Constructive Anatomy

MARXISM: AN AUTOPSY--Henry Bamford Parkes--Houghton Mifflin ($3).

Any readers who think they are being invited to a rip-roaring wake over Communism's corpse will find that Henry Bamford Parkes, despite the title of his book, has no such jamboree in mind. Even Marxists may concede that the body of their belief, with all its nobility of purpose, its elaborate doctrine, its often tragic record in action, has rarely undergone such delicate surgery. For the argument of this book goes far deeper than any current disillusionment with a "discredited" Communism.

During the past ten years men of good will, trying to escape the Left-Right dilemma, have been bravely challenging defeat, whooping up democracy, deploring dictatorship, condemning war, and agreeing that not much can be done about it all. To reflective witnesses, however, even the best "liberal" thinking has seemed about as far behind the times as Montesquieu's and Jefferson's was ahead of theirs. Parkes's book catches up with history. A young (34) history instructor at New York University, previously known for a brilliant History of Mexico and for a few remarkably lucid essays, Parkes has tested the dogma of the Left in the light of history and reason, drawn his conclusions, brought them into sharp focus with political facts, and thereby outlined a progressive program with at least theoretical drive and good sense.

History. Karl Marx believed and taught that the industrial proletariat was inherently revolutionary, that its numbers and miseries would increase, that its conflict with the capitalist class would intensify, that eventually it would be able to overthrow the "bourgeoisie," and that, after the revolution, classes would disappear in a new kingdom of freedom, and government would "wither away."

Parkes demonstrates that by 1914 the working class had almost universally developed a tradeunion, not a revolutionary, point of view; that the stronger the union movement became, the less revolutionary were its purposes; that the proletariat's size was reduced by machinery, its miseries by reform. Seeing all this, Lenin did not deduce that Marx had been wrong. Instead he formed the Communist Party to lead the working class, not to what it seemed to want but to what Marx had decided it ought to want. And to win the Russian Revolution, Lenin had to diverge from Marxism again by giving property--land--to the peasants.

Lenin's great experiment established a dictatorship, nominally "of the proletariat," actually of the Communist Party and eventually of Stalin alone. New class distinctions arose between workers, managers and bureaucrats. The Soviet Government has so far shown no signs of withering away--though Communists expect it eventually to do so. Meanwhile outside Russia the sometimes heroic Communist International has been effective in nothing so much as in scaring the pants off the middle class.

Theory. The failures of Marxism in practice argue fallacies in theory. The first of these, according to Parkes, is the idea that the working class alone can, or will, seize political power. The modern working class and the capitalist class are not independent as were the French bourgeoisie and aristocracy before the French Revolution; they are interdependent parts of the same economic organism.

Marxist economics got its modern prestige from Marx's prophecy that capitalism would go through more & more severe crises, would eventually stall. Parkes shows clearly that the Marxian analysis was correct only up to a point. Marx, for example, harped on only one form of "exploitation," that of the working people by the owning classes; modern experience proves that restricted production (high prices) and frozen capital are chief causes of depression, exploitation of workers, farmers and middle class alike.

The great appeal and the great value of Marxism lay in its passion for social justice, and this Parkes excepts from autopsy. Marx was right, Parkes believes, in encouraging a militant trade unionism. Industrial democracy is essential. But the crucial error of Marxism, as Parkes sees it, was the theory that freedom could be attained only in a collectivized society. On this point the evidence is mountain-high. Says Henry Bamford Parkes: "Capitalist society is half free and half slave; instead of extending freedom to all, the Marxists propose to abolish the freedom of all."

For the Majority. Parkes's closely thought-out proposals rest on this conclusion and on the equally demonstrable one that "the kind of system which prevailed in America before 1929 is unworkable. . . ." His alternative is laissez-faire, the principle of the free, competitive market under the law that Jefferson believed in. Parkes proposes to apply it unflinchingly to modern industrial society. If this sounds familiar, readers will discover that its implications are about as flabbergasting as they are logical. Stripped down to economic essentials, they are:

1) As the free market demands a constant flow of purchasing power, and as the fatal kink in that flow under modern capitalism is unearned income derived from fixed interest rates, the kink should be straightened by a reduction--ultimately an extinction--of dividends and interest. Holdings of public institutions should be excepted. The trick would be turned gradually by cutting down on the rights of inheritance. In the end, business men would do their borrowing entirely from the government.

2) Since Big Business, in the Parkesian view, tends to restrict production and employment instead of cutting prices, and since 50 years of trust-busting have shown the impossibility of making them stay busted, another course becomes appropriate: "If a job in corporate industry constituted a property right . . . industrial managers would normally find it profitable to keep their workers fully occupied," thus expanding production, lowering prices. Parkes argues that workers would give up a fixed wage if they were free to choose their industries, guaranteed (within limits) a job, and if wages varied suitably with corporate profits.

Parkes's argument is that these two steps, enacted wisely into law with appropriate safeguards, would end by restoring a free economy. Also, that they would produce a truer social justice than Marxism would. Further, that they make up a program which offers specific benefits to both workers, who would get property, and farmers and middle class, whose traditional debts would be lightened by the cut in interest. The key problem of progressive politics has always been to find a basis for uniting these classes. Marxism divides them (to fascism's benefit); the noble but vague economic liberalism of Walter Lippmann passes over their heads. "A program," says Parkes apropos of Lippmann, "which benefits nobody in particular will not be supported by anybody in particular."

Parkes reasons that his or similar ideas should be acceptable in time to an electoral majority. He points out that the hard-won democratic state is not essentially an instrument of capitalist domination, as Marxists contend. It is essentially a legislative means for translating the ideas of the majority into law. Sticking strictly to that theory of the state, the Parkes program would not require an OGPU or Gestapo.

Criticism. Lacking the debater's ebullience of a John Strachey or the optimism of a Lippmann, Henry Bamford Parkes's chiseled style may chill some readers before his argument warms them up. Avowedly theoretical, his book will be condemned as such by those who forget that all practice implies a theory. Avowedly long range, it will not be adopted with glad cries in 1940. Unreconstructed Marxists will be able to shrug off the Parkes analysis as one more--though an unusually revolutionary--example of the bourgeois mind. Unreconstructed Wall Streeters will like the Parkes logic up to the point where it requires their own demise.

But as an effort at disinterested, civilized social blue printing, Marxism: An Autopsy is head & shoulders above any documents of the right, left or centre for a long time back. If its program is, as Parkes calls it, tentative, it is certainly seminal, certainly consistent with one thoroughly proved thesis: that, to progressive politics, Marxism is more a liability than an asset.

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