REVOLUTION IN EUROPE
Williams, David C.
Revolution in Europe By David C. Williams FiVE million French men and women voted Communist in this year's elections, hardly less than in 1946—which was a time of postwar chaos, and twelve months...
...They thought, in particular, that Europe's socialists could mold the future, and it was fashionable to say that the choice for Europe lay between Communism and Socialism...
...Later, they saw the well-equipped and well-paid American soldiers...
...When they had the chance, in Russia and in Eastern Europe, they shirked the task and took the easier road to totalitarianism...
...French Productivity Center, it is possible to reach individual employers who want to catch up with the 20th Century...
...Moreover, they are in firmer control than ever of most European governments...
...This feeling is reflected among European scientists, who tend to look down upon those of their number who have chosen technology as their field...
...While respecting the desire of their European counterparts to talk in terms of high-flown theory, they must persuade them to give more attention to the day-today task of collective bargaining...
...Hollywood was the first American Moscow...
...At the bottom of the social scale are Europe's workers...
...There is little indication that they are willing to perform the classical function of the entrepreneur under capitalism—that of taking risks...
...Worker-management teams from all parts of Western Europe made their pilgrimages to America, and came back loaded with blueprints and textbooks...
...In 1947, Americans of good will thought that Europeans themselves could provide the creative ideas needed for the regeneration of the Old World...
...Another is the strong revival of conservative forces in Europe...
...Some of the demagogues who shout the loudest about Communism, and who smear anyone who disagrees with them by calling him a "Red," are the foremost disciples of the big lie...
...Many French and Italian capitalists do not even invest their money in their own countries...
...If the United States can be identified with the achievement of the "revolution of rising expectations," the battle of ideas with the Communists will be won...
...In France and Italy, millions of them have come to feel so completely frustrated by the existing system that they have, by turning to the Communists, in effect separated themselves from their own national traditions and communities...
...The agents of this new revolution are the many government officials, . businessmen, and trade unionists whom Washington is sending abroad...
...Instead, they tended to operate in terms of limited quantities at high prices...
...William Benton's amendment to the current foreign aid bill, aimed at weakening cartels abroad and encouraging free trade unionism, this has become an essential aspect of American foreign policy...
...Thus Americans, who at first found themselves associated with conservative forces in Europe in their struggle against Communism, now see the necessity for radical changes in much of European society...
...You say, "It can't happen herel" But it has happened here—it is happening here—right before your eyes, and it is not only the Communists that are doing it...
...The fundamental reason for the failure of European socialists to realize their high postwar hopes is that the prerequisites for democratic socialism do not yet exist in Europe...
...Moreover, they seemed reluctant to compete with one another...
...This approach brought some results, of course...
...We spent four years, thousands of lives, and billions of dollars to defeat such disciples as Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo—from 1941 to 1945...
...U. S. labor officials abroad are foremost in the campaign...
...Scanning the results, American liberals abroad, in embassy and ECA posts, have come to the conclusion that the problem areas of Europe need more than cotton and copper...
...They are no different from Stalin himself in their ultimate objective of grabbing power by any means...
...There is not the efficient and incorruptible civil service necessary to enforce them...
...All men are created equal, Jefferson wrote, and all have the right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness...
...History is something of an ironist...
...To them, the gravity of Europe's situation first became apparent in terms of the low productivity of its industry...
...And from 1945 until now we have been resisting the big lie aggression and subversion directed by Stalin and his Communist associates...
...American technical and economic aid can be routed to them, in return for their undertaking to share the benefits of higher productivity with their workers, in the form of higher wages, and with consumers, in the form of lower prices...
...Like actors thrust upon the stage before their time, Europe's socialist leaders were doomed to frustration...
...Revolution in Europe By David C. Williams FiVE million French men and women voted Communist in this year's elections, hardly less than in 1946—which was a time of postwar chaos, and twelve months before General Marshall made the speech launching the European Recovery Program...
...American officials are seeking to open the closed windows of the European economies to the bracing winds of competition...
...Each of the multiplying number of contacts in this rapidly narrowing world has driven home the lesson that poverty is not inevitable, that a better and more ample life is within reach...
...What has happened is very reminiscent of the New Deal years...
...One obstacle, an obvious one, is the fresh burdens rearmament is putting upon the hard-pressed European economies...
...With the adoption of Sen...
...People for the first time saw what comforts and luxuries Americans in their own walks of life seemed to enjoy...
...But critics pointed out that it had, after all, often been tried before...
...Class lines are fixed, and are difficult even for the able to cross...
...These had enjoyed the full benefit of the latest American machines and methods...
...The pursuit of happiness, at least in the terms that ordinary people define it, has real meaning when it seems that the goal is actually attainable...
...They are seeking likewise, through greater European economic unity, to create the mass markets that mass production requires...
...We probably shall have to keep up the fight against it for many years to come, perhaps for the rest of our lives...
...With each injection of recovery spending, they took fresh heart, until now they can afford to condemn the New Deal and everything that went with it...
...But it becomes a real threat when some men of power and position in a country boldly practice the big lie to mislead the public and put their selfish grab for personal power ahead of national interest...
...Italy's 1951 municipal elections showed the Communists even stronger than in 1948—and this after three years of lavish ECA assistance...
...capitalism, it was assumed, was dead beyond recall...
...Yet experience showed that, in general, such factories did well to attain the levels of productivity of the most up-to-date enterprises in the countries in which they were located, and lagged far behind their American parents...
...And while Stalin is Hitler's foremost disciple today and our country is the world's best hope against evil aggressors who want to enslave the world, ironically enough there are some disciples right here at home...
...Through such establishments as the...
...Instead of putting it into new productive facilities, they hoard it or send it abroad...
...While urging them to be more militant at the bargaining table and on the picket line, they must also advise them to cooperate with progressive management in introducing new machines and methods and boosting output...
...Many American business firms had branches or affiliates in Europe...
...New as it is, this idea has already taken a firm hold of the European imagination...
...Americans, of course, have difficulty thinking in abstract terms...
...It will meet heavy resistance from the cartel-minded majority of employers, and from the Communists, who will fight it as part of the "speed-up" drive for rearmament...
...Much as American moving pictures have been despised by European intellectuals, they have had a tremendous impact upon the masses...
...What has not been accomplished in much of Europe—what in fact failed in many European countries, beginning with 1848—was Jefferson's kind of revolution, which Marxists call "the bourgeois revolution...
...They have dedicated themselves to objectives which are impossible to realize, or if realized would mean the end both of democracy and of their own rights as workers and as human beings...
...He returned recently from a quick look-around at Europe after a year's absence from the continent...
...Handicraft production, or small-scale production in old-fashioned family-owned firms, survives to an astonishing degree...
...The results of the French and Italian elections underline this as one of the most important problems facing the United States as she seeks to rally the free world against the threat of totalitarian aggression...
...European businessmen, he noted, did not have the American urge to profit by selling goods in large quantities at low prices...
...The Communists have been shrewd enough to take advantage of it, by Stalin's Disciples Here For the last decade we have been fighting the exponents of the "big lie...
...They need ideas—and perhaps the same sort of ideas which have inspired the continuing American revolution...
...It would be under way even if there were no such thing as Communism in the world...
...Moreover, the rigid class hierarchy which still prevails in Europe is a great obstacle to progress...
...Eric Johnston made some harsh but apt comments on his European colleagues...
...In 1947, French and Italian capitalists were near despair, facing with dread an imminent Communist revolution...
...Fair labor standards could be imposed as well, as a necessary contribution to European morale...
...Moreover, America can penetrate the serried ranks of Europe's reactionary employers, and the governments they control, to reach the progressive employers that do exist...
...As Dan Goldy, Deputy Director of ECA's European Labor Division, has put it: "It should be possible to fan the spark of industrial revolution so that the economies of Western Europe take on something of the dynamic quality that has characterized the American economy...
...They must tirelessly counter the propaganda of the Communists against the United States, without themselves seeming to be "agents of American imperialism...
...Russia in 1917 and Eastern Europe in 1945 took the short-cut which leads to totalitarianism...
...These words, some Americans now say, are as truly revolutionary for Europe as on the day they were written...
...They can be even more dangerous in that they are not as easily detected and exposed as are the Communists...
...They can be just as great a danger to your country and mine, to your freedom and my freedom, as the Communists...
...Some sort of unified civilian authority must come into being, as a necessary counterpart to General Eisenhower's unified military command...
...Free Europe, in recent years, has been lapsing into what an American ECA official, William Joyce, described as "that curious amalgam of guildism, stat-ism, and cartelism which is called capitalism in Western Europe...
...American liberals abroad, however, feel that rearmament can bring benefits as well as burdens...
...Just as they had begun with simple remedies like copper and cotton, later they pinned their hopes on the infusion of technical "know-how" from the United States...
...This 20th Century manifestation of the American Revolution has been aptly called "the revolution of rising expectations...
...Through the placing of rearmament contracts, NATO can demand genuine progress towards American' standards of efficiency in European industry...
...Now they are fat and sassy, and eager to forget that they ever needed American aid...
...Most industries were strongly organized into price-fixing combinations, and prices were set high enough to keep the most inefficient producers in business...
...American business men have the task of convincing their European counterparts that it pays to modernize and produce for the masses rather than for the classes...
...Equality of opportunity, careers open to talent—these are ideas sorely needed in Europe's stagnant, class-stratified societies...
...When Roosevelt took office, business interests were near bankruptcy, both financially and in the esteem of the community...
...Of course every country has its Communists and advocates of the big lie...
...And they have been vindicated in their view that its completion is essential before democratic socialism can be established...
...Perhaps, it began to be thought, the real secret of America's success lay deeper than the surface of "know-how...
...ECA has had the same effect in Europe...
...Of course, the 18th Century rhetoric of Jefferson and his colleagues is no longer the most effective vehicle for the ideas of the new American Revolution...
...To this, the American reply should be that Communism is a return to the feudal tradition of the rule of the many by a privileged few...
...In the major Continental countries, democracy itself is by no means firmly established...
...American trade unionists have perhaps the most difficult job...
...Sen...
...Margaret Chase Smith, in her syndicated column ^Kinvincing millions of people that -scientific socialism" offered the jpost direct path to the better world of the future...
...The early Marxists saw the need for completing the bourgeois revolution, as an essential step towards socialism...
...These tasks are perhaps harder now than they have been in years...
...Certain occupations—government, land-owning, the learned professions, military service—enjoy the highest prestige...
...Looking for the ideas needed, they have found them in our own Declaration of Independence...
...There is not the community self-discipline required to DAVID C WILLIAMS, formerly European representative of Americans for Democratic Action, is now ADA's director of research and education...
...Yet it makes such obvious good sense that it has already begun to penetrate the barriers of prejudice and misinformation with which the Communists have surrounded the majority of the French and Italian working class...
...pay high taxes and abide by elaborate regulations...
...Business men do not stand high in public esteem...
...The result is that the "second Industrial Revolution"—the transformation of industry to mass production for mass markets—has, in comparison to America, hardly begun in Europe...
...Perhaps it was rooted in the very nature of American society, as compared with European...
...Would they have ever dreamed that, almost against its will and even without realizing it, the United States has dedicated itself to the task of completing the bourgeois revolution in Europe...
Vol. 15 • November 1951 • No. 11
