U.S. Policy and Communist Vulnerability
WOLFE, BERTRAM D.
An analysis of U.S. Policy and Communist Vulnerability By Bertram D. Wolfe VULNERABILITY IMPLIES an alert and determined opponent, ready to take advantage of every weakness and every opening....
...While as a theory Marxism can be refuted by intellect talking to intellect, the strength of the Marxist movement as such lies not in the realm of ideas but in the realm of emotions...
...The Strategy and Tactics—Leninism Leninism is the strategy and tactics for waging this war, for utilizing the revolutionary forces afloat in the world for the purpose of building totalitarian single-party power throughout the world...
...And this is a fundamental difference which we must strive to understand...
...And in vast areas of the world there is total politicalization and autarchy...
...Marx: The working class is destined to develop its own consciousness, its own theory, its own organization, its own party, and its own revolution...
...Insofar as the Communists are doing just that and we are not, they are slowly winning the war and will continue to win the war which will occupy the rest of our century...
...Those who "being naught were to become all," having become something, the whole scheme loses its tidy outlines...
...Before the year was up, it was to come with the next war, within the year...
...It uses the working class as a battering ram because the urban working class is the most unified and concentrated, but it uses the peasantry as a battering ram too...
...In this struggle, the workers have displayed stubbornness, tirelessness, courage, selfishness, solidarity, skill, incapacity to recognize when they are defeated, and the power to enlist the sympathy of the rest of society in fighting off this prophetic destiny and this prophetic assignment...
...In its place has come the increasing social and political regulation of the economy...
...The power of resistance of capital has gradually weakened...
...in the 20th century, two world wars and their revolutionary aftermaths have proved that nationalism is the one great cause for which millions are ready to fight and die...
...and it tries to use discontent in all classes...
...Not merely in comparatively classless America, but in once caste-ridden England and France and Germany as well...
...The state...
...A decade later, Marx undertook to lay bare "the law of motion" of industrial society in a work called Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy...
...America and the free world are at this moment stronger economically and militarily than the opponent that is determined to destroy us...
...Main Street frequently exercises more power than Wall Street, and labor and farmers have more influence on legislation than corporation executives or bankers...
...Besides having claimed to be a science, it has been a creed which can be clung to by faith when the intellect questions and rebels...
...We did create it...
...The world revolution of our time...
...The book is strangely constructed so that most of it consists of empirical evidence, striking descriptions of the workings of industrial society, drawn from the England of Marx's day, or rather the England of the day before Marx's day...
...The special mission to do the shattering was assigned by Marx to the working class...
...Moreover, the whole notion of an autonomous economy, with its own autonomic laws, on which Marx based himself, and on which Marx's opponents in the mid-19th century based themselves no less, all this has become obsolete and revealed itself as no longer a workable hypothesis...
...We, not they, are the champions of the freedom of the human spirit, of the freedom of the arts and sciences, freedom of conscience, freedom of belief and worship, freedom from scarcity and want, and from the tyranny of irresponsible and omnipotent officials...
...But the apocalypse failed to appear...
...Such has been the perversity of history that it has not vouchsafed the revolution Marx expected in the countries of advanced industry, but has vouchsafed revolutions which invoke Marx's name only in underdeveloped countries on the eve or in the incipient stages of industrialization, in countries shaken by the impact of the West's economy and equality upon autocratic institutions which Marx regarded not as pre-socialist but as pre-bourgeois or non-bourgeois...
...is that it prophesied the end of nationalism...
...When it wages war on its own people, it is a real war, a war of nerves, a war of quarantine (the Iron Curtain), a war of propaganda, of agitation, of conditioning, of psychological warfare, of physical warfare, of prisons, of concentration camps, of bombardment by loud speakers and press and movies and all the means of cultural conditioning and...
...He took most of the evidence from the Parliamentary Blue Books, reports of a Parliament that had already investigated the evils of early industrialism and was busy regulating, moderating, reforming and removing the evil excrescences of industrialization...
...Indeed, in this lies the strength and the staying powers of Marxism after Marxism as a "science" has proved itself bankrupt...
...Western society planted everywhere the seeds of its own creativeness...
...Centralization of the means of production, and socialization of labor, at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument...
...Not the "bourgeois-minded and vacillating" working class but a revolutionary elite, a classless vanguard party, is the guardian of the working class...
...They know that they are engaged in a war to the finish, a war for the world...
...Whether these features are to be welcomed or to be feared, they have surely produced a world which makes the projections of Marx and the projections of his 19th century opponents alike irrelevant...
...Unlike the intellectuals who offered them Socialist leadership, they have no stomach for being reduced to naught, the better to prepare themselves for becoming all...
...Marxism as an "ism...
...If the worker has engaged in a "class struggle," it has been one to put off from himself this increasing proletarianization and impoverishment and this mission which Marx and the Marxists would confer upon him...
...it has lost in numerical weight in society while it has gained in status and in economic and political power...
...3. It promised "production for use," that is, for the sake of the consumer and consumers' goods...
...If we do not, then there are no psychological or ideological vulnerabilities of Communism...
...The industrial proletariat has not become the whole of society, except for the little handful of magnates at the opposite pole...
...The 20th century has made it a commonplace that politics tends to determine economics...
...The latter could only fume impotently and curse "that man in the White House" while we went through the tremendous revolution in our society known as the New Deal...
...It is not the revolution which Marx predicted, nor did it grow from the seeds he sowed...
...As a science, it has produced only invalid results, but it is also an "ism"— Marxism...
...into the folly of an attack...
...6. It promised "freedom," and it has abolished all freedoms...
...second, their strategical and tactical vulnerabilities...
...In Marx's day there was a general superstition of which Marx was the most prominent advoate but which was general for most of the leading thinkers of his age: the superstition that "economics determines politics...
...We are proving vulnerable because of our incapacity and unwillingness to use the openings which their system has provided, does provide and will continue to provide...
...Those 110 years have not dealt kindly with Marx's predictions and have mocked and refuted the very "law of motion" which he claimed to have discovered...
...The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production...
...His book thus gives overwhelming evidence of this evolution and reform, as he himself is compelled finally to point out...
...Not a word of what Marx has written is helpful in approaching the problems of our era...
...As such, it is, of course, highly vulnerable if there is standing over against it an alert, determined and watchful opponent, ready to utilize the revolutionary situations and strategies and to contest for the leadership of the forces set free by Western civilization itself...
...Insofar as it has claimed to be a science, it is dead...
...National feeling provides great vulnerabilities in the Soviet empire, if we have the wit to exploit them...
...Industrial society not at the end but the beginning of its development...
...Here, Bertram D. Wolfe, in an article adapted from a recent lecture at the National War College, discusses some of the basic elements of that relationship...
...What they propose to do is to extend their power and their zone: to set up regimes of specialized productivity for power and for war, not regimes of plenty and freedom...
...Another thing which would startle Marx were he to be resurrected today is the succession of industrial revolutions which followed his "industrial revolution...
...We, not they, are the advocates of a just and enduring peace, based on the respect for the rights and the existence of all nations in being or a-borning or yet to be...
...Wolfe is the author of Three Who Made A Revolution...
...The prophecies...
...but with this grows too the revolt of the working class...
...Marx's third prophesy dealt with the increasing polarization of society...
...Actually...
...When he is discussing the achievement of the 10-hour work law...
...But we do not try to understand or to utilize it...
...In place of becoming an executive committee of a shrinking bourgeoisie, as he described it, it has been increasingly democratized, subjected to pressure of the labor vote, the farm vote, and the intermediate class votes, even to the pressure of strategically located minorities such as the Negroes in the big cities of the North...
...The knell of capitalist private property sounds...
...and the end is nowhere in sight, unless atomic war should bring a cataclysm indeed, but not Marx's cataclysm...
...Whoever harnesses the forces of that revolution which the West has set in motion yet has not striven to understand, whoever manages to put these forces in politics and economics, in science and technology, in all fields of life to its use, and to deny them to its opponent, that side will win the struggle for the world...
...We must first examine the self-refuting inconsistencies in Marxism and its prophecies that have been refuted by history...
...But for this it was not necessary to study the Parliamentary Blue Books...
...Thus, the very moves we make to preserve peace are moves which profoundly endanger the peace...
...The second startling thing about the Communist Manifesto, which aimed to be the program for the Revolution of 1848...
...Lenin promised that "every cook is to become master of the affairs of the state...
...We aim to persuade our opponents that our intentions are friendly...
...In fact, totalitarianism is, from this angle, an attempt totally to determine the economic and social structure of society by putting one's hand on the powerful political lever, the lever of unified centralized and exclusive power...
...And I don't mean the word "war" figuratively but literally...
...Second, we need a revolutionary strategy, to put the revolutionary forces of our time at our disposal and deny to them their use and exploitation...
...There is no country in the world more badly in need of agrarian reform than the USSR itself...
...Though the Marxist Revolution never occurred, and is not likely to occur, we do inded live in an age of revolution, a revolution which began before Marx's time and which will outlast our own lifetime...
...Leninism can be understood as a strategy and tactics for the conquest of power, for the maintenance and expansion of power, for making that power absolute and total...
...But we are acting as though from feebleness, thus endangering peace by making the Communists underestimate our strength and luring them, without intending to do so...
...7. It promised "the workers' paradise," and has immured its people behind an impenetrable wall and turned their country into a prison for their thoughts and for their very lives, which cannot be penetrated by learning what happens on the outside, nor by the freedom to discuss what is happening to themselves on the inside...
...Every separate issue, every negotiation, every conference, every utterance, they regard as a move in that war, whereas for us in the West each is treated as a separate concrete issue to be settled once and for all in order that we may relax...
...Ho Chi Minh, dictator in the name of a dictatorship of a non-existent proletariat through a nonexistent party of the proletariat, dictates over a society which is not only not socialist but is still pre-capitalist...
...to link the revolutionary forces afoot in the world to their war for the winning of the world...
...Along with the constantly diminishing number of magnates of capital . . . grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation...
...2. It promised "perpetual peace...
...to divide the world into their "peace" zone, where we may not and do not intervene, and our "war" zone, where the entire world and the United Nations and they also may intervene—to that extent it is not they but we who are vulnerable...
...The world was headed toward immediate and total catastrophe...
...1. It promised "land to the peasants...
...We, not they, are today the advocates of genuine agrarian reform and the right of each man to till his own land...
...At the same time it has used this war upon its own people to keep them mobilized for unending war to win the world...
...For this they have fought their struggle, and to these aims they have succeeded in rallying most of modern society...
...Marx: Economics determines politics...
...And it is destined to leave it now in a fearful cataclysm, a day of wrath and doom, by the workings of "the imminent laws of capitalist production itself...
...Or where is the proletariat of North Vietnam...
...There is no "Lockeism...
...It has spread from Europe, which was its home, to Asia and Africa, which in Marx's time knew not the nation...
...With this caveat in mind, let us examine first their theoretical foundations and...
...its own problems, and its own dissensions...
...Lenin: The working class left to itself is capable only of bourgeois thought...
...When it came neither with the street skirmishes nor with the wars which Marx advocated, he decided it would come with the next downswing in the business cycle...
...It treated industrial society, in mvthical Hegelian terms, as a system, all the parts of which were so connected that no change could be made in it...
...as the French Socialist...
...But the industrial revolution is unending...
...We aim to trade concessions, which in practice means only to give away positions we possess, so that the other side, which offers nothing in exchange, can renew the battle from a more advantageous position...
...Marx began his long work to give a "scientific" foundation to this expectation of the apocalypse...
...Only then do weaknesses and inconsistencies become vulnerabilities...
...We, not they, are able to call the armies to "fraternize across the trenches," for it is they who must cut off their armies from the news of what is happening in the West, and we who must make our armies and theirs understand what is happening in their land...
...In the battle for the future shape of the world, all the creative and explosive weapons are in our hands if we have the wit and the understanding to take them up...
...Leninism claims to be Marxism: the "Marxism" "of the period of imperialism, world war and world revolution...
...Thus—and I have named only a few of these potential vulnerabilities—all the revolutionary slogans which Lenin sought to use and which the Kremlin uses today against all peoples, governments and institutions, could easily be turned by a determined opponent, in tune with our age and ready to use revolutionary strategy, into weapons in our hands...
...as a strategy and tactics for the utilization of the discontents, the unrests, the disturbances and the revolutionary forces which the West has set afloat in the world—to the end of subverting and destroying all that the West stands for, and all that the West dreams of...
...He knew the development from cottage artisanship to machinofacture, from the use of wind and water and animal and manpower to the use of steam power...
...Yet when one comes to the last chapter, "the last for which the first was made," a chapter called "The Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation," one finds that Capital came into the world, conceived in original sin, "a congenital bloodstain on its cheek, dripping with blood and dirt from head to foot, from every pore...
...4. It promised "plenty...
...Out of labor's influence on government, and out of the classless pressure of the whole of society, has come a state regulation of economic life, a legal limitation of the hours of work, a minimum wage, collective bargaining, the legislated right to organize, and a whole sweep of social security legislation...
...The factory magnates have resigned themselves to the inevitable...
...Though in all these things the free world has its own imperfections and lapses, these are the things that the free world stands for and in good measure realizes, and these are the things which totalitarianism completely destroys and makes high treason even to think upon...
...Yet 1848 witnessed the greatest explosion of nationalism in the history of Europe...
...Marx: The revolution will come first in England, or perhaps Germany or France...
...The society which he thought was to polarize until it had reached the breaking point of total polarization has actually been depolarizing...
...Here is where an alert opponent would find more vulnerabilities than he would know what to do with if he were really on the job...
...What we need, first of all, is an understanding of this universal, unitary, unending war to the finish...
...Not polarization hut depolarization...
...The Communists seek to give neither abundance nor freedom...
...The Communists' hands would prove nerveless and lifeless if we would but grasp the weapons which they are using against us, which are not theirs by right and by right can be made to belong to us, for they are indeed our weapons...
...Since then have come the age of electricity, of conveyor belt, combustion engine, synthetic chemistry, electronics, automation, fission, fusion...
...Only then will their system prove more vulnerable than ours, as potentially it is...
...When this did not come immediately, as the Communist Manifesto anticipated...
...Now the state is the master of the affairs of every cook...
...One capitalist kills many": all other classes are destined to be proletarianized: and...
...But after their death the revisionists who followed were outlawed and condemned, and ceased to be Marxists, and those who claimed to be Marxists survived only with the aid of the frozen orthodoxy of a dogmatic creed no longer subject to scientific examination or revision...
...The power of attack of the working class has grown with the number of its allies...
...The expropriators are expropriated...
...And piling up the discontents, it aims to put in power not the working class but its own elite vanguard non-class party...
...Intermediate classes have not disappeared...
...And therefore, in spite of the inconsistencies, cruelties and absurdities of their system, the balance of vulnerability has been swinging from their side to ours...
...Marx: Revolution comes after capitalism has reached its pinnacle and comes first in the most advanced countries...
...Whether the answer to this question is Yes or No will determine the outcome of the protracted war that is likely to occupy the rest of our lives and the rest of our century...
...In 1848, this catastrophe was only days, or at most weeks, away...
...Politics determines economics through tariffs, protectionism, quotas of export and import, currency regulation and manipulation, regulation of the interest rate, deficit spending, price floors, price ceilings, parities, subsidies, state fostering of cartelization as in Germany, state persecution or prosecution of cartelization as in our antitrust acts in the United States, supranational economies like Benelux, the "inner six common market," the "outer seven free-trade area," and all the other supranational economies that are beginning to grow up...
...The growing supremacy of politics over economics...
...In the four decades that this new power has existed and become total, all of its original promises have turned into their opposites...
...The West's rapid expansion to all the continents of the world upset all the world's surviving civilizations...
...Marcel Deat...
...Insofar as we act as if we were weak, as if our task were to persuade the unpersuadable and to settle what cannot be settled, instead of to win the war the Kremlin is waging against us: insofar as we have permitted the Communists Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev's arrival in the U. S. next week marks a new turn in Soviet-Ameriean relations...
...Marx and Engels in their last years were uncomfortably aware of this, and were beginning an uneasy and reluctant patching or revising of their dogmas...
...as if by mitosis, society is to be polarized...
...Thus the conclusion of 1848 is tacked on again after the mass of empirical material to the contrary which makes up the bulk of the volume...
...Lenin: The revolution comes first in Russia, where capitalism is weakest, and then we carry the revolution to advanced Europe, or failing in that, to Asia and Africa from backward Russia in order to deny to the advanced countries their outlets and markets, cut them off from the backward part of the world and cut the undeveloped countries off from them...
...One hundred and ten years ago, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels issued their call to arms in the Communist Manifesto, with its dogmatic pronouncements and apocalyptic expectations...
...Lenin: Politics determines economics...
...5. The state that was "to wither away" has expanded to totality...
...but there is a Marxism...
...This is a world revolution in the true sense...
...We, not they, are the champions of the rights and freedoms of working men, the freedom of movement, the freedom to change jobs, the freedom to build organizations of their own choosing under their own control, the right to elect their own officials, to formulate and negotiate their own demands, the right to strike, the right to vote for a party and a program and candidates of their own choice...
...and it has produced perpetual scarcity of all the goods that make life gracious, pleasant, easy, cultured, rewarding, full of promise and possibility...
...Classes have become more fluid and more equalized...
...The state thus has proved refractory to Marxist prophecies...
...as in China, the peasantry can be used as the battering ram...
...To win the suffrage on the continent of Europe, to influence and exert control over government, to legalize and contractual-ize improvements in the hours of their lives that are spent in labor, to win some security and dignity within the system in which they live, to become "something" in the world in which they have their being, rather than to be "everything" in the world which exists only in the fantasy of the Utopians, of whom Marx was perhaps the greatest—it is to these aims that they have rallied...
...but they study ceaselessly to utilize it for the spread of their power and for the destruction of ours...
...Hence, the comparatively rapid advance since 1860...
...It would come with the next street skirmish...
...the system could not be improved or reformed: it could not evolve: it could only be scrapped...
...The Communists know that they are engaged in what Professor Robert Strausz-Hupe and his associates at the University of Pennsylvania Foreign Policy Research Institute have called "a protracted war...
...We are not feeble...
...Instead it has set up production for production's sake, for the sake of expanding the oppressive power of the producer-owner state...
...He thought that industrial society had reached "the end of its development" in 1848 when he pronounced its doom so stirringly...
...Thus what has happened to the economy is that it has been increasingly politicalized...
...they have multiplied...
...This was the industrial revolution that Marx studied...
...The heart of those works was an expectation of an early apocalypse...
...It is a revolutionary strategy for the winning of the world and for the remaking of man according to Lenin's blueprint...
...The Communists did not create it...
...But this determination and this readiness are today lacking in the free world...
...If we do, the Communists are vulnerable on every front and at every moment and in every layer of their society...
...The Theoretical Foundation—Marxism The theoretical foundation lies in something called Marxism...
...Marx's Capital has this as its function...
...His theory was but one of the misunderstandings of this revolution...
...And now...
...If one reads Marx's Capital as an empirical student should read it, the overwhelming evidence of the Blue Books drives one, as it drove him, to this conclusion...
...The Russian Revolution—Promise and Performance The Russian Revolution is now over 40 years old...
...It dictates to the working class...
...It rules over the working class—and all other classes...
...Unkindest cut of all...
...And when the scepter of power has been seized, the vanguard party can claim that it has established the dictatorship of a proletariat which does not yet exist...
...Lenin: Revolution comes first where capitalism is weakest—"the break in the system at the point of its weakest link...
...It is an ersaz religion, and this is harder to reach with rational argument and harder to cope with...
...a revolution can be made in a backward country where the working class is not ripe, and the vanguard party can profess to be establishing a dictatorship in the name of the proletariat where it is only beginning to come into existence...
...8. It has raised the banner of "national self-determination" and "anti-imperialism," but it has become the most aggressive, the most oppressive, the most rapidly expanding imperialist power in the history of man...
...And even the "owning class" was divided in its attitude...
...In America, absurdly Marx would think, one man, woman and child in every eight is today a stockholder in the great corporations which he thought were going to provide the little "handful" of capitalists to be destroyed...
...when necessary, a bullet in the base of the brain...
...We aim to "reassure" the Soviets as to their "security...
...This integument is burst asunder...
...The defects were treated as integral to the system and incapable of being removed defect by defect, and replaced by other structures or circumstances, but only shattered, replaced by another system...
...regulation of child labor, and other such achievements of the England of his day, he writes: "Capital is under compulsion from society...
...Edward Gibbon once wrote, "Persuasion is the resource of the feeble: and the feeble can seldom persuade...
...At the same time, it provides great vulnerabilities for the free world in Asia and Africa, because the men in the Kremlin do have the wit to exploit the nationalism which the Communist Manifesto said was on the way out or was already out...
...as a prescription for the building of a party designed to seize and hold power...
...If this is so...
...no "Smithism," "Millism," "Durckheimism...
...the worker himself has not consented to be increasingly proletarianized, increasingly impoverished, and to have thrust upon him the mission with which Marx endowed him...
...nor to aid it in finding new forms of abundance and of freedom...
...Thus, the flaw in the foundation itself, the theory on which Communism claims to build, lies in the fact that a hundred years of subsequent history have reduced every theoretical tenet of Marxism to a shambles...
...wrote, "has undergone a process of socialization, while socialism has undergone a process of nationalization...
...Actually it was but at the beginning of the development of its productive forces...
...Leninism claims to be Marxism, yet in all essential respects it has stood Marxism on its head as Marx claims to have stood Hegelianism on its head...
...But in the end it took away even the land which the peasants had under the Tsars, and it herded them into a new state-owned serfdom...
...The worker rejects his mission...
...Micheletism," "Rankeism" or "Gib-bonism...
...Instead it has produced a totalitarian state which forever wages a two-fold war—a war on its own people to remake them according to its blueprint, and a war upon the world...
Vol. 42 • September 1959 • No. 32
