The daily worker. [volume] (Chicago, Ill.) 1924-1958, 1935-01-26
On a High Spiritual Plane

On High Spiritual Plane
IT REMINDS me of wealthy old maid I happened
to know years ago in the city of Boston. Out
Of her boredom, she had managed to find kind
Of escape in dabbling with social theories In her
added head carefully washed and combed every
morning by wage slave. squirmed veritabe
snakes nest Of the most amazing and contradictory
ideas. She was as hospitabe to every idea as the
madam of bagnio to the male sex be they crippled,
impotent perverted or however foul. Simu1tane-
olSy, this lady was a Gandhi pacifst Ramsay
Macdonald Socialist, Bergsonian evolutonist
Tostoyan Christian Henry George Single Taxer,
Yogi, Soviet sympathzer, theoretical vege-
tarian birth control advocate, and devotee of
walter Lppmann.
She had good income invested by her shrewd
Yankee father in steel, copper and war industry
stocks She could we'll afford to be an eclectic
and hirt with all these ideas In the long run,
they meant nothing to her, but the handiest way
Of lodging the doom Of those who do not need to
wcrE-Annl
So this LADY said to me- very kindly one eve
Ming:
why are you so obsessed with the eess strug-
gle? Isn't the world bigger than that?"
Our world at present, isn't any bigger" said
so what we are trying to do is to abolish the
class struggle, in order that there may be better
world You are only shutting your eyes, and wish
comfort"
All these liberal theorists are uncomfortable in
the face Of the realities If the world were only
like that portrayed in the books of Christopher
Morley or Robert Nathsr-Stark Young Hervey
Allen and the Saturday Evening Post school Of
authorship
Eut there are twenty million Americans starry
ing on relief and half the nation, and more is
made up of the working class Young people rise
Sft 7sis IN briro ~
crude and struggling world to the attention of the
comfortable book-reviewers and liberals
And they tell us with one idea. We
are yulgarianS and materislists But they are ly-
ing on a higher spiritual plane. They are above
the problems Of war and starvation the fate OF
the people. Rome burns but their delicate souls
are more interested in the nuances Of fddling They
are the artists, but we are the common mass. They
are the guardians of culture, while we are the
barbarians
How well it all fits in with the sources of their
income Most of them are retained by capitalist
Journals and newspapers. and the Hearss the
Ochses, the Lannon'S and Whitelaw Reds are care
full about the literary servants they employ. What
use to a millionaire would butler be who was
filled with partisan ideas of the class struggle?
Most buffers are chosen because they have the
"artist" soul, they are usually as spiritual and
neutral as ell hell
Life as a Nursery Playground
TO THE charge that Marxism spreads gray
twilight in the literary world one can only an
swer. nonsense.
The writer who has acquired the faintest in
sight into Marxism finds that he has had the dull
bourgeois scales removed from his eyes, and that
1t would take him several 1ifetnes to appraise the
new world he is beholding
If there is ere truthful charge that might be
made against Marxism, it is that it reveals so in
f1nitely more complex and dynamic world to the
writer that it often takes him years to readjust
himself
This explains why many able writer's on en-
countering Marxism, must often go through years
of silence. They are serving a and painful
apprenticeship The world they find, is not the
easy nursery playground of the liberals where they
had formerly lived.
II is more tragic, more humorous more amaz-
ingly interviewer with motif and counter-motif
The men Of Darwns generation were first stunned
to despair by his great formulation When they
finally digested 1t, they we're stronger and more
complex In their thinking. Does one have to prove
this any longer? No. but one has still to prove
ss to children, that Marxism is science of human
behavior, sharper and more universal tool for
the mature writer than the Bible stories that still
satisfy the liberals.