Can Intellectuals Be Marxists?

THE current spectacle of the American Communist Party shedding crocodile tears over the fate of Catholics in Germany and protesting their undying love for the New Deal would excite an onlooker's indignation or amusement even if he did not know that this sudden concern for democratic "bourgeois" principles was prompted solely by opportunism and that this opportunism is dictated by the obvious failure of Communism to establish itself in any of the democratic countries. Marxism, in fact, has been partially established in only one important country. For centuries that country had been the most despotically ruled, the least industrially developed,