Sidney Hook, philosophy professor at New York University, has published in the current Partisan Review an article on "The Future of Socialism." He has some interesting points to make on the relationship between Communism and democracy, and especially on certain misconceptions about that relationship among one group of American "liberals." Some excerpts from Mr. Hook's article:
We see all around us . . .the' semantic confusion according to which Russia is a democracy of another kind. ... It is downright absurd to imagine that by surrendering political democracy one can get any other kind of democracy. And yet this was the illusion of many who thought of themselves as Marxists—particularly Lenin.
That profound thinker, Henry Wallace, darling of the totalitarian liberals,* is wont to contrast political democracy in the U.S. with the "economic democracy" of the Soviet Union....
Deny a people the freedom of the Bill of Rights, and security becomes slavery, vocation forced labor, privacy concealment, the family a hutch for mass breeding, the school an outpost, of the state, social intelligence a technique of rationalization, art and literacy weapons to impose conformity, the person a subject. . . .
Since I am first a democrat and then a socialist—in the sense that I am more profoundly convinced of the validity of the democratic ideals than of any specific way of achieving them—I believe in consequence that our main emphasis must fall upon the ideals and practices of political democracy and those measures of socialization and social control that are easily derivable" from it. This means a theory of piecemeal socialism through the democratic process. . . .
Abroad. What is not yet clear to those responsible for American foreign policy is that capitalism in other countries of the world is either dead or dying, that it cannot be revived, and that the peoples of the world will not be won for an American imperialist rule more interested in a favorable balance of trade than in the welfare of the impoverished masses. . . .
The only chance of strengthening a world front against totalitarianism is by building a democratic analogue to Stalin's multi-national Bolshevism . . . motivated by a desire to avoid war and prevent the one world of planned enslavement which is the Russian program. ... If the Western statesmen don't understand that the world cannot remain half slave and half free, the Russians do, and they are engaged in the most extensive propaganda effort since the Comintern was founded to make the one world their world. The weakness and injustices of our democracy provide them with excellent material for propaganda. . . . .
At Home. Despite their comparatively small numbers, the totalitarian liberals have so poisoned the climate of opinion in America that it is difficult to distinguish between the friends and the foes of the democratic tradition. ... It is ironical that although the Communists have captured central posts in the labor movement, American workers by & large have escaped infection by illusions of Sovietland.