Lipton’s Journal/January 25, 1955/271

From Project Mailer

Prose on wings, tra-la, tra-la. What I started to say in the previous note was that radical socialists because they are sociostatic have ended up aiding society. They present tools of analysis bourgeois society unaided could never have come up with, but because socialists think sociostatically, so capitalists can turn their thought to their own advantage.

Norman Thomas[1] is always complaining that the Republican and Democratic parties have stolen his program, and indeed they have. Marxism for all its grandeur and its genuine revolutionary ethic—its ultimate anarchism which nearly all socialists have forgotten—approached the problem of society as a materialist conception. But capitalists are also materialists. So they could adapt Marxism to their needs, improve their sociostatic techniques, shore up the crazy house and keep the warped mirrors form cracking . . . yet.



note

  1. A Protestant minister and pacifist, Thomas (1884–1968) ran for president six times on the Socialist Party ticket.