The Rise of Radicalism
Simmons, Jack
The Rise of Radicalism by Eugene Methvin Arlington House $9-95 What do Rousseau, Robespierre, Babeuf, Marx, Nechayev, Lenin, and Mao all have in common? If you were to answer that all are...
...And it would be nice if more Americans knew more about how their business really works...
...If a corporation's profit margins are being squeezed, it will find it harder to borrow money, sell stock, or generate earnings to finance the new factories and equipment it needs to produce more...
...Methvin does point out that Marx--fortunately, I should think-never acquired political power, so we shall never know how he would have used it...
...The type is the idealistic, violent, and usually intellectual radical, the malcontent who cannot bear the unpleasantness and intractability of a fallen world, who conjures a utopia in his mind, and who does not hesitate to commit the basest atrocities in the attempt to shoehorn reality into his ideal...
...In many areas and industries, however, the pressures are weak or nonexistent, as many citizens can testify as they watch the prices they pay edge ever higher...
...American business thrives on failure...
...The reader will find here innumerable points of special interest: Marx's psychosematicism, Lenin's being influenced far less by Marx than by the Russian Jacobins (especially Nechayev, who invented the professional revolutionary, and whose chilling description is included), Lenin as the first applied sociologist, and the ease with which Mussolini and Hitler fit the psychological type usually reserved for fanatics of the socialist genus...
...Every year proprietors, partners, and corporate executives test their products and services in the market...
...Of course, a corporation's stockholders pay ordinary income taxes on all the dividends they take out of the company, but the immediate tax impact on the business need not be so severe...
...But you would be right again, and you would have stated a more important truth, if you were to answer that all were psychological misfits, neurotics at the very least...
...By their nature controls work to preserve the status quo...
...Corporations pay a 22 percent tax on the first $25,000 of income, 48 percent on everything over that...
...Because we now live in the "Age of Megamedia...
...Society has devised unemployment compensation and other institutions to cushion the shock of change, but to prevent change serves no one's true interest...
...The primary aim of the government is to hold prices down, no matter what...
...Jack Simmons THE BUSINESS OF AMERICA (continued from page 4) at individual rates, ranging up to 70 percent, on all the profits of their businesses...
...This is the main thesis of Eugene Methvin's latest treatise, The R/se of Radicalism...
...The failure of an enterprise releases resources of materials and manpower to seek more useful employment elsewhere...
...In a controlled economy, however, supply and demand do not operate directly on price...
...Coolidge said, the business of America is business...
...Methvin hands on two myths about Rousseau: that he advocated a return to nature (in fact, he believed that it was too late for that), and that he thought that men were naturally good (in fact, he believed that we are amoral...
...See how the professional hatemongers manipulate men, create or exacerbate social ills, and build up their international "cartels of hate" in the pursuit of their dreams...
...The Alternative November 1973 29...
...There is a strenuous effort in the academy to whitewash Marx (Erich Fromm is the worst offender here, I think: Marx loved his wife and all that) and I, being but a product of my academic environment, do not yet know which interpretation is closer to the truth...
...In business the status quo can be deadly...
...Yet what it means to the businessman is a reduced yield on the dollars he has invested in his business...
...If you were to answer that all are influences on, or heroes of, the Left, you would be right...
...Actually, of course, it doesn't...
...It hopes that the larger enterprises, subject to controls, will put competitive pressures on the small firms to keep their prices down...
...To some extent the pressures are working...
...From the leaflets, pamphlets, and posters of the French revolutionaries, through the use of radio, loudspeakers, and the airplane by Hitler, to the fawning television journalists of today: read all about it in this book...
...One might also have wanted a chapter or at least a few pages on Herzen who, though not a vicious man, was the first Russian socialist and a typical alienated intellectual...
...If they meet the public's needs and wants efficiently they succeed, but every year many thousands of them fail...
...As Mr...
...Why is it only in the last two hundred years that these madmen have had so much influence...
...One might also doubt that Marx was quite the ogre Methvin makes him out to be...
...Ironically enough, the government relies on free market forces to keep the little businesses more or less in line...
...To the man on the street that probably sounds eminently fair...
...But these are, again, only nits, and although the academic-minded might complain, they do not detract from the soundness of the author's thesis...
...Government economic controls, no matter how wisely constructed and administered, simply cannot cope with anything as dynamic as American business...
...Of course the free market and competition would work among the large corporations, too, if not always in ways that the controllers would prefer...
...Of course one could pick nits here and there...
...This is a most felicitous term, for it combines two facts that especially characterize the modern world: the astonishing advance in communications technology, and urbanization, which has brought pliable, mass audiences into existence...
...Smaller businesses with sixty or fewer employees are exempt from controls...
...How can the government ever hope to keep an eye on all of them...
...The two aims, unfortunately, can conflict...
...A price increase thus can carry the seeds of its own destruction...
...The government, for example, is permitting businessmen to pass along to their customers only the exact dollar amount of any increases in costs...
...For all the above-mentioned persons, and for others, Methvin describes the nature and probable origin of their psychopathologies, how they fed themselves on hatred for finite and imperfect man, and how, if given the opportunity, they transformed their inner tension into outer terror...
...A controlled economy is at best a rather messy place...
...Pretty soon, the controls will collapse or they will have to be supplemented by extensive rationing to spread the scarce goods around...
...So there they are, America's 12 million businesses...
...Yet the federal economists are wise enough to recognize that they should encourage an increase in the supply of goods reaching the market...
...All in all, this book is an excellent introduction to violent radicalism...
...The obvious result: shortages...
...When prices are held artificially low, producers are discouraged from adding to supply and consumers are encouraged to buy...
...Although this book is many things---social history, intellectual history, and an encyclopedia of radicali s m - i t is basically a study in psychohistory, a study of a distinctive personality type with which humanity has been afflicted at least since Plato but which has become especially pernicious in the last two centuries...
...In the market a price rise may persuade businessmen to produce more or it may induce consumers to buy less, or it may do a little of both...
Vol. 7 • November 1973 • No. 2
