ABSTRACT
There can be little doubt that the left in America has come to the end of a long phase of its history. There has always been an American left, under whatever name. It is an honorable record—that of the vanguard movements in the history of the democratic experience. Nothing could be more dangerous than to equate the communist parties or Soviet international politics with the whole of the Marxian outlook. And nothing could be more foolish than the present tendency to view the recent influence of Marxism as merely a vast conspiracy, whether Stalinist, Trotskyist, or Leninist. The revolutionary image and the image of men’s control over their social destinies released energies in literature and art as in social action. Many were touched by it who never became Marxist in their thinking and never joined any of the Marxian parties or splinter groups.
