this plain. Suppose a man needs to hammer nails for his new house. He must hit the nails square on the head. But in order to do this, the man must be in good general condition. If his eyes are poor, if his brain is dizzy, all his technical skill of wrist-action won’t save him from hammering nails badly. No man, it is obvious, is in shape for even an act so simple as hitting a nail on the head unless his body and mind are a fit _medium_ for the job. No society of men or class of men is in shape for any needed action, save in so far as it has been conditioned to become the _effective medium_ for that action.

In simple societies, the prime conditioning arts are lyrical: they are music, the song, the dance. By means of the experience absorbed and sustained through them, the folk becomes the effective medium for the kind of action its emotional and economic needs, and the needs of its rulers, call for. In our world where a chaos of forces is breaking down the life of man before our eyes, the chief conditioning art—although all arts have their place—must be one to synthesize our complex pasts and present, and to direct them. This is the art of words, by which man captures the worlds and selves that have borne him, and renders them alive with his own vision.

We know now, roughly, the kind of social action to demand of our literary art. It is in general to condition men for the multitude of direct actions of which their life consists: it is, with us, the crucial task of conditioning our readers—who we hope will be the workers, the farmers, and their allies, to become the effective medium of revolution.

This subtle process of _conditioning_ is not to be confused with the work of direct _preparation_ for daily struggle: work which falls primarily to the teachers, the theorists, the organizers of party and of union, who are largely conditioned by the accumulated work of writers. And it must be clear that this work of conditioning the social body, however invisible it seems, is the direct action of the writers. Words, of course, are also instruments for “preparation”: reportage, pamphlets, slogans, manifestoes (this paper is a kind of manifesto), have their legitimate uses in political work. But only in so far as the need of the revolutionary _medium_ is understood; and as the main function of literary art, _which is to create this medium_, prevails. The writer who forgets this, in order to bend his art to some seemingly more immediate task, weakens the organic health and progress of mankind by betraying his integral part in it. And in a world full of hunger, of hideous injustice, of threatening war, only a clarity rare, hard and heroic, will hold the literary artist to his own often thankless, often obscured, yet fundamental, action.

2. _The American Writer Under Capitalism_

I apply at once these definitions to the special problems of the American revolutionary writer. To this end, we must first glance at the general state of readers and writers in our country.

We have never lacked literary talents. But the economic soil in which they rooted was washed away ere the roots could hold. We have had great writers. They have been influential abroad, where an organic cultural life possessing what we still lack—memory and consciousness—could employ them. Here, a Poe, a Whitman, a Thoreau, a Melville, could win only sentimental disciples because the discontinuity of ethnic and industrial conditions made their message obsolete more quickly than a generation could mature to hear them. We Americans are weak—infinitely weaker than the peasants of China, America Hispana, or old Russia—in that intuitive connection with soil and self and human past, which makes of a folk an effective medium for creative action. In this, our common state of cultural malnutrition, the need of sound literary art cries aloud. But our writers have been attainted by the disease they must help to cure. A sense of impotence, derived from their unconnectedness with the vital classes of the American world, has delivered them up to a succession of European fads and dogmas; and their reflections of foreign literary styles, like the shallow glints of a kaleidoscope, have added up to nothing. When they have turned to our world, our writers have been unable to resist the overpowering pulls of the capitalist system. They have been entertainers, purveyors of candy and cocktails. When at the end of the War, they began to rebel in numbers, their revolt was hollow: an exhibitionistic beating of drums or a snarl and a sneer.

Now the deepest cause of their subjection as writers, and of their impotence, is the hidden ideology of the American system, which—liberal and conservative alike—most of our writers have absorbed. _And this is painfully to the point_, because—whether they know it or not—the same ideology prevails among our revolutionary writers. Far too many of us have taken over the philosophy of the American capitalist culture that we are sworn to overthrow.

3. _The American Revolutionary Writer_

This American ideology, which has ruled from the beginning—from the time of those prophets of bourgeois business: Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton, the true masters of our way of life—is a shallow, static rationalism derived from the thinnest, not the deepest, eighteenth-century minds of France and Britain: an empirical rationalism based on fact-worship, on a fetishism (both unscientific and unpoetic) of the finished cut-and-dried report of the five senses, which is not remotely related to the organic rationalism explicit in Spinoza and implicit in the historical dialectic of Marx. Had this vulgar rationalism ruled in seventeenth-century England and France, there would be no modern science. It is, since it ignores the organic and evolving nature of man, by definition the foe of all creative work: the foe, therefore, however hidden, of art and revolution.

Briefly, I will disclose symptoms and attitudes in our revolutionary writers, which reveal (although the writers know it not) this sterile philosophy....

(1) Disbelief in the autonomy of the writer’s art; in its integral place _as art_ in the organic growth of man and specifically in the revolutionary movement. This self-distrust makes the writer capitulate _as artist_: leads him to take orders, _as artist_, from political leaders—much to the dismay of the more intelligent of said political leaders. It moves the American writer to misapply in his art borrowed foreign definitions of values which have cogence in their place and time of origin; but are meaningless here. This is a carry-over of the faddism of middle-class American writing.