Books: Bourgeois Bolshevik

A PROGRAMME FOR PROGRESS — John Strachey — Random House ($3).

In the early 19303 a minor revolution occurred in the U. S. The Communist Party, having failed for years “to capture the masses,” much to its own surprise “captured the intelligentsia.” Almost overnight, writers, admen, publishers, newshawks, college professors, engineers, lawyers, heiresses, cinemactresses, vaudevillians began to call each other comrade and urge their Negro maids to attend Communist rallies on their nights off. This triumph brought special inconveniences in its train. Workers asked few questions. But the intelligentsia were the most inquisitive and prying converts the Marxists had ever made: they were in the habit of reading about every new ism they embraced. They wanted to read about Communism too. There was very little to read.

The great ideologues of Communism, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who really had something to say, had said it so clumsily that old Bolsheviks liked to boast that it had taken them a lifetime to understand the third volume of Das Kapital. Comrade Lenin was somewhat too electric for diaper-stage dialecticians. Comrade Stalin, densely narcotic in Russian, was practically lethal in English. There remained a library of dull, flimsy, semiliterate pamphlets (many of them translated from Russian via German). Moreover, their authors were constantly falling into doctrinal disfavor.

The need for an orthodox but readable statement of Marxism in English was occasioning grave concern to the Agitprop (the Party’s propaganda bureau) when Evelyn John St. Loe Strachey appeared, like a Red Moses, to make a path for the intellectual children of Israel through the Red Sea. His masterwork, The Coming Struggle for Power, made him the most important popularizer of Marxism outside Russia.

John Strachey (as he calls himself with Bolshevik brevity) is a big (6 ft.), rubber-jointed, rugby-shouldered Oxonian, with watchful, musing eyes, a somewhat rabbity mouth, puffy lips. In his youth he was a member of the British Labour Party. He and dark, lean, taut Sir Oswald Mosley (now imprisoned leader of British Fascism) stood for Parliament at the same time, quit the Labour Party at the same time. When Sir Oswald formed the National Party, young Strachey became his left-hand man. But by 1935 the young men were so far apart that Lady Mosley cried: “He claims to be a friend of my son, but he has done everything he can, together with every other Communist, to break up my son’s political meetings. He certainly is not my idea of a gentleman.”

To U. S. Communist intellectuals, Evelyn John St. Loe Strachey was more than a gentleman — he was a bourgeois Bolshevik. He exuded respectability, which — next to an aura of romantic criminality — is the quality middle-class Marxists most prize. Was not his cousin Biographer Lytton Strachey, whose bland ironies and subacid wit had done as much as any one intellectual force to sap his generation’s faith in education, the church, the state? Cousin Lytton had knocked the notions of pre-Communist intellectuals into a half-cocked hat so successfully that Cousin John had only to pick up the pieces and fit them together according to the Marxian blueprint.

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.