This desperate moment came for Britain and the world, not because the West lacked the material resources to defend itself, or because the Axis enemy did not know of the West’s superior military potential, but because that potential was allowed to remain mere potential for decades, while the aggressors were visibly and rapidly arming, not only materially but in spirit, while the West was disarming materially as a result of disarming in spirit.
At the end of the war, Churchill looked back and said: “There never was a war in all history easier to prevent by timely action than the one which has just desolated such great areas of the globe.”49 But such timely action to deter war with armaments and military alliances, as Churchill had urged throughout the 1930s, would not have exalted the anointed visionaries, as their championing of opposite policies did. The British, American, and other Allied soldiers who paid with their lives in the early years of the war for the quantitatively inadequate and qualitatively obsolete military equipment that was a legacy of interwar pacifism were among the most tragic of the many third parties who have paid the price of other people’s exalted visions and self-congratulation.
The Cold War
In the years immediately following the end of the Second World War, there was a keen awareness in many quarters that the West’s weak and foolish policies had led to the horrors of that war—and had risked even greater horrors had that war been lost. As Time magazine said in its May 14, 1945, issue:
This war was a revolution against the moral basis of civilization. It was conceived by the Nazis in conscious contempt for the life, dignity and freedom of individual man and deliberately prosecuted by means of slavery, starvation and the mass destruction of noncombatants’ lives. It was a revolution against the human soul.50
A generation whose young men had fought, suffered, and died on in numerable battlefields around the world now clearly understood the need for military alliances to deter aggression. Nor was this either a political party issue or an ideological issue in the United States, except on the far left. Mainstream liberals like Harry Truman and Hubert Humphrey supported the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and military deterrence in general. President John F. Kennedy declared, “we dare not tempt them with weakness.” However, even at the beginning of the Cold War, disarmament advocates who again called themselves “the peace movement” opposed military expenditures and military alliances, and used many of the same arguments and much of the same rhetoric that pacifists had used to such fatal effect in the years leading up to World War II. However, such movements and such arguments were crushingly defeated politically in the United States, though they were much more formidable in Europe, which has generally been to the left of the U.S. on both domestic and foreign issues.
The great turnaround came with the Vietnam war, which lasted longer than the Second World War and showed no sign of victory or even a stalemate that would put an end to the mounting casualties. Now the discredited ideas of a previous generation enjoyed a resurgence, especially among those too young to have suffered the bitter lessons that had destroyed similar illusions before.
Demands for “summit meetings”—the new term for what Chamberlain had so often called “personal contacts”—and for disarmament agreements once more became politically irresistible. Once again, the actual substance of these meetings and the verifiability of agreements that grew out of them were considerations swamped by the euphoria they produced. The “spirit of Locarno” and of other sites of international meetings in the years between the two World Wars were now echoed in “the spirit of Geneva,” “the spirit of Tashkent,” and of many other sites of Soviet-American meetings of heads of state.
This approach reached its zenith (or nadir) in the Carter administration and its failure was epitomized by President Carter’s expression of shock when Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan. Carter began to repair the neglect of American military forces but it was, in the tragic phrase of the early years of World War II, “too little and too late.” General disenchantment with both the domestic and foreign policies of that administration brought the most profound change in American policies at home and abroad in many years with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980.
While the public was ready for the change, the morally anointed among the intelligentsia and the media clearly were not and expressed both alarm and disdain as President Reagan began a military buildup to counter the growing Soviet nuclear arsenal and proposed exploring the prospects of an anti-missile defense system to reduce the effectiveness of the Soviet nuclear threat. Perhaps the peak of this new trend that Reagan set in motion came with American military action in the Persian Gulf war of 1991, when the much-lamented military spending of the 1980s paid off under the Bush administration when abundant, high-tech military equipment led to a swift victory with remarkably few American casualties, despite many dire predictions of a bloodbath on the battlefield.
Another change of administrations, as a result of the 1992 elections and due more to domestic than to international developments, brought yet another return to the de-emphasis of the military and a resurgence of international conferences and summit meetings—and of the illusions on which they are so often based. These illusions were perhaps epitomized in a New York Times headline about the 1997 visit of China’s President Jiang Zemin to the United States, where there were said to be “signs of bonding” between the two presidents.51
SOCIAL VISIONS
If the tyranny of visions can prevail in questions of war and peace—which is to say, life-and-death questions for both individuals and societies—it should hardly be surprising that the same tyranny can prevail in visions of social and economic activity. Perhaps no vision underlies more social and economic theories than the vision of the rich robbing the poor, whether in a given society or among nations. The belief that the poor are poor because the rich are rich is reflected in such expressions as “the dispossessed” or “the exploited,” as well as in more elaborate theories ranging from Marxism and Lenin’s theory of imperialism to modern “dependency theory.”
Can people who have never possessed be dispossessed? Can they be plundered for riches they never had? The assumption of some prior, more fortunate condition also seems to underlie Edwin Markham’s poem, “The Man with the Hoe,” which paints a bitter and tragic picture of a man bent with toil, whose mind and soul are numbed with weariness:
How will you ever straighten up this shape;
Give back the upward looking and the light;
Rebuild in it the music and the dream ... ?
Similar assumptions of better times in the past underlie a whole literature on the “noble savage” or romantic pictures of preindustrial times in Europe. In particular places and times, there have indeed been retrogressions and there have also been such things as the Spanish looting of the treasures of the Incas, but the more general explanation of wealth differences in this way, domestically and internationally, would require more evidence that this was a pervasive pattern. As with so many other examples of cosmic visions, the intellect of the intellectuals has not been bent toward testing such beliefs against empirical evidence, but rather toward illustrating such theories with selected facts.
If the goal were to test the belief that the wealth of the wealthy derives from the poverty of the poor, then one might, for example, see if countries that abounded in millionaires and billionaires had poorer people than countries that do not. Alternatively, one might see if a particular period in a country’s history when the rich were getting richer was also a period when the poor were getting poorer. More sophisticated tests would also be possible—but only if testing were the goal.
Among nations, it would be possible to see whether the acquisition of colonies led to an accelerated enrichment of the imperialist nations and whether the loss of such colonies led to economic setbacks in the imperialist nations and/or an improved prosperity among the liberated peoples. Yet remarkably little attention has been paid to such empirical questions by those with cosmic visions of
exploitation. One of the masterpieces of propaganda has been Lenin’s Imperialism, which brilliantly illustrates his theory with statistics, without subjecting it to the slightest test.
Lenin’s Imperialism
The achievement that Lenin’s Imperialism represents as a masterpiece of propaganda cannot be fully appreciated without first understanding the formidable obstacles its author had to overcome, in order to rescue Marxian economic theory from more than half a century of history that contradicted it—and then launch the rescuing theory in the face of masses of additional evidence contradicting Lenin’s own doctrine as well.
Marx’s theory of the end of capitalism depended crucially on the working class’ responding to a deterioration of its condition—whether absolute deterioration or deterioration relative to other classes—by becoming revolutionary.52 Within Marx’s own lifetime, the idea of absolute impoverishment of the working class was abandoned by Marx and Engels themselves, who noted the growing prosperity and subjective embourgeoisement of the proletariat around them in England.53 By the time Lenin wrote Imperialism, the Marxian predictions were well on their way to becoming a joke. How could Marxism be rescued in the face of an increasingly prosperous and quiescent working class in the capitalist world? On a more practical level, how could a new vision inspire new revolutionaries to risk all in a bid to seize political power? Lenin’s Imperialism solved both these huge problems.
The “exploitation” of the working class in capitalist nations was ameliorated and revolution postponed, according to Lenin, by their sharing in the fruits of the exploitation of less developed countries. In search of this exploitation, industrial nations sent to less developed foreign countries their “surplus” capital that would otherwise have created the serious economic problems at home that Marx had envisioned. In Lenin’s words, the new capitalists “plunder the whole world” and, out of their “enormous super-profits” they are able to bribe the more fortunate members of the domestic working class and, in particular, their leaders who are co-opted.54 Thus “millions of toilers” now “live in more or less bourgeois conditions of life,” Lenin said.55 In this way, capitalist imperialism simultaneously keeps the working class quiet and finds outlets for a “prodigious increase of capital, which overflows the brim.”56
Lenin offered not only an excuse but a vision, presented as an empirically testable hypothesis, for which he proceeded to offer empirical evidence. The key evidence in Imperialism was presented in a table like that below.57 The countries listed in capital letters across the top are European industrial nations that are making capital investments abroad. The places listed vertically on the left-hand column are the destinations of this capital.
Before examining the implications of this table, we must first recognize that it fulfills one of the important functions of propaganda: It appears to offer evidence, and certainly it offers information, on a subject that most people are unlikely to be familiar with and in numbers on an impressive scale—in this case, billions of marks. Modest as this achievement might seem, from a purely logical standpoint, it was well suited to its purpose. As someone knowledgeable about confidence games has pointed out, the purpose of the confidence man is not to convince skeptics but to help others to believe what they already want to believe. Displaying the paraphernalia of evidence, embellished with appropriate rhetoric, accomplished that important purpose.
From the standpoint of logic, evidence differs from mere facts in that evidence consists of facts more consistent with one theory than with another. Therefore the appropriate criterion for evidence is not simply whether it is factually accurate but whether it is logically relevant to making that discrimination. Parading statistics which document to the hilt things that are not at issue—that capitalist industry was growing greatly and that banks had huge deposits,58 for example—is logically vacuous. Nevertheless, it can and did succeed as propaganda designed to create an atmosphere of great knowledge about esoteric things and their presumably sinister inner meanings.
Returning to the table, opposite, the data for Britain seem on the surface to fit Lenin’s theory of imperialism, since Britain had relatively little invested in Europe, as compared to its investments in the presumably less industrially developed regions of the world. However, the data for France and Germany seem to fail even this superficial test. As regards Britain, Lenin said: “The principal spheres of investment of British capital are the British colonies, which are very large also in America (for example, Canada) not to mention Asia, etc.” Thus “enormous amounts of capital are bound up most closely with colonies.” A substantial part of France’s European investments were said to be in Russia, a less developed part of Europe at that time, and Germany’s foreign investments were said to be “divided fairly evenly between Europe and America.”59 But no data were presented in support of any of these claims. Nevertheless, Lenin’s argument seems at first to be reasonably plausible and reasonably consistent with his theory of imperialism as a means of exporting capital from the industrial to the non-industrial world, where greater and more profitable “exploitation” is presumably possible.
What is remarkable, however, if not astonishing, are the huge and heterogenous categories in which data for the investment recipients are presented. “America,” for example, encompasses the entire Western Hemisphere, which includes levels of economic development ranging from the Amazon jungles to the steel mills of Pittsburgh. Similarly, “Asia, Africa, and Australia” are three whole continents lumped together as one category, likewise covering regions that range from jungles to industrial metropolises. For those who wish to believe, the presumption is that capital is being exported to the less developed regions of these vast and heterogenous territories—and, for this constituency, that is sufficient.
For those who do not share Lenin’s vision, or those who retain some fundamental respect for logic and evidence, a finer breakdown of data would make the whole Leninist construction collapse like a house of cards. For the period covered by Lenin’s data and doctrine—the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—the United States was the leading recipient of British, German, and Dutch capital.60 At the time when Lenin wrote, the British Empire was the largest empire in the world, encompassing one-fourth of the earth’s land and one-fourth of the world’s population. Contrary to Lenin, however, its investments did not go primarily to its imperial possessions. Its greatest investments were in another industrial country, the United States, which received more British investments than all of Asia or all of Africa or all of Latin America.61
Britain’s other major overseas investments were also in Canada, Rhodesia, and South Africa.62 Nor was Britain unique European offshoot societies and economies in Australia, in this pattern. France and Germany were likewise reluctant to sink much of their money into Africa, for example,63 and commercial trade with Africa was similarly trivial for the economies of the European imperial powers.
On the eve of the First World War, Germany exported more than five times as much to a small country like Belgium as to its own colonial empire,64 which was larger than Germany itself. France likewise exported ten times as much to Belgium as to all its vast holdings in Africa, which were larger than France. Out of Germany’s total exports to the world, less than one percent went to its colonies in Africa.65 During the period when Lenin wrote, and for much of the remainder of the twentieth century, the United States invested more in Canada than in all of Asia and Africa put together.66
In short, the huge and heterogenous categories used in Lenin’s Imperialism concealed evidence that showed the direct opposite of what this classic work of propaganda claimed. The idea that the non-industrial world offered a safety valve outlet for the “surplus” capital of the industrial world cannot stand up if the industrial nations are investing primarily in each other. This would be adding to their economic and social pressures, rather than relieving them, if the Marxian theory of excess capital accumulation were correct.
The utter failure of Lenin’s Imperialism a
s a work of logic only highlights its success as propaganda. To convince people of the truth of something that is true by logical inference from evidence requires no talent whatever in the arts of propaganda. But to convince many highly educated people around the world of a theory that is demonstrably false, by the use of hard data, artfully presented, is clearly a triumph of propaganda and makes Lenin’s Imperialism one of the great classics of that art.
Marxism-Leninism is the ultimate in a common pattern among intellectuals with cosmic visions—highly sophisticated defenses of primitive misconceptions. In this case, the misconception is that the rich are rich because the poor are poor—that what is involved, in one way or another, is that wealth is extracted from the many for the benefit of the few, whether among classes or among nations. This might make sense if wealth were a zerosum game, but that such theories could flourish in an era when the total wealth of the human race has been increasing at a rate unprecedented in the history of the species is both a triumph of propaganda and a symptom of something in the human psyche that makes it susceptible to such a picture.
The Quest for Cosmic Justice Page 11