Books
by Holley R. Cantine, Jr.

Retort, A quarterly journal of Anarchism, art and reviews

Spring, 1945

reprinted in Retort Special Anthology Issue, 1942-1951. Retort was originally published by the 
Retort Press, Bearsville, New York; Holley R. Cantine, Jr., Editor.


The Power House by Alex Comfort. Viking. $3.00.

In these days, when the publishing industry is prostituting itself to the War-Effort, throwing 
overboard its esthetic and intellectual standards in the interests of patriotism, it is not a little 
surprising, and very gratifying, to discover that a book like The Power House, which is 
uncompromisingly opposed to war and all forms of government, can still be published.

The Power House is laid in France, during the period from about a year before the war to the 
summer of 1941. The characters are all either Frenchmen or German soldiers, and represent a 
wide range of types and classes, including a collaborationist textile manufacturer, Gestapo 
agents, intellectuals, and several different categories of manual workers. A large part of the book-
-perhaps too large a part--is taken up with fairly technical descriptions of men at work. Comfort 
seems to know a great deal about machinery, and he writes about machines in motion 
imaginatively and dramatically, but I felt that he would have demonstrated the dominant position 
of the machine in modern life just as clearly without quite so many examples. The war sections, 
especially the retreat of the French army, are wonderfully handled. The atmosphere of chaos, 
disintegration and frustration that he creates is even more compelling that such first-hand 
accounts as Malaquais' WAR DIARY.

Comfort is a young English anarchist of the individualist school. His philosophy, as it emerges 
from The Power House, where it is expounded, in slightly different versions by several 
characters, is something like this: Man, as an individual, is rational and decent, but when he 
becomes part of an organization--the army, a political party, or whatever--he ceases to be an 
individual, and becomes a citizen--an unthinking automaton, whose actions, though ostensibly 
directed towards a good end, are irrational and destructive.

At the present time, since organizations are all-powerful, the only hope for the individual is to try 
to escape, by devious strategems, from the demands of citizenship. To avoid being killed, which 
is his first duty as an individual, he must sometimes acquiesce outwardly, but in so doing he is 
very careful to keep himself from being submerged, and accepting the values of the citizen. He is 
always on the lookout for a way to escape, and he resists, whenever he can do it without unduly 
risking his life or causing injury to others:

every woman who hides a deserter, every clerk who doesn't scrutinize a pass, every worker who 
bungles a fuse, saves somebody's life for a while..." The supreme delusion of the citizen is that it 
is possible to do good by harming others: "There's a crime being committed ... 'Act up to your 
principles', whisper the thimble-riggers and prompters. You rush to help--every step you take 
crushes an innocent person--before you reach your objective, you are drenched in blood, and by 
now that objective has been skillfully moved out of reach. Never mind, they show you another... 
There is only one responsibility--to the individual who lies under your own feet."

Comfort has selected many incidents to illustrate his principles, with special emphasis on the 
futility of trying to do good by injuring others. It is a violent book, and death by violence plays an 
important part in it, but despite the fact that there is no display of moral indignation, one is left 
with a strong feeling that nothing of any value can be accomplished by violence. Thus when a 
group of underground workers undertake to blow up a German troop-train, in retaliation for the 
shooting of hostages, they only succeed in destroying a train filled with French civilians, killing a 
large number of them, and incidentally lose their ringleader to the Gestapo in the process. One 
might cavil that sabotage is not necessarily so wide of the mark, but cannot escape the 
conclusion that disasters like this are all too frequently the consequence of accepting such 
tactics. Similarly, an abortive uprising in a slave-labor camp accomplishes nothing but the killing 
of a handful of German common soldiers and the capture of all the rebels by the authorities, who 
have every intention of making an example of them.

The characters who represent Comfort's own viewpoint adopt, on the whole, a policy of artful 
dodging--yielding to the system when it cannot be avoided, but getting out of difficulties by faking 
illnesses etc., whenever they can. This program has been criticized by some because it is not 
sufficiently constructive; it does not offer any method for improving society, but only provides a 
possible escape for individuals. This criticism seems to me absurd. It has been the practice in 
radical circles entirely too long to deprecate individual action, and maintain that only 'mass' action 
is worth bothering with, a viewpoint that has its origin in the seizure-of-power complex that has 
dominated left-wing thinking for the past few decades. It is quite apparent that Comfort, like many 
other radicals today, does not see any possibility of improving society in the near future, but 
rather than retire from all activity, as so many of the others have done, he has worked out a 
concrete approach that is capable of being put into practice under the Total State. The best 
program in the world needs living men to carry it out, and until it is possible to act in a more 
constructive manner, survival is of paramount importance, a fact that too many leftists tend to 
overlook. Comfort's program might be open to serious criticism if it was nothing but a way of 
escaping, regardless of the means to be employed, but since he clearly indicates the importance 
of maintaining resistance to authority, and responsibility towards other individuals--as individuals-
-it could serve as the basis for a new and morally sounder radical movement. As Don Benedetto 
says to Spina in Silone's Bread and Wine, "One must respect time. Every season has its own 
work. There is the season for pruning the vines, the season for spraying them, the season for 
preparing the barrels, the season for gathering and pressing the grapes. If in spring, when the 
vines are being tied to the stakes, some one passes by and says, 'It is not worthwhile doing that, 
because if the barrels are bad the wine will be spoiled. The first thing to do is to attend to the 
barrels,' you can answer him and say, 'Every season has its own work. This is not the season for 
cleaning out the barrels, but for pruning the vines and tying them to the stakes. Let me therefore 
remove the useless branches from the vines.'" While Comfort perhaps leans a trifle over 
backwards in opposing the concept of 'mass' action, he is making a valuable contribution to 
radical thought in his insistence on the fact that the individual is the end of all social advance, 
and that to sacrifice individuals for the sake of some 'higher' good destroys the whole basis for 
the struggle for a good life.

H.R.C.Jr.