Paul Mattick 1944
Source: Politics, vol. 1, June 1944, no. 5, p. 156.
Transcribed: by Thomas Schmidt;
This booklet is an incompetent and badly written answer by the leader of the Socialist Labor Party to such equally incompetent but literarily better-versed critics of Marxism as Lewis Corey, Sidney Hook, Edmund Wilson, and Harold Laski. Some of these critics are called “renegades” though it is difficult to establish from what they have deserted. They merely tried different enterprises, a trouble which such organizational monopolists as Petersen are spared. Of course Petersen is right in maintaining that, in comparison with his present-day critics, Marx is really a “universal genius.” But the proof he delivers in support of the only true God, who is Marx, and the only true Church, which is Petersen’s Party, is even more harmful to the cause of Marxism than the criticism of the people he attacks.