opportunity and a choice. Should he continue the grab-and-keep society
that had flowered in Europe and elsewhere during the previous century,
with its consequent poverty for the many, unemployment, exploitation and
the power-struggle of the empires, or make a revolutionary change? As
the stalemated war of 1914-18 with its frightful destruction of life and
property continued year after year, the determination in favor of
revolutionary change grew and crystalized.
David Lloyd George, Britain's Prime Minister, put the situation into
words presented to the Versailles Peace Conference on March 25, 1919:
"The whole of Europe is filled with the spirit of revolution.... The
whole existing order in its political, social and economic aspects is
questioned by the masses of the population from one end of Europe to the
other." (Memorandum of Lloyd George to the Peace Conference, 1922 Cmd.
1614.)
Lloyd George proved a true prophet. Mass discontent and the spirit of
revolt spread rapidly. Soldiers at the front mutinied. The armies of
Tsarist Russia dissolved as the privates and officers alike returned to
their homes, determined to stop war, end Romanoff tyranny and build a
better life for the Russian people. To gain these results they replaced
the Tsarist absolutism by local, regional and nationally elected
people's Soviets.
Before the War began in July, 1914, the socialist parties of Europe were
divided between moderates who were willing to accept welfare-state
reforms and allow the grab-and-keep structure of monopoly capitalism to
continue in authority, and revolutionaries who demanded the abolition of
capitalist imperialism and its replacement by socialism. European
reformist socialists shouldered arms in July, 1914, and shot down their
comrades across the frontiers. European revolutionary socialists, led by
Lenin in Russia, Liebknecht in Germany and Jaures in France gained in
strength as the war proceeded. Liebknecht and Jaures were assassinated.
Lenin lived in exile until he went back to Russia and led the
revolutionary forces that liquidated Tsarism in the closing months of
1917.
For the first time in the history of western civilization, a proletarian
revolutionary force had established its authority over one of the most
extensive and populous nations on the planet. For the first time a
responsible government threatened to abandon the fundamental assumptions
and principles of western civilization. Could this new "subversive"
government survive in the merciless free-for-all in which western man
was engaged? Could it not only survive but build up a social system
which contradicted and condemned the underlying precepts of the West? In
a word, could socialism be built in one country, surrounded by civilized
monopoly capitalist powers?
Historical events have answered these questions in the affirmative. At
this writing the Soviet Government has survived continuously for more
than half a century. During that period it has transformed economically,
politically and culturally backward portions of Europe and Asia into one
of the most advanced areas on the planet.
Monopoly capitalist society assumes that productivity, wealth and
fire-power, effectively co-ordinated under competent authority, will
guarantee survival and perhaps win supremacy. Beginning its life in one
of the backward areas of the planet, the Soviet Union has met all of
these tests by converting itself into a first class world power. Its
productivity is second only to that of the United States. In wealth it
stands second among the nations. Its fire power has carried the Soviet
Union to victory in civil and international war. Its ruling
oligarchy--the Soviet Communist Party--has maintained its authority
through the stresses of domestic strife and major international
conflict. In terms accepted by the existing free-for-all West, the
Soviet Union is an established world power.
Through the first three decades of its existence the Soviet Union was
the only government avowedly engaged in building a socialist rival to
monopoly capitalism and determined to replace capitalism as the dominant
planet-wide social system. After 1943 it was joined by a dozen other
European, Asian and American countries, dedicated like the Soviet Union
to the task of building socialism. In addition to these dozen countries,
several others such as India, Burma, Indonesia, Ceylon, Ghana and Libya,
declared their intention of building socialism by legal, and gradual
stages. Almost all of the countries busied with socialist construction
were in East Europe and Asia. The countries building toward socialism
were more widely scattered, but by and large they were Eurasian.
From 1919 to 1943 socialist construction was directed, at least in
theory, by the Communist International with headquarters in Moscow--the
"general staff of the World Revolution". Under war pressure the
Communist International was dissolved in 1943. No equally inclusive
international socialist authority has since been established.
World revolution is not confined to the Old World of
Africa--Asia--Europe. It is widely prevalent in the Americas where it
can claim a certain priority. Outstanding among colonial uprisings of
modern times was the rebellion of the British colonies of North America,
from 1776 to 1783. Even more widespread was the rebellion of the
Spanish, Portuguese and French colonies of Central and South America
which spanned most of the nineteenth century and extended on into the
twentieth. Russian Bolsheviks held the headlines on revolutionary
activity from 1917 to 1943 but it should not be forgotten that one of
the most prolonged and thorough-going revolutions of the present century
gripped Mexico from 1910 to 1917. At the beginning of this period Mexico
was a political semi-dependency of the United States. It was
semi-feudal, with a large population of Amerindians and a pre-industrial
economy. Foreign capitalists and entrepreneurs, including those from the
United States, played a leading role in the country.
Mexico's 1910-1917 revolution was prolonged. It was also radical,
up-rooting many aspects of its old social pattern, speeding up the
bourgeois revolution, and preparing the way for a Mexican form of
populism and a Mexican foretaste of a proletarian revolution, initiated,
led and manned by Mexicans.
Mexico's revolution resulted in two important developments that have
played a major role in socialist construction. Both contributions
appeared in the Mexican Constitution of 1917, adopted eight months
before the Russian Bolsheviks seized power in November.
The first contribution was a chapter on the rights of labor. Bourgeois
constitutions had emphasized "civil" rights: the right to vote, trial by
jury; freedom of speech, press, assembly; the right to go and come; the
right to compensation when private property is taken for public
purposes; the right to modify or replace the existing constitution. The
Mexican Constitution of 1917 contained a detailed specification of the
rights of labor, including proper working conditions, adequate
compensation, education, health, social security. The Constitution also
contained a crucial property provision: the natural resources of Mexico
are the property of the Mexican people and cannot be alienated.
This second provision was inserted in the Mexican Constitution at a time
when extensive concessions to develop Mexican resources had been handed
out to North American and European capitalists. It was inserted in part
because the social ownership and sharing of land and other
natural resources has been one of the basic demands of the
Socialist--Communist--Anarchist movements from their inception.
Monopoly capitalism depends primarily on the private ownership of the
means of production, including natural resources. Capitalist opposition
to socialism is not only a matter of theory. In practice the private
ownership of natural resources enables the owner to charge rent to any
and all users. Natural resources are sharply limited and usually
localized. As population grows, demand for living space is intensified
and rents rise. It is not an accident that the stretches of "black
earth", of copper, iron, petroleum, the precious metals, and the land
occupied by Mexico City, London, New York and other population centers,
poured a stream of wealth into the treasuries and augmented the power of
their owners.
Effects of the insertion into the Mexican Constitution of the provision
making natural resources "the property of the Mexican people" have been
far-reaching. One socialist country after another has written into its
constitution a provision that its natural wealth is the inalienable
heritage of its people. This provision has two important results: it
establishes natural resources as part of the public sector of the
national economy; it also limits the possibility of handing out
concessions to foreign exploiters, private or public.
During the opening years of the present century socialist parties and
other forward looking organizations were demanding social ownership of
natural resources, public utilities and other social means of production
as the next logical step toward a more equitable distribution of wealth
and income. There was a possibility that such revolutionary changes
could be made under bourgeois law by exercising the right of eminent
domain, upon the payment of reasonable compensation to former owners. At
least in theory, the democratic majority in any bourgeois country could
put an end to private enterprise capitalism and establish socialism by a
constitutional amendment, legislative enactment, and a caretaker
political apparatus to administer and supervise the transition.
Socialist parties were making "reformist" demands for better working
and living conditions and "revolutionary" demands for changes in
property and class relationships. Increased productivity and growing
affluence made it possible for a progressive bourgeois state to meet the
reformist demands, establishing a welfare state legally and
constitutionally.
Under the bourgeois constitutions generally existing at the beginning of
the present century, a popular majority could adopt necessary
constitutional amendments, pass the necessary enabling laws and launch a
program of socialist construction.
Such a program was part of the thinking of European and other socialist
leaders during the opening years of the present century. Inspired and
encouraged by the successes of socialist construction in the Soviet
Union and other socialist countries, middle of the road socialists
proposed to move gradually and legally from capitalism to socialism.
Conservative socialists who were members of coalition governments in
parts of Eurasia, described such welfare states as victories for
socialism, despite the fact that they left the essentials of state power
in bourgeois hands.
Between 1920 and 1950 the western world found itself in this essentially
revolutionary situation: the world-wide revolution in science and
technology had opened the way for the human race to turn its back on the
limitations and inadequacies of civilization and advance to a new level
of culture and human opportunity.
The impact of this revolutionary situation expressed itself at several
levels:
1. Much of west and central Europe, important parts of North
America, much of Australasia, important parts of East Asia
and fringes of Africa had at least two generations of experience
with some degree of affluence.
2. Scientifically and technologically maturing societies that
had opted for socialism constitutionally and legally were
engaged officially in socialist construction. These countries
and peoples were located chiefly in Eurasia.
3. Former colonial and client dependencies of the nineteenth
century empires struggling for self-determination and statehood
were entering a stage of affluence. These countries
and peoples were mainly Afro-Asian. Some of them were
located in Latin America.
4. Countries and peoples still under the political, economic
and cultural umbrella of the formerly dominant empires
were at different stages in the completion of the bourgeois
revolution. Their ruling oligarchies--fascist or neo-fascist--were
stubborn defenders of remnants and fragments of the
nineteenth century bourgeois culture. Their stronghold was
the Atlantic Community.
During the cold war years following 1945 each of these groups was
undergoing the drastic social changes incident to the worldwide
revolution of the period. Meanwhile mini-wars, civil and international,
were fought in the Americas, Africa and Asia. By common consent
conventional weapons were used and atomic weapons were kept in
mothballs.
These experiences were highlighted in British Guyana and Cuba. British
Guyana was a Crown Colony, with a London-appointed Governor and a small
occupying force of British troops with an elected legislative assembly
and a considerable measure of home rule.
Democratic socialists Cheddi and Janet Jagan helped to organize the
Peoples Progressive Party of British Guyana. Twice Jagan won a popular
electoral majority and was established as Prime Minister of the British
Colony. His two periods of administrative responsibility were badgered
and hectored by every reactionary force that could be mobilized inside
and outside British Guyana, from the British appointed governor to the
domestic and foreign business interests and the urban trade unions.
Before a third election British and American governments, business and
labor interests got together. Money was funnelled into the country
through trade union connections. Protests were staged. Riots were
organized. The electoral system under which the Peoples Progressive
Party had won its victories was altered in London and Jagan was replaced
by a system of proportional representation under which the P.P.P. was
defeated and a new regime inaugurated.
Throughout the struggle the Peoples Progressive Party had insisted upon
winning popular majorities as a basis for establishing socialism in the
colony by democratic methods and legal means. Imperialist reactionaries
from Britain's Prime Minister and the President of the United States to
the A.F. of L.-C.I.O. retorted: "No you don't", and backed up their veto
with money, riots and guns. As a consequence of this counter-revolutionary
conspiracy, the Peoples Progressive Party was forced out of office and
an administration favorable to British, United States and native Guyanese
capital was substituted.
A revolt was led by Fidel Castro and his associates against the
Washington-backed Batista regime in Havana, Cuba. When Cuba was seized
by United States armed forces during the Spanish-American War of 1898
much of the island was in the hands of anti-Spanish rebels who were
demanding independence of Spain's imperialist rule. Between 1898 and
1959 seven million Cubans enjoyed technical independence. Actually the
island, located only 90 miles from Florida, was economically a United
States colony and politically a Washington dependency, with United
States armed forces stationed in the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base. After
seizing power in 1959, Castro went to the United States seeking a market
for Cuba's chief export, sugar; a source of food supplies not produced
in Cuba, and the manufactures necessary for the economic and social life
of an essentially agricultural island.
Batista had emptied the Cuban treasury before he fled the island in
1959. Castro therefore needed loans to meet the immediate needs of the
Cuban economy. He also sought to continue arrangements under which the
chief market of Cuban sugar was in the United States. Castro was turned
down cold. All doors, political and economic, were closed to him. As a
revolutionary with left leanings he got the cold shoulder in New York as
well as in Washington.
Faced by economic bankruptcy and political hostility in the West, Castro
turned to the Soviet Union and other socialist countries. They bought
his sugar on long term contracts; provided him with manufactures;
extended loans. Under these economic and political conditions Castro's
Cuba had no choice. Of necessity it became a part of the socialist bloc,
took over the property of Americans and other foreign investors, planned
its economy and announced socialist goals, thus making the island of
Cuba the only outpost of socialist construction in the Americas.
Socialists exercised authority in one country from 1917 until 1943.
Thereafter the land area devoted to building socialism steadily
increased. By the time China threw off imperialist leading strings and
opted for socialist construction in 1949, a third of mankind was living
on territory under nominally socialist control. Most of this territory
was Asian. An important part lay in eastern Europe. Until 1917,
effective control of the planet was held by a half-dozen empires headed
by the British, who exercised authority over a quarter of the human race
living on a quarter of the earth's land area. After 1917 socialism
mushroomed as a potential competing social system, challenging monopoly
capitalism in Europe, replacing it in large sections of Asia and even
threatening to destroy the foundations of western civilization.
"Action and reaction are equal and opposite" is an axiom of physical
science which is also applicable in the social field. The sweep of world
revolution and the growth of socialism-communism after 1945 called into
being an opposing force of counter-revolution. The greater the successes
of socialism, the more ardent and assiduous was the counter drive, aimed
to modify, negate and, if possible, to destroy the revolution and
restore the social system of imperialism-colonialism built by monopoly
capitalism to its prerevolutionary status of planet-wide ascendancy.
Winston Churchill personified this counter revolutionary drive. It was
he who proposed to "strangle the Bolshevik infant in its cradle". The
Peace Conferees, meeting in Versailles, heeded Lloyd George's warning of
March, 1919, and turned their attention to the urgent task of
strangling socialism. Revolutionary beginnings in central Europe were
stamped out. Funds were raised and arms were supplied to the
anti-Bolshevik forces in European Russia and Siberia. At the height of
the counter-Bolshevik crusade there were sixteen armies in Soviet Russia
with the common aim of destroying Bolshevism and restoring the country
to its previous status as one of the pillars of western civilization.
This military phase of the counter-revolution lasted for four years. It
failed. By 1922 the Soviet leaders were able to turn their energies to
the task of rebuilding a devastated country while they planned and
organized a socialist society.
Counter revolutionary forces failed to overthrow the Bolsheviks during
the civil war of 1918-1921. They failed again when the Nazi armies
swarmed into the Soviet Union in June, 1941. The years from 1941 to 1945
cost the Russians perhaps twenty million dead, six million dwelling
units and immense damage to their economy and their social organization.
When the war ended, responsible observers in the West predicted that if
the Soviet power survived, decades must elapse before the country was
back on its feet.
War destruction had played havoc with much of Europe. The Soviet Union
was especially hard hit. Under the Marshall Plan billions of dollars of
United States aid were poured into Britain, France, Belgium and West
Germany. At the same time, the Soviet request for United States loans
was refused categorically by President Truman. Alone and unaided the
Soviet People repaired the extensive damage inflicted by the 1914-18
war, the Russian Civil War and the 1941 military invasion from the West,
and went on with the task of socialist construction which the war had
interrupted. Within five years--by 1950--the Bolsheviks were again on
their feet, going strong, extending substantial aid to China and other
professedly socialist countries and playing a crucial part in the
struggle for disarmament and peace.
At war's end in 1918 the Soviet Union was struggling to draw the first
breath of socialist life. Three decades later, after expelling the
Nazis, the Soviet Union was a sturdy giant of a nation standing head
and shoulders above its nearest European competitors. During the
interval, Soviet Russia was attacked, denounced, boycotted, encircled,
invaded, ostracized as the leading figure in "an international communist
conspiracy". When the policy of intervention and invasion failed, the
counter-revolutionaries turned to cold war.
Whether or not there was a "communist conspiracy" to overthrow
capitalism, there was certainly an organized capitalist conspiracy to
overthrow socialism-communism. Representatives of the chief capitalist
empires made repeated attempts to subsidize anti-Bolshevik forces in the
Soviet Union. From 1918 to 1921 and from 1941 to 1945 they used every
available means, including military invasion, to overthrow the Soviet
Union and stamp out the beginnings of socialist construction in Central
and East Europe.
From the military invasions of the Soviet Union immediately following
war's end in 1918, western spokesmen, led by President Wilson, did their
utmost to subsidize counter-revolution inside the Soviet Union, to send
American and other armed forces into the country, to villify, denounce,
boycott and handicap the Soviet Government. Sixteen years passed
(1917-1933) before Washington extended diplomatic recognition to the
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. President Wilson did his best to
keep the Soviet Union and Mexico, both under the control of
revolutionary governments, out of the League of Nations.
After the 1936-1945 war Washington played the same role with regard to
China, refusing for twenty-two years to recognize Socialist China
diplomatically, leading the drive in the United Nations to exclude China
from membership, although the United Nations Charter specified that
China should be one of the permanent members of the Security Council.
Secretary of State John Foster Dulles justified the policy of
blacklisting and boycotting China by declaring that there was no such
nation as China on the Asian mainland, only 650 million slaves, and that
Chiang Kai Shek's rump government on the island of Formosa was the
"China" specified in the U.N. Charter.
Under the Truman Doctrine announced immediately after war's end in
1945, the United States refused to tolerate any extension of socialism,
whether by revolution from within or by invasion from without any
country. This doctrine was applied to Greece, to Iran, to Guatemala, to
Santo Domingo, to Chile. During the Korean War, which began in June,
1950, one of President Truman's first directives ordered the United
States Seventh (Pacific) Fleet to occupy the waters about Taiwan
(Formosa), which was historically part of China.
In order to implement this anti-communist policy, Washington used a
newly created international secret service, the Central Intelligence
Agency or C.I.A., gave it an initial appropriation of $100,000,000 and
turned it loose to spy, corrupt, undermine and overthrow governments
that refused to accept or follow Washington's leadership.
Between 1815 and 1914 the planet enjoyed a measure of peace and order.
In the three decades between 1914 and 1945, two general wars, a plague
of lesser wars, a general economic depression and a hurricane of
revolutions scourged the planet. Meanwhile, the revolution in science
and technology and its products penetrated almost every crack and cranny
of human society.
Had the changes incidental to these rapid transformations been carefully
planned and supervised, the disturbances in the ecology and the shocks
to human society would have been less disturbing and upsetting. In the
absence of any planet-wide authority, there could be neither general
planning nor general supervision. There were warnings aplenty from
liberals and radicals who were attempting to keep the situation in
perspective, but such utterances failed to reach the great bulk of
mankind.
Disturbing and upsetting products of the revolution in science and
technology--the harnessing of steam, the internal combustion engine, the
air plane, electronics, plastics, and the release of atomic energy--were
used to mutilate, destroy and kill. During the half century that began
in 1910, tens of millions were mobilized, fed, taught, armed, and led to
the slaughter fields by the masters of western civilization in two long
orgies of wholesale destruction and mass murder--1914-18 and 1936-1945.
Energies and techniques that might have brought peace and plenty to the
human family were used to set fire storms that incinerated property
while it degraded humanity to the horrors of mass suicide.
In a very real sense these ghoulish results were the logical outcome of
competitive nationalism armed and equipped with the technology produced
during the two centuries of the great revolution. War is the most
carefully planned, most elaborate and most intensive form of
competition--the decisive climax of a life and death struggle for
survival.
The great revolution had put into human hands almost infinite
possibilities for utilizing nature and improving the social environment.
With foresight, careful planning and skillful manipulation of forces and
trends the cultivatable portions of the planetary land mass might have
been turned into a garden of unending plenty dotted with marvelous city
centers of light and learning.
In order to achieve such results it would have been necessary for the
human family to coordinate its efforts around an agreed division of
labor, share the goods and services produced and move from one level of
affluence to a level of abundance.
Instead of joint efforts to achieve abundance and security, the most
prosperous and most highly developed centers of western civilization
consolidated their authority in sovereign states, surrounded by
forbidding frontiers, armed them with the most destructive agencies that
human imagination and ingenuity could devise, schooled the citizens of
each nation in the suicidal formula: "might makes right; every nation
for itself and woe betide the laggard and the loser."
The logical ideology of such a formula was egomania, suspicion, fear and
hatred. Its outcome was a competitive life and death struggle for wealth
and power, with the nation or a bloc of nations as the units of
competition. The struggle at its highest level involved occasional local
wars and periodical general wars like those of 1914-18 and 1936-45.
Before the great revolution such struggles were waged chiefly with
weapons wielded by human muscle power, supplemented with whatever animal
power was available. Equipped with the products of the technological
revolution, the struggle became a war of machines, powered by the
energies of nature. Retail killing and destruction was replaced by mass
murder and wholesale annihilation.
Given the assumptions, the practices and the institutions of
civilization, the catastrophic losses of the present century could have
been foretold and, with competent leadership and disciplined
followership, could have been averted. But leadership was self-serving,
shortsighted and for the most part untrained, while followership was
split up into national and local segments, each following the suicidal
doctrine of every nation for itself and the devil take the laggards.
Socialists-communists around the earth have spent a wealth of time and
energy during several generations predicting the present revolutionary
upset and preparing for it. They have been derided, denounced and
persecuted for their efforts. Despite bitter opposition they have
prepared for change, they accept change, they welcome it, because in
change they see the only path to improvement and betterment.
They are learning to live with change and even to welcome it because the
time of troubles through which their society is passing is warning them
of the dangers they face. At the same time they are learning, bit by
bit, of the spectacular achievements of the billion human beings in
socialist-communist countries.
The majority of mankind has been unprepared for revolutionary change.
When change came they resented it, maybe resisted it at the outset.
Those who have a vested interest in capitalist imperialism--the real
backbone of the counter-revolution--join and support counter-revolutionary
organizations and take part in counter-revolutionary activities.
Planners and organizers of the counter-revolution have the bourgeois
state generally on their side and enjoy the backing of the bourgeois
establishment, its organizations and its facilities. Since their object
is defense, they have no constructive program. Instead they stumble,
fumble and bungle as their system flounders into one disastrous crisis
after another.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
WESTERN CIVILIZATION ATTEMPTS SUICIDE (1914-1945)
Each bit of handiwork, each artifact, tool and machine is an expression
of man's wish and will. Each transcends nature and is an affirmation
that takes its place in the vast storehouse of human culture.
Cities, the building blocks of civilization, not only transcend nature;
they replace her. Up to a certain point man lived more or less
consciously as a part of nature. Bit by bit and step by step man shifted
from the stream, the glade, the tree and the cave to the hut, the
village, the city, the nation, the empire, the civilization.
Early in this study I wrote of civilization as an experiment: an
aspiration, a creative urge, a concept, a purpose, a unity of thought
and act, a conscious sequence of related actions, a construct of
multiplying complexity.
These terms, by and large, are constructive and, to a degree, creative.
I might have written a parallel series of words associated with
destructiviness. In every social situation construction and destruction
are Siamese twins. One does not appear without the other. The same
forces, the same implements, the same institutions and practices that
construct can be used to destroy.
Through ages, men learned how to establish, maintain and perpetuate
community and organize society. At every stage of the building process
it was necessary to check, to question, to evaluate, unlearn, tear down,
make a new start. Pushing up and tearing or wearing down is implicit in
nature. It is an essential aspect of human society.
Each human being is a living example of production and destruction. Each
generation repeats the affirmation, modifying it little or much in
accord with circumstances.
Modification means purposeful change--partially or wholly abandoning the
old and replacing it with something new. In the course of these changes
the conservative elements in man and in society, voluntarily or under
coercion, give up the old and learn how to use the new. The learning
process is always more or less painful, especially to people past middle
age.
The world-wide revolution resulted from a long-continued related series
of affirmations, punctuated and interrupted by contradictions and
conflicts.
Trends inherent in the world-wide revolution of 1750-1970 suggest a
cycle that reached its high point at the turn of the century and began
its downward course around 1900. The chief European empires were jointly
and severally involved in the bitter struggle for survival and supremacy
from 1870 onward. Until the outbreak of war in 1914, events followed an
irregular course marked by the shifting relationships of Italy and the
increased pressure from Germany for a showdown. The showdown was the war
of 1914-18, continued in a second phase from 1936 to 1945.
Immediate political results of the showdown were victory for one side
and defeat for the other side. Economic, sociological and ideological
consequences were profound and far reaching. We noted some of them in
the previous chapter.
UNESCO's _History of Mankind_ devotes its final volume six to the
twentieth century. The authors note that the chief European powers
emerged from the general war of 1914-18 "weakened in every way: in men
and wealth, in the balance of their economies and the stability of their
political structure and above all in their relation to other powers
rising or beginning to rise in other parts of the world". (Vol. VI p.
10.)
Aside from the victory-defeat relationship which led to political
realignments during the post-war years, the essence of the experience
is to be found in the UNESCO phrase "weakened in every way". Another way
of describing the experience is to state that the participants in this
four year blood bath were "bled white."
It is easy to be specific. In the course of the war sixty million people
were mobilized. Most of these people stopped what they had been doing
until mid-summer of 1914 and began an entirely new line of activity. Up
to that point most of them had been living with their families, in their
neighborhoods, going through a daily routine that included household
cares, production or service work, the conduct of neighborhood affairs,
the maintenance of normal livelihood activities, the upbringing of the
new generation and perhaps most important of all, adaptation to a
rapidly changing social situation.
The changes that took place in the summer of 1914 involved an almost
complete reversal of purpose and direction. Up to that point Europeans
were devoting a considerable proportion of their time to production and
the maintenance of the normal life routine. At that point they left
their homes, exchanged ordinary clothes for uniforms, laid down the
implements of peace, picked up the weapons of war and prepared, under
very expert leadership and direction, a series of mass movements
designed to disrupt the ordinary life routine of other human beings on
the other side of lines drawn on a map, but having little relation to
customary life activity and even less to geography.
Execution of this purpose involved a mass movement from the home
territory into that occupied by the "enemy". If the enemy resisted he
must be forced to do the will of the invaders. Instead of cooperating in
a joint effort to maintain and improve the general welfare, uniformed,
armed, expertly-led masses began beating up each other, until one side
gave in and cried "enough."
Plans for war had been drawn and redrawn for years, for decades.
Elaborate preparations had been made. Destructive weapons had been
designed and built. Transport had been provided, food stored. Defensive
preparations had also been made in the form of fortifications so placed
as to obstruct or prevent "the enemy" from crossing the "frontier".
When sport-lovers go from home for a day to play a competition in
another city or province, they go, play the game and then go back home
to continue the ordinary life routine. In the case of the project we are
now considering they left home in July, 1914 and returned months or
years later. Many never got back home because they were killed in battle
or died of wounds; many were "missing"; they disappeared.
If casualties in the 1914-18 war had been numbered in dozens, or scores
or even in hundreds, the communities from which they came could have
gone on without them--handicapped perhaps but not seriously disrupted.
But when they were numbered in thousands and tens of thousands it was a
quite different story. Actually, they were numbered in millions.
Mobilized to carry on the war were 42.2 million on the Allied side. On
the side of the Central Powers, 22.8 millions. The total: 65 million. 12
million of those mobilized were Russian, 11 million were Germans, 8.4
million were French, 8 million were from the British Empire. From
Austro-Hungary came 7.8 million, from Italy, 5.6 million. Turkey
furnished 2.9 million, Bulgaria 1.2 million; 4.4 million came from the
United States; 0.8 million from Japan. Lesser numbers came from other
countries.
Except for Spain, the largest contributions of war conscripts came from
the countries with the largest populations. With the exception of Spain,
all of the great powers of Europe provided the "cannon fodder"; the
human beings which Europe's "great powers" assembled to take part in
this profligate orgy of mass murder which went on for more than four
years, from July 1914 until November 1918.
Body count reports and "estimates" give the total number of human beings
murdered in the four year period as 8,538,315. (The legal definition of
"murder" is killing, not accidentally but with the intention of taking
life.)
This figure of 8.5 million murdered human adults, most of them in the
prime of life, refers to the murdered bodies that were recovered and
disposed of. In addition there were "prisoners" and "missing."
As the 1914-18 war proceeded it became less a series of combats between
human beings; more and more it was a war of machines such as
battleships, tanks, big guns and by war's end, of airplanes. Human
beings drew up the plans, made the blueprints, shifted the gears, pushed
the buttons. Their efforts were supplemented and multiplied by the
killing power of physics, chemistry and mechanics brought to the task of
wholesale murder, which produced 8.5 million dead human bodies.
"Prisoners and missing" accounted for 7,750,000 additional human beings.
Many of them were torn to shreds and smithereens by the gigantic
concentration of mechanical and explosive power, designed, constructed
and transported to the European battlefields for the express purpose of
carrying on this month-long and year-long collective endeavor to take as
much life as possible and destroy as much property as possible while war
declarations authorized and legalized mass murder and wholesale
destruction.
Not all victims of the hideous 1914-18 blood bath were killed. "Wound
casualties" numbered 12.8 million among the Allies; 8.4 million among
the boys, young men and adults mobilized by the Central Powers. Some of
the wounded were crippled for life. Some were less severely injured, but
all 22.2 million were more or less severely handicapped when they stood
up to face the rigors of civilian life at war's end. All were denied the
possibility of living normal, productive, creative, satisfying lives.
Wars are fought on battlefields. In the war of 1914-18 many of the
battlefields included villages, towns, cities. These complex
institutions, occupied by men, women and children were smashed and
burned wholesale.
The figures which I have used in listing the 1914-18 war losses were
compiled by the United States War Department. They are more or less
accurate, but they underline the fact that for years on end the centers
of western civilization concentrated their energies and devoted every
means at their disposal to cripple or destroy fellow human beings and
their habitations.
When we read of the destruction of the Roman Empire we console and
perhaps try to fool ourselves by saying that the immense network of
civilization which the Romans and their Greek associates spread across
Eurasia and Africa during the historical period that began about 700
B.C. was destroyed by hordes of migrating "barbarians." When we turn to
our own civilization, however, there are no barbarian hordes to take the
blame. The wholesale destruction which took place in Europe from 1914 to
1918 and which was repeated and multiplied during the wars of 1936-1945
was carried on officially by spokesmen for the most advanced, most
highly developed, most civilized countries of the western world.
We have been using the word "murder" to describe the wholesale slaughter
of Europeans by Europeans that took place from 1914 to 1918 and from
1936 to 1945. The word "murder" is inaccurate. The Europeans who carried
on the wholesale destruction and mass murder during the two most general
wars of modern times were committing murder in one sense. In quite
another sense they were engaged in collective suicide. Europeans were
blotting out the life and well-being of fellow Europeans. When the
process came to a temporary halt in 1945 every European participant in
the struggle was weaker in human potential and poorer in economic means
than they were when the war began.
Arnold Toynbee describes the entire episode as the "down grading" of
Europe. He might have added two words and reported "the down grading of
Europe by Europeans", as a glaring example of large scale, long
continued, deliberate self-destruction.
Fundamental social changes were bound to follow the revolutionary
technical transformations that took place during the world-wide
revolution of 1750-1970. Changes may be made in various ways. Some are
slow and relatively painless, particularly when they extend over
generations; other changes are so rapid that they are agonizingly
painful. Involuntary changes, made under outside pressure are almost
always painful. World-wide revolution, under the best of conditions,
promises to be painful. When it comes from alien sources, and is under
forced pressure, the costs are almost sure to be excessively high.
This brings us face to face with one of the most important problems
facing mankind at the present moment. Given the worldwide revolution of
the past two centuries, what changes--political, economic, sociological
and ideological--must be made to prepare the way for the new society and
shift the family from the old homestead to the new apartment with a
minimum of pain and a maximum of satisfaction?
CHAPTER TWELVE
TALKING PEACE AND WAGING WAR
Blatant contradictions disorganized human life after war's end in 1945.
In the crucial area of war and peace three groups were bidding for
attention: dedicated peace partisans (peacenicks); nationalist
enthusiasts waging wars of liberation; and massive semi-official and
official nationalistic groups busily preparing for the next big war.
Occasionally these groups joined hands on "hot" issues. Generally they
were far apart. Often they were in active opposition.
Dedicated peace advocates were an important factor in this post-war
period. They had been vocal and influential in July, 1914 immediately
before the outbreak of the first general war. They had continued to play
an active role between the first and second general wars. In the autumn
of 1972 the World Peace Council called together a peace assembly in
Moscow representing significant elements from 143 countries. The largest
single element in the World Peace Council was the Socialist bloc, headed
by the Soviet Union.
Peace advocates mobilized wide public support for the "no more war"
movement that developed during the closing months of the 1914-18 war;
for the Briand-Kellogg Treaty of 1928 which renounced war as an
instrument of policy; for the effort to secure general disarmament that
resulted in the General Disarmament Conference of 1933 and for the
United Nations Charter of 1945.
Official declarations in favor of disarmament and peace had been
paralleled by the organization of unofficial peace committees and
societies in western Europe, in the Americas and in the socialist
countries.
Peace efforts had been strengthened by the outbreak of local
wars--between India and Pakistan, between Israel and the Arab League; by
wars of independence and liberation in Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, North
Africa.
Much of the public backing for the peacenicks came from student groups
in official and private high schools, colleges and universities.
Nationalist liberation movements were active in settled communities such
as Ireland and Canada's Province of Quebec. There were less established
movements in newly liberated restless ex-colonies and remaining colonies
of the chief European empires, of Japan and of the United States. The
widely advertised World Peace Council turned more and more from general
advocacy of peace, such as the Stockholm Peace Petition, to the support
of liberation movements among colonials and supressed minor
nationalities.
Preparations for another general war were expanded and intensified as
the competitive struggle for oil and other natural resources mounted. By
the end of the 1960's total arms expenditures of the chief powers were
running at $200 billion per year. In 1973 the total reached $225
billion.
There was much general talk about peace, but the most insistent note
sounded for a high level of spending on armaments. Britain's Prime
Minister Heath voiced a sentiment vigorously promulgated by every
representative of national security "British interests come first".
Confusion was heightened by the presence of men who faced all three
ways: talking peace, waging small wars and preparing for the next big
one. In February, 1974 in his State of the Union message to the U.S.
Congress, President Nixon spoke of "our goal of building a structure of
lasting peace in the world." At the same moment the Washington
administration was feeding the fires of war in South East Asia and
asking the United States Congress to increase 1975 U.S.A. defense
appropriations from $80 billion to $90 billion per year.
When war ended in 1945 there was a planet-wide sigh of relief and a
devout hope that after so many years of local and general wars, the time
had come for western man to take a long decisive step in the direction
of peace. The United Nations Charter expressed this hope to end the use
of war as an instrument of policy.
Since the period of general social relaxation usually known as the Dark
Ages was superceded by the multiple innovations of the Reformation, the
Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the scientific-technical developments
of the 1750-1970 Revolution, man the dreamer, inventor, designer,
planner, architect and engineer has modified many aspects of nature and
transformed the social environment.
Until the Reformation and the Renaissance, European ruling oligarchies
in territories along the Mediterranean and throughout western Europe
were able to perpetuate their privileges and preserve the life styles of
an agricultural-feudal society. Improvements in navigation and the
growth of trade, commerce and industry opened the way for the bourgeois
revolution with its rapid growth of cities and the parallel increase of
wealth, income, and living standards among the newly-enriched
businessmen and their associates and dependents.
Social changes in feudal Europe had been gradual. The dynamism implicit
in the bourgeois revolution escalated the rate of social change with
corresponding modifications in the pattern of European political,
economic and cultural institutions and practices.
In the early stages of the transformation the awareness of change was
limited to a minority of city dwellers. To the rural illiterate
majority, change was a closed book. A great social gulf separated the
feudal countryside from the growing centers of trade, commerce and
industry. Bourgeois life processes narrowed and gradually bridged the
gulf. Differences between city and country living persisted, but the
stark contrast between city abundance of goods and services and their
virtual absence from the common life of the countryside grew less and
less marked as the proportion of the total population living in the
countryside declined with the trek to cities and their suburbs.
Europeans living for the most part in a pre-civilized rural environment
passed through generations of illiterate unawareness of the social
process through which European life was expanding. The rapid extension
of industry and commerce after 1750 (the bourgeois revolution) completed
the transformation of a rural, semi-feudal west and central Europe into
a continent of town and city dwellers devoting their lives to pursuits
unknown to their immediate forebears. In this new Europe the countryside
played a decreasing role, as food supplies and raw materials came
increasingly from less developed parts of eastern Europe or from the
colonies which were opened up by the planet-wide trade and commerce
promoted by the aggressive expansion of the European empires.
Most Europeans, satisfied with the axiom "old fashions please me best"
were stand-patters in the early stages of this transformation. As the
conversion of Europe from feudal status to urban dynamism continued,
however, an ever larger part of the population became aware of the
change through which their society was passing. With the Renaissance and
the Enlightenment inert unawareness gave place to enthusiastic
propaganda in the writings of pamphleteers, essayists, poets, novelists
and social reformers who set the intellectual tone for the new society.
In a very real sense, the bourgeois Europe which emerged after 1750 was
something new under the sun. Large elements of the population,
previously engaged in producing and consuming the bare necessaries of
food, shelter and clothing were increasingly engaged in trades and
professions and rendering services unknown to the feudal countryside. As
the expansion of western civilization continued, entire European nations
like the Low Countries, England and Germany turned to trade, commerce,
industry, leaving only a dwindling minority engaged in agricultural
pursuits. The change was speeded by the revolution in science and
technology.
Changes in economic and social relations are paralleled by corresponding
alterations in the total way of living. Western civilization was, in its
entirety, a cultural departure from the pattern of any preceding
experiment with civilization because of the drastic changes that the
revolution in science and technology had introduced into human society.
Throughout the life-cycle of western civilization minor and major
alterations have been made in its structure and its function. Some of
the earlier political changes were part and parcel of the bourgeois
revolution. They included:
1. The abolition of absolute monarchies and hereditary aristocracies and
their replacement by limited monarchies and republics with various types
of representative and popular governments selected by ballot.
2. The replacement of personal tyrannies and autocracies by written
constitutions and laws passed by elected parliaments.
3. Replacement of war as the sport of kings and the chief instrument of
policy makers, by negotiation, diplomacy, and treaties which became the
core of existing "international law."
4. Arbitrary national sovereignty was supplemented by more or less
permanent alliances and by the formal international organizations such
as the Universal Postal Union, the World Court and the League of
Nations.
5. Regional Associations were organized; the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization; the Organization of American States and the Organization
for European Unity.
6. Disarmament conferences were held. General peace treaties were signed
like the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact of 1928 and the United Nations
Charter.
7. Two major efforts were made to establish a general confederation of
nations and empires--the League of Nations in 1919 and the United
Nations a quarter of a century later. Both the League of Nations and the
United Nations proved to be feeble and ineffectual efforts to bridge the
gulf between limited national sovereignty and planet-wide order and
peace. But they were tentative steps in the direction of a federation of
the world and they did mark a notable advance from the chaos and
conflict incident to the planet-wide expansion of the European empires
toward more stable economic and social conditions and more orderly
international relationships.
Paralleling these changes in the political life of western civilization
there have been a number of drastic economic reforms. One was the
abolition of chattel slavery. A second was the replacement of serfdom
and peonage by free labor receiving fixed wages and salaries. A third
change was the division of large feudal estates and other concentrated
landed properties into small units owned and operated by working
farmers. A fourth change was the establishment of free trade areas
within and among sovereign states. A fifth innovation was the transfer
of individually operated and family businesses into associations and
corporations with limited liability and widespread ownership by bond and
stockholders. Sixth, trade unions and consumers' cooperatives were
recognized and legalized. Seventh, legal provisions were made for social
security against accident, sickness, unemployment, old age. Minimum
incomes were guaranteed. Eighth, many steps were taken toward public or
social ownership of the means of production, including land and other
natural resources. Ninth, repeated governmental efforts were made to
deal with the inflation that attends prolonged exhausting wars. These
efforts included the regulation of credit and debt and the substitution
of new currencies for old ones that had been hopelessly devalued.
Political and economic changes in the life-patterns of western
civilization have been accompanied by far-reaching cultural reforms such
as the provision of free public education; the emancipation of women;
the provision of public recreation facilities; popularized culture
through information, the drama, music, literature, art; equalizing
opportunity and facilitating movement up and down the ladder of
recognition, approval, disapproval.
Political reforms of western civilization date from the Reformation and
the Renaissance. Economic reforms were speeded by the industrial
revolution. Together they are often described as the bourgeois
revolution, which resulted in the power shift from landlords,
ecclesiastics and knights in armor to businessmen, protected and
assisted by the state, the church, channels of information and
propaganda, the police and other armed forces. Cultural reforms
accompanied the reforms in politics and economics.
Underlying the changes and supplementing reforms were improvements in
the means of communication and transportation; the discovery and use of
new sources of energy and the changes in production and merchandizing
which have played so vital a role in the transition from a skimpy
economy of scarcity to an open-handed economy of abundance, extravagance
and conspicuous waste.
Through all of the political, economic and social changes made in the
structure and function of western civilization its basic activities have
remained unchanged. The nuclei of civilized life have been cities
concerned primarily with trade, commerce, industry, finance--planned,
organized and administered by businessmen, their professional and
technical associates and assistants. In practice, city centers of wealth
and power have expanded, using the military as the readiest means of
implementing policy. They have occupied and garrisoned the foreign
territory brought under their control. At home and abroad they have
exploited nature, men and other animals in their interest and for their
profit. The trading cities of medieval Europe, the emerging nations of
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the colonizing empires of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the industrial European
empires of the nineteenth century devoted their energies increasingly to
expanding into new territory, occupying and exploiting it, and fighting
the wars which pock-marked the ceaseless struggle for pelf and power. In
short, they continued to build up the institutions and to follow the
practices of civilized peoples. This has been true of the millennium
that began with the crusades and has hastened the rise of western
civilization and its extension to planet-wide proportions.
Similar conclusions can be drawn from the life stories of the score or
more of civilizations that rose, flourished and sank into inconsequence
during the previous five thousand years.
Each civilization has had its own habitat, its own life pattern. Each
has had its own languages, laws, traditions and customs. But despite
such local differences, all of the civilizations have had in common
those characteristics which justify their inclusion in the family of
civilizations.
Anyone who wishes to test the accuracy of these generalizations may be
satisfied by reading and observing the events that began with the wars
between Japan, China and Russia, the Spanish American War, the Boer War,
and the revolts in Cuba, China and the Philippines, all of which took
place between 1895 and 1905. The present century opened in a period of
critical struggle between empires, within empires and between imperial
centers and colonial dependencies. These preliminary skirmishes led up
to two general wars in 1914-1918 and 1936-1945, accompanied and followed
by a score of minor wars and a planet-wide rash of civil wars and wars
of independence waged by peoples of the erstwhile colonies.
Three johnnie-come-lately empires played star-roles in the drama:
Germany, the United States and Japan. The histories of all three
countries from 1870 to 1950 provide ample support for the contention
that the central theme of western civilization, as of its predecessors,
is a competitive struggle for wealth and power, aimed at expansion and
exploitation, using war and the threat of war as instruments of policy.
Even under the pressures generated by the innovations and the political
and economic changes of the current world wide revolution, the principle
objectives of civilization have remained constant: geographical
expansion; military, economic and cultural occupation; exploitation of
the newly acquired territories and peoples. Each civilization has built
up and maintained a professional military apparatus and used it as the
final arbiter in the determination of domestic and foreign policy.
The means used to achieve these objectives have varied from time to time
and from place to place. The basic pattern of civilization has
appeared, disappeared and reappeared.
Each civilization has made heroic efforts to reform itself when
submerged in a time of troubles that made its institutions and its
practices intolerable to those in power or those groups and classes
which had grown so desperate under its exploitation and oppression that
they preferred death to continuance of the established order.
Each civilization has made its contribution, retaining its essential
form while modifying its practices to meet the requirements of
particular situations. Western civilization is no exception to this
general rule.
Following the all but universal principle that "action and reaction tend
to be equal and opposite," subjugated, occupied peoples revolt against
"foreign" occupation and exploitation. Again western civilization is no
exception, as the movements for independence and self-determination that
followed the 1946 post-war collapse of the European empires clearly
showed.
Reaction against western civilization went beyond revolt to include the
rejection of the obsolete concepts, forms and practices inherent in
civilization. Rejection has been accompanied and followed by proposals
for replacing civilization by concepts, forms and practices more in
keeping with the social relations and situations resulting from the
current world revolution.
Most reforms of civilization have been attempted during the life of
western civilization because during that era both the structure and
functioning of civilization have been called into question. In no
civilization (Egypt, Rome or the modern West) have the essential
principles of civilization been seriously modified. Again and again,
during the times of trouble that marked the breakdown of successive
civilizations, particular institutions were rejected but civilization as
a way of life has been accepted and re-established in the course of each
new cycle.
During previous cycles the breakdown of a civilization had been followed
by a period of rest and recuperation before the beginning of the next
experiment. The breakdown of western civilization, a negative reaction,
has been accompanied by a planet-wide drive to replace the concepts,
forms and practices of civilization by the concepts, forms and practices
of socialism-communism.
Socialism-communism as a way of life for nations and continents is a new
experiment on the planet earth. Heretofore there have been small
groups--families, tribes and sects--that have adopted and followed
cooperation as a way of life, but widespread planned cooperation on a
national or continental scale is a novelty.
As a result of these changes, conflict-torn and fragmenting western
civilization found itself divided into three factional groups:
I. Corporate business organized domestically and internationally to
preserve and extend its wealth and power. Big business interests, their
dependents and backers were concentrated chiefly in West Europe and
North America. Their network of interests and controls was planet-wide.
Literally they were the backbone of western civilization.
II. Builders of socialism-communism, an alternative and rival life
pattern, have been concentrated in East Europe and Asia. The
socialists-communists occupied a minority position in most of the
countries dominated by big business. Their program called for the
replacement of capitalist competition and conflict by a cooperating,
planned, planet-wide society operated for service rather than for
profit.
III. A third segment, made up largely of nations and peoples located in
Africa, Asia and Latin America, who up to war's end in 1945 had been
colonies or dependencies of the big business directed empires. Since
1945 they have become increasingly independent and self-determining.
The three-fold division of the planet was determined in part by the
age-old ideas, principles and practices of civilized peoples during the
past six thousand years. In part, it was the outcome of the planet-wide
revolution of 1750-1970. It was likewise the result of the wars,
revolutions and independence movements that have upset and realigned the
world since 1776. Under the impact of these forces human society was
being unmade, re-examined and remade.
By comparison with its own beginnings and with its predecessors, western
civilization has made many changes in its political, economic and
sociological way of life. It has also developed national and regional
variants of its overall pattern.
Despite these changes, and with the possible exception of its very large
and significant socialist-communist sector, the West has retained the
structural and functional features of previous civilizations: urban
nuclei supporting themselves by trade, commerce and finance; expansion
up to and beyond the point of no return; the life and death power
struggle within and between its constituent peoples, nations and
empires; the use of war as the final arbiter in these struggles; the
rise of the military to a position of supremacy in policy making and
public administration; an all-pervasive pattern of exploitation within
the urban nuclei and between rival provincial factions; speculation in
the necessaries of life; the growth of overhead costs far beyond the
increase of production and of income; the degradation of currency;
multiple taxation; the abuse of credit; inflation, unemployment and
chronic hard times.
Western civilization differs from its predecessors in one crucial
respect: it is planet-wide. Previous civilizations known to history have
been limited by oceans, deserts and other geographical barriers. The
revolution in communication and transportation has by-passed geographic
barriers.
The French saying "the more things change the more they remain the same"
finds ample justification in the story of western civilization and its
predecessors. In one instance after another, for at least six thousand
years, civilizations have been built up to summits of wealth and power.
Then, on the downward sweep of the cycle, they have declined, decayed
and been dumped on the scrap heap of history. No two of these cycles
were exactly alike. Each cycle was a social experiment that followed a
well marked path. There were variations, innovations, deviations from
the norm, but institutions and practices were strikingly similar. In
this broad sense, and despite minor departures, the life patterns of
civilization have appeared, disappeared and reappeared with close
similarity in structure and function.
Western civilization has had a life cycle of approximately a thousand
years. During that millennium it has undergone many changes--political,
economic, sociological, ideological. Throughout these changes its basic
characteristics have remained; have appeared and reappeared. In the
1970's western civilization retains the essential features which justify
us in describing it as a civilization.
The great revolution which began about 1750 and has increased in breadth
and depth throughout the past two centuries had led to vital changes in
structure and functioning, particularly of the West but generally in the
entirety of human society. So far-reaching are these changes, and so
deep running, that human society, particularly in the West, has outgrown
or is outgrowing the life pattern evolved by civilizations during the
past four or five millenia. As a consequence, geographical expansion by
the time-honored method of grab-and-keep has become more difficult, far
more expensive in manpower and material wealth and is in growing
disrepute among a sizeable minority of individuals and social groups,
even in the centers of western civilization. It is in notable disfavor
among the former colonies and dependencies of the European empires.
At the same time, war as a means of achieving social ends has fallen
into greater and greater disrepute. War costs, measured in terms of
human well-being and welfare had soared to fantastic heights before
1945. The devastation, during that year, of two moderate sized cities,
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was a foretaste of the increasingly bleak
chances of human survival with the stockpiling of nuclear weapons far
more destructive than the fission bombs used on the two Japanese cities.
Under the conditions prevailing before the great revolution, competitive
struggle between nations and empires, expanding as a result of victory
in war, had ceased to be a practicable means of gaining, holding and
increasing wealth and power. If the costs of the international power
struggle exceeded the gains, there were no longer victors who won and
vanquished who lost. Instead, everybody lost as the entire social
structure was wrenched, dislocated, wracked and down-graded. Certainly
this seemed to be the plain-as-day lesson of the two general wars and
the flurry of minor wars which swept the earth after 1910.
Expansion through armed struggle no longer paid its way. It was the
obvious lesson stressed by J.A. Hobson and Nicolai Lenin in their
respective studies of imperialism (1903 and 1916). It was the theme of
Norman Angel's _Great Illusion._ It was summarized by Arnold Toynbee's
_War and Civilization._
If the costs of expansion exceeded the income, the outcome of expansion
would be dismemberment for the vanquished and bankruptcy for the
victors. Indeed, this formula generalises the experience of the survival
struggles during the war years which began in 1911. I summarized the
experience in _The Twilight of Empire_(1929).
The catastrophic economic breakdown during the Great Depression of
1929-1938, the spectacular and fateful rise of Hitlerism in Germany
after 1927, the destructive Civil War in Spain from 1936 to 1939,
followed immediately by the war devastations of 1939-45 were part and
parcel of the same picture. The same may be said for the revolt of the
colonial peoples, downgrading all European "victors" in the war of
1914-18, and the social revolutions following 1945 that shook up the
planetary power structure and opened the way for socialist-communist
forces to begin socialist construction in one country after another.
Some European states had become super-states, armed to the teeth,
surrounded with their satellites, dependencies and colonies. They
expanded, exploited and battled as they played the absorbing and ruinous
game of "Beggar My Neighbor". Politically and economically the struggle
reached and passed its high point between 1914 and 1945. The subsequent
years have revealed the aftermath--a down-graded Europe and an ascendant
Asia.
Empire building has been made prohibitively expensive by the revolution
in science and technology; if the human family is to survive in
anything like its present numbers, a way must be found to end the use of
war as a means of attaining social objectives. New techniques, chiefly
non-competitive, must be discovered and employed in the maintenance of
social relations.
Not only must war be abandoned as a means of achieving social
objectives, but exploitation of nature and man must be superceded by a
planet-wide life style that conserves natural wealth and shifts the
center of economic endeavor from competition to cooperation.
Abandonment of war as an instrument of policy and the renunciation of
exploitation of man by man and nation by nation as a means of enrichment
would put an end to the scandalous and corrosive extremes of riches and
poverty that have cursed every civilization of which we have a written
record.
Western civilization, like its predecessors, had consisted of rival
nations and empires competing for living-space, wealth, position,
expanding territorially as they exploited nature and available labor
power for the advantage of the few.
Civilization as a life style, built around the competitive struggle for
wealth and power, using war as an instrument of policy and multiplying
the techniques of expansion and exploitation, has had a series of
experimental tryouts already under way at the dawn of written history.
Under no circumstances has civilization proved to be wholly rewarding
and satisfying. The current revolution in science and technology has
rendered civilization unreformable as well as obsolete.
The structure or pattern of civilization has divided western
civilization into separate parts that benefit by separateness and profit
from conflict. The result is a typical example of a self-destroying life
style struggling through an impasse from which there is no escape save
through a third fratricidal war.
Today civilization is a bad buy, especially for young people starting
out in life. Civilization still has its advantages for those who have
lived actively, achieved many of their material objectives and retired
to spend their declining years in a well-feathered nest. For some
privileged young people, willing to settle for comfort and conformity,
civilization offers the leisure to learn, and an opportunity to test
themselves out against a big field of ardent competitors. But for
energetic, forward-looking, idealistic young people, the opportunities
offered by western civilization are deemed inconsequential, trivial and
in the long run, inadequate. For them, the game is not worth the candle.
Today civilization is a bad buy for two reasons. The first is that
antisocial, predatory, exploitive and parasitic elements are
unfortunately and unnecessarily prominent in the lives of all civilized
peoples, including the present West. The second reason is the arrogant,
self-righteous, peremptory, bragging, bullying, dictatorial approaches
adopted by civilized people in their dealings with those who live on the
fringes or outside the pale of civilization. The first reason is an
inescapable consequence of the political, economic, ideological and
sociological assumptions of the civilizing process. The second reason is
inherent in the methods used by civilized peoples in their dealing with
the uncivilized majority of humanity.
_Part IV_
Steps Beyond Civilization
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
TEN BUILDING BLOCKS FOR A NEW WORLD
In the previous chapter I argued that we are marking time in a fool's
paradise while western civilization slips backward and downward toward
dissolution and oblivion. Like many of its predecessors, our
civilization seems to have exhausted its capacity to create, progress,
advance. Instead it is disintegrating and breaking up in our current
time of troubles.
In an earlier epoch of human history civilization helped to bridge the
wide gap between man the victim and plaything of nature, and man as the
user, director and, to a limited degree, the coordinator of natural
forces. Today questions of our demise or our survival and advance are
pressing and urgent.
Civilization has played an important role in the social history of
mankind during the several thousand years when segments of the human
family have turned their backs on barbarism, regrouped their forces,
revamped their patterns of association and experimented with the more
complicated, specialized and integrated life pattern of civilization.
These experiments have paralleled or followed one another, separated by
shorter or longer ages of rest and recuperation. Each epoch of
civilization has contributed ideas, artifacts and institutions to the
sum total of human culture. This has been the case with past
civilizations. It is true of western civilization.
Civilization, like other aspects of human culture, is never static but
always dynamic. It changes constantly, waxing and waning. It develops,
expands and contracts. It reaches out toward universality, then breaks
down and dissolves into a welter of conflicting regional and local
interest groups. These changes are the outcome of hard-nosed experience.
They are related to alterations in ideas, outlooks and purposes. They
are often associated with technical discoveries and inventions. They
come and go in more or less clearly defined cycles. They are influenced
by deep running political, economic and social forces and trends.
Each civilization matures into forms and develops functions and
institutions that tend to consolidate and crystallize in well defined
social patterns and habit grooves in which two forces oppose each other:
one force is status--preserving that which is; the other force is
change--that which tends to become or is becoming.
Status and change confront each other at all social levels. During
periods of rapid social change they take the center of the stage and
dominate the drama.
The planet-wide revolution of 1750-1970 is an outstanding example of
rapid change. The current opposition of status and change has pushed
other aspects of social life into second place and has made the social
status of yesterday outmoded today and obsolete tomorrow.
The disintegration of western civilization (indicated by its 1910-1975
time of troubles) is having profound effects on western man. The effects
are physical, mental, energenic and moral for individuals. Socially they
find expression in vandalism, hooliganism, major crime, in the break-up
of the family; in alienation, inertia, boredom; in laxity, indiscipline;
loss of faith, weakness or absence of purpose. Most serious of all,
perhaps, western peoples are learning to ignore principle, live for the
moment, satisfy their already sated appetites and pay little or no
attention to the future. These attitudes are widespread in the western
world of the 1970's, particularly among the young. These effects, on the
whole negative, are offset by a number of positive factors. Human beings
are curious and imaginative. They are also ingenious, inventive and
intuitive. All of these attributes are assets when dealing with the
future and the unknown.
In a previous generation, preceding the war of 1914-18, a very large
part of the West was under the influence of the Christian church, which
promised good things in the hereafter. During the ensuing years of
military conflict, planned destruction and wholesale murder, another
considerable part of the West, both socialist and liberal, was promising
security, comfort and convenience here and now. The influence of the
Christian church on life style, even among its own membership, has
declined in the past half century. Affluent monopoly capitalism,
meanwhile, has provided the rich, the middle class and important numbers
of workers and farmers with necessaries and amenities far beyond the
levels imagined by reformers and revolutionaries of a previous
generation. As an integral part of this maturing revolutionary situation
a generation of human beings born since war's end in 1945 has come on
the scene, surrounded by the concrete and glass buildings, block printed
nylons, the automobiles and domestic appliances of monopoly capitalism
and by the social security of socialism. In both segments, capitalist
and socialist, the more gifted, original, sensitive, creative members of
this comfort-pampered generation have turned their backs on affluence
and security and begun shouting a new slogan: "We want to live!"
There is nothing surprising about this development. Many trained,
experienced observers have been predicting it. Youth, idealism,
aspiration, optimism, ambition--cannot be satisfied with status in any
form. They want to live, to achieve, to face difficulties, to overcome
dangers, to express themselves, to create. They are not content merely
to arrive at physical affluence. Affluence and social security cannot
satisfy. They merely sharpen the appetite for a continuance of the life
journey, on the best terms permitted by the current time of troubles.
Among the members of the post-war generation, this ambitious, perceptive
elite is aware of two disturbing and compelling realities. The first is
the peril to mankind implicit in a continuance along its present
disaster course of war, with its inescapable counterpart, social
dissolution. The second is the possibility that out of the wreckage and
rubble of an outmoded cultural pattern, a mature, chastened, more
experienced, more consciously purposive generation will arise,
possessing the wit to see the necessity of creative advance, and the
wisdom to guide the pioneers of humanity along the difficult and
dangerous path that they must follow if they are to reach the land of
purpose and promise.
Current frustrating experience with the breakdown of western
civilization, coupled with historical precedents, confront the present
generation of mankind with a compelling challenge and a unique, precious
opportunity. The challenge arises out of experiments with particular
civilizations and with civilization as a way of life. Our analysis of
this situation leads to only one possible conclusion: Repeated
experiments with civilization unmask it as a way, not of life, but as a
cycle of rise, expansion, maturity, decline and certain death.
The challenge is emphasized by the failure of reforms and reformers of
civilization to make changes in structure and function sufficient to
meet the challenge of the birth-maturity-death cycle. Nor has it been
possible for western civilization to take advantage of the drastic
changes and challenges arising out of the current world revolution.
Man's top negative priority at the present moment is to reject the
wiles, the temptations, the mortal conflicts and the annihilative
destruction which have disrupted and decimated civilized society during
the past six thousand years and reached their apex in the Great
Revolution of 1750-1970. These experiences prove beyond the shadow of
doubt that this pattern of human collective life is inadequate to meet
the present and future needs of the human family.
Man's top positive priority is the present-day occupancy of the planet
Earth by 3,700 million human beings who wish to survive, to utilize and
conserve the natural habitat and to improve the social environment.
Within narrow limits, almost all members of the human family want to
live and to help other humans to do likewise. Multitudes of human
beings, particularly among the youth, want to enjoy outward looking,
satisfying, productive, creative lives. They also want those near and
dear to do the same thing.
What steps must they take in order to realize their hope and fulfill
their aspirations?
Broadly speaking, they must pick their way warily through the maze of
artifacts, gadgets and gimmicks produced by human ingenuity during the
current world revolution. Most of them are superficial and time
consuming. A few are fundamental. They are of the utmost importance as
implements to human advance. Taking what advantage they can of recent
innovations, avoiding dead-ends and illusion leading to rainbows, the
more sensitive and more competent segments of mankind must close ranks
and move upward and onward to a new level of culture. The chief
instrument available for such an enterprise is the twentieth century
version of the political state. The bourgeois revolution was achieved
through the developing, evolving political state. The political state is
the binding force that held scattered fragments of the human family
together during the stresses and strains of the current revolution in
science and technology. It is the political state that must be depended
upon to resist the fragmentating forces of a disintegrating western
civilization, to preserve the social structure and administer human
society through the transition from civilization into the structure and
functioning of the new social order which is presently supplanting
civilization.
Through Europe's transition from feudalism to capitalism, the feudal
state, here and there, step by step, was replaced by the bourgeois state
as the chief structural building block of western civilization. The
bourgeois revolution, in various parts of Europe, lasted for several
centuries; the process was well under way by 1450. As lately as 1945
feudal pockets remained in Eastern Europe.
An even more profound transformation of European society is made in the
course of the Great Revolution of 1750-1970. The transformation is in
its early stages. During the process, the political life of
Europe-in-transition will be administered by the political institutions
of the bourgeois state, together with the closely related state patterns
of socialism-communism which have come into being during the present
century.
During this transition the bourgeois state itself has evolved. At the
outset it was a revolutionary force devoting its energies to the
elimination of feudal institutions and practices and replacing them by
the institutions and practices needed for the advancement of bourgeois
interests.
Today the bourgeois state is a bulwark of conservatism; devoting its
energies to the preservation of bourgeois forms and practices and doing
its utmost to fulfill its counter-revolutionary role of resisting and,
if possible, destroying the institutions and practices needed to replace
the political institutions and practices of civilization by the new
institutions required to move mankind from the outmoded lifestyle of
civilization to a lifestyle beyond and above that to which humanity has
become adapted during the now obsolete epoch of civilization.
At the same time, the socialist-communist variant of the bourgeois state
pattern is providing the framework within which the institutions and
practices needed for the transition from civilization to a newer and
more universal social order are being matured. At the next stage in the
birth process, the institutions and practices necessary for upbuilding
the social order that will replace civilization are being worked out in
theory and embodied in experimental practice.
In practice, an accurate distinction must be made between the
conservative bourgeois state, the temporary transitional state and the
universal socialist-communist state that will shepherd humanity along
the difficult and dangerous path of the political life pattern beyond
civilization. In theory such distinctions are needed as part of the
scaffolding within which the social pattern of beyond-civilization will
be constructed.
Like most decisive epochs of human history, the revolution through which
we are passing has had both a negative and a positive aspect. In Chapter
11 I wrote about one of its destructive aspects--the extreme
destructivity of two periods of general war. At this point, I would like
to list ten positive contributions made by the same revolution toward
the development of a social life style that is offering itself as an
alternative to civilization.
1. NEW SOURCES OF ENERGY. Up to 1750 human beings had the energy of
the human body plus the energy of domestic animals. They used wind to
turn mills and sail ships and water to turn crude wheels. They also
burned various things, particularly vegetable fibres, to produce heat.
During the revolution they have learned to use steam, electricity and
chemical explosives. Recently they have learned to use the energy in the
atom, to use water power extensively and, to a slight extent, the energy
of the sun and the tides.
2. The revolution has taught people who previously feared CHANGE,
to welcome change and take full advantage of discoveries and inventions
that modified nature and profoundly altered human society.
3. Among the INVENTIONS were the extensive use of the wheel for
movement on land, the use of steam engines and electric motors for
moving, manufacturing and transportation and the use of electricity for
communication.
4. INCREASED HUMAN MOBILITY on land and water, and, more recently,
in the air and, still more recently, in outer space. Easy and rapid
movement, and almost instantaneous communication brought people together
in towns and cities, built up trade in goods and services, increased
speed of communications and enabled people living at a distance from one
another to keep in close touch, bringing human enterprises and human
beings into continuing contact. Human life, thought and action were
coordinated. Increased mobility UNIFIED HUMAN SOCIETY.
5. RESEARCH is now an accepted aspect of all phases of human life
and activity. Research is a recognized occupation. Research teams solve
problems, map the paths of enterprise. We are learning first to think,
then, only after careful study, decide on courses of action and follow
them through.
6. The field of inquiry and research covered the entire range of human
experience. Information, resulting from research, provided the subject
matter of new sciences. In the new fields new skills were developed and
new professions built up. The members of this new TECHNOLOGICAL
INTELLIGENTSIA, added to the learned professions, created a large
group who expected and enjoyed affluent living conditions.
7. SPREADING AFFLUENCE increased the number of families that
enjoyed abundance of goods and services, comforts and luxuries mass
produced and offered in a mass market, lifting people out of scarcity by
growing abundance. Scarcity ceased to restrain. Instead, people learned
the values of RESTRAINT, ECONOMY, FRUGALITY, SIMPLICITY.
8. Increase in size and complexity called into being a new profession.
MANAGEMENT with the necessary PLANNING, BUDGETING, COST
KEEPING.
9. Large numbers of well-fed, housed, educated and aware human beings
created the possibility of arousing, mobilizing and utilizing
people--especially young people--to take part in voluntary group
projects, co-operate and create. Such experiences developed SOCIAL
AWARENESS and led to LARGE SCALE MASS ACTION.
10. People growing up in affluence, living above the rigors of poverty,
asked questions about themselves, their society and the universe in
which they lived. They learned that they and their fellows had not only
the five accepted "senses," but additional senses with corresponding
experiences. This opened their eyes to the possibility of additional or
extra senses, opening the immense field of "EXTRA SENSORY PERCEPTION,"
E.S.P.
These ten areas, opening up largely during the years of the great
revolution are "new wine" which cannot be contained in the old wine
skins. They raise questions and open up vistas which transcend the
narrower confines of civilization. They are among the materials and
facilities out of which a new world is coming into existence.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
MOVING TOWARD WORLD FEDERATION
One of man's earliest collective experiences is summed up in the saying:
United we stand; divided we fall.
United we survive and prosper. Divided we quarrel, fight and sooner or
later break up into smaller sovereign competing groups. If human beings
wish to utilize nature or to enjoy the advantages of collective action
and group life they must get together and stay together.
This necessity for collective action has appeared and reappeared all
through written history. It is one of the most important lessons of
present-day human experience. It holds for families, neighborhoods,
villages, cities, nations, for mankind as a whole. It is joint action
for the general welfare.
The principle of collective action has been recognized and put into
practice during the ten centuries that span the rise of western
civilization--put into practice up to a certain point--the nation or the
empire. Beyond that point, collective action has taken two forms:
competition and conflict, including war, and coordination or cooperation
under agreement, contract or treaty.
Among the outstanding results of the great revolution, improvement in
communication and transportation have brought humans into contact with
one another on an increasingly extensive scale, reaching its high water
mark in planet-wide networks of trade, travel, migration and diplomacy,
leading up to the One World which was so much in the foreground of
public discussions between the two general wars of 1914 and 1939.
Much has been written on the subject. I contributed by two bits in _The
Next Step_, a book published in 1922 and _United World_, published in
1945. Perhaps the most critical failure of western civilization was its
inability or unwillingness to take that next step during the decisive
years that followed the Hague Conference of 1899.
In listing the Ten Building Blocks for a New World (Chapter 13 of this
book) I began with world federation because in terms of the public life
of the earth around 1900, the planet was divided into two alliances of
nations and empires--the Allies, headed by Great Britain and the Central
Powers, headed by Germany.
Instead of cooperating to gain their declared objectives of peace,
prosperity and progress these two power blocs engaged in an armament
race from 1903 to 1914, leading up to general war in 1914, with a second
general war between the rivals in 1939.
When I was organizing Part II of this study (A Social Analysis of
Civilization) I had to decide whether to begin with economics or
politics. As an economist I was inclined to put economics first, but
since the study centered on civilization, and since all known
civilizations were not groupings of economic subdivisions but aggregates
of nations, empires and their dependencies, and since the expansion of
civilization has consisted in enlarging the geographical area of the
civilization in question, I decided to begin with politics. As the study
has progressed I have seen no reason for reversing the choice.
On the contrary, since I began collecting data for this study at the
time of the first general war, I have watched the unfolding political
struggle for economic and cultural objectives with the increasing
conviction that politics is the primary focus, with economic forces
always in play, but usually in the background, leaving the center of the
stage to politics.
This is another way of saying that the present-day world is divided
primarily into political nation states rather than into areas of
economic function. Always, economics is important. But, at least
superficially, political considerations are in the foreground to clinch
decisions. A time may come when economists or sociologists occupy the
central offices where primary decisions are made. That time has not yet
arrived. In so far as the present generation is concerned, politics is
in the foreground. The politicians make the crucial announcements and
sign the key documents.
Therefore our survey of the Steps Beyond Civilization begins with
politics. Our attention centers on the political aspects of World
Federation with economic considerations present and always operating,
but not dominating the crucial decisions.
For better or worse, in 1975 and the years immediately succeeding, we
will be living on a planet divided into some 140 politically sovereign
states. In view of the widespread pressure toward self-determination,
the number of sovereign states has increased considerably, especially
since war's end in 1945.
Presumably the principal "united we stand" applies to those 140
sovereign states.
Sovereignty includes the right of self determination--putting the
interests of one particular state above the interests of the entire
family of nations--the part before the whole. Here is a contradiction
and a possible conflict of interest. Britain's Prime Minister Heath,
like many another spokesman in his position, summed up the issue in the
pithy phrase: "British interests come first."
If the French, Italian, Japanese and other prime ministers take a
similar stand, implied by the principle of sovereignty, situations are
bound to arise in which the interests of two or more nations clash,
opening the way for conflicts at many levels: differences of
interpretation, negotiations in the course of which concessions may be
made by both parties. The differences may be settled by diplomats
sitting around conference tables or by armies on the battlefield.
With 140 sovereign states on the planet, the probability of conflict
would seem to be overwhelming. As a matter of daily experience such
confrontations and conflicts do occur. Most of them are handled by
negotiation. A few lead to armed struggle.
Since 140 sovereign states exist on one earth, means must be found that
will enable them to co-exist, if possible, without conflict, and
certainly without military conflict. The means generally relied upon
today for dealing with such problems is negotiation between
representatives of all parties at interest. At the national level this
would mean negotiations between representatives of the involved
governments.
Negotiations between representatives of various governments are always
going on--dealing with political, economic and cultural issues. Within
each nation such negotiations are conducted between spokesmen for
various government departments. Internationally they are conducted by
representatives of various governments working through their diplomatic
or consular services. Within each nation and between nations
confrontations may be settled by negotiation. At each level they may
result in armed conflict.
Governments exist to deal with conflicts and, where possible, to resolve
them before they reach the shooting stage. This is notably true in
domestic affairs because there are usually public officials charged with
the duty of dealing with problems. Internationally, unless there is an
international agency such as the Universal Postal Union of the
Organization of American States, the issue must be settled by special
representatives of the parties.
The argument for a world government begins with the assumption that
means should exist to deal with international issues before they reach
an acute stage. Such means exist within each local government. Similar
arrangements should exist at the international level to deal with issues
that arise between governments.
The political core of a social stage beyond civilization will be a
planet-wide, international, regional and local network of institutions,
integrated, coordinated and administered on the federal principle: local
affairs controlled locally; regional affairs controlled regionally;
international affairs controlled by a planet-wide political authority.
Such a relationship would imply states rights for the local authority;
regional rights for the regional authority, and full awareness in the
central authority of the possibility, at this juncture, of establishing
order, justice and mercy on the planetary level--in our present
terminology, a "world government."
Basic to this federal structure would be the Jeffersonian assumption:
"That government governs best which governs least", with an amendment:
"provided that the authority in question governs sufficiently to
establish and maintain physical health, social decency, order, justice
and mercy in reasonable proportions throughout the area subject to its
jurisdiction".
At each level, local, national, regional and planetary, there will be
committees, councils or other authorities with full responsibility for
the conduct of public administration at the local, the national, the
regional and the planetary or international level.
Currently the federal principle is widely established at local and
national levels. Attempts are being made in various regions to
effectuate stable authorities at the regional level, such as the United
States of North America or the United States of Mexico. There has been
much talk of planet-wide government established by one wealthy and
militarily powerful nation over its peers, or by a voluntary association
with its peers. Institutions established thus far: League of Nations,
The United Nations, The World Court, the Universal Postal Union, have
fallen far short of stable, planet-wide, all inclusive political
authority.
At the moment there are 122 states which are members of the United
Nations. There are perhaps an additional score of nations which have
applied for membership or which might be accepted if they made an
application. Accept this rounded figure, and we have perhaps 140 nations
or potential nations on the planet. Some are long established and
stable. Other nations are new-born, with small populations, few
resources and minimal means of defense or offense. By and large this is
the family of nations which might be coordinated into an effective world
authority which would be responsible for order, decency and peace in a
federally coordinated world.
World authority, to be effective and reasonably stable, must be equipped
with sufficient delegated powers to maintain orderly and decent
relations between its members, establish peace, and carry out policies
necessary to provide and promote ecological and sociological welfare. To
achieve such results it must have a built-in balance between central
authority and local-regional self-determination. It must also enjoy
sufficient elbow-room to provide for social change and for consistent
social improvement.
The goal of world government, as of any political enterprise that
pretends to represent human needs, will be social stability, security,
efficiency of service, and enlarged opportunities for citizens to speak
and act for themselves, directly or through their representatives, at
all levels. Politics is the theory and practice of the possible in any
given situation. Executives and administrators in Los Angeles, London
and Tokyo or in the United States, Britain and Japan will deal with
public transportation, public education and public law and order in
terms of general principles such as those stated in the opening
sentences of this paragraph. They will also face specific situations
arising out of climate, access to raw materials, custom, habit and other
ecological and cultural factors which differ profoundly from continent
to continent, nation to nation, city to city and district to district in
the same nation.
Human communities have sought and found different means of dealing with
the problems of community administration. At one extreme of social
administration are various types of arbitrary, personal dictatorships.
The Greeks called them tyrannies--arbitrary rule by individuals or small
groups subject only to their own decisions.
At the other extreme are social groups that arrive at decisions as the
outcome of discussion in which all group members may take part. Group
decisions may require unanimity or they may be the outcome of voting,
with a majority or plurality vote carrying with it the right and duty to
put decisions into effect as part of the public life of the community.
Various forms of government have been established locally and
regionally. At the level of a civilization, the government has been
established almost universally as the outcome of armed struggle and
military conquest, and has been exercised through the use of armed force
in the hands of armed minorities.
A century without general war, 1815 to 1914, led to a widespread
balance-of-power assumption that planet-wide peace and prosperity could
be established and maintained by preserving a balance between the armed
forces of individual nations or alliances. Hence there need be no more
general wars fought for survival or supremacy.
The bitter struggle for markets, raw materials and colonies that
followed the French-German War of 1870 developed into an armament race
after 1899. From the Hague Peace Conference of 1899 to the outbreak of
general war in 1914, desperate efforts were made to maintain the
power-balance and avert a general war. The failure of these efforts
proved the ineffectiveness of the balance-of-power formula.
Today it is generally taken for granted that a balance of power between
armed nations is no guarantee of peace and order. It is also taken for
granted that frivolous talk like that of an "American Century" after
1945 has no justification in the light of present-day history. As
matters now stand neither a balance between rival armed powers, nor the
domination of the planet by any one power can be relied upon to maintain
world order and keep world peace.
Forms of self-government and representative government developed during
the bourgeois revolution and advocated and partially applied during the
proletarian up-surge, are being continued or are reappearing during the
current struggle for power and prestige at the planetary level. As the
planet approaches one world technologically, there is an increasing
possibility of a planetary political federation, directed by a world
governmental apparatus.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
INTEGRATING A WORLD ECONOMY
Repeated efforts have been made to establish large-scale, widely ranging
economies. This was the case during Egyptian and Phoenician
civilizations. It was certainly true of the economy of the Roman Empire
and of Roman civilization.
Such efforts faced drastic limitations. The most formidable was the
narrow margin of surplus produced by hand labor in the forests, on the
fields and in the workshops, operated, in the main, with hand tools,
with minor inputs of energy supplied by domestic animals and with the
small amounts derived from wind and moving water.
Two further limitations existed. First, as each civilization matured its
leaders and policy makers ceased to labor on the land or in the
workshops, preferring to keep their hands and clothes clean, to free
themselves from irksome demanding toil and devote themselves to tasks
more befitting "gentlefolk." This was notably true of landlords as a
class. It was also true of the richer traders, merchants and
moneylenders, particularly of the third and fourth generations.
Expansion of empires and the civilizations which they developed entailed
military operations. Military operations, in their turn, produced
war-captives, who must earn their keep and, if possible, something more.
Sold in the market to the highest bidder, war captives and their
descendants became chattel slaves. As civilizations were expanded by
conquest and matured by struggle, they developed some type of forced
labor to balance the increased parasitism of the masters and the
growing numbers who were called upon to produce "services" rather than
material goods.
Certain areas of civilized economies were taken over by the public
authorities. Planning and building of cities and their ports, of
highways, including bridges, of viaducts, aqueducts, of drainages for
the cities, of public buildings. The construction of defenses, including
city walls, were partly or wholly public enterprises. Temples and tombs
for the mighty were often in the same category.
Maintenance of large elaborate households by political leaders, and in
later periods of empire building, by the successful merchants and
technicians, led to the employment of many servants, including
subordinate members and relatives of the elite.
Much necessary labor was performed by members of each household. The
resulting economy was therefore fragmented at the household level with
virtually all of the energy supplied by human beings and domestic
animals.
As each civilization developed its pattern of forced labor, including
the labor of war captives, it launched the deadly competition between
freemen and slaves which almost inevitably ended in favor of the slaves,
who were housed and fed by the masters and who could operate at overhead
costs lower than those involved in the hiring of wage or salaried
workers.
Land ownership tended to center in the political-military leaders, the
temples and, as each civilization matured, in the hands of its
bourgeoisie.
Integrating such economies proved to be a difficult, arduous task, well
beyond the powers of the average political, military or hereditary
leader. In a very real sense, the problems of management were extremely
personal and correspondingly concentrated in the hands of skillful
acquisitors. Nowhere was the impact of the 1750-1970 revolution more far
reaching than in the area of management.
Economic activities, in the course of the great revolution, had less and
less connection with the homestead, and except for a tiny minority of
the personnel, had no connection with the family of the owner-operator.
The seat of the family--the home--continued to exist, but on a far more
restricted basis. Arts and crafts moved from the household into the
workshop, where they expanded both in extent and in complexity. Domestic
tasks were associated with hand labor and simple tools. The great
revolution filled the workshop with the ancestors of present day
machinery, but with a prodigious difference. In the early step from home
workshop to factory, hand tools in plenty were being used in the
workshops. As "modernization" progressed, hand tools were replaced by
specialized machines.
The implements of specialization--the machine building tools and the
machine tools themselves--were housed in forests of associated
workshops. The mechanics of specialization sprawled over acres and
square miles of factory floor space. Nowhere were the results of the
great revolution more in evidence than in the vast difference between
the workshop attached to the house of the early industrialist and the
forest of chimneys and stacks, and the acres and square miles of
floorspace in present-day industrial establishments, with their
personnel numbered in thousands and the capital invested in plant and
equipment running into the millions or billions of dollars.