Macdonald turns now to the failure of the New Deal to solve the problems of American Capitalism – unemployment, not enough social welfare, etc.—resulting in Roosevelt’s Administration turning to the European conflict:

“It is true, says the President with his famous smile, ten million of you are unemployed and we have had to cut relief payments, but just think what social progress we’ll make once we have rid ourselves of those monsters in black or brown shirts three thousand miles across the Atlantic!”

“Whatever side wins will impose it’s Versailles on the loser, and the Third World War will begin to grow before the ink is dry on the treaty. Imperialist aims are still of major importance but modern warfare must also be regarded as the chief instrument whereby the obsolete bourgeoisie maintain their death-grip on the social order.”

“ ‘The real error of nearly all studies of war,’ writes Simone Weill in a remarkable article published in International Review last year, ‘ an error into which all socialists have fallen, has been to consider war as an episode in foreign politics, when it is really an act of interior politics, and the most atrocious act of all.’ Her development of this idea seems to me to open novel perspectives on the war question. ‘Marx has shown forcefully’, she writes, ‘that the modern method of production consists essentially of the subordination of the workers to the instruments of labor, which are disposed of by those who do not work. He has shown competition, knowing no other weapon than the exploitation of the workers, is transformed into a struggle of each employer against his own workmen and, in the last analysis, of the entire class of employers against their employees’.”

“‘In the same way, war in our days is distinguished by the subordination of the combatants to the instruments of combat, and the armaments, the true heroes of modern warfare, as well as the men dedicated to their service, are directed by those who do not fight. And since this directing influence has no other way of fighting the enemy than by sending their own soldiers, under compulsion, to their death—the war of one state against another state resolves itself into a war of the state and the military apparatus against its own army.’

‘War, in the last analysis, appears as a struggle led by all the state apparatuses and their general staffs, against all men old enough and able to bear arms.’”

At the end of Macdonald’s presentation of Weill’s Marxist analysis of  how wars  serve the ‘interior state,’ he turns back to the issue of why contemporary  intellectuals have backed away from Marxism:  “Why should a Marxist analysis [like Weill’s] be so alien to the way of thinking of our intellectuals?”

“Their moral indignation is turned against a scapegoat fascism across the ocean, to defeat which they are making common cause with the class and the economic system which in this country right under their very noses is preparing the next world slaughter. The explanation is to be found in the peculiar relationship of the intelligentsia to the class struggle. They conceive of their own thinking as being disinterested, free from class loyalties, taking as its referent ‘society in general.’ In a sense this is true. They have not the direct economic interest in one side or the other of class war which the proletariat and the big bourgeoisie have. But in a deeper sense they deceive themselves.  Like the petty bourgeoisie which produces most of them, the intellectuals shift back and forth between the two polar antagonists, attaching themselves to which ever at the moment seems to be the stronger. But since the bourgeoisie is usually very much in the ascendant, the intellectuals generally think in its terms. So today, they follow along after the bourgeoisie towards war.”

Macdonald’s pessimistic warning to the intellectuals concludes his essay: “The American intellectuals are off again on another moral spree. They will come to their senses in the cold grey dawn of a war-torn world, and they will experience again what Rosa Luxemburg wrote in 1916:

“Shamed, dishonoured, wading in blood and dripping with filth, thus capitalist society stands, not as we usually see it, playing the roles of peace and righteousness, of order, of philosophy, of ethics, but as a roaring beast, as an orgy of anarchy, as a pestilence devastating culture and humanity — so it appears in all its hideous nakedness.”

Next Week: Wallace Stevens, “The Woman who had more babies than that”