American Power in the Twentieth Century
Harrington, Michael
A SPECIAL FEATURE Michael Harrington AMERICAN POWER IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY The democratic Left must help finish the creation of the world. The world—and I borrow here from Peter...
...Gandhi could be persuaded to go along with this idea...
...There is always the danger that some reformer will suggest that monies be appropriated for an undertaking like TVA, and that actually redefines the lines between the public and private sectors...
...could take in support of the democratic revolution simply involves ceasing to do the wrong thing...
...It is not enough to take Mao's truths seriously...
...The globe has, of course, existed for eons, and humans project their various histories more than 4000 years into the past...
...The reactionary policies the country has followed in widening the international gap between the rich and the poor are thus not the inexorable expressions of economic and social structure...
...In the thirties, Roosevelt's attempts to follow Keynes and to inject effective demand into the economy were half-hearted and ultimately ineffective...
...So the U.S...
...Yet, no one of the democratic Left would propose political support for a fascist government, however economically successful...
...IV, p. 517...
...Funds would be guaranteed over a considerable period of years, and this would allow local planners to make more efficient use of their resources...
...Here too, as in the case of overseas exploitation, there are powerful vested interests in the prevailing order of injustice...
...They reach their full growth when the hope of a people for a better life ahead has died...
...rightly noted that Cuba, by specializing in sugar production for the "socialist" market, had become politically dependent on the Russians...
...neither Western workers nor Third World peasants enjoy sacrificing present consumption to future investment while working harder than ever before...
...some of the theoretical justifications of the "Kennedy Round" recognized that tariff reciprocity was profoundly unrecipr+ocal in practice...
...Now it is clear that the Marshall Plan was not simply designed in order to give businessmen a stable market in the Old World...
...government, and vice versa...
...There was some ghoulish humor in this document...
...The resultant misery of various millionaires would hardly overturn the American economy...
...for now it is obvious that free and equal trade between unequal nations leads to sys tematic injustice...
...In other words, socialist wealth now tolerates poverty, which is an even more unforgiveable crime . . . don't forget * The New Economics, by E. Preobrazhensky, translated by Brian Pearce...
...Here is Julius Nyerere's observation: Socialist countries, no less than capitalist countries, are prepared to behave like the millionaire—to use millions to destroy the other "millionaire," and it need not be a capitalist millionaire—it is just as likely to be a socialist "millionaire...
...Even under the best system of international economic planning there will be waste, funds will be appropriated by the corrupt and the dictatorial, etc...
...And these demons are fought with guns and counterespionage, not with social programs...
...In the case of a shooting conflict, the military obligingly dispenses with competitive principles and adopts uneconomic methods like cost-plus contracts (When it is necessary in a conservative cause, or in fighting a war...
...Indeed, by the end of the thirties, Keynes himself wondered if any peacetime (and capitalist) government would ever intervene on the scale required by his computations...
...Import controls are also designed to support the (costly, noncompetitive) American wells in the manner to which they are accustomed...
...There is no need here to discuss the complex question of how much this analysis applied to events before 1945...
...In saying this, I do not intend to turn the free-enterprise myth topsy-turvy or argue that nationalization is some magic, painless way to modernization...
...it can disallow dictatorial pyramid building and old-fashioned thievery...
...But this cannot be done while appropriations are subject to the vagaries of annual political review in donor countries...
...smaller proportion of the national income than similar exports had for Britain in the nineteenth century.* In France, by the mid-sixties, this situation had become a key element in Gaullist economic thinking...
...But ultimately, if this is to be done it will happen because the buried, deep-running force of American idealism bursts out of the channels in which the generals and the executives have confined it, to take its own direction...
...Space exploration, he concludes, would meet this requirement...
...This self-interest rationale for foreign aid persists to this day...
...Yet, it follows from the record of Communist totalitarianism (a system which is neither capitalist nor Communist) that the Bolshevik theorist had divined one of the most important truths of the second half of the twentieth century: that the division between rich and poor, industrialized and backward, North and South can transcend social systems...
...America has the potential of positive change, of helping to create a new world...
...Yet, the results of these efforts have often been at variance with the spirit that motivated them...
...If massive intellectual and financial resources were invested in the task of such an analysis, rational planning and resources could be allocated on a global scale...
...First, if peace were to break out, a massive cutback in the billions for defense plus the normal growth of a full-employment economy would provide sufficient funds for rebuilding America and going to the stars...
...for the market mechanism is a cause of, rather than a solution to, its poverty...
...The real peace treaty we need now," the former Vice President told a rally in 1946, "is between the United States and Russia...
...In Heilbroner's view, the "social psychology" of the less developed countries is an even greater barrier to modernization than their low levels of production...
...There were even public opinion polls in the United States which showed, in the late forties, that there was no strong popular support for action against Mao...
...But free enterprise can participate in such a process only in a subordinate, never in a primary, role...
...If the new countries are to accumulate capital, or even keep pace with their expanding populations, and if there is absolutely no hope of genuine aid from the advanced lands—a huge surplus must be extracted from the labor of the people...
...All the righteousness of the anger of the world's poor cannot will factories and a high level of mass education into existence...
...Native industry was broken up either by force or because it could not compete with cheap, manufactured goods...
...And yet, the average American would argue that the U.S...
...to instill some social purpose in American businessmen...
...2) Such an approach meets the problem of the gap between rich and poor head-on by proposing (if quite modestly) some redistribution of income shares...
...For during the postwar period, America usually gave political, economic, and military support to the confirmed opponents of social change...
...The British Labor government took much the same line when it reopened its bid for entry into the Common Market in 1966...
...But Truman did not take up Stalin's proposal that the Communists and capitalists should recognize each others' spheres of exploitation...
...Advances in technology, synthetics, the organization of the market, and a whole host of factors have reduced the importance of the ex-colonies for the big powers...
...It was based on reactionary politics, and it viewed the Soviets as only one manifestation of the godlessness and disorder of a world which had taken leave of its fundamental values...
...The Fallacies of Good Infenfions The late Paul Baran, a Marxist sympathetic to the more orthodox brand of Communism, saw how the postwar economic trends turned the Cold War into a worldwide paradox...
...This situation was precipitated by a foreign-sponsored boom in the oil industry which, with the third largest output in the world, employs only 33,472 workers...
...During that year, it reported, the self-help efforts of the Third World resulted in an increase in savings of 6 per cent (of the surplus deducted from a meager, sometimes starvation-level, consumption...
...John Strachey once calculated that, were the Arabs to nationalize the petroleum operations in their countries and permit a "market" price to emerge, oil consumers in the West would be able to buy at a much cheaper price than now prevails...
...This trust in the country's inherent evil is, however, almost as naive as the patriotic faith in its goodness...
...was ruled by domestic conservatism...
...and Russia to a measure of detente—the armament race and the threat of nuclear holocaust...
...Mao's Vision: Peasants vs...
...and a curse in a country with rampant underemployment...
...Moreover, the two countries may end their conflict by a gentleman's agreement between rich Northerners to keep the Southerners of the planet poor...
...The goods and services go overseas, the dollar stays here to pay for them...
...They must create a coercive state, whether Communist or not...
...Even when a tiny minority whose hour has not yet come—it is those who are struggling for justice rather than growth rates who are the political determinant of what is truly progressive...
...Fair Rules for World Trade To most Americans, the principles behind the rules and regulations for world trade drawn up at a meeting in Havana shortly after World War II and partially embodied in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) , are the essence of fairness itself: the nations would exchange with one another according to a principle of reciprocity...
...And the generous vision of Robert Kennedy—and of American liberalism generally—must be amended so as not to depend on private enterprise, either in the U.S...
...This grim exception proved that it was possible, where there was a real political will, to defy the rationality of an artificial world and to favor principles over balance sheets...
...In both years, net foreign investment was only about 5 per cent of gross private domestic investment (the percentage actually declined a bit from 1964 to 1965...
...To clarify this point requires an analysis of the two anti-Communisms...
...In his farewell message as President, Dwight D. Eisenhower said of the "immense military establishment" which was "new in the American experience," that its "total influence—economic, political, even spiritual—is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the federal government...
...it is not at all precluded that the American people could come to accept these disturbing complexities of international politics...
...This was a practical expression of the classic economic faith in free trade and in the benevolent workings of the world market...
...The U.N...
...These movements of capital, leaving the oil industry aside for a moment, accounted for a • For relevant figures on the trends in international trade, see Modern Capitalism, by Andrew Schonfeld, Appendix I, pp...
...As the foregoing has shown, postwar aid, whether capitalist or Communist, has been inspired by almost every motive except one of orderly economic development for the earth's poor...
...His illusions must also be treated with the utmost respect, for there is a very objective basis for their appeal to despairing masses and aspiring elites...
...economists have come up with an even broader conception...
...But Heilbroner's description is overly pessimistic...
...The statistical possibilities for doing global good require radicalized politics if they are ever to be realized...
...But this notion was decisively rejected by the Kennedy Round...
...An African is no Tamil," write Stillman and Pfaff, "a Malay is not a Pathan...
...At first, there will be wars of national liberation and defensive alliances (this is the "democratic" stage of the process...
...There is a deep American political tradition which holds that a man who gives away something for nothing is probably effeminate and certainly not fit for public office...
...for our time demands a new type of revolution...
...The leaders of Latin America," President Kennedy said at Bogota, "the industrialists and the landowners are, I am sure, also ready to admit past mistakes and accent new responsibilities...
...aid was directed to the areas of the greatest pay-off...
...Heilbroner concedes that an American economy with $1.3 trillion in corporate assets could afford the loss of $16 billion of capital in Asia, Africa, and Latin America without facing an internal crisis...
...Under this plan, all nations would pay in to a central fund and each would be compensated if there were a drop in export proceeds...
...But a heritage of backwardness is not easily overcome...
...investment overseas, in 1965, $49.2 billion...
...There were those on the Left who criticized de Gaulle for not having acted earlier and more decisively in this area...
...Hopeful Omens of Change There are a few hesitant signs of hopeful change...
...Beyond that, almost all the nationalist, nonCommunist revolutionists and reformers of the ex-colonial world have affirmed one or another version of the Leninist thesis...
...Oil is powerful in Washington, and therefore any hope of a truly democratic foreign policy would require the defeat of its domestic influence...
...So, Furtado concludes, the very structure of economic life in the new nations—forced upon them in the last century—makes it difficult for them to absorb the benefits of scientific and technical progress on those rare occasions when they might have the opportunity to do so...
...The president of Cornell University has estimated that in a 12year postwar period some 43,000 scientists and engineers, "many" of them from developing countries, have migrated to the U.S...
...The French were then able to involve the L.S...
...With the enormous amounts of money being invested in Europe and America, it is only reasonable that risky, emerging societies should pay dear for whatever they receive...
...they were designated the hewers of wood and the drawers of water...
...But once one leaves the initial, European period of the Cold War and turns to the Third World, the disparity between economics and foreign policy becomes manifest...
...The delegates pointed out that they could often get cheaper goods in Europe or Japan...
...The nation could make new international departures without undergoing a sweeping domestic transformation...
...The following turgid piece of prose is from an article entitled "Cost Accounting In Economic Relations Between Socialist Countries...
...State Department to veto the sale of machines which might have facilitated the development of the force de frappe...
...There was, to be sure, some economic progress and modernization in the colony...
...On the one hand, the advanced countries were making brilliant use of the advantages they had secured by force over the previous two centuries...
...The priorities so skillfully built into the very structure of the international economy are often a more efficient, and subtle, way of keeping the world's poor in their unhappy place than were the gunboats and troops of the earlier imperialism...
...The gloomy pattern he outlines is a possibility, perhaps even a probability...
...They were moving into the spheres of super-industrialization, automation, and affluence—making so much money off each other that they were now less interested in exploiting their ex-colonies...
...that it has spent tremendous sums in the military defense of freedom around the earth and given away billions of dollars to impoverished nations...
...In either case, economy and society grew up side by side with the machines and the new organization of work...
...Yet, it can insist on regional planning in return • In Rosenstein-Rodan's computation, if all the non-Communist advanced nations with per capita GNP of $600 or more were involved, the United States' share of the burden, on the basis of 1961 figures, would be 65 per cent of the total...
...The U.N...
...The Soviet Union did not lay claim to interference in these affairs as it understands the whole importance of Belgium and Greece for the security of Great Britain...
...If the United States had persisted in its policy of cooperating with the nationalist revolutionary movement in that country, there would have been a chance of avoiding the more than two decades of bloodletting which followed the return of French colonialism...
...His nation, he said, was interested in world-wide trade liberalization but "considerations of national security and structural problems within our own economy have led to the imposition of import restrictions...
...Some American right-wing critics are hostile to the present process of foreign aid for the worst of reasons: they want to turn their backs on the people of Asia, Africa, and Latin America—and they are sympathetic to the world's status quo and to military rule...
...This clearly has anti-capitalist and socialist implications, but not in the ideologically neat way Lenin and Trotsky once imagined...
...There was an immediate uproar when the Latin Americans attacked the policy of "tied" aid—which requires the beneficiary to spend his gift or loan in the United States ("The goods and services go overseas, the dollar stays here to pay for them...
...For the rationality of the profit motive directs the foreign giant corporation to distort the economic structure of the developing nation at best, and to keep it backward at worst...
...Where the world market of the past century was designed to transfer wealth from poor to rich, we must now devote our ingenuity to the building of mechanisms with the exact opposite effect...
...As the history of Russia demonstrates, the elite which acts in the name of the nation develops common economic privileges and interests, and these eventually come into conflict with the needs of the great mass of the people...
...Kennedy also scores the reactionary effect of the oversubsidization of the Latin military, and of the State Department's practice of placing the interest of American oil profits on a higher plane than those of a Peruvian domestic Peace Corps...
...Practical reasons have already impelled the U.S...
...Estimates differ as to how much it would cost were the advanced countries to foot the developing nations' deficiency in capital...
...Many Americans were committed to the fight against Communism for excellent reasons of democratic principle and hatred of injustice...
...it is fated to be reactionary, the very headquarters of the world's counterrevolution...
...sometimes they are even murderous, as the Chinese of Indonesia and the Indians of Africa have learned...
...No one in Europe any longer believed that they lived under the threat of Soviet invasion, and this was the basis of de Gaulle's attack on NATO...
...Political, military, and even cultural considerations led to the decision to defend the continent against what was seen as the imminent threat of Communist insurrection and/or invasion...
...The London Economist reported in October 1966: "The poorest among them, a former World Bank official has estimated, are now paying more interest and principle on World Bank loans than they are receiving from the World Bank in new loans...
...Thus, foreign aid has been an immensely profitable undertaking for the American economy and whenever it shows any sign of becoming a real gift, of requiring more giving than getting, it has been cut back...
...private enterprise is also the principal repository of the technical and technological skills which Latin America needs...
...In its original, reformist version, the Alliance sought to meet this problem by making grants contingent on policy changes in the recipient nations, such as the creation of an equitable tax system...
...And he clearly implied that his country, as it becomes more industrialized, will take advantage of the exploitative relationships which have been so conveniently designed by world capitalism...
...There is a certain puritanism on the Left whenever the question of space comes up...
...In such a world, the gap separating the impoverished from the affluent will grow no matter what the U.N...
...The international division of labor must be restructured, and this will go against the old, irrational rationality...
...According to the rationalizations of the time, the various countries were simply doing what they could do "best," submitting to the impersonal laws of economics...
...But, Preobrazhensky continued, this "non-equivalence of exchange" would go on even after the victory of socialism in the capitalist countries for it was, in part at least, a function of the backwardness of peasant economies as compared to any industrialized economy, capitalist or socialist...
...For Mao, the contradiction between the rural areas of the world and its cities is the dynamic force in this epoch...
...In return for all this idealism and largesse, he would conclude, the country has received little but ingratitude...
...Then followed this frank and revealing anecdote: For a long time, India insisted that it handle all the distribution of fertilizer produced in that country by U.S...
...at times, mass action won concessions and ameliorations...
...For historical reasons normally not of their own making, underdeveloped countries are desperately short on human resources...
...As noted earlier, Nasser wanted the 1966 New Delhi summit meeting to advocate a freezing of the entire debt of the developing countries but, for political reasons, neither Tito nor Mrs...
...Since 1945 and with the single but glaring exception of oil, this assertion has become less true with every passing day...
...In March 1966 a Buenos Aires meeting was convened to consider what gains had been made by the Alliance for Progress...
...And Maoism (and all the Maoist variants, for the theories of the Chinese Communist are symbolic of a political and intellectual trend found throughout the Third World) makes a choice for totalitarian progress...
...The funds for Europe were mainly grants, for the poor countries mainly loans...
...To accomplish this, economic aid must be freed from the priorities of generals, diplomats, corporation executives—and commissars...
...The struggle between the various Western powers "for the sources of raw materials...
...On the other hand, the East European Communist countries have been openly fighting since 1956 to reject the "socialist" division of labor proposed by the Russians...
...But, to the military a genuine program for social justice smacked too much of Communism...
...Asia, Africa, and Latin America were carefully and systematically denied the benefits of the new industrialism...
...American (and Western) prosperity does not depend on the evil which is done in the international economy...
...In the period of the post-European Cold War the U.S...
...Sober, intelligent proposals have demonstrated the possibility of creating a new world by simply changing the present injustices of aid and trade...
...Secretary of Defense...
...For the economy as a whole, the raw materials and capital export markets of the Third World have become less and less important...
...The advanced economies hardly require this tribute from the impoverished...
...the advanced country would lower its duties on raw materials in response to a reduction of charges on industrial imports in the underdeveloped lands...
...While trying to be noble, the U.S...
...But this fine aspiration was to be pursued according to the traditional rules of world capitalism—rules which were a major source of the misery that supposedly was to be abolished...
...If these trends continue, the old antagonists of the Cold War might make a de facto, worldwide gentleman's agreement in which each tacitly respects the right of the other to exploitation in its own economic and political sphere...
...journal World Economic Survey in 1965 put the matter succintly...
...The disastrous results of America's seemingly fair policy of tariff reciprocity can stand as a sort of summary symbol of how this nation has made money and harmed the poor of the Third World, even when sincerely trying to do good...
...The socialist Gaston Deferre, for instance, said that "Europe will be colonized by the United States unless we decide to pool our resources in order to create industrial concerns comparable in size to the American ones and able to compete with them on an equal footing...
...And being of an anti-imperialist imperialism, a power which usually dominated other lands through the subtlety of money rather than the brutality of force, America burdened its people with an excessively good conscience...
...it is the one way to implement peacefully the decent values which motivated the anti-Communism of the democratic Left...
...A deficit of $20 billion would, in that year, be less than the 3 per cent of American GNP Harry Truman proposed to spend on the Marshall Plan and would approximately equal the extra appropriation Lyndon B. Johnson asked for the Vietnam War in 1967...
...Yet, even while insisting upon these far-reaching changes in American policy, the political limits of our intervention must be kept carefully in mind...
...Conference on Trade and Development...
...Lincoln Gordon of the State Department replied for the U.S...
...But this imperialist process on the Communist side was not restricted to profiteering from world market prices...
...After the first stage of totalitarianism there comes, with adjustments and thaws, the second stage of totalitarianism...
...The exploitation of impoverished people, however, is not a necessity for the American economy but only a cruel convenience...
...Indeed, in the postwar period, American military funds for the avowed and practicing opponents of decent change in Asia and Latin America were much more generous than those given to the modernizers...
...This tragedy is utterly rational according to the economic "laws" of the world the West has carefully created in the last century...
...The emotion of patriotism unites the entire nation, and class differences are submerged in the common effort...
...paradoxically, in the short run, the Third World would perhaps be better off if the capitalists were more interested in exploiting it.* But the heart of Lenin's argument was not the simple assertion that there was a greedy scramble for resources and markets...
...the Latin-American oligarchs are the classic case in point...
...I do not know whether there has been established in Greece a truly representative government and whether the government in Belgium is truly democratic...
...And that is something which is not to be found in the philosophy of Lenin or his followers...
...embraces an almost imperialism...
...There must therefore be, Galbraith argues, a public investment in a peacetime production which is technologically similar to the annihilation industry...
...Paradoxically, one of the most vigorous actions the U.S...
...And that is why it is so important to specify exactly what is proposed in this activist notion of creating a new world—and what is not proposed...
...International economic planning and a world system of taxation is the simplest and most direct way of achieving redistribution of wealth, and it has the virtue of creating pressure for structural reform in the recipient countries...
...However, the same maturity that forced the capitalists to war among themselves over the division of global spoils also heightened the revolutionary consciousness of the working class...
...And this logic can easily override consideration of the needs of the people or the requirements for building a balanced, modern economy...
...this country— and the rest of the West—could actually benefit by acting humanely in the world...
...But this monstrous subsidy from the miserable to the fat is, after all, quite logical...
...From Truman's Presidency to the present, it has been U.S...
...It requires, to use John Kenneth Galbraith's symbolic language, a revolution that would be less than a "Russian" and yet more profound than a "French" revolution...
...For the totalitarian industrialization is not carried out by an impersonal History but by men and women...
...That will be the politics of hope...
...but they are not inexorable fates...
...They are reasonable, businesslike evils perpetrated according to the rules of this world which was so carefully made for us...
...But it also gave potential substance to the Maoist vision of the imperialist "cities of the world...
...Only a campaign of an intensity and singlemindedness that must approach the ludicrous and the unbearable offers the chance to ride roughshod over the resistance of the rich and the poor alike and to open the way for the forcible implantation of those modern attitudes and techniques without which there will be no escape from the misery of underdevelopment...
...There is another paradoxical political case for global decency...
...Similarly, the United States admonishes other nations on the importance of free trade and the test of international competition (in the 1960's, India was particularly favored with such lectures) . Yet, America scrupulously ignores these pieties where its own corporate interests are involved...
...No doubt, generosity is a peculiarity of the American national character, and this excellent emotion has provided the political basis for foreign aid from the Marshall Plan to the present...
...America is always ready to turn its back on the myths of the market economy, but such idealism is almost never applied to truly idealistic projects...
...Under such circumstances, justice would paradoxically require, as Gunnar Myrdal has phrased it, a double standard of international economic morality...
...At times, Baran veered back to the classic Leninist thesis, as in Monopoly Capital which he wrote in collaboration with Paul Sweezy...
...For all of these reasons, it is particularly important to insist within the United States that the day-to-day decisions of foreign policy involve the choice of a new order of things for the twenty-first century...
...But it was hardly necessary to be a Marxist to understand the tremendous significance of the tens of billions of dollars of annual armament spending...
...That is the task of the democratic Left...
...or in the emerging nations, as the prime mover in the modernization process...
...In theory, the answer is yes...
...When there was a Communist-led insurrection in Greece, Stalin was as good as his word...
...The future could even conform to a half-truth found in the fantasies of Mao Tse-tung: the advanced Communist societies can benefit from international injustice every bit as much as the corporations...
...But if capitalism did these things it would not be capitalism...
...Thus, even benevolence has increased the gap between the rich and the poor...
...In 1964, there were $44.3 billion of direct U.S...
...could not possibly fulfill the hopes of these decent people...
...The priorities involved in these allocations, with one major exception, were those that usually motivate investments of a private corporation...
...The colony exported primary products from its fields and mines according to the needs of the metropolitan economy (the profits were shipped out, too...
...the interest due on past loans to India in 1966, to quote the Times again, was equal to 35 per cent of the foreign exchange required for the next five-year plan...
...After World War II a new indignity was in store for the Third World...
...In part, this is the same shamming cynicism as Harry Truman's Leninist tough talk, used to conceal decent motives...
...The Russo-Korean treaty of 1949 did not even contain a mutual assistance provision, and in January 1950 Dean Acheson suggested that both Korea and Formosa were outside of the American defense perimeter...
...Even if the highest estimate is valid—the U.N.'s prediction of a $20 billion savings gap by 1970—the sum at issue is well within the means of the advanced nations...
...For the most recent government figures, see the September 1966 issue of Survey of Current Business...
...but then military hardware has the marvelous quality of becoming obsolete almost on the day it becomes operational...
...and the actual public U.S...
...This perplexed and angry view is not described here for purposes of ridicule...
...It is easy to ridicule the fantasy elements in Mao's vision...
...And, for the indefinite future at least, this drama is to be played out without the intervention of the Western working class, that old Marxian hero, said to be integrated now in imperialist society...
...But, as the grim figures of failure and retrogression during the first half of the Development Decade show, the basic anti-human trends which distribute more wealth to the rich and more poverty to the poor remain in force...
...Also in 1966, the U.N...
...And so, the crucial issue is political, not economic, for trends do not create new societies...
...Thus, France used its disbursements to create a special, and advantageous, relationship with its ex-colonies, and President Kennedy could say, "Our assistance makes possible the stationing of 3.5 million Allied troops along the Communist frontier at one-tenth the cost of maintaining a comparable number of American soldiers...
...For all of the failings of the Alliance for Progress, for instance, there is no question that in the period of its inception John F. Kennedy managed to identify his Administration's policy with the aspiration for change in Latin America...
...For the anti-democratic and totalitarian program of modernization which Mao represents is one of the most important trends in the developing lands...
...More broadly, "Asia is the domain of sophisticated and accomplished civilizations," Africa has "no culture comparable to Asia," and Latin America is an "archaic Western society...
...Robert Kennedy's criticisms are sound and so are his proposals to double economic aid and cut military subsidies...
...The views of Galbraith and Robert Kennedy are obviously in this tradition...
...It is most dangerous to think that, as peace begins to break out, it would be simple enough to transfer funds from the work of destruction to that of construction...
...Therefore, Acheson concluded, American funds must go to Europe...
...For some time, the best Americans have called for a democratic revolution in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, both on grounds of justice and as an alternative to Communism...
...down upon their heads...
...they must sell cheap and buy dear from the booming factories...
...we must be under no illusions as to the extreme difficulty of uprooting longestablished ruling oligarchies without disruptions involving lesser or greater degrees of violence...
...An America that cannot even provide decent housing for its own "well-off" poor is hardly going to lead in the bold measures needed to end the threat of starvation forever...
...The impoverished lands of the Third World, however, were suffering more and more from their inherited disadvantages...
...a substitution of welfare spending for military spending," they comment: "We must say of such liberals what Marx said of the bourgeois reformers of his day: 'They all want the impossible, namely the conditions of bourgeois existence without the necessary consequences of those conditions.'" This argument, based on a Marxian generality (which arose out of a contraversy with Proudhon), is hardly convincing proof of the state and tendency of the American economy in the late sixties and seventies...
...America, he argued, was devoting enormous military and political means to the service of relatively modest material ends...
...Such cases are based on the denial of the very existence of an international order of economic inequity—but they prove the contrary...
...Although America must provide massive assistance precisely in order to minimize the potential for bloody conflict within the Third World, there must be an expectation of turmoil and even violence—and the U.S...
...if higher education is democratized, the upper-class monopoly of the universities will be broken...
...This can hardly be done with the freely given consent of the people, and democracy will therefore be viewed as hostile to economic development and political independence...
...A pax Sovietica-Americana is preferable to a holocaust initiated by the two powers, of course...
...to argue for redoubled efforts...
...However, since a single decision of Royal Dutch Shell was reported by Elizabeth Jager to have effected the balance of payments position of both Britain and Italy, it is unlikely that any such experimentation will be allowed...
...Yet, there is a much better way of appropriating these funds: a progressive income tax: (1) This notion has an obvious grounding in equity, since the richer a nation (or an individual) the smaller the percentage of income devoted to necessities and the greater the ability to meet social obligations...
...does wrong in the name of virtue...
...But not only the foreign investor distorts the backward economy...
...Yet, there would be no need for new institutions—only the old arrangement has to be turned upside down...
...To follow the principle of efficiency in world affairs—to insist that resources be allocated and production organized "economically," in the cheapest way—is to condemn the backward to be even more backward...
...In obedience to the "laws" of the world market, the developing country must find some export specialty that suits the needs of the big powers, for that is the only rational thing to do in a system created by, and for, these big powers...
...Mao's Thought and Global Good & Evil No consideration of America's predisposition toward global good and evil would be complete without reference to the Thought of Mao Tse-tung...
...Yet, there is hope of combining peace with a modicum of justice which is the aim of these proposals...
...yet that course would require considerable radicalization of its political life...
...For an emphasis on international construction, massive investments of men and money in the Third World, and disarmament would reverse the priorities which have prevailed in the postwar period...
...Concretely, American foreign aid and military programs, private investment, and tariff policy were permeated and guided by the principles of the old order they were intended to challenge...
...There is a system to ameliorate the great fluctuations in coffee prices...
...The tricky political and military vagaries accompanying postwar aid taxed the capacity of a modern country's computerized planning process—and overwhelmed the shaky planning institutions in the new countries...
...A SPECIAL FEATURE Michael Harrington AMERICAN POWER IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY The democratic Left must help finish the creation of the world...
...Celso Furtado, a brilliant Latin-American economist, has vividly analyzed what this means: Technology developed "organically" in the West...
...An extraordinary potential exists in the world of the late 1960's...
...It would mean a conscious decision to reverse the present reactionary priorities of the world market, to create a mechanism which would automatically transfer some of the profits of the international economy from the rich to the poor...
...But this view ignores two important points...
...In 1966, Senator Robert Kennedy, in a long, probing speech on "The Alliance for Progress: Symbol and Substance," attempted to draw up a balance sheet on this experiment which had been initiated by his brother...
...If, for instance, Eduardo Frei of Chile had followed the advice of the sophisticated executives of the Committee for Economic Development, he would never have "Chileanized" part of the copper industry (a program de signed to double output and assure partial state ownership) . In that case, one of the most hopeful governments on the continent would have lost much of its dynamic and popular support...
...As Russia becomes more modernized, the two social systems seem to some of their proponents less at odds...
...the Present This can best be done by examining the actual, living fate of a projection very similar to the one urged by Baran and Sweezy...
...then, to have the American government provide the financial framework within which these two groups can make a free-enterprise idyll of peaceful progress...
...However, and most emphatically, this proposal is not primarily "anti...
...Thus, statesmanship has served to increase the distance between the world's haves and have-nots...
...Therefore, for all of its talk of "freedom," as soon as the Maoist ideology posits a revolution of impoverished peasants going it alone, it must also opt for totalitarianism...
...How can "mutual benefit" mean the selling at world market prices of raw materials that cost the underdeveloped countries unlimited sweat and suffering and the buying at world market prices of machines produced in large, modern, mechanized factories...
...But the contradictory elements in this vision guaranteed its self-defeat...
...In the twenties, the purchasing power of the masses of Americans was held down while the productive capacity of the society was vastly increased and there was an eventual collapse...
...New Deal...
...It reaches out to African nationalists who come to power on the basis of classless, populist movements, and who are therefore suspicious of party democracy which they associate with the ways of imperialism...
...Thus, for example, the "differential" tarriff raises the duty on an import according to the degree to which it has been industrially processed...
...All these figures support the thesis that exploiting the Third World is a diminishing and non-crucial part of the American economy...
...But the American economy does not correspond to the rigid simplicity of the Baran-Sweezy model...
...thus, unwittingly but inevitably, made money and, more often than not, worsened the plight of those it had set out to aid and whose support it sought in the Cold War...
...Or, America could take the lead in a gigantic international effort to finish the creation of the world...
...Trade and Development Conference in 1964 reported the result: between 1950 and 1962 prices paid for the exports of the underdeveloped countries went down by 7 per cent and prices paid for their imports from the industrialized countries went up by 27 per cent...
...The conservatives propose to prime the pump by raising the living standard of the wealthy, the liberals and radicals by improving the lot of the poor and of society as a whole...
...Senator Kennedy recognizes that neither this dream nor the original ideals of the Alliance are anywhere near accomplishment...
...Relevant here is that throughout the postwar period, the trend in the export of capital has been to accentuate investment by the affluent powers in the affluent powers, rather than competition among them for opportunities in the ex-colonial world...
...But this massive, steady flow of funds could only be assured if foreign aid by the advanced nations were put on a permanent basis...
...This means understanding and applying Gunnar Myrdal's paradox: only a double standard can ensure fairness...
...The seeds of totalitarian regimes," Harry Truman said in March 1947, "are nurtured by misery and want...
...Win-the-War, not during that of Dr...
...Experts, like P. N. Rosenstein-Rodan, have already demonstrated that the details of such an international income-tax system can be worked out if there is the political will.* Aid for Totalitarians...
...The United States must abandon its ideological hostility to the public sector in the developing nations...
...But the Maoist illusion has great appeal...
...And this is precisely why it is so important to understand how the U.S., even when it acts out of its best instincts (and is not motivated by hysterical anti-Communism, oil diplomacy, and the like) , has intensified the very social and economic miseries it deplores...
...the triumphant entrepreneurs not only stole from their subjects but also integrated them into their economic system...
...Toward a New World Economy If, however, the direction of this spiral were reversed, hopeful factors would reinforce one another...
...There can be little doubt that this client relationship helped cause Fidel to opt for Moscow against Peking in the ideological Sino-Soviet dispute...
...P. N. Rosenstein-Rodan, "International Aid for Underdeveloped Countries," in The Strategy of World Order, Richard A, Falk and Saul H. Mendlovitz, ed., Vol...
...Thus, the militarization of American foreign policy and its association with so many dictators and anti-democrats is not the result of a particular malevolence of this or that politician, but it is related to massive structural trends both within the U.S...
...In Peru, Kennedy said, President Belaunde had asked for $16 million for a domestic Peace-Corps type project...
...In the summer of 1966, for instance, Fidel Castro expressed outrage at the "criminal" idea that Moscow was going to sign a commercial pact with Brazil...
...The newest machines save manpower—a blessing in the U.S...
...Applying such high-flown biblical imagery to politics strikes most Americans as grandiose...
...But the victorious socialist revolution in the "capitalist countries"— that socialism based upon the European working class and technology which all the original Bolsheviks anticipated—never came to pass, and Preobrazhensky's hypothesis was never tested...
...There is a definite reactionary potential in a Soviet-American alliance...
...Not only is it statistically possible for U.S...
...As mechanical ingenuity advanced, the workers were progressively withdrawn from primary and secondary occupations (agriculture, mining, and mass production) and channeled into the service and white-collar sector...
...The crucial question is whether or not it is possible, without a revolution of the system itself, to substitute social for armaments spending...
...My point is not to argue for a "Russian" revolution, an imitation of Lenin in 1917, and much less of Stalin in the thirties or of Mao in the fifties and sixties...
...Mussolini made the trains run on time, Hitler "solved" the problem of unemployment, South Africa has the highest per capita income for black men on that continent, and Franco has recently presided over growth rates to be envied by Communist planners...
...It cannot be, for a new world cannot be constructed out of hostility...
...but, if one is serious about closing the gap between rich and poor nations, only something like this approach might work at all...
...Then, with whatever pittance was left to them, the natives were allowed to buy manufactured goods from their exploiters and so provided them with still another profit...
...The mass unemployment of the Depression, it must be remembered, was not ended by the social and economic policies of the New Deal...
...But it is possible to tamper with the "historic odds" cited by Fulbright (and Heilbroner) ; for they are, to a degree, man-made...
...The man-made logic of the international division of labor is so compelling that it directs the developing country to embrace the misfortune which has been visited upon it...
...Lenin believed that capitalism was forced to export its capital because it could not invest it profitably within the limits of the advanced economy...
...Europe can, after all, absorb more capital than Asia, Africa, or Latin America...
...Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1965...
...It is therefore crucial to be concerned with the far side of disarmament and the kind of a world that must be created...
...The idea, however, did not die out...
...Mao no longer defines imperialism as the last stage of capitalism but sees it as the united front of the rich, whatever their social system...
...Dean Acheson, in an important speech in Cleveland, Mississippi, on the direct orders of President Truman, noted that American exports were twice as great as the imports, and that the balance of trade was too favorable...
...But in an enterprise which requires such far ranging construction, the stress must be positive and the challenge is, in Fulbright's moving phrase, "to extend the frontiers of our loyalty and compassion...
...And yet, there is hope...
...indeed honestly felt committed to a democratic alternative to Communist industrialization, to abolition of the world's inequities by means of freedom rather than dictatorship...
...But the backward economies export more than money to the industrialized countries...
...And, more recently, the trend has been to loans rather than grants...
...An America not inexorably fated to exploit the globe on its own is hardly driven to do so in concert with the Russians...
...The issue of who "lost" China began to play a role in American politics, and Chiang's pseudo-China on Taiwan became a centerpiece of the nation's Asian policy...
...The world—and I borrow here from Peter Worsley's imaginative way of speaking—is scarcely begun...
...f Goran Ohlin's study, Foreign Aid Policies Reconsidered, Chapter IV (OECD, Paris, 1966), summarizes much of the work already done in computing the capital shortage of the poor nations...
...it would be a waste to allocate resources to a modern technological sector which would, after all, only duplicate Western factories and at a much higher and noncompetitive cost...
...3) As Senator Fulbright has emphasized, this would take foreign aid out of the realm of charity and philanthropy and make it a matter of right, like U.S...
...Experiments in Third-World Aid: The Alliance for Progress To make a democratic revolution here and now, it is necessary to go beyond the French model—to institute extensive economic planning, and to ignore the allocation of resources made by the market...
...Moreover, one cannot speak of a simple substitution of social spending for defense outlays...
...They asked the Kennedy Round negotiators to remove their products from the list of items excluded from tariff reduction...
...journal World Economic Survey reported that the purchasing power of the Third World had declined while its net outflow of interest and profit to the wealthy powers—the tribute the poor pay to the rich—had increased by 10 per cent...
...Yet it is important to remember that the Stimson approach was explored by another leading figure in those days: Joseph Stalin...
...But the huge and politically powerful oil industry thrives on these inequities...
...direct tribute, and sometimes slave labor, were required...
...With this very important caveat about oil a general and un-Leninist: proposition can be restated: the prosperity of the American economy need not depend on the exploitation of the Third World and, to a considerable measure, does not at this moment...
...Native oligarchies, tribalism, antimodern cultures, and other reactionary trends were vigorously encouraged by the West during its imperial rule...
...In 1964, for instance, 31.2 per cent of the American money had gone to Canada, 27.2 per cent to Europe, 20.1 per cent to Latin America, 6.9 per cent to Asia, and 3.5 • See After Imperialism, by Michael Barret Brown, p. 206...
...Guevara followed his logic to its conclusion: "If we establish that type of relationship between two groups of nations, we must argue that the socialist countries are to a certain extent accomplices of imperialist exploitation...
...large-scale land redistribution necessarily implies major changes in the internal political balance of many LatinAmerican countries—away from oligarchy and privilege, toward more popular government...
...The American word, if it is backed up with the right deeds, could thus become a mighty force...
...As Forbes Magazine (which advertises itself as a "capitalist tool") headlined the cover story in the March 1, 1966 issue: "Feeding the World's Hungry Millions: How It Will Mean Billions for U.S...
...But he doubts that the U.S...
...It makes more contemporary sense out of Lenin than anything I have read...
...But from 1945 on, every one of the advanced capitalist powers pursued some variant of a full-employment policy...
...More generally, the flag of American almost-imperialism usually did not, during the postwar period, follow the dollar, except in the case of oil...
...the French proclaimed it in most noble terms: they were engaged in "la mission civilatrice...
...successful if we are fortunate enough—but a revolution which is coming whether we will it or not...
...In theory, the period of monolithic "democracy" which accompanies this accumulation of capital is to be followed by an age of greater political freedom...
...But on the conceptual level he retains Harry Truman's classic assumptions about Point Four: the government is to create a context in which American businessmen and ex-colonial entrepreneurs can cooperate, to the profit of all, in the work of modernization...
...If the nation has erred, he would say, it has been generous to a fault, and only a Communist could deny the charity and anti-colonialism of its historic record...
...General Assembly decides...
...In retrospect, the President's confidence was either naive or ceremonial...
...The advanced powers will have to agree to some long-term mechanism of international taxation which will automatically provide the required sums —to create a contrat social for the planet...
...And whenever the Third World managed to attract some public or private capital from the great powers, they paid cash on the barrelhead...
...Theories on the Fate of Old and New Nations The theory that the advanced powers are inevitably committed to reaction implies that there is no hope of democracy in the new nations...
...To accomplish this, the tariff policies of the advanced nations would have to be radically changed...
...At the height of the struggle between the Nato West and the Warsaw-Pact East there existed a straightforward version of anti-Communism...
...Although the peasants of this world are hardly going to usher in a reign of peace and justice, they could well become the agents of their own enslavement...
...At times, these transitions were accomplished by brute force...
...A change in trade policies would not require sweeping innovations...
...It would be hard to imagine a more audacious revision of Lenin than Mao's version of Leninist orthodoxy...
...First, there must be international economic planning which will allocate massive resources to the new nations on the basis of their needs and capacities...
...The abolition of joblessness took place during the reign of Dr...
...Basically, what the developing nations need—and want, for they made these demands on GATT in the summer of 1966—is a transition from tariffs which discriminate against them to those which discriminate for them...
...As the World Marxist Review shamefacedly admitted and Guevara boldly asserted, both the fat Communist and the fat capitalist can benefit from the "non-equivalence of exchange" on the world market...
...It was, for example ; the program of Presidential candidate Henry A. Wallace in 1948...
...But there are much higher projections: Jan Tinbergen has set the needed funds at $7 billion, Michael Brower at $12 billion, and the First Committee of the U.N...
...how can the recipients of all this charity call the United States imperialist...
...For after recent events in countries like China and Cuba, this view can no longer be seriously maintained...
...One cannot ignore the uncomfortable fact that the West is dominated by business or even argue that there is no role for private corporations in the work of development...
...A far-flung network of alliances and treaty organizations was established...
...There would be many motives for such a change, among them enlightened self-interest (the present trends hurry toward more instability and violence which could be disastrous for the wealthy as well as for the hungry)—and that current of democratic idealism which still flows within American society...
...Obviously, fledgling societies cannot compete with the advanced giant industries of Europe and America...
...For when there is conflict between the needs of the American corporation and those of the impoverished whom we supposedly are helping, the domestic dollar comes first...
...Thus, they were becoming constantly "less equal...
...This sounds quite sensible, and it leads to the conclusion that priority should be given to those export industries "that can earn substantial foreign exchange if they can compete with effective industries in other countries...
...Profit, Priorities & Economic "Laws" As Gunnar Myrdal has pointed out, everyone knows that it is more profitable to invest in safe projects than in risky ones—in European and American affluence rather than in Third World poverty...
...But it is not enough to refrain from doing evil...
...if agricultural credit is made available to the masses, the moneylenders are threatened...
...Over a century ago, Marx realized that one of the factors which made the bourgeois revolution more dynamic than any previous upheaval was the development of the means of communication...
...By maintaining the international order of economic injustice, the West makes it materially impossible for the Third World to advance toward both modernity and freedom...
...The oil industry's argument is, of course, that as the producer of a strategic fuel its interests must be protected precisely in the interest of America's common good...
...Trade and Development Conference reported in 1964, reciprocity had actually widened the gap between the rich and the poor...
...Following Marx, Lenin held that capitalism was not simply interested in plunder and booty abroad...
...There is a strange dialectic of anti-democracy, based on de facto cooperation of Western capitalists and Chinese Communists...
...At the same time, however, the petroleum and mining industries accounted for around 40 per cent of this total, about the same portion as that of manufacturing...
...But there are others, and they are much more numerous, who are simply bewildered by the seemingly endless and futile appropriations in Washington...
...must find itself sympathetic to armed revolutionists of the Left rather than, as so often in the past, to the military dictators of the Right...
...In this setting, to put an end to the Cold War allows America to recover its vision, to demilitarize its outlook...
...It is precisely the material and spiritual agony of the totalitarian accumulation of capital initiated by the latter two leaders that must be avoided...
...And it was no accident that McCarthy's heyday coincided with Stalin's last ; demented years, and with the Korean War...
...In Old Myths and New Realities, Fulbright wrote...
...American leadership, unable to see the need for reform at home, was of course bewildered by a world in revolutionary transition...
...The failure of the French computer industry had made that country dependent on American corporations— and allowed the U.S...
...ated and effective than those of the pirates and freebooters...
...Oil is, after all, more sovereign than India...
...Capitalism had remained capitalism, yet it had learned that improving the lot of the masses could be good business...
...And the marvelous fact of ex-colonial people rising out of their poverty should make it politically easier in the U.S...
...In practical terms, as long as America's economic and social policies frustrated its political visions, the country regularly turned to the authoritarian Right even as it talked in the words of the democratic Left...
...they were consonant with the persistence of great poverty, increasing injustice in the distribution of wealth and, particularly in the U.S., a chronic and scandalous level of unemployment (but not general joblessness of the thirties type...
...Yet, it is sad to remember that most of our disinterested idealists have been reactionary, as in the case of Dulles...
...And in August 1946, five months after Winston Churchill's famous "Iron Curtain" speech, President Truman was telling Chiang that, unless he liberalized a bit, "it must be expected that American opinion will not continue its generous attitude toward your nation...
...New Delhi is afraid to protest this outrage because it might then lose the three-quarters of assistance which does come through...
...The U.N., obviously, cannot intervene in the political life of every developing country...
...The Senator acknowledged that basic issues are at stake for a revolution is coming—which will be peaceful if we are wise enough...
...The production possibilities are therefore almost infinite...
...This would lay the basis for the global economic planning which alone can make the notion of "democracy between nations" a meaningful reality...
...It is necessary to consult reality as well as authority...
...it was based on conservative and reactionary powers and excluded the modernizers, non-Communist revolutionaries, and neutralists...
...they only make them possible...
...Gigantic corporations, with the conscious political support of their governments, are engaged in a fierce competition for markets...
...the developing countries' debts to the Western powers should be forgiven or else rescheduled and made interest free...
...But affluent countries might enrich themselves at a somewhat slower rate and without pushing the majority of the world's population more deeply into misery...
...And to follow this unprecedented course of action is our only chance to close the gap between the world's rich and poor...
...During this time, American "direct investment" abroad (where business sets up a plant in a foreign country rather than exporting American goods to it) more than doubled—and England and Canada absorbed more than 60 per cent of the increase...
...The U.N...
...Unless this question is answered, the whole enterprise could have the most paradoxical results, and some of these reforms could subsidize local oligarchies, rotten power structures, and economic backwardness...
...the same was true in Argentina...
...it was a type of international Keynesianism creating an effective demand for U.S...
...Studies in Long-Term Economic Projections for the World Economy, United Nations, 1964...
...However, the London Economist reported, both India and Yugoslavia were fearful that the advocacy of such a radical step would bring the wrath of the U.S...
...The Varying Uses of Aid India provides an even better example for the profitable uses of American generosity...
...By 1970, Europe, North America, and Australia will have a total GNP of over $1.5 trillion...
...In this last sentence, the Russian spokesman sounded very much like Harry Truman imitating Lenin...
...Where Marx and Lenin had seen the working class as the historic agency of social change, the Chinese Communist leader looked to the peasantry—the class Marx had regarded as lumpish, like so many potatoes in a sack...
...to promote international injustice in order to maintain domestic prosperity...
...It is the fashion to denigrate spending money on heaven when earth is still so shoddy...
...My government attributes the utmost importance to commercial relations with countries in the course of economic development, like Brazil...
...Capital in the developing lands would no longer be at the mercy of the wild fluctuations of the world market in primary commodities or the vicissitudes of a cold war...
...Preobrazhensky advocated the abolition of this inequity as fast as possible through the modernization of the retrograde societies...
...If, as Aldous Huxley once said pessimistically, a 99 per cent pacifist is a 100 per cent militarist, then one can optimistically hope that an almostimperialist will become anti-imperialist...
...In both years, the distribution of this capital was about the same...
...This outrage has been repeatedly denounced by the Secretaries General of the U.N., various Popes, the World Council of Churches, and the U.S...
...Mass production requires a huge market nonexistent in an archaic agricultural society...
...So, World War I signalled the beginning of the epoch of "imperialist war and proletarian revolution...
...Paradoxically, the new nations suffered because the advanced lands were now less interested in exploiting them...
...On the whole, the postwar experience violates the letter of the Leninist argument at almost every point—yet leaves much of its spirit intact...
...Lenin and Keynes: Past Projections vs...
...companies and that it also set the price...
...The Politics of Hope There is a sort of international Keynesian argument for the selfinterest in America's doing justice in the world...
...Thus, if literacy is broadened, so are the eligible electors in Brazil...
...the attendant violence and impieties are viewed with alarm and their existence becomes one more reactionary argument for pursuing international policies that breed still more violence...
...He stood by while his comrades were put down in blood...
...it is already a curious fact...
...the American figure would be 44,500...
...The Progress of the Third World It has been said so often that the rich nations are getting richer and the poor nations poorer that the very enormity of the fact is lost in cliche...
...In certain cases, the nonprofit logic of military need prevailed over the calculus of the market in the American aid effort...
...and the Third World emerged as a cohesive bloc at the U.N...
...Thus, the pro-Castro editors of the Monthly Review in the U.S...
...Government investment in socially useful projects tends to raise disturbing, ideological questions...
...Social Spending Another important theory seeks to demonstrate that America's reactionary stance in foreign affairs, particularly in the Third World, is an inevitable consequence of the very structure of the society...
...The socialization of death is, thus far, much more generally popular than the socialization of life...
...products overseas and consequently leading to higher profits...
...The Russian dictator wrote to Harry Truman: The question of Poland has the same meaning for the Soviet Union as the question of Belgium and Greece for the security of Great Britain...
...A vast increase in war spending is usually accompanied by an end to social innovation...
...In the 1950's and 1960's, the atomic balance of terror imposed a de facto recognition of power realities somewhat along the lines Stimson, Stalin, and Wallace had proposed...
...to make a maximum reduction of tariffs on tropical foods, and to compensate the developing countries for their loss of tariff preferences when this takes place...
...As for the Chinese Communists, it is only lip service...
...In economic terms, it is not necessary for the U.S...
...But the outflow to the advanced countries in interest and profit went up by 10 per cent...
...These were the internal reasons for the nation's reactionary foreign policy...
...only there were no equals...
...And perhaps the most summary and cruel statement of this phenomenon was made by Jacques Ferrandi, Director of the Fond Europeen du Developpement: "We can say without exaggeration that certain recently contracted loans [for "development"] are being used to pay old debts...
...Cold war, imperialism, the accentuation of the chasm between rich and poor nations, all these are deep trends in both the national and international economy of the U.S...
...Gar Alperovitz has summarized it in this way: The essence of Stimson's view was a conservative belief that the postwar power structure in Europe had to be acknowledged so that a modus vivendi could be established with Russia...
...Relevant is the fact that the Senator from Arkansas has long recognized the reality described by Heilbroner and that he has not recoiled from it in horror...
...And, it should also be noted, when AID threatened to turn off food shipments unless India accepted American price-fixing for fertilizer, it acted as the agent of oil companies...
...This approach accentuated the gap between the rich and the poor, for it meant that American donations were effectively militarized and usually assigned to the indigenous friends, rather than the foes, of backwardness...
...Our improbable and only hope is to create a new world to replace the inadequate one in which we now live...
...But those interrelationships that transcend tribe, nation, and empire, uniting the people of the earth in a common destiny —whether they like it or not—are only a century or so old...
...He notes that in the first period of the Alliance there was no real increase in per capita agricultural production...
...But even a country that manages to escape from these inexorabilities of the international economy and invests in an advanced enterprise is victimized by the way the world is organized...
...A similar conclusion developed out of quite another point of view...
...possesses no colonies...
...And during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, Khrushchev was forced to bow to the United States in the Caribbean...
...When the first factories needed semiskilled and unskilled operatives, peasants were expropriated and a working class was created...
...The various formulations of America's (or, more precisely, capitalism's) role and fate, from Lenin to Mao, have obvious deficiencies...
...And even in the advanced countries Lenin's idea has had a profound effect upon intellectual life...
...Conference predicted for 1970...
...There is no way of evading this point...
...In the middle of the "Development Decade," proclaimed by the U.N., the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) announced that the developing lands were more ill-nourished in 1965 than they had been before World War II, and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) estimated in 1966 that the nourishment needs in these countries will grow twice as fast as the supply during the remaining years of the century...
...policy to proceed according to this scenario: to discover some reasonable excolonials committed to capitalist development of their lands...
...The crucial question is not technical, but political...
...But the United States has been profoundly imperialist in the decades after World War II (and before, but that is another story...
...In lobbying for the Administration's 1967 program, the Agency for International Development (AID) told Congress, "In the less developed world today, the AID program is introducing American products and performance standards to some of the great potential markets of the future...
...But it is not absolutely fated to come true, and by thinking that it is, there is a danger of helping to fulfill a deplorable prophecy...
...Some of these machine and human skills could be put to benevolent use—but some could not...
...Anti-utopia seems more possible than a better world...
...These new trade and aid programs might come to serve as a substitute for the Cold War...
...The oil industry, then, acts according to the classic Leninist scenario...
...The poor nations are left with the grubby tasks of primary production and with a stagnant or declining market...
...And if the fat Communists use these prices in their relations with the impoverished Communists, then they are getting the same kind of unjust advantage as the fat capitalists...
...The historic odds are probably against the prospects of peaceful social revolution...
...It speaks to some Western intellectuals who discover in the ex-colonial peasant the miraculous resurrection of The God That Failed...
...This fact has not escaped the notice of the Third World...
...America is imperialist...
...Yet, there is no possibility of justice so long as India must return about one-quarter of the monies it receives in foreign aid just to service past debts...
...And these men were quite right to regard social reform and private investment as often antithetical...
...Inefficiency, corruption, and instability were tolerated, as in the various governments in Vietnam in the sixties...
...For world prices reflect, precisely, the cheapness of primary products and the great expense of industrial goods...
...The Cold War began with a series of crises in Eastern Europe and the Middle East (Poland, Greece, Iran, Turkey...
...has already begun the ground work of developing econometric models of the world economy.* If the goal of closing the gap between the rich and the poor is taken seriously, this tentative undertaking must receive massive support and become the focus of a system of planned, internationalized aid...
...Thus, Western business has preserved much of its old-fashioned Leninist spirit, though it has profoundly revised the letter of Lenin's law...
...And lacking any sense of the economic, political, and social roots of both nationalism and Communism, these rightist anti-Communists saw the enemy as a conspirator, a subversive, an agent who drove otherwise contented workers and peasants to revolt...
...These figures cover a wide range of societies at different levels of development...
...No one is really interested in building decent homes for the poverty-stricken within the United States, and smart money would shun even more such an undertaking overseas...
...Thus, Furtado points out, the corporation is designed to fit the needs of profit-making in an advanced economy, and when one tries to transplant its technology to impoverished, developing lands, furious contradictions result...
...Thus, a new economy was created...
...the latter was, of course, a neutralist...
...In Power and Impotence, the Failure of America's Foreign Policy, Edmund Stillman and William Pfaff wrote, "In effect, the early Cold War was a contest for the control of a prostrate, but fundamentally very rich, continent that had functioned as the center of world politics for three hundred years...
...synthetics now substituted for old imports, and subsidized, protected agricultural sectors took care of about 80 per cent of the need for primary products...
...Indeed, world oil prices are an ingenious and artificial creation...
...The U.S...
...The former group had enlisted in the cause of the "Free World...
...But more interesting than these routine and self-interested betrayals of our cherished principles are cases when the U.S...
...but the catch is, of course, political...
...Many theorists, both in and outside the Third World, describe such terrible necessities as if they were the finest flowering of civilization...
...The Soviet Union was not consulted when these governments were established...
...Second, the present "laws" of the international economy must be repealed and turned upside down...
...But the setting is not at all Leninist, for the fight is not conducted so much in Asia, Africa, or Latin America as in Europe and America...
...There is the tragic possibility that this view might lead America to continue to promote the gap between rich and poor nations...
...The basic premise was stated in Harry Truman's reminiscences of the 1945 Mideast crisis: "If the Russians were to control Iran's oil, either directly or indirectly, the raw material balance of the world would undergo a serious change and it would be a serious loss for the economy of the Western world...
...He therefore favors a policy of watch ful waiting and he is, of course, opposed to American intervention into every upheaval...
...Thus, there was hope that a revolution would proceed from the top down...
...In Guevara's terms, sweat is cheap and ma• chines are costly...
...This helped uproot the old traditions but did not provide new employment, and mass unemployment has been a chronic problem for the post-Jiminez and pro-Alliance governments...
...So far, America is creating the world very badly—though this need not be...
...In this way, and by refusing to create and finance the armies of Latin America, the U.S...
...Now this is a call for wide-ranging change (though it falls short of what is needed...
...In the mid-sixties Walter Lippmann, and other moderate critics of the war in Vietnam, held that there simply was not a discernable American self-interest to justify the commitment of hundreds of thousands of troops to Southeast Asia...
...Recently, in a Senate speech in May 1966, Senator Robert F. Kennedy gave an example of the kind of private self-interest dominating the policy of the nation...
...policy to escape from economic determinism...
...McNamara summarized this anguished prospect in a Montreal speech in 1966, in the year 2000 half of the developing nations will have achieved a per capita income of $170 a year, assuming a continuation of present trends...
...Matthew's parable of the rich getting richer and the poor poorer is coming true now on a global scale, East-West Entente—Rich North Against Poor South...
...Lenin's prediction certainly held up from 1916 to 1945...
...Instead of assuming that our military technology allows us to intervene everywhere in the world, we would then act as if our social ingenuity and political institutions were universal models...
...In a pure world of mathematical logic all nations would indeed gain by making equivalent concessions to one another...
...For foreign aid, military aid, grants and loans and tariffs were all organized according to the irrational rationality of the world market...
...Ironically, the very success of the Western welfare state, and particularly of government policies to promote full employment, made profiteering in the backward areas less attractive...
...This was typical of the Cold War...
...In the doing it is necessary to explain that past programs failed, not because they were so exceedingly generous, but because they were inadequate and manipulative...
...Certainly, the defenders of conventional wisdom and the actual aid-andtrade policies of the postwar period have utterly failed in their professed goal of narrowing the chasm which divides the fat North from the hungry South...
...that rich countries . . . may be found on either side of the division between the capitalist and socialist countries...
...There are economic arguments for such a course, and they must be stated...
...The Cold War has many causes, and the fate of the Third World is not pre-eminent among them...
...Now all of this has a familiar, Leninist ring to it and hardly shows that the world market has been turned into a charitable trust...
...For it is now necessary, as Senator Fulbright has said, to "extend the frontiers of our loyalty and compassion...
...A massive commitment to international development does not provide simply an economic substitute for the arms economy...
...In order to compensate for the tremendous disadvantages which have been imposed upon the poor lands for well over 100 years, they must, in strictest equity, be given special advantages...
...This particular case grows out of the fact that there is money to be made in the starvation market...
...it can insist that nations, and regional groupings, show that there is a "popular consumption criterion" (the phrase is Galbraith's) in their equations—that projects benefit the present, as well as the future, generation...
...This cruel paradox, like everything else about the contemporary international disorder, is a creation of man in history...
...Harry Truman's Leninism in the following statement on Point Four was probably such verbiage, designed to win support from a dubious business community for the do-gooding concepts of Point Four: It seemed to me that if we could encourage stabilized governments in underdeveloped countries in Africa, South America, and Asia, we could encourage the use for the development of these areas of some of the capital which had accumulated in the United States...
...thus, they suppress the opposition, not simply of the wealthy but of the mass of the people who now must work harder, eat less, and give up the consolation of their ancient superstitions...
...Second, space is not empty of social, scientific, and even aesthetic significance...
...but it also has another dead serious aspect...
...The democratic Left in its commitment to help in the creation of a new world aims at nothing less than at utterly transcending the options which are now available—or at providing a new choice...
...He "knew" very well the character of the Greek government, and he had indeed been "consulted...
...There was more than a hint of this attitude when Lyndon Johnson proposed in 1966 to build a Great Society in Asia (since he had not yet built one in the U.S., the announcement was, at a minimum, premature) . Yet, by ceasing to support the rightist opponents of change, by open political sympathy extended to revolutionists (and sometimes even violent ones) , and, above all, by making political democracy in the Third World an economic possibility, the United States could take a step toward the creation of a new world...
...But with the Korean War the ideological hostility which was rooted in the serious conflict of interests in Europe began to take on a life of its own in Asia...
...The United States and the Soviet Union, having brought mankind to the brink of nuclear holocaust, could simply walk away from the Cold War, retreat into their separate self-interests, and respect each other's injustices...
...Africa's Balkanization to suit European needs is an obvious case in point...
...in their Indochina debacle and thus laid the basis for the tragic Vietnamese conflict of the sixties...
...he believes that human nature will eventually assert itself in the Communist world and produce a "Thermidor" which will make the revolution practical and realistic...
...These cruelties were much more sophistic...
...As a result, the U.N...
...If American society has come to a certain consensus that the government must intervene to stave off depression and that intervention would certainly be needed in the case of peace, there is still a fierce debate as to how this shall be done...
...But even this unfortunate example proves that our role in the world does not have to be determined by cost accountants...
...The main point remains: the history of the Cold War shows that American foreign policy need not be the result of economic interest, and much of it has not been...
...If the country's international actions were dedicated to reduce the gap between rich and poor nations, the oil industry would suffer...
...I suggest that we extend the frontiers of our loyalty and compassion in order to transform our aid to the world's poorer nations from something resembling a private gratuity to a community responsibility...
...Business...
...And the President's speech in support of Algeria's right to independence was one of the few events of the fifties that demonstrated not all Americans were bent on subordinating democratic and anti-colonial principles to the political needs of the NATO alliance...
...Nikolai Patolichev replied for the Soviet Union in the pragmatic phrases of a good businessman who will let nothing interfere with a good deal: We believe that foreign trade cannot, and should not, acknowledge frontiers or ideology...
...The list of recipients is dreary and familiar: Chiang, Rhee, Bao Dai, Diem, Ky, Franco, Batista, Jiminez, Trujillo, and so on...
...Then a very poor nation could obtain huge sums of money for nothing—although there was usually an unspoken interest rate computed in the numbers of the dead and maimed...
...To protect what financial support they did receive, they refrained from complaining...
...The problem is not to change this or that aspect of American, and Western, policy: a fundamental reorientation is required...
...The Southern and poor powers are therefore seen as developing a common consciousness of their plight...
...This obviously is a super-profit and it depends on arrangements with countries that are either poor or rich in a distorted way (Kuwait, which has the second highest per capita income in the world, is a balkanized fief for oil and not, as it should be, a source of wealth for Mideast development generally) . In the process of accumulating this enormous wealth, the oil industry works hand in glove with the U.S...
...The historians of the twenty-first century might well conclude that the Korean War was the most curious "accident" of our postwar period...
...North American private capital has not participated in Latin-American development as it was supposed to...
...and the "mother" country entered into an alliance with the most reactionary of the local leaders...
...In practice, everything depends on politics...
...Foreign capital, of course, utilized the most modern techniques in order to maximize profit...
...aid was much too small and should be immediately doubled...
...concluded, the developing countries were sending back to the donors more than half of the funds they had received...
...Until World War II the Pacific and Atlantic oceans allowed Americans to disdain foreign entanglements on principle...
...Up and On from Almost-Imperialism America, the almost-imperialist, could act to change the imperialist order of things...
...Lenin's belief that capitalism's inability to resolve its internal contradiction drove it to seek imperium over the entire world has become one of the most influential ideas of the twentieth century...
...In his provocative, thoughtful article on "Counterrevolutionary America" in the April 1967 issue of Commentary Robert Heilbroner argued that this was necessarily so...
...The Latin-American status quo is not even prepared to take a position of enlightened self-interest...
...Beyond these crucial political and military acts, a public commitment by the United States to make a democratic revolution economically possible will be in itself an incitement to change...
...Mao is on to a possibility, not a necessity...
...And by far and large, postwar American policy reinforced the vicious economic "laws" from which the country benefits so profoundly...
...Could the American economy tolerate such steps toward peace...
...The new nations, the CED said, must invest "where the increment in value of product promises to be greatest...
...One wants to save the workers and peasants of the Third World from the horrors of totalitarian capital accumulation, to be sure, and, in a social and economic sense, that is an anti-Communist program...
...Such a program is easily within the bounds of the possible for the rich powers...
...The continuous increase of production in the Soviet economy permits us to accelerate the rhythm and volume of our exports...
...between the developed and developing countries...
...But oil politics have also effected American foreign policy...
...in this way, all nations would obtain a larger market for whatever they happened to sell and each would be encouraged to specialize in the areas of its particular genius...
...And even when the money was not so blatantly an instrument of the donor's foreign policy, it was regularly tied to the needs of the advanced economy rather than to those of the impoverished economy...
...through the welfare state and the labor movement, has laid the basis for an advance in the prosperity of the entire nation, so a decent life for the peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America would be to the economic advantage of the entire world...
...Therefore, it is often necessary for the politician to disguise noble impulses in the rhetoric of the counting house...
...For now that the Cold War is, thank God, coming to an end in Europe, it is possible for the first time to realize the decent values which most Americans thought they had been fighting for all along...
...Writing of the liberals who "postulate...
...We have one foot in genesis and the other in apocalypse, and annihilation is always an option...
...The pretension to omnipotence which led to the tragic commitment in Vietnam is as dangerous in the service of a good policy as of a bad one...
...The Third World cannot simply put its faith in Adam Smith or any of his heirs...
...The first day of this creation took place when economics, science, and warfare put the planet together...
...Thus, St...
...Yet, the United States need not be imperialist...
...And a shift of money from Defense to, say, Health, Education, and Welfare would require a basic turn toward the democratic Left within the society...
...There are deep differences within the ex-colonies...
...but we have now lived that future and cannot afford to ignore its reality...
...In undertaking to help complete the creation of a more humane world, one must not expect too much...
...This is not true, and a failure to recognize the counter-productivity of private American (or other advanced) capital in Latin America is the basic flaw in Robert Kennedy's candid, genuinely motivated critique of the Alliance...
...Thus, the developing countries discover that they must accumulate capital from their own internal resources...
...income tax and Social Security...
...So the world's poorest countries have done more to raise the living standards of the affluent than to help their own people...
...And yet, this familiar, excellent idea is more radical than its proponents realize...
...But even supposing Heilbroner's descriptive analysis is correct and there is no way for developing nations to avoid the agony of totalitarian modernization, democratic Leftists still cannot give their support to those who carry out this transformation...
...The second day is now, and there might not be a third...
...If the underdeveloped countries cannot expect any effective aid from the affluent economies, if they can only modernize on the basis of their own impoverished resources, they will be forced to exploit the one thing they have in abundance: human beings...
...It could conceivably provide room for human beings, vast new resources for the development of the world, and it will certainly incite a deeper knowledge of both man and the universe...
...A Republican, business-oriented Administration held office for two terms, the Dixiecrat-Republican coalition prevailed in Congress, and McCarthyism made it difficult to even have a debate...
...These demands were basically turned down...
...There is close correspondence between material self-interest and the political and military commitment on both sides...
...And international economic planning should not be proposed as a utopia but as the only Practical way to reach ends Americans have thought they were supporting for over two decades...
...There is a perpetual danger that this attitude will lead to a surrender of morality in the name of the "wave of the future...
...Thus, the rich nations specialize in activities which make work easier, goods more abundant, leisure more widespread, and living standards higher...
...for they have made the most sweeping revisions of doctrine, albeit in a spirit of fanatic fundamentalism...
...Yet, by far and large, the U.S...
...Here, too, the "rational" approach is to give the largest amount of help to the richest rather than the poorest nations, and this is logical in terms of the world market and the international division of labor...
...In Venezuela, the urban population increased from 35 per cent of the total in 1936 to 63 per cent in 1965, and the 1,632,000 citizens of present-day Caracas total more than all city dwellers in 1941...
...In 1963, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) reported, 84 per cent of aid funds were bilateral—subject to military and political priorities...
...This fragile hope is my point of departure...
...Therefore, some minimal criteria have to be established for these grants...
...In a series of complicated calculations, the U.N...
...And this exactly is admitted in the convoluted phrases of the Russian World Marxist Review...
...For these and many other reasons Congress will enthusiastically vote $70 billion for Defense while it haggles over a less than $2 billion appropriation for fighting poverty...
...To the average citizen, this statement is a patent slander...
...for its aid...
...This might lead to a deal between well-heeled commissars and executives to end the old-fashioned conflict between East and West, so that the industrialized North could get on with the serious work of exploiting the backward South without regard to race, class, or political creed...
...To defy the artificial yet tenacious principles of the present international economy will require that money flow from the rich to the poor until a new and sensible rationality is forged...
...This notion strikes most revolutionists, and not just the Communists, as unpardonably tender-minded...
...For just as the vast increase in buying power, which developed in the U.S...
...The Briton and the Russian had coldly divided up Eastern Europe (the details are to be found in Churchill's memoirs of the war) , and Greece was given to England...
...If the imperialist heritage of economic interest, ideology, and feeling of superiority were rooted in economic necessity, there would be no hope of overcoming it...
...Plainly, the Latin-American developers were to subordinate their needs to those of the American commitment in Vietnam, the balance of payment problem, and the alleged threat of domestic inflation...
...There is, after all, a basis for a conspiracy of the industrial North, corporations and commissars alike, against the backward South...
...For modern technology is urban and one could almost define a modern nation by saving that it has succeeded in shifting masses from the fields to the factories (and, eventually, to the computers) . But, most important of all, the collectivization of poverty can only produce poverty, not a society of justice and abundance...
...428-29...
...Senator J. W. Fulbright is a conservative in the old, humane and humanist sense of the term...
...They spread and grow in the evil soil of poverty and strife...
...In analyzing why this is so, I hope to develop a long-range perspective on the practical problems of creating a new world...
...For the democratic Left has understood that peace, in this nuclear age, is the precondition for all progress—but it would be a serious mistake to think that peace is a sufficient condition for that progress...
...The struggle between East and West, Communism and capitalism, which has dominated international politics since the end of World War II, could now come to an end—and be replaced by this conflict between the North, both Communist and capitalist, and the South, which is poor...
...In the U.S...
...in spite of the amazing advance in technical knowledge, there could be no talk of a superabundance of capital...
...So of the $40 billion spent by AID and its predecessors between 1946 and 1965, $18.5 billion went to restore capitalism in Europe ($13 billion during the brief Marshall Plan period, an extra $2.7 billion to Greece and Turkey, $2.8 billion to Europe after the Marshall Plan) . Chiang's "China," Vietnam, and South Korea received another $6 billion...
...As the system became mature and over-organized, the rate of profit fell, and business was thus driven overseas in search for capital outlets...
...India received more money in the years after the Communist attack in 1962 than in the 15 previous (and largely neutralist) years ($1.4 billion as against $1.022 billion...
...Committee of Experts which outlined this system concluded that, had it been working between 1953 and 1959, the developing countries' claims would have ranged between $246 and $466 million a year (and the advanced countries would have received between $12 and $142 million a year...
...This means discarding a central assumption of U.S...
...There are solid, conservative reasons for the high esteem conferred upon spending for destruction...
...for uneven development and wretched conditions of the masses are fundamental and inevitable conditions and premises of this mode of production...
...Once again, we must speak of possibilities rather than of utopias...
...It profiteers in the Third World, supports local reaction, opposes democratic and modernizing movements, and sometimes treats the U.S...
...Meanwhile, the advanced economies were required to make a reduction in duty which was, at most, a minor annoyance...
...More to the point, the income in 1964 on $14.3 billion of petroleum investment was more than twice as great as that realized on the $16.8 billion of investment in manufacturing ($1.9 billion as against $.876 billion...
...For given a turn to the democratic Left, this nation could play a crucial and positive role in finishing the creation of the world...
...He was simply advising Truman that he could be counted on to keep a bargain...
...If the West proves incapable of this dramatic about-face (and nothing that has happened in the postwar period gives any basis for optimism) , if changes of this character do not take place peaceably, things will continue to get worse—and the earth of the year 2000 will be even more outrageously unjust than it is today and certainly more unstable...
...but it is not a genuine vision of justice...
...The tragic conflicts of the sixties, as Theodore Draper has pointed out, pitted the United States against popular upheavals-in Vietnam, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic—and were a consequence of previous American policy, such as the support of French imperialism and of Cuban and Dominican dictatorship...
...As Mr...
...It is, of course, only one more irony imposed upon the world's impoverished that this burst of idealism took place for purposes of destruction rather than construction...
...could make an enormous contribution to the cause of democratic revolution without pretending to be omnipotent...
...There is no point in picturing this development in idyllic terms...
...Therefore, the only true friends of the "Free World" were on the Right...
...It will take radical new beginnings to justify modest hopes...
...But American generosity and anti-Communism also had the effect of priming the European pump...
...In fairness, it must be added that the Common Market agriculturists are adept at the same games...
...People somehow failed to realize that these "laws" were artificial constructions of Western power...
...There must be, in contradiction to "French" revolutionary principles, conscious economic and social planning, not private enterprise...
...The ancient ways have to be rooted out, the social structure has to be overturned, and this requires some shock treatment like that of Communism...
...The result of these trends has been, in the words of Raul Prebisch, "a regressive redistribution of income...
...And this is precisely what the Committee for Economic Development (CED), one of the most sophisticated and liberal business organizations in the U.S., advocated in a 1966 policy statement...
...This marvelous symmetrical theory assumed that there was free economic exchange among equals...
...but it is more important to understand their profound relationship to reality...
...At almost every point, the result has been to make American foreign policy more reactionary...
...And so, in the 1967 AID proposals, the request for $50 million for fertilizer to India was a "tied" grant and its stated goal was to encourage private enterprise—which is to say American oil corporations—in this area...
...the export sector distorts the entire economy...
...In 1966, the Council of Economic Advisers optimistically figured that the new nations could only use $3 to $4 billion more than is now available...
...Cherished "laws" of the world market must be repealed...
...The new mid-century technology no longer required great quantities of traditional raw materials...
...If private industry, as Senator Kennedy suggests, is seen as the primary source of capital in the underedeveloped regions, both foreigners and moneyed natives will have a systematic tendency to invest in the wrong —the highly profitable, distorting, and not socially useful—enterprises...
...Given the political and social outlook of private business, available funds will go to private rather than to public enterprises, and to undertakings in the ex-colonies only when they promote a quick profit rather than balanced growth of the whole society...
...The words were fine enough—but the President uttered them in defense of the Truman Doctrine in Greece, where the United States placed its enormous power at the disposal of conservative forces fighting a popular movement whose leadership had been won over by the Communists...
...Although he wished to preserve American economic interests in Eastern Europe, he took for granted Soviet special interests in the border countries just as he accepted American special interests in Latin America—the two areas were "our respective orbits...
...In this political atmosphere McCarthy rocketed to prominence...
...But eventually, the proletarian nations (which are really peasant) will realize that nothing less than socialism can suffice...
...for the essential conservatism of the American economy in this artificially unjust world subverted most of the nation's progressive political aspirations...
...There is a general American commitment to government intervention against depressions, and there is the possibility that, with a turn toward the democratic Left, this commitment could take the form of a vast social investment which would substitute for the armament sector...
...It can inspire peasants who see no hope in a world order which condemns them to hunger and misery...
...This is a fascinating book written from a democratic socialist point of view...
...I disagree with Fulbright's analysis—particularly in discussions of human nature and Thermidor—yet tend to share many of his conclusions...
...In 1956, the American inability to intervene in Hungary constituted an admission that Communist power in Eastern Europe could not be rolled back...
...The demand for their raw materials was stagnant, or shrinking, despite their growing need for increased imports in order to feed their expanding population and/or to industrialize...
...policy from Harry Truman to the present—that a sophisticated and liberalized free enterprise could provide the economic basis for political democracy in the Third World...
...Che Guevara made the same point more bluntly...
...Consumption could, for instance, be gradually increased without endangering the whole modernization program...
...and the West, and the rich Communist East) to do wrong, this country could take the lead in making a democratic revolution—in finishing the creation of the world in humane fashion...
...From this point of view, anti-Communism was one, and only one, way of defending a status quo...
...Sometimes they will even be found within the Communist movement—or in the one, official and single party: wherever they are, these people represent their nation's most precious resource...
...There even are American liberals who advocate such an arrangement as a way of ending the Cold War...
...to reduce the rate on goods from developing lands more than rates on goods from advanced countries...
...AID put food shipments to India on a month-to-month basis until the Indian government let Standard of Indiana market its fertilizer at its own price...
...The First Committee of the U.N...
...The democratic Left could be at least as candid as the conservative Senator...
...You cannot continue to inundate a country with your manufactures," Karl Marx shrewdly observed at the time, "unless you enable it to give some produce in return...
...per cent to Africa...
...The Chinese Communists did not maintain an ambassador in North Korea and, Robert Guillian speculated in Le Monde in 1966, may well have regarded the invasion of the South as a Stalinist adventure...
...Planning Toward Internationalized Economic Aid Perhaps the most positive and dramatic action this nation could undertake would be to internationalize its economic aid...
...There is a concrete possibility of the development described by the Algerian delegate to the U.N...
...In 1945, as de Gaulle bitterly recounts the fantastic incident in his memoirs, Roosevelt was in favor of independence for Indochina on the basis of the "ideology" of democracy...
...And not only those who submit to Communist orthodoxy give lip service to this analysis...
...He delicately refrained from noting that Russia and Eastern Europe were really also part of the "cities of the world...
...John Foster Dulles officially gave the Cold War its ideological cast: the struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union was turned into a titanic conflict between good and evil in which any challenge, no matter how remote, had to be met...
...Thus, Marx insisted that the socialist future could be more liberating than the capitalist present only because it was to be built upon the material accomplishments of that present...
...now, of course, this point is a thousand times more relevant...
...Therefore, he concludes, ". . . Communism, which may indeed represent a retrogressive movement in the West where it should continue to be resisted with full energies, may nonetheless represent a progressive movement in the backward areas where its advent may be the only chance these areas have of escaping misery...
...In a cold war, particularly one run by a top executive from the Ford Motor Company, the old rules of efficiency are in force...
...To paraphrase Keynes, the pursuit of a just world economy will guarantee not civilization itself but its possibility...
...This is an example of the kind of work now being done in this area...
...These will not be easily defeated—but they can be...
...for under Moscow's system of fraternal exploitation it was suggested that some of the East European states play the classic role of raw-materials and agricultural supplier to the industrialized Big Brother in the Soviet Union...
...There was and is, however, a major exception to this rule...
...Kennedy added...
...but the Maoists of the mid-sixties were obviously working on the basis of that deduction...
...I am not suggesting anything subtle or Machiavellian...
...but these rules could be changed...
...It is not clear to me that America must react with such hostility to the violence and turmoil of the developmental process...
...government like a hired plant security guard...
...It might, however, be difficult to persuade the well-fed to stop making a profit from the hungry...
...In the name of equity and not of charity, trade policies must discriminate in favor of the developing countries...
...The American commitments were, of course, made in the revered name of centuries of historical, political, and religious ties...
...As the Secretary General of the U.N...
...Thus, in the 1950's Chiang, Syngman Rhee, Bao Dai and Diem received a vast outpouring of Ameri can aid—and Nehru relatively little...
...As Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., described the conduct of American businessmen in Latin America in the early sixties, they pressured the Alliance "to talk less about social reforms and more about private investment...
...An Iranian sociologist has reported that Togo sent more physicians and professors to France than vice versa and that, between mid-1950 and mid-1964, Argentina sent 13,800 engineers to the U.S...
...If the investment of capital from the United States could be protected and not confiscated, and if we could persuade the capitalists that they were not working in foreign countries to exploit them, it would be to the mutual benefit of everybody concerned...
...In a 1965 speech, Guevara said, We should not speak any more about developing mutually beneficial trade based on prices which are really disadvantageous to the underdeveloped countries because of the law of value and the unequal relations of international trade caused by that law...
...To them, fat, prosperous, capitalist America cannot possibly ally itself with the downtrodden and against the international status quo...
...There is no use pretending that these people can be easily convinced to support the regular allocation of even larger amounts of money...
...This would be an enormous improvement over the trends of recent years when the ratio has been regularly declining in the U.S...
...should follow the advice of the Latin Americans who met in Bogota in August 1966 (Frei of Chile, Lleras Restrepo of Columbia, Leoni of Venezuela) and restore the "Betancourt doctrine" under which this nation refuses to recognize Rightist coups d'etat...
...Americans Abroad: Benefactors and Entrepreneurs The foreign policies of the big powers operate to reinforce the logic of injustice which is part of the world created by the nineteenthcentury West...
...Acting again in classic capitalist fashion, the Russians have been quite willing to subordinate their ideology in order to make a killing on the international market...
...It is racist to assume that the Third World represents a unity, that all the non-whites, all the Southerners and all the poor are like one another...
...The American oil companies, Forbes said in this article, had got the message and were embarking on fertilizer production...
...As a result, in 1964-65 28 per cent of the internships and 26 per cent of the residen ties in U.S...
...To do incalculable harm to the masses of the Third World, the Western politician or businessman need not be evil, but only reasonable and realistic...
...which possesses more than half of the total GNP of the rich, nonCommunist part of the world) . This system would yield almost threefourths of the $20 billion gap the U.N...
...Yet, it is true that America has displayed a vested interest in at least some of the misery and poverty of the globe, and the defense of such ill-gotten gains could be (and in the past has been) the basis of a world view and foreign policy...
...Since the Administration—and the people—genuinely believed in their own benevolence, the only possible explanation for nationalist and antiAmerican movements abroad seemed to them subversion, spying, infiltration...
...it is possible to establish political sympathy for revolutionary movements without sending agents to direct them...
...The essence of trade between a capitalist power and a colony, Preobrazhensky said, was that "the figures will always show an inequality in the expenditure of labor on the two masses of goods exchanged as equivalents...
...it was political as well...
...but they rested upon a crass substratum of self-interest...
...If some wealth were actually transferred from the rich nations to the poor, at least some economic compulsion toward coercion and violence would be removed...
...the local oligarch follows the same rationale of profitability...
...Yet, it is particularly important that the democratic Left be aware of the element of reality at the center of Mao's often fanciful thought...
...I refer, above all, to the preposterous and powerful notion that the peasants of the Third World are going to build the socialism which the European workers failed to make...
...If the backward economy contents itself with the simple—and impoverishing—extraction of raw materials, it is rewarded...
...For many reasons this profoundly influential perspective is false...
...It is much simpler, of course, to solve these thorny issues on paper than in practice...
...quite simply, Communist domination of Western Europe or capitalist domination of Eastern Europe would have decisively tipped the international balance of power...
...and for 'spheres of influence' " was also a fight to avoid crisis at home...
...but if it develops itself and sends out more sophisticated products, it is penalized...
...Indeed, this attitude regularly sup plied the official rhetoric for American development in the Cold War itself...
...For the market mechanism cannot be the mainspring of Latin-American development in terms either of attracting foreign or allocating domestic capital...
...That country had been partitioned in desultory fashion on the basis of proposals made by General MacArthur and sanctioned by Stalin...
...Arms Economy vs...
...For now the wealthy powers had created such stable and enormous markets that they could make more money producing for one another's affluence than by investing in underdeveloped countries...
...There is the danger that America might adopt a policy of "sentimental imperialism" (the phrase is that of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr...
...The version of Keynesianism embraced by the American businessman of the sixties did not involve the notion that a reduction in Defense spending would be compensated by a corresponding, multi-billion-dollar rise in social investments...
...On our part, we should recognize that we have no more business in the political affairs of Eastern Europe than Russia has in the political affairs of Latin America, Western Europe, or the United States...
...To this day Latin-American profits are high in trade, and there is no real incentive to industrialize...
...As a result, the French government launched a state-subsidized merger movement to create a corporate base large enough to sustain a modern computer technology...
...Trade and Development Conference predicted that the "savings gap" would reach $20 billion in 1970.t However much these computations differ (because of different definitions and the fact that so little effort has been devoted to the task), economists consider that there is an objective basis for determining how much capital the developing world needs and how much it can absorb...
...In his famous essay on "People's War," Lin Piao called North America and Western Europe '`the cities of the world"—and Asia, Africa, and Latin America "the rural areas of the world...
...Economic and Social Council Meeting in Geneva, in July 1966: "Even as the detente in the Cold War has permitted an attenuation of the conflict between blocs with different social systems, one must fear that the East-West opposition will revolve on its axis and become an antagonism of North against South...
...And there must be more equitable sharing of wealth to create a large domestic market, and massive investments in education and new industrial and economic infrastructures...
...As Kennedy states the premise, "private industry is the primary source of capital in all the underdeveloped regions...
...hospitals were filled by foreigners—and 90 per cent of the students from Asia who came to study in America didn't go home...
...they leave the world-to-come to the preachers while they pragmatically reconstruct the reality that is...
...But this emphasis on the ideological aspect of the Dulles policy should not lead to the conclusion that justice would have been served if the nation simply had stuck to its material self-interest...
...To qualify for this exceptional support, a regime had to be fanatically anti-Communist—and it almost always was opposed to any real democratic social progress as well...
...But in the impure world fashioned in the nineteenth century the impoverished lands were required to give up the possibility of protecting new industries during the first, hesitant phase of development...
...But there is a recalcitrant exception to these trends: oil...
...When capitalism conquered the planet, it destroyed or corrupted the indigenous achievements it encountered...
...The American people were bewildered and fearful in the presence of a megalomaniacal dictator, and involved in a frustrating shooting war only five years after World War II had ended in Tokyo Bay...
...Although there are tremendous social, political, and economic forces urging the U.S...
...Secretary of War Stimson's perspective was not adopted...
...Indeed, non-economic factors might keep America from doing anything decent for the world's poor...
...The alliances with rightist dictators were, in this perspective, acts of virtue, not of necessity...
...The American symbol of this one-dimensional and paranoid antiCommunism was, of course, Senator Joseph McCarthy...
...This can be done...
...There are two distinct parts of this thesis, one a description, the other a value judgment...
...It is not that such an approach will work perfectly...
...In October 1966 a neutralist "summit" was held at New Delhi and there were reports that Tito, Nasser, and Madame Gandhi were going to protest this tragedy and call for a "freezing" of the debt of all the developing countries...
...But this most emphatically does not mean that this country should adopt some democratic variant of the Maoist strategy and seek to foment wars of "national liberation" all over the globe...
...But there was, and is, another anti-Communism...
...This does not mean that the wealthy nations are to opt for poverty in order to fulfill a moral obligation to the wor'ld's less fortunate...
...The author was V. I. Lenin, the date, 1916, the text, Imperialism...
...In 1916, Lenin had the excuse that he could not look 30 years ahead into the future...
...Even if America and Russia have now discovered a common interest in not annihilating one another, they still represent different social systems with conflicting ideas about how to organize the globe...
...it appeared in the October 1966 issue of the international organ of the pro-Moscow Communists, the World Marxist Review: The prices for which the socialist countries sell their goods are influenced mostly by the conditions of production in the capitalist lands, and for this reason the exchange proportions are not always commensurate with the proportion of the expenditure of socially necessary labor within the framework of the socialist world economy...
...and in its dealings with the world...
...They have suggested a development insurance fund based on the "willingness of advanced countries to contribute, on the understanding that their direct benefits will not equal their contributions...
...Domestic agriculture is subsidized, world oil prices are rigged to suit the needs of Texas millionaires, and so on...
...is politically able to tolerate the upheavals, the smashing of the old oligarchies, the violence inherent in the development process...
...this is essentially the same difficulty faced by the Alliance for Progress: what attitude would an international aid agency take toward reactionary governments, toward rightist or Communist dictatorships...
...The "reactionary Keynesians" favored tax cuts which would disproportiontately benefit the rich, maximize private consumption, and keep the public sector on starvation rations...
...The basic infrastructural needs of the poor nations—roads, education, cheap mass housing, etc.—are simply not profitable investments...
...Beyond these pragmatic considerations, there is a moral imperative which requires that humanity live up to the fullness of its powers, and men can rightly boast that they have always experimented and innovated...
...In their work Monopoly Capital Baran and Sweezy curiously treat this most fundamental issue only in a footnote...
...Such disequilibrium would have been intolerable enough according to the old-fashioned rules designed for nations within a single social system—but it became utterly impossible when the contending powers represented alternate ways of organizing the globe...
...Indeed, it is high time that the Western powers reverse the scandalous trend toward loans instead of aid which has been picking up strength throughout the sixties...
...it is potentially the major source of development capital...
...Toward the end of World War II, a Republican member of Franklin Roosevelt's cabinet had an intriguing idea of a postwar settle ment...
...Since it is not, there is hope—but so far, in the postwar period, this is a most modest and theoretical consolation...
...there was a cold war instead...
...In this view, the society does not need the Cold War in order to protect its overseas profits, but rather to justify a domestic war economy which is the main bulwark against depression...
...Cities of the World" In terms of world peace, this detente between the nuclear giants was most welcome...
...Standard of Indiana understandably refused to accept these conditions...
...The companies benefit, of course, from direct production controls within America—the money made in this rigidly dirigiste sector of the economy paradoxically seems to create laisser-faire millionaires—and the princely benefits from the 27%2 per cent depletion allowance...
...There is no easy road out of underdevelopment, and one must talk pragmatically about some sort of international mixed economy...
...Thus, the late Paul Baran resolved his paradox about the disparity of the enormous military means which America deployed to protect its relatively modest international economic ends...
...The American policy I have described sets in motion a vicious circle: the market transfers wealth from the poor to the rich—and foreign aid, far from off-setting this tendency, exacerbates it...
...There have been proposals to commit all wealthy countries to automatically give 1 per cent of their GNP for international economic development...
...The latter asserts that if a coercive and even totalitarian accumulation of capital is the only practical way out of the impoverished past into a more just future, then one reluctantly endorses the "progressiveness" of this tragic, but unavoidable, transition...
...If America were to embark upon a genuinely democratic foreign policy, and sought to abolish the gap between rich and poor nations, this vested interest in death would be threatened...
...When Stalin acknowledged the legitimacy of the British—and imperialist—claim to a sphere of interest in Greece, he was making a not so sly reference to an agreement he had made with Winston Churchill...
...they send their most precious national resource, trained human beings...
...Such international economic planning could make long-range policies possible...
...The developing nations were deprived of capital and skills, and both of these deficiencies can be made up in part by capital and technical assistance from the advanced economies...
...However, another question in international economic planning is anything but a technicality...
...In this setting, the principles of "fairness" laid down at Havana allowed Western capital to increase the world's economic unfairness...
...Thus, the democratic revolution must build on economic and social foundations unknown, and even antithetical, to those of the great European capitalist transformations of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries...
...It might serve as an emotional and political substitute for the reactionary passions of rightist anti-Communism...
...The State Department held up these funds in order to "make the Peruvians more reasonable" in the negotiations which they were then carrying on with American oil companies...
...But perhaps the most single revealing example of how American policy reinforces the systematic injustices of our artificial economic world is found in the area of tarriffs...
...Ob viously, funds must now be allocated on some more rational, predictable basis of need and capacity to use them...
...But this effort in political persuasion must be made...
...The external debt of these nations in 1964 was "on the order of" $40 billion, or roughly equal to the entire postwar American aid program up to 1965...
...I am not referring to the straightforward evils of protectionism which were designed to do harm to the poor and benefit the rich...
...Their word for such brutal and forced accumulation of capital is "socialism...
...As a result, the military defiance of economic law accentuated rather than reversed the reactionary priorities at work in the rest of the Ameri can aid program...
...These efforts hardly created utopia...
...Indeed, the U.S...
...Senator Fulbright put it this way in his Arrogance of Power: I suggest that we begin to replace bilateral foreign aid, which is analogous to private philanthropy, with an internationalized program based on the same principle of public responsibility which underlies progressive taxation and the social services we provide for our own people...
...Thus, imperialism was the distinctive and last historical stage of capitalism itself—a final, desperate attempt to postpone the crisis of the system...
...Maoism also has a message for aspiring elites...
...Peasants may well be capable of greater political struggle than Marx imagined, but in the ultimate analysis they can only deliver power to the city dwellers who will rule over them...
...As John Kenneth Galbraith pointed out in The New Industrial State, the billions for armament go to a very specific sector of the economy, one that requires extensive research and development for the creation of a sophisticated and advanced technology...
...As John F. Kennedy realized when he initiated the Alliance, there is structural resistance to positive change in the developing lands...
...Building an arsenal of annihilation is a congenial activity for American society...
...Some random cases will demonstrate this fantastic situation: The New York Times reported in 1965 that Latin-American "debt payments were as high as the total of all public development loans and grants during the year...
...On the world market, the demand for manufactured goods zoomed while that for primary products declined...
...But the real struggle was over the future of Europe...
...If democratic reformers came to power, the argument went, they would only create instability, a breakdown of order, and conditions which would lead to a Communist take-over...
...The strange notion of a non- and even anti-capitalist imperialism was first put forward in the 1920's by one of the most brilliant of the Bolshevik economists, E. Preobrazhensky.* His analysis still casts a very real light upon the present relations between the Communists and the Third World...
...It goes without saying [Lenin wrote] that if capitalism could develop agriculture, which today lags far behind industry everywhere, it could raise the standard of living of the masses, who are everywhere still poverty-stricken and underfed...
...They were, to borrow an irony from George Orwell, becoming "more equal" than ever before...
...It sought some alternative both to Communism and to the status quo, for it recognized the right and necessity of revolution but thought it should be democratic, not totalitarian...
...In the fifties, this logic brought American support to Batista, Jiminez, Trujillo, and their like...
...The real meaning of the word "socialism" in the Maoist vocabulary is a forced accumulation of capital more pitiless and systematic than that of Western capitalism...
...At this point one encounters an element of truth in the Maoist fantasy of international politics and Communist betrayal...
Vol. 14 • September 1967 • No. 5
