WHAT HAPPENED TO THAT REVOLUTION?
Chase, Stuart
What Happened To That Revolution? By STUART CHASE THREE or four years ago it was the fashion to proclaim "the revolution." Tycoons, Senators, commentators, editors, announced it, as well as lesser...
...Our political leaders in the democracies apparently take no stock in the revolution, or in the war as a function of the revolution...
...Did it fall into a culvert, or was it, too, just a passing fashion in the ideological parade ? If it was a mere fashion, then my map of the world is seriously askew...
...Instead we see the 380 million tormented men, women, and children of Europe...
...none of us can now escape from revolutionary changes if we would...
...Then in 1943 the climate of opinion, as the professors call it, began to change...
...When the war ends, then our real problems will begin...
...Carr's program was widespread...
...Indeed, it might be Metternich and the Holy Alliance of 1815 all over again...
...There are no sighs of such surveys in Washington, and only a few signs in London —and those quite a distance from Downing Street...
...When the boys began to acclaim the revolution in 1941, I felt that my judgment was confirmed...
...FINALLY, I do not want to be classed with those perennial wise men who preach that we ought to do this, and the government should do that...
...Very little seems to square up...
...For a time, praise for Mr...
...Such a tide might result in virtual control by Moscow of some powerful industries in Germany, Silesia, Czechoslovakia, Austria, and northern Italy...
...Now the revolution is in visible eruption in Greece, Italy, France, Belgium...
...Nobody, except possibly Sen...
...Here were vigorous leaders, prepared to act—dynamic men who were going somewhere...
...But how will that calm the whirlpool of the machine age which threw up fascism...
...So defined, the war is only a by-product of this deeper rhythm...
...The tighter the nation was welded into a total war economy, the more peeps began to be heard about the good old days, growing steadily louder, deeper and older, At the height of the laissez faire boom, one could pretty definitely locate the perfect state in 1849, the year Cobden succeeded in getting the Corn Laws Repealed...
...Now to tear up the goal posts and join the snake dance...
...Here are the Big 3 about to mop up the Nazi Party, after pounding Germany into submission with 11-ton bombs...
...The revolution has been a benchmark for me ever since I met Thorstein Veblen in 1919...
...Presently the final whistle blows, and we have won the game...
...The belligerents are clearly in the last quarter of this game, with all the statistics in our favor...
...Here, for instance, is the late Gen...
...It is all over, at least in Europe...
...Hitler will have gone, but will the causes which produced Hitler have gone...
...Most people in Western countries know that there is enough for all, if the machines are not throttled down...
...Whatever kind of revolution he thinks it is, he is using it to strengthen Russia and the Slav bloc...
...Even the Untouchables had their accepted place...
...What Britain and the United States to date have done, as an inevitable part of the war, to be sure, is to exasperate the revolution by bombing the industrial and transport underpinning out from under Europe...
...James E. Murray, has taken any steps beyond the love-will-find-a-way philosophy of action...
...but how is it going to give employment, security, and status to the people of Europe ? They propose to get rid of fascists everywhere...
...E. H. Carr, in his book...
...This revolution, remember, ignores national boundaries...
...Now one small voice let out a chirp, chirp for free enterprise...
...The Nazis are scuttling, and Hitler, his arms folded like Napoleon, has jumped off the high cliff at Berchtesgaden...
...We are busily training young men to untrain the young men of Germany, assuming any young men are left in Germany...
...T> EVOLUTION" is perhaps an unfortunate label, "V for it calls to mind the classic picture of ragged proletarians singing the Internationale, and mounting barricades...
...Roosevelt uses it, he does not often mention it...
...To me, however, the word means the celebrated Industrial Revolution, moving at a more rapid tempo...
...They seem to be operating in another universe altogether...
...Now, in 1945, they are so many Galahads, the lean, hard men of the foxholes, the conquerors of Iwo, the saviors of the Republic...
...The revolution has boiled up to a more ominous level...
...As we study this map, nations begin to disappear...
...This body was to be set up by the Big 3, and supported by their armed forces for as long as necessary—a perfectly realistic move...
...Will the revolution have gone...
...That seems to be his purpose in Poland, the Baltic States, Rumania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia...
...In default of other programs, however, people— youngsters, white collar folk, farmers—were drawn into the political vacuum, and gave the fascist salute...
...Hugh Johnson in his column in November, 1941: "We are witnessing a profound revolution in our politics and our economy which is moving at hurricane speed . . ." Here is Walter D. Fuller, then chairman of the board of the National Association of Manufacturers : "We can point to past accomplishments of free enterprise until hell freezes over, but people are concerned about the future, not the past . . . This country cannot return to the good old days because those days just weren't good enough...
...Throughout the ages, human societies, even the most primitive, have had a place for their members...
...Excellent...
...1 could paper a drill hall with quotes like this, collected between 1939 and 1942...
...They propose to punish the Nazis, which again is satisfactory...
...In general, the war is reported like a football game, with so many yards gained, and so many statistical points scored...
...He has long since abandoned the pure Marxian concept of revolution...
...The United States is out to "win" the war in good old Harvard-Yale terms, and to kick a few extra goals by demanding Unconditional Surrender...
...When they forgot all about it a few months later and went whooping after Cobden and Bright, I tried not to take my eye from the ball...
...Some of its economic methods were sensible—such methods as discarding the gold standard, and figuring in terms of men and materials rather than money...
...Wallace...
...Labor leaders praise the logical felicities of the free market only less fervently than officers of the Chamber of Commerce...
...People on the continent, especially in Italy, are more placeless, insecure, bitter, hungry, and jobless than they were in 1939...
...One finds almost nothing, in the press or on the air waves or in the releases of the State Department, about answers to the revolution...
...Johnson and Anthony Eden...
...But against our original map, these things show up as secondary...
...From his unilateral maneuvers in Poland and the Balkans, it is clear he knows that the revolution is boiling, and he seems to be trying to put it to use...
...No map I have seen shows any escape from shattering depression unless the most energetic steps are taken...
...People are on the march to demand full employment, all-out production, economic security...
...A cheery prospect...
...Now, for the first time in human history, people without work have no status at all, while the fear of losing both the work and the status touches nearly everyone in a factory culture...
...This slump may turn out to be a culmination of the deflationary crisis of the early '20's, and the gigantic crisis between 1929 and 1932...
...We will come back to this point...
...The war rescued them from the social refuse heap, and raised them to a high and shining place...
...EVEN in the United States, the revolution has been swallowed up in dreams of what someone has called a push-button paradise, completely dominated by private business men...
...If the leaders of the democracies have even discussed this question, let alone devised an answer, I am not aware of it...
...Yet when the concert of Vienna met a century or more ago there was not a railroad, a steamship, a telegraph wire, an electric motor, an oil pipeline, a machine gun, in the world...
...They promised jobs for all, security, and admission to the master race...
...He appears to know, as I said before, that the revolution is boiling hotter than ever...
...Our leaders offer no program to relieve the pressures •which produced Mussolini and Hitler...
...I would just like to record the conviction that most of the hell and damnation around us in the world today arose from a revolutionary demand, imposed by the advance of the technical arts...
...He inherited one from the Duke of Marlborough, drawn in the prancing stage of nationalism and expanding empire...
...It is the power age, forcing men into new habits, patterns, institutions...
...Here is Anthony Eden: "The old world is dead...
...Soft" was another...
...The revolution, as defined, certainly helped to produce Mussolini, Hitler, Franco...
...Fascism could never have had what successes it did, except through its attempt to give the revolution an outlet and an answer...
...If America has no program for meeting the revolution at home, how, in heaven's name, can she hope to meet it in Europe, where the crisis is far more advanced ? * * * THIS brings us back to Stalin...
...That is what I mean by "the revolution," whatever it may have meant to Gen...
...The machine is responsible, too, for this...
...If so, why is it boiling already so furiously in all the "liberated" countries...
...Somebody in the Kremlin is certainly using the map of world social revolution...
...He recognized and defined the revolution, and then came to grips with it in terms of a European Planning Authority to give employment and security to everyone on the continent...
...One does not need to quarrel with these projects...
...The idea of the paradox of plenty has now got around...
...Conditions of Peace, proposed to get at causes...
...Keith Hutchison and other correspondents, reporting from London, find that Britishers expect a brief postwar boom in the United States to be followed rapidly by a "slump worse than that of 1929...
...Its political methods were ingenious and foul...
...As the harsh realities of postwar cut-backs draw near, the fashion is fading a little, but still nobody seems to mention revolution, not even Mr...
...Perhaps even worse than the physical misery of unemployment is the fact that it takes away an individual's function...
...So people are restless, marching, looking for the certainty, the place, which their forefathers knew and which they have lost...
...In any future war, against one country or another, these industries would, of course, prove helpful to Russia...
...Bums and loafers" was one favorite term for them...
...The official program is apparently to stamp out symptoms, without regard for cames...
...Victory in the war is to be welcomed, but it has nothing to do with meeting that worldwide demand...
...Churchill never uses such a map...
...After 1932, when the banking structure of the Republic went over like a house of cards, I was more convinced than ever...
...It would be a tough problem for a steering committee composed of Socrates, Darwin, and Lincoln...
...Tycoons, Senators, commentators, editors, announced it, as well as lesser fry like sociologists and authors...
...The war, in a curious, perverted way, provided a temporary answer...
...Underneath the economic lies the social revolution...
...IN the United States, the press and the air waves are now filled with plans about what we are going to do to Germany, and how we are going to join an associa tion to shoot up aggressor nations, and how the Big 3 are going to safeguard peace in our time...
...Now one hears no more about it—only about projects to break up German industry, restore a peasant culture, and so reduce the living standards of all Europeans...
...To the outstanding question of our time, nobody.in authority seems to be paying the slightest attention...
...presently another, a little more emphatic...
...perhaps they can be helpful in the years to come...
...If Britain and America have nothing but plebiscites and Sunday-school talk to offer the rest of Europe, Stalin might not be too surprised to see the whole continent turn to Moscow in its agony...
...I do not know what the answer is, or what the government ought to do...
...In Germany, the fascist appeal was heightened by the bitterness remaining from the terms of the Versailles treaty...
...Or one hears of jealous spheres of influence, where Russia and Britain pull political wires without reference to what is happening in the next wrater valley...
...WITH the world map of revolution to guide one's thinking it is perplexing to lay it down beside the maps prepared at Teheran, Yalta, Dumbarton Oaks...
...Stalin, however, must have one and takes a look at it from time to time...
...He knows, I think, that this is a different kind of revolution, in which the middle class is, if possible, even more rebellious than the manual workers...
...Presently all Europe will be aflame...
...If Mr...
...Our reigning ideology had retreated almost 100 years...
...They are paying dearly for it in death and wounds, but to many the price is not too great...
...The very same young men...
...It shows itself in human beings on the move, whatever language they may speak...
...In an effort to put off this evil day, it is anticipated that instead of seeking to expand consumption at home, America will attempt to market its surplus products abroad, thereby, in the popular British phrase, 'exporting unemployment.' " Gunnar Myrdal, the distinguished Swedish economist, reporting to the Swedish Government after a careful survey of America, agrees with the British view: "Within half a year to 3 years, the seller's market will change into a slump...
...Wallace and a few others talk about 60 million jobs, but nobody is doing much of anything about them...
...Here in America in 1940 were 4 million young people without work, without hope, redundant and unwanted...
...Or is it...
...This, the little people may have thought, is better than dry rot, better than starving in the presence of abundance...
...Millions of people do not know where they belong any more...
...Where is that revolution, anyway...
Vol. 9 • April 1945 • No. 15
