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Unlike other Marxist propagandists, John Strachey did not storm his readers as if they were a barricade. He was serene in his faith that the gospel according to Marx was a fatality, delightful to write about, hopeless to struggle against; he was not above a decorous chuckle at the impotence of "the class enemy." Possessed of a lucid, sinuous, uncluttered, unhurried style (a rare gift for an economist), he managed to clear up the most abstruse points of the Marxian dismal science in a conversational tone, in which the Oxford accent was almost audible. Comforted, disarmed, enchanted, his readers learned that they were participants in a class struggle which was as clear-cut and eternal as the struggle between Ormazd and Ahriman. More important, Comrade Strachey showed them with scientific certainty how and why they must win. The Coming Struggle for Power became a bestseller. In 1933 he wrote The Menace of Fascism; in 1935, The Nature of Capitalist Crisis; in 1936, The Theory and Practice of Socialism. Each was a clear and simple tip, assuring the worried ex-bourgeois that they had picked the winning side.
These assurances were needed as the years rolled by. When the Nazi-Soviet pact all but guaranteed a German victory over the Allies, even Comrade Strachey hesitated. He found it almost as hard as the Red Army to take Finland. By the time the Nazis overran Norway, Strachey was moved to write a letter to London's The New Statesman and Nation, "dissociating" himself from the attitude of London's Communist Daily Worker.
This week John Strachey published A Programme for Progress, intended to chart an interim policy for the slow destruction of capitalism. Comrade Strachey's program for gradually abolishing capitalism; 1) vast public works; 2) reduction of the rate of interest; 3) discriminatory taxes; 4) excessive pensions and allowances; 5) unlimited government spending; 6) "popular control" of the banking system; 7) government control of payments for foreign goods.
The country in which this program had been most nearly realized was the U. S. Loud was Comrade Strachey in praise of the New Deal; he differed from U. S. Communists chiefly in his praise of Franklin D. Roosevelt. But the New Deal had made one fatal error, he felt, on its way to becoming a dictatorship of the proletariat —it had neglected to take over the banking system. So closely did Dissenter Strachey follow the Communist Party line that to his embarrassment he found himself treading on the heels of his old friend, Fascist Oswald Mosley. Reluctantly Author Strachey admitted that his program was strangely similar to that of the Nazi Government. But, he explains, fascism is a dictatorship of the capitalists; the success of his program presupposes a dictatorship by labor.