The Half-Way Revolution:

...One has no glimpse of an underlying strategy, of men at work with a sense of creating history, confident, as Russian or Chinese leaders seem confident, that the levers of the future are in their hands...

...Man has often lived through great changes and great upheavals...

...They are being asked, as fellow citizens of a new great society, to join in building a fairer, juster and more ample world...

...So far it has carried the world's economic revolution halfway—only to the point of involving the world's peoples, not to the point of satisfying them...

...By ending colonial control, they have, as it were, enfranchised the developing nations as they once enfranchised their own workers...

...But what are they...

...So he loses out in the argument to the well-trained young fellow from Moscow who genuinely believes himself engaged on a crusade for all mankind, and who attacks the Western student for belonging to a society which puts profits first, exploits the world, grows richer while the rest grow poorer and does nothing to lessen the gap— save perhaps when a Communist scare leads to some improvised and half-baked activity...

...The myth cannot be dispelled simply by the defensive arguments that times have changed, that Britain's backing down over Suez or America's patience over Cuba proves that the imperialist drive has spent its force...

...In this new world-wide society, the Western nations form an elite whose wealth is increasing...

...It is possible that such modifications in Western policy would ultimately affect even the Communists...

...but, on balance, they give the impression of finding it a nuisance rather than an opportunity...

...All too often, the Asian or African reaction to such pleas is to believe that fear of the Russians has induced the West's new patience—an argument which increases Communist prestige and makes the West look not restrained but simply weak...

...The Marshall Plan's impact did not end in 1952...

...At the present time, she is living in Ghana, "where her husband, Sir Robert Jackson, holds the post of Commissioner of Development...

...for, as an American extremist once remarked, in these days "the rich want liberty but the poor want ham and eggs...

...Peking argues that they will continue to raven, Moscow suggests that the risk of hydrogen war will deter them...

...They react to an external challenge—to Communist encroachment, to resurgent local nationalism, to an anti-colonial outbreak...

...The memories of imperialism cannot be exorcised simply by not doing what other nations never thought it legitimate to do in the first place...

...At present, a Western student involved perhaps on a joint work project with Indian students from the troubled universities of Calcutta or Lucknow cannot explain coherently what the West really intends...

...And the process of disproving the Marxist myth—a process which began with the first Factory Act and the first shilling in the income tax—would be completed by replacing the picture of imperialist exploitation with the reality of world-wide economic aid...

...The political and social revolution of equality—national equality, racial equality, economic equality—destroys the old traditional landmarks and inspires new hopes and passions from one end of the earth to the other...

...They carried to them new ideas of economic and national equality which effectively helped to undermine old ideas and old institutions...

...But there is already a distinct deviation between the more relaxed views of Moscow and the revolutionary rigidity of Peking's faith...

...The old polarization between the classes in the domestic economy has given place to a new one in the developing world: a division between the wealthy lands of the North, where the breakthrough to sustained growth has been achieved, and the underdeveloped lands of the South, where partial mobilization creates an explosive mixture of hope and frustration...

...Now the West must move boldly to help the underdeveloped nations prosper by their own efforts The Half-way Revolution By Barbara Ward MEN do not WIN battles either of weapons or of ideas by remaining perpetually on the defensive...

...The earth's political and social crust has become thin and friable...

...Such a molten world of change is, inevitably, malleable and plastic to a degree never experienced before...

...Here we meet a profound paradox...

...The contrast is all the more remarkable in that it was in this same community of Atlantic nations that all the modern revolutions had their origin...

...The Western student cannot therefore even begin to talk of the value and advantage of free institutions...

...And the work that lies ahead is to create the permanent institutions and policies by which Western wealth can be set to work positively to advance the world's general welfare, to build up the conditions in which developing nations can prosper by their own efforts in a stable and expanding international economy...

...but it cannot he said that the various reactions add up to much more than either holding a line or retreating to unprepared positions...

...They are entangling you in their economic web and when the day of reckoning comes, you will find—as Egypt and Tunisia and Central America have discovered in their time—that the imperial debt collectors will stop at nothing to recover their stake...

...The need is for a positive framework of Western action based upon the opposite of exploitation: the transfer of wealth from rich to poor to ensure that the poor can develop their own potentialities for their own good...

...No one can be dogmatic on this point...

...His argument would be action, his proof the facts...

...But if, while maintaining as much armed strength as is needed for effective deterrence, the Western governments employed their power mainly in sending grainboats, not gunboats, tractors, not tanks, it is possible that Khrushchev's case for the possibility of coexistence would be strengthened, and that this in turn would affect the future policies of 600 million Chinese, fully armed and organized under total state control...

...Wealth, after all, gives larger elbowroom and opens up greater possibilities of action...

...The only way in which some security and sanity can be achieved in Western relations with the Communists is by gradually destroying the mania in Communist minds and enabling them to see facts directly, not through the distorting glass of ideology...

...The Communists' most effective argument is still that economic aid simply masks a Western attempt to reimpose imperial control by economic means...

...The first possibility seems to demand Western conciliatoriness, the second Western toughness...

...Ho w is it that a world engaged in the heroic task of re-creating its whole social order in the pattern of growth and hope stirs so little interest, so little sense of participation, so little confidence for the future among those who first set the whole process in motion...

...But the next fundamental step—to use governmental action to share wealth more widely, to distribute some of the riches and build up the prosperity of the poor—has yet to be taken...

...and it is significant that one of the points most at issue between Moscow and Peking is whether coexistence with "ravening imperialists" is possible...

...it has become revolutionary in a sense never before experienced by the human race...

...but so far, they participate in its labors rather than in its rewards...

...The economic revolution of growth, technology and industrialism is spreading around the globe...

...And the most ubiquitous and unpredictable of all revolutions—modern scientific advance—abolishes space, annihilates time, opens the vistas of the infinitely great in outer space, of the infinitely small in human heredity, offers a hint of an unlimited plenty and the possibility of atomic annihilation...

...They are compelled to accept the fact of world-wide change...

...This attitude has put a strong imprint of defensiveness on much of their international policy...

...These billions of blocked rupees are the shackles destroying your economic independence...

...It is almost as though the Marxist prediction of the increasing wealth of the few and the growing impoverishment of the many, which has been negated within democratic society, has reappeared at the world level to create even wider disturbance and unrest...

...and the rich grow richer in a closed circuit of shared and profitable exchange...

...But now the revolutions are multiple and simultaneous...

...The Westerners do not help you for nothing...

...It left behind it a whole legacy of new thought and policy in Europe, and a new habit of cooperation within the Atlantic area...

...No one can be certain how long it will take for reason to reassert itself over myth in the Communist world...

...The decision to use government as an instrument of greater justice and solidarity was fundamental to the change in the West from a narrow class-oriented market to the mass consumption economy of today...

...The struggle for the sympathy and allegiance of the newly independent nations poses increasingly complex problems for the West on several levels—political, economic and psychological...

...It was the Western powers which achieved the first breakthrough into economic growth, allowing its explosive powers to create a real if still disorganized world society...

...and certainly one way of doing so is to offer sustained, incontrovertible and world-wide proof that the link between capitalism and exploitation has given way to a new relationship based upon shared wealth, joint work and common humanity...

...Western nations whose one aim is to stay home are attacked by Communist idealogues for intending aggression...

...In such a form, even the proudest nations can accept assistance, for they are not being bought up or patronized...

...But if patiently, doggedly, cooperatively, undeterred by difficulties and setbacks, unconcerned by criticism and misunderstanding, the Western powers set themselves to create the agencies of joint work for world development, and if they financed them adequately for the enormous task, the young Western student would no longer be unable to give a reason for the faith that is in him...

...An analogy from domestic policy may make the point clearer...

...How HAVE THEY COME so to underestimate and misinterpret the spirit of the age...

...Here the most revelant fact is that, in their international relations, the Western powers still cling to the idea of an automatic, self-regulating system in which each nation, pursuing its own interests, contrives in some mysterious way to serve the interests of all and create a functioning community...

...The Western powers have not yet quite brought themselves to abandon the fallacious idea of a self-regulating world economy and put in its place a responsible social order in which wealth and opportunity are more evenly shared...

...A "Marshall" approach to India could begin to establish just such a flowering of new thoughts and relationships between Asia and the West, and create new patterns of cooperation for other areas, such as Africa, once political stability and economic cohesion permit the attempt at a big push there as well...

...These debts you are piling up, they argue, tie you to America's chariot wheels...

...And this inevitably creates the context in which Communism, the most coherent and articulate organizer of revolution in human history, seeks to guide the torrent of unleashed human energies into the channels of Communist control...

...It is in the West's interests to enlarge this area of ideological disagreement as vigorously as possible...

...The imminent international collapse of capitalism, its essentially imperialist nature, its utter inability to deviate a handsbreadth from the historical path mapped out for it by Marxism-Leninism over fifty years ago—these are still the staple dogmas of Communism and they introduce into all the West's relations with the Communists an element of wild and disconcerting irrationality...

...These may be contributory causes...

...For many years associated with The Economist of London, Miss Ward is also the author of Five Ideas that Change the World and Faith and Freedom, as well as a contributor to Foreign Affairs, Harper's and other magazines...

...Naturally, to be effective, such a policy requires that the underdeveloped nations pursue a serious strategy of expansion themselves...

...It is not enough to point to the sudden disappearance of the absolute world dominion which the West enjoyed until the day before yesterday...

...He cannot say that the deepest traditions and highest aspirations of the West are involved in the great task of world reconstruction...

...but it has a different ring in Asia and Africa where imperialism is still the most vivid memory, where so often in the past private investment was its point of entry and where gunboats turned up to collect the debt...

...Past savings make fresh saving easier...

...and humane and Christian conscience could no longer tolerate the flagrant evils of an unregulated economy...

...It is not charity...

...not a year passes without the tremor of a subsidence or a volcanic burst from the fires banked up below...

...The dilemma is not made easier by the fact that both reactions often seem to be needed at the same time...

...The attack may sound ludicrous to Western ears...

...Yet there are signs in Russia of a certain shy onslaught of reason...

...They are not the real explanation...

...Khrushchev has not, it is true, made any admissions about capitalists changing their colors...

...Why, having launched all the revolutions, are they now so unmoved by them, save perhaps to reflex actions of distaste...

...Seen in this context, the annual transfer of, say, 1 per cent of national income from the wealthy to the developing nations is not a bribe or a dole or a means of buying off the Communists...

...The Western powers must repeat at the international level the decisions which saved free society within the nation...

...It can be argued that they have taken an essential preliminary step...

...But as the system with its complexities, opportunities and injustices developed, two forces made for change: More citizens acquired the vote and could exert pressure on the government...

...But now, with the ruins all around them of traditional societies, and with painful struggles apparent on every side of a new order waiting to be born, the Western powers suddenly seem to be abdicating—as though the wrecker's job were enough and they had little interest in the buildings to be raised on the world's dismantled sites...

...It is not enough to point to the wealth of the West, although this is undoubtedly a factor, since wealth can breed complacency...

...In a period of such change and confusion, of such incandescent energy and uncontrollable aspiration, those who offer new molds for the lava flow of human hope are certainly working with and not against the general movement of the age—a visionary age, rebellious, impatient, violent and aspiring...

...It is justice...

...In this article, adapted from a chapter in her new book, India and the West (published this week by Norton), Barbara Ward discusses some of these problems and suggests ways of dealing with them...

...In sharp, paradoxical contrast, the free Western nations seem to have few such ambitions...

...India, for example, should be given high priority in future aid programs precisely because India has the plans, the administrators, the lively entrepreneurs, the general will to develop, thus insuring that capital assistance will make the maximum impact...

...The world has never been more receptive to the force of new ideas...

...Above all, the Western powers are caught in the cruel dilemma of not knowing whether the Communists, on the basis of their inherited phobias, genuinely fear them as ravening capitalists, or whether they simply believe—with an equally inherited bias— that they are museum pieces to be contemptuously swept aside...

...Industrialists whose only idea is to invest safely in Canada are accused of plotting the economic infiltration of Southeast Asia...

...To want no more than to stop Communism probably ensures that ultimately Communism cannot be stopped...

...The analogy also gives the clue to a positive Western approach...

...During the early thrust of industrialism in the West, the underlying beliefs of the governing groups were still rooted in laissez faire...

...Like the dispossessed urban workers of Victorian times, the peoples of the underdeveloped world have been drawn into the modern economy...

...But the greatest significance of a new approach based upon a sustained effort of economic assistance lies in the battle for men's minds...

...On the contrary, the impression at times is of leaders abandoning regretfully their domestic round of politics and recreation to turn almost with disgust to deal with another unwelcome intrusion from the external world...

...Regimes fall in a night, rioting students chase elected prime ministers from their assemblies, politicians of 20th century inspiration throw off colonial rule, while in the streets tribal gangs hack each other to pieces...

...It is applying to a new world society the fundamental principles of equity and solidarity without which the West could never have surmounted the uncertainties and pitfalls of its own nascent industrialism...

...The most tragic legacy of Marx and Lenin has been to educate a whole generation of leaders in ideas and attitudes that no longer touch reality...

...He cannot say that Western governments are finally committed to positive, long-term economic aid aimed simply at bringing the rest of the world up to the level of the developed lands...

...This is the West's unfinished business...

...He cannot explain, with missionary fervor, how his nation's domestic principles of justice and solidarity must now be made world-wide...

...He cannot boast that he and his sons and his sons' sons will be engaged in the task until a modest affluence in bread and work and shelter is the lot of all mankind...

...He simply implies they are too scared to practice the old aggressions...

...Far more important than any steps taken to lessen the threat or limit the pretensions of Communism are the positive aims, policies and visions which the West wishes to achieve itself...

...The imminence of capitalist collapse under repeated slumps and crises has given ground to Khrushchev's cautious admission in America that "the slaves of capitalism live well...

...to have enjoyed a position of dominance and influence in the past is often a very potent reason for wishing to continue to hare it...

...This must be sought in more fundamental political attitudes...

...But in the world at large a comparable shift has yet to occur...

...When one considers the rigidity of Marxist dogma, this may seem to postpone understanding to the Greek Kalends...

...They launched all the continents on the tremendous experiment of modernization and opened them up to trade and settlement whether they wanted it or not...

...Sustained and successful cooperation with India, achieved through functioning joint institutions, has the chance not only of local success but also of creating new patterns of working and prospering together...