Recipe For The Defeat Of Nazism
Table of Contents
Chapter I The Unbalance of Power
Chapter II Total War
Chapter III The Totalitarian United States of Europe
Chapter IV The Era of Super Imperialism
Chapter V The Re-Armament of America
Chapter VI International Strategy and Perspectives
Introduction
The first broad phase of World War II has come to an end. The French have been captured. The British have been placed on the defensive and rendered relatively innocuous. The German war machine now dominates a Totalitarian United States of Europe of more than three hundred and fifty million souls.
World War II now unfolds itself on a higher plane as Germany, in alliance with Japan, undertakes to dissolve the Soviet Union and to bring that mass of peoples and territory under subjection. The Soviet Union once destroyed, Hitlerism must then attempt the gigantic task of drawing the Western Hemisphere into its orbit. The stakes are nothing less than the mastery of the entire world. A new era of history has begun.
This is no time to equivocate or to blur the problems before us. The whole panorama spreading in all its grandiose proportions must be considered objectively and dispassionately so that the people of the United States see clearly what they must do. Our very existence hangs in the balance.
Chapter I -- The Unbalance of Power
As with clock-like precision Germany absorbs or conquers one nation after the other, the task of sifting the reasons for the amazing victories of Nazism throughout all of Europe becomes ever more freighted with care and concern. We see an Adolf Hitler almost overnight, like the hero in some dime success story, catapulted before our eyes to pinnacles of power unparalleled in human history, we can hardly believe that history is still subject to the prosaic laws of cause and effect and that, after all, nothing has come to pass without natural cause.
The sources of the Nazis power lie in the economic, political, and social worlds which emerged from the ruins of the first World War. Our Starting point, however, should be not 1918 but rather 1914, since it is only by sharply contrasting the pre-war with the post-war world that we can get a proper perspective for our picture. Let us, then, take up the situation as it presented itself just before World War I began.
In 1914 a congeries of civilized empires had in its collective grip the peoples of the entire world. The territorial dimensions and political influences of each of these empires were carefully delimited by a delicate balance of power that, for the time being at least, provided a false sense of security and stability.
In Europe, the balance of power consisted, on the one hand, of the Triple Entente, composed of the British, French, and Russian empires, and on the other hand, of the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austro-Hungary, and Italy. Around each set of allies were grouped the smaller states of Europe and contacting them at various points were the imperialist systems of other nations stretching their tentacles to every point of the globe.
Had our economic world moved smoothly and serenely at an equable well regulated pace throughout, the balance of power then extent might have lasted considerably longer than to 1914. Such, however, could not be the case. The fundamental law of our economic system is the law of uneven development that constantly breaks through closed circles making of human history a spiral curve that never returns to its original starting point. This uneven development was bound to end the old equilibrium some time and shift the scales in one direction or another.
Of the great powers that had seized the modern world for their own aggrandizement, Great Britain was the earliest and the greatest. The entire United Kingdom containing only forty-five millions of people, or a little over two per cent of the world's total, and producing perhaps ten per cent or so of the world's wealth, nevertheless managed to control and dominate directly close to four hundred million people living in colonies and dominions covering a territory about seventeen and a half million square miles and containing preponderating quantities of grain, live-stock, jute, rubber, nickel, tin, gold, and materials essential to modern life. To this listing must be added Britain's indirect control through her international investments of a large number of other vital goods and services.
What was the secret of Britain's strength and how had she managed to retain her world-wide control over such a long period of time? The general answer is not very complicated. Reaping the full benefits of the great commercial revolution of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, England was first to develop the factory system to its modern levels and, thus strengthened immeasurably, was enabled by the middle of the eighteenth century to defeat all her rivals for the chief portions of the international trades and to wrest for herself a huge colonial domain. The increased markets for English goods and the large profits accruing from the traffic in turn fostered the industrial revolution at home. The new inventions in the manufacture of textiles and of machinery of production, in the processing of metals, and in the field of power, secured to England, now the heart of the United Kingdom, supremacy in the economic field for a long period to come.
By utilizing her economic supremacy and colonial control to full advantage, Great Britain, all during the nineteenth century, managed successfully to handicap her European rivals for power. To vanquish challenging France under Napoleon, Great Britain threw her great financial might in unceasing struggle to bolster the old regime of continental Europe, till her opponent, bled white, lay writhing on the ground and a new "Holy Alliance" could be created to guard British interests. Again, to restrain a rising Germany under Bismarck, Great Britain, now allied to France, joined forces with Tsarist Russia to surround Germany and to create a new balance of power which would guarantee more adequately the stability of the old equilibrium.
But the same industrial revolution that had given strength to England to break open and to conquer the major markets of the world for herself, could not possibly be confined to that little isle alone; the very force of British industry compelled industrial development and expansion abroad.
Soon, highly centralized France, geographically favored almost as much as England, was to enter into the race. Huge portions of Africa and Asia came under the merciless exploitation of the French. As in the case of England, here too a small portion of the world's population, forty million, having approximately only half of even the United Kingdom's economic weight, took possession of an immense area more than twenty times the size of the home country and inhabited by a numerically larger population.
Other competitors appeared: Germany, the United States, Japan, Russia, as the industrial revolution pervaded every phase of the economic process and rapidly transformed every aspect of political, social and intellectual life everywhere. These new competitors challenged still further the older monopolies seized by the earlier beneficiaries of the commercial and industrial revolutions and presented the English and French imperialists with the problem of how to retain their leadership.
British and French supremacy had been maintained by three chief methods: colonies, free trade, and financial control. A brief discussion of these three methods will help us not only to understand the pre-war world but to grasp the changes that took place in the economic and political order following World War I.
Colonies, let us note, preceded free trade; free trade, in fact was based on colonies and was the child of seventeenth century monopoly just as it became the mother of twentieth century monopoly. None the less, for many years it was the fashion for English economists to write endlessly on the theme of free trade versus monopoly as though no other relation between the two but antithesis could possibly exist. These economists persisted in blinding themselves to the fact that nothing could be more natural for those countries possessing the best means of production and the largest and wealthiest colonies than to advocate free trade and to use the advantages of their colonial monopolies as the chief instrument to conquer the economic markets in any field of competition that free trade implied.
It is true that the Mercantilists, who dominated the colonial policies of imperialism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, stood for principles which negated free trade in so far as the relationship of the colony to mother country was concerned, for under the Mercantilists the resources of the colonies were to be used entirely for the benefit of the home industrial imperialist country. The parent nation dictated the laws of immigration, of export and of import, of production, and of internal commerce for the colonies. This, however only laid the basis for the later adoption of free trade doctrines; for once the home country had the resources and strength of the colonies behind her, she could feel strong enough to meet all competition elsewhere. Only then could she afford the luxury of adding the doctrines of free trade to her armament so as to try still further to batter down trade barriers and to broaden the market for her own products.
If free trade came from the womb of monopoly, it itself was an excellent way for certain groups to maintain their monopoly. For the British Empire, and to a lesser extent for the French Empire, free trade became an absolutely indispensable economic method to dominate and monopolize world markets. Let us examine briefly the case of Great Britain.
Great Britain herself did not have the raw materials sufficient for her enormous production of finished goods for a world market. She had to obtain these supplies not only from her colonies which suffered from lack of development and of capital, but above all from other parts of the globe, particularly from the Western Hemisphere. Naturally, Great Britain wanted the most unhindered flow of these raw materials to her shores and under such circumstances could do nothing else than become a chief advocate for a world system of no tariffs, or very low tariffs, and for a completely fluid world market.
Add to this the fact that Great Britain, as mistress of the seas, more that any other nation carried the world's sea trade, drawing untold revenues from this means of transportation, especially when her ships in many places had wrested for themselves a practical monopoly.
Furthermore, since England had been the first to place modern manufactured goods on the market and was most efficient in their production, free trade could not but guarantee industrial supremacy to that country. Once free, open competition was the rule, England could maintain her premier position as the work-shop of the world so long as other countries could not surpass her in industrial production.
Finally, free trade meant that Great Britain which had most of the trade would have most of the world's money as well. Free trade was based on a world money system in which the precious metals played the part of a universal equivalent for all values. Pouring into England from all parts of the world came a huge flood of money which could be used by the bankers and financiers of that country to insure a still firmer hold on the resources and goods of the world.
By means of their enormous reserves of gold and means of credit, the bankers of London were able to invest their capital in all foreign countries and to attempt to bring those countries under their direct or indirect domination. In all their investments, British financial experts were interested not merely in private gain and in the rate of profit, but also in monopoly. It was for this reason that the chief investments of British bankers abroad were not so much in factory production as in railroad and public utilities, in government bonds, and in the formation and establishment of those huge international cartels, syndicates, and trusts which marked the imperialism of the twentieth century.
Obviously, if colonies, free trade, and financial control were the ways by which the British and French empires obtained their hegemony, these means could not be the ones likely to be favored by their rivals. New needs created new ways in Central Europe and in Asia. Following the French Revolution which burst asunder the fetters stifling the modern productive system in Central Europe, a tremendous economic development arose in Germany and in neighboring countries. Soon productive expansion and the need for markets and for raw materials began to put their pressure upon the political structures of Germanic Europe resulting in one convulsion after another. The revolution of 1848, the War with Denmark, the War with Austria, the War with France, the formation of the federated German Empire, the ensuing close alliance with the Austro-Hungarian Empire, bitter antagonism to France and England, the efforts to win over Italy and the formal alliance entered upon with that country, the push towards the East and the growing hostility towards Russia, -- all of these great events were political counterparts to the tremendous growth of German economy and the need of that economy for greater "elbow room".
Germany was compelled to follow a course of development entirely different from that of Great Britain and France, if only from the fact that her industrial awakening arrived so belatedly, when her Western rivals had already seized almost all the best colonial lands and had obtained supremacy in commerce and finance. Germany could not possibly win by following a policy of laissez faire or let it be, so prominently advertised in the West; she could not afford to let Liberalism win the day; she could not adopt a philosophy of government to the effect that government is best which governs least; she could not let individual enterprise overshadow organized control, she could not permit politics to be secondary to economics, nor pacifism to overshadow the policy of military might.
Once Europe as a whole had become awakened and was developing its own complicated division of labor, Germany's central geographic position became of enormous strategic importance. Gone were the days when Germany's position, remote from the Atlantic Ocean and ocean-going trade, had militated against her. No longer was Central Europe the battle-ground for one exhausting war after another. Blessed with raw materials and resources superior to those of either France or Britain, and with a population almost equal to both of them combined, the Germans were in a position to become the foremost industrialists of all Europe. Not commerce, not finance, but industry, -- here was the economic key to world power for the German people.
Had Germany followed the course of England, it might have been expected that her industrial development would have a long, slow, and laborious process. Only gradually had English factories become modernized and transformed by cumulative inventions of machinery and by improved methods of management as English production pragmatically plodded behind lush English trade. And here we may pause to note as part of the law of uneven development the corollary that the very unretarded pursuit of a line of least resistance in one direction may definitely hinder the rate of growth of other portions of the country's economy and thus hinder the evolution of the entire economy.
In the case of England, the path of easiest development had been trade, oceangoing trade, connected with colonial control and financial leadership. For a long time the merchant had been the dominant factor in British life and had become the most vociferous exponent of the doctrine of Free Trade as he pushed aside any attempt on the part of government officials to coordinate the people's activities.
Englishmen who left the home country to settle in the virgin colonies of America, South Africa and Australia, British seamen who roamed the seven seas and whose chief reliance for months on end was the law of the cutlass and the yard-arm, traders who wanted to go wherever they wished without let or hindrance to make as much money as they could, a State totally unable to control in any centralized fashion the far-flung activities of its peoples and its scattered possessions, surely these factors could not lead to any definite and conscious industrial policy by the English administrators of government. Despite the rich plums it could still hand out to its favorites, the British State was steadily reduced to the minor functions of colonial meddling and police action at home. A philosophy of Utilitarianism sprang up that declared that the greatest good to the greatest number could be achieved if government kept its hands out of business and let its people alone in their economic endeavors. Thus industry developed in England without a plan, haphazard and chaotic, accrescing with the needs of trade and finance but making no conjointed efforts to insure maximum efficiency of its capacities. There was no need for hurry. Germany had to hurry. Coming late upon the scene, she had to make up for lost time. With no great future in trade or finance, and concentrating upon industrial might for supremacy, Germany soon found that she did not have to go through the entire gradual evolution that had prevailed in England and France, but that she could take advantage of the most recent scientific discoveries, of the most far-sighted inventions, and of the most advantageous practices of management to stand on the shoulders of her rivals and to begin where they left off.
In her industrial progress Germany was favored by a set of remarkable circumstance that should be noted here. In the first place, she had a far more obedient working population than that which toiled in either France or Britain, a population which had been freed from serfdom not by its own efforts, but by those of the French. There was no pattern of the Paris Commune in Germany; there were no Anarcho-Syndicalist tendencies within the German labor movement to insist that the general strike and sabotage become the chief tenets of its immediate program. There were not even the milder traditions of Magna Carta, of Protestant Rebellion, of Bills of Rights, of revolutionary Labor Chartism, of Irish revolutionism among the German masses as among the British. The Socialism of the German proletariat was a Socialism that held the development of German industrial might as its dearest object. The Socialists of Germany sang the loudest the praises of the trust, the cartel, the syndicate, the monopoly, the nationalized industry controlled and owned by the State.
In return, industry could not fail to put its indelible stamp upon such a proletariat. Let us remember that the industrial process is the result of an entirely different subdivision of labor from that which results in free trade. The trade in commodities presupposes a division of labor in society in which one group produces one set of products and another group an entirely different set, which products are then exchanged in definite proportions with each other. People engaged in the cycle of exchange are not at all necessarily interested in the methods of production. So far as the trader is concerned, each productive group is independent of any other and he can remain entirely indifferent to their technique and culture. What he is mainly interested in is their products.
A nation whose most articulate sections are exchangers, traders, and merchants, therefore, must give a corresponding style and set of attitudes to the people generally that soon become frozen in definite social patterns. While such a nation may become acutely aware of the anarchical relations governing the market place, it can yet remain alien to the organization, discipline, and planfulness that mark the subdivision of labor within the factory itself.
The subdivision of labor within a factory or industry is in sharp contrast to the subdivision of labor giving rise to free trade and commerce. Within an industrial plant there is established a definite relation of men to machinery, a definite place for each man, a single control of the labors of all the men, a coordination of all the activities in the workshop, a planfulness that makes all operate under the will of the master or the manager of the enterprise. Nothing is deliberately left to chance. Everything is studied so that the collective product thus cooperatively created may be put on the market with maximum efficiency and with the least expenditure of energy and waste. Naturally, a proletariat engaged principally in such enterprises will be stamped with an entirely different style and socio-political attitudes than the working-class of a nation emphasizing chiefly trade and commerce.
As we have already noted, Germany as a nation was primarily neither a commercial firm nor a counting house, but above all a huge industrial undertaking which millions of workers were toiling day and night to perfect and to enlarge. The German people naturally would prominently display those traits in which they were trained, which were so necessary and useful inside the factory, and which led to such a high degree of cooperation, organization, discipline, definite relations of men and machinery, obedience to one central will, and completely coordinated activity to carry through a single purpose and to achieve a single result. We must appreciate these qualities of the German people if we are to evaluate the causes for the later resounding victories of Nazism over all of Europe.
The second remarkable feature favoring Germany's struggle for industrial supremacy was the type and activity of the German State. In this country the state was ubiquitous and intimately fused with industry. Once the German robber barons and princes, who for centuries had demonstrated their Edelheit by plundering the traders of their vicinity, had united under their chief, the King of Prussia, as Kaiser of the German Imperial Reich, such impoverished rapacious rulers could not possibly be expected to let business alone and to keep the state merely as tax-gatherer and policeman. Nor was such conduct feasible under the circumstances.
While the noble dynasties of England or of France might get rich on the gleanings from trade and commerce and from the rich pickings from the colonies, such avenues of gain were not open to the Junkers of Germany. Wealth and power could come to them only through the careful nursing of the productive machinery of the country. Germany could get the capital to rival her competitors only by husbanding her resources with the utmost care, only by working her industries with the greatest efficiency, only by focusing the whole power of the nation, through the instrumentality of the agencies of the State, behind each and every one of her enterprises bidding for world markets. Far from adopting the laissez faire theories of British and French Liberalism, the Germans had to follow in the strictest manner the principle of close coordination of the activities of the state with every economic advance.
Hence the protagonists of free trade theories were never very popular in Germany; instead, from the very beginning, there arose the idea of a Zoll Verein or Customs Union which could use the weapon of the high tariff to protect Germany's industries from competition with those of the rest of the world. Coupled with the tariff to build up German economy went the subsidy from the state to allow her factories and workshops to outsell the "free" industries of every other country. The State was conceived as the central ganglion giving the purposeful orders to each industrial member of the body corporate. The State had its nerve centers in every important business venture and governmental rules and regulations planfully controlled the operations of thousands of plants throughout the nation.
In this manner, by the close fusion of State and industry, Germany at last found the solution to the problem of how to beat the combination of finance and free trade so successfully used by the British and French.
To grasp the full import of this intimate relation of state and industry in Germany, we must constantly bear in mind that the German state placed above every other section of the population its military caste which, headed by the royalty and nobility, dominated every phase of State activity. Nowhere more clearly than in Germany was it recognized that by no means was the State chiefly an instrument to keep traffic in order, or to help old ladies across the street. Rather was it the central agency of the nation to push its way to power by military means. The very essence of the State was the army; to abolish the army would mean to annihilate the state, an alternative unspeakably horrible to the state-loving German who firmly believed that the German state was the highest product of civilization. Since all history had shown the German that in the intercourse of state with state might made right, he was quite ready to asseverate that war was the fundament and culmination of state activity. Thus in Germany the partnership established generally between state and business meant especially a partnership between industry and the army.
This partnership was much to their mutual advantage. On the one side, industry needed the organizing centralization and planning of the state and could also profitably use firm, aggressive, military methods to win new markets. (We stress again the fact that Germany, inferior to her rivals in the fields of trade and finance, could wrest the monopolies established by the British and French only by a ruthless use of the war machine.) On the other side, German militarist adventurers had dire need of the maximum development of industry, not only as a source of revenue for the political rulers of the country, but, above all, as a source of power for conquest.
To conclude, military and industrial advance went hand in hand and the industrialists heartily seconded the military caste so firmly ensconced in German society.
In an industrial society wealth accumulates in quite a different way than in a trading or money-investing society. In the latter case, as in England, say, wealth may accumulate and generally does, by the process of centralization: that is to say, it accumulates by a process of bringing a given mass of capital into fewer and fewer hands without necessarily entailing any expansion of physical production of goods. Just the opposite is the case in an industrial society which can accumulate capital principally by the method of concentration: that is to say, it accumulates by enlarging the industrial plant or creating more branches so as to turn out more products than before. Centralization does not at all imply any increase in the product; concentration of capital on the other hand, must not only realize an increase but must also dispose of this increment or perish. Furthermore, the advancement of an industrial firm by the extension of its productive apparatus not only implies the necessity of finding a large market for its new goods and of obtaining more raw materials, but above all demands a greater organization of the industrial process itself.
British financial capital, for example, could be invested in the railroads of South America or in the utilities of British Dominions without the slightest thought being given to the physical development of these industries by the investors. So long as their investments were protected and brought results.
Englishmen had no need of concern with changing either the economic or political relations of the country involved. Indeed, if only as a matter of inertia, such investors would rather incline towards ultra-conservative maintenance of the status quo.
German industrial capital, however, could be invested in Bohemia, say, only by erecting factories there, by training the proletariat of that locality with the help of imported German mechanics and foremen, and in general by rapidly organizing that new territory of Central Europe. With the expansion of German industry into other lands came the inevitable necessity of seeing to it that these other lands were organized in the same manner as Germany herself.
Here arose an acute political problem that had to be solved unless Germany was to find an end to her economic expansion. If German industrial development was to continue in the East, the only logical direction it could take, then the role and destiny of the German Empire obviously was to control this eastern portion of Europe so as to develop it properly and bring it completely within the German economic system. Such control could not but threaten the political and national integrity of those states of eastern Europe industrially inferior to Germany and living on an entirely different plane of culture. Every push of German industry into East Europe, therefore, carried with it political explosives to blow to pieces the old balance of power.
German industrial development in Poland, for example, at once brought with it both an unsettling of the internal relations within the Russian State and a correspondingly sharp response from Tsarism which looked upon this industrial infiltration as a method by Germany to undermine and conquer parts of the Russian Empire. Again, German industrial expansion in the Balkans found itself in sharp contradiction to the haphazard and chaotic political forces dominant there. It was patent that the multifarious special interests, rules, tariffs, hindrances of all sorts luxuriating in the Balkans made it extraordinarily difficult for German industry to proceed in any adequate manner without a complete political and economic reorganization of that territory under German guidance.
Especially noteworthy was the situation created within the Austro-Hungarian Empire by the evolution of German industry. That Empire had been delicately balanced by a set of internal forces which set Czech against Hungarian, Austrian against Pole, Rumanian against Turk, Ruthenian against Croatian, Slovene against Italian, Slovak against Jew. Precariously perched on top were the Hapsburgs ruling only by dividing one group against the other, and, within certain limits, fostering the chaos by allowing each group to do with itself exactly what it pleased.
Such conditions German industry could view only with abhorrence, and was bound to set as its goal the elimination of these petty conflicts and the integration of Central Europe into one economically organic whole.
Had parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire been independent states, the task of establishing a different order would not have been difficult. Bound by a million ties to the German economic system, Bohemia would have been annexed to that country of which it was in reality but a part. So would it have gone with other sections. But standing in the way of this reorganization was the hybrid Austro-Hungarian Empire having its own independence to maintain, its own dynasty, stupid state cliques, and politicians to appease, its own tariffs and economic destiny to fight for. The Hapsburgs could neither industrialize their own country nor permit others properly to do it for them.
No doubt, even before World War I Germany could have tried to effect an organic unity between the Germanic peoples living on both sides of the border between Germany and Austria. If these attempts were not seriously tried, although they were seriously enough discussed, it was not, as Adolph Hitler imagined, because of any personal relations between the Hohenzollern dynasty that ruled Germany and the Hapsburgs, but was rather because of the fact that any expansion of Germany into Eastern Europe would have spelled war, and Germany could not at that time have afforded a struggle with the entire remainder of Europe allied against her.
Basically, Germany failed to unite with Austria before the war for the very same reason that she failed to win the war, namely the superior set of forces thrown around Germany by the French, British, and Russians. Russia especially was concerned with the maintenance of the antiquated Austro-Hungarian system. More than anything else it was Russian Tsarism that kept the Austrian Kaiser and his clique upon the throne, helped bolster that precarious balance of internal relations within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and barred the way to German expansion in the East.
The contradiction between the organizing and disciplining tendencies of German economy and the anarchical and chaotic political conditions in Eastern Europe became constantly accentuated as production itself developed qualitatively new levels. If national boundaries, jealousies, tariffs, regulations, politicians, armies and such had militated against progress when industry was still on a mechanical plane, producing machinery, railroad engines, textiles and similar material how much more did these conditions hinder the expansion of industry when new chemical and electro-dynamic techniques were introduced?
Could the Balkan nations or the petty principalities making up the old Austro-Hungarian Empire possibly develop such industries as radio, aviation, electrical equipment, wireless, automobile, moving pictures, telephone, or television? Incapable of economic ingenuity or of any grand achievement themselves and unable to utilize the inventions and discoveries of science and industry waiting at their door, the small countries of eastern Europe were rapidly becoming an historic anomaly no longer justified in any economic sense. The petty principality would have to go the way of the feudal manor or the hand loom factory. Historically it had outlived its usefulness.
No one saw this more clearly than the Germans. If German industry was to organize its expansion it would have to take over these anachronistic principalities of Europe and bring them in line with economic progress. Hence German concentration of capital egged on the German military to put an end to the petty states and their selfish barriers to progress. Before Germany stood the gigantic alternative: either the organization of Europe or the extinction of the Empire.
The spread of the industrial revolution into Central Europe could not but violently affect the Russian Empire which with unparalleled rapidity had driven its way across Asia to the Pacific. In very self defense the Russian state had been compelled to adopt modern technique and put it to use for its own protection. In contradistinction to the English with their gradual methods, the Russians pushed their industrialization with feverish speed, its rate of growth often rivaling that of the boom towns of the American West. The new industrial plants erected were large and modern, and were operated according to the most advanced European methods. The sites chosen for industrial centers were generally planfully selected with the cities artificially built around the plants that were erected there first. Russia came to illustrate in classic form the law of combined development, a backward country leaping rapidly through various stages of evolution in order to realize the most advanced methods of production far ahead of the general level of the country.
Despite all her filth and backwardness, Russia had a tremendously progressive role in the awakening of Asia. Sprawled all across that continent, her adoption of Western methods operated as a continual prodding of a slumbering mass of humanity embracing half the human race. Every step forward taken by the Russian giant whether economic, social or political, was bound to have deep reverberations throughout the Orient.
In Asia, Russia was limited in her conquests only by the power of the British Empire and of Japan, limitations which served all the more sharply to remind Tsarism of its great need for capital and Western methods. Yet, each defeat of Russia in Asia brought convulsions at home making the ruling dynasty all the keener to resist any alteration of the status quo in Europe. Russia was in the paradoxical position of having to Westernize herself while fighting the influences of the West with all her might.
The chief danger to Russia, the chief disturber of her status in Europe, was the tremendous growth of the German Empire. This was so not only because of the external struggle of both powers over the Balkans, East Europe, and the Near East, but also because Germany, through her growing penetration of Poland and Eastern Europe, had rendered the position of the anachronistic Romonoff dynasty extremely precarious. Poland, ever more closely bound to the West in general, especially to the Central European economic system of which Germany was the heart and center, was impelled continuously to fight the Absolutism of Russia rooted so deeply in Asia. In a sense it could be said that the struggle between revolutionary Poland and the decadent ruling cliques of Russia flowed from the struggle of the German economic system for more breathing space.
Thus Russia occupied a double position: regarding Asia she was Western and progressive, but as concerned Europe, Russia furnished the chief bulwark for reaction, with her immense hordes standing ever ready to beat down the political uprisings that followed the course of the Industrial Revolution, Tsarism refused to recognize the fact that Russia could not have her industrial development without having an industrial society which would render intolerable the Absolutism of the Tsar. Just as Russia could not fight against industrialization, so could she not win her conflict with the politics of the West, that West whose nearest exponent and menacing rival was German.
Here then, were the conflicting forces that made for the balance of power existing before the World War of 1914-1918. England and France, allied with Russia, formed a counterweight to Germany allied with Central Europe, with Austro-Hungary, and with an Italy who believed that she could realize her imperial ambitions in the Mediterranean and in Africa only by opposing French and British interests.
For a long time the countervailing forces were relatively equal and neither side dared launch the offensive against the other. But in this case time was no healer of wounds; delay only made more acute the burning contradictions that could find no other solution than open battle. Germany could no longer desist from her push to the East, a push that meant World War I.
If we agree to the general thesis that in the long run that politics follows economics and that in any struggle among nations, that one that is the best developed economically will eventually prove superior politically and militarily, Germany should have won the war, and indeed, almost did so, even though Italy finally broke from her former partners and joined the side of England, France and Russia. If Germany did not vanquish her opponents it was not in violation of the general thesis but rather in confirmation thereto, for Germany lost World War I only because a country even superior to Germany threw into the fight its full economic strength and later its military might against her. It was the support given by the United States in terms of money, credit, materials, and men that finally won the day for the exhausted British and French Empires.
Had the United States remained in the European field in the political sense, the normal course of events where superior powers conquer inferior powers might have followed in Europe. But the United States, for reasons of its own, did not care to remain in Europe, either to take territory for herself, or even to join the League of Nations. The reasons for this voluntary withdrawal by the mightiest country of all to enter the World War go to the very heart of the diplomacy consistently displayed by the United States from the early days of the foundation of the Republic. At this point, however, what we must carefully analyze is not the cause for the voluntary renunciation by the United States of the booty of war, but the consequent result of this withdrawal upon apparently abandoned Europe.
The Versailles Treaty had contemplated such drastic repartitioning of Europe as to make impossible even in the far future the rebuilding of the German military and economic machine. Germany was to be almost entirely disarmed, her army disbanded, her navy sunk, her marine confiscated, her railroads stripped of rolling stock, her resources mortgaged, her products taken through reparations and war indemnities, her colonies handed to others, her political set-up entirely smashed. Belgium, France, Italy, Poland, yes, even Denmark and Lithuainia all hacked slices from Germany. East Prussia was cut off by the Polish corridor while the old Napoleonic policy of separating the Rhine area and Bavaria from the rest of Germany was given serious consideration. Germany's allies fared even worse. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was completely broken into fragments, parts becoming independent, the rest going to a swollen Jugo-Slavia, Poland, and Rumania. Bulgaria was stripped of a large portion of its land and deprived of entrance to the Mediterranean. The old Turkish Empire was given a mortal blow and saved a remnant of its independence and power only by most heroic revolutionary measures.
In short, the Versailles Treaty was dictated by the diplomats of France and of Britain in a tone of finality and decisiveness just as though they had really won the war all by themselves and were actually the stronger nations. This was a fatal illusion. These diplomats either calculated on always being able to bring the United States to their aid, or they failed to realize fully that the military and political withdrawal of the United States from positive European politics created an anomalous situation where the countries that had won the war were too weak strictly to enforce the peace.
A defeat for England and France might have modernized those countries and compelled them to revamp their economic systems. Their undeserved victory, however, only served to fasten on them for a still longer time the out-of-date methods which had almost cost them the war itself. While Britain and France returned to free trade, colonial control, and financial juggling to keep supremacy over Germany, that country was utilizing the results of the war to get rid of all her old machinery and material, and, with the help of capital from the United States, to rebuild a far mightier industrial machine than ever before. Superficially, from the Versailles Treaty, France and Britain appeared entrenched in world mastery for generations to come; actually, their victory only made them more ripe for defeat in the next struggle. Strangely enough, the war ended the balance of power not in favor of the victors, but in favor of vanquished Germany!
*******************************
Nothing was clearer in 1919 than that the World War had shattered the old basic rhythms and patterns of world politics, replacing them with sudden unpredictable spasms and convulsions. The difficulty of defeating Germany had exhausted Europe; the peace treaty had Balkanized it; and from one end to the other of the continent flared the Communist Revolution. To make matters even more difficult, there had taken place during and immediately after the war a definite shift in world economy, a shift away from Europe and towards the United States. All of these considerations helped create a permanent desperate crisis for the powers that won the war as well as for the powers that lost it, a permanent crisis that the old methods could not in the least liquidate.
How unstable was the power of the ruling classes and how miserable the masses had become could be gauged by the Communist Revolution that broke out in Russia and from there extended to Finland, Poland, Hungry, and Bavaria, and threatened to seize power even in Italy and in Germany. No country was safe from the threat of civil war and for a long time after the armistice the chief concern of the politicians of Europe was the fight to prevent the working classes from uniting their forces to take over power for themselves. German Junkers and French democrats vied with each other in earnest cooperation in Finland, Poland, the Baltic Provinces, and elsewhere to crush the advance of the Russian Red Armies; Rumanians and Czechs marched into Red Hungary; the troops of Versailles occupied the Red Ruhr; German officers were given a free hand by their erstwhile enemies to disperse the Bavarian Soviets, while Austria was starved into submission and Germany and Italy were aided by credits and supplies from the United States. As Soviet Georgia and Soviet Armenia were invaded by French and British forces, a huge international interventionary army was rushed into the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics to put an end to the communist revolution at its very source.
What could speak more eloquently of the general exhaustion of capitalist Europe and of the weakness of the Versailles victors than the fact that in the end Bolshevism was not conquered but that, on the contrary, while, thanks to the aid of the United States, Communism was set back in Germany, in Italy, and in the rest of Europe, sovietism continued supreme in Russia, and Siberia, a territory covering one-sixth of the entire globe and containing enormous resources and potentialities? From now on Communism would no longer be content to be merely a spectre haunting the world, but would be a living vital force constantly urging the masses of workers to overthrow the capitalist system and to build a cooperative commonwealth of their own.
If Europe was to be freed from soviets it was imperative that the Soviet Union be destroyed. The failure of England and of France to annihilate the soviets only made the problem ever more acute and pressing for the rulers of all Europe, and indeed, of the world.
The Russian Revolution profoundly affected the entire nexus of political relations of post-war Europe. For one thing, in 1919 the old alliance between France and England on the one hand, and Russia on the other was now absolutely impossible. Alliance with Russia meant the spread of Communism than which nothing worse could be imagined by either the Paris Bourse or London's Downing Street. Implacable hatred for anything Russian now become the order of the day for these elements that controlled the French and British Empires.
The rupture of the old alliance of France and Britain with Russia presented these imperialists with a duel problem: First, how could they stem the tide of bolshevism to prevent it from spreading throughout Europe and the West? And second, how could they replace the Russian alliance so as to enable them to surround Germany East and West as in the past? The League of Nations appeared as the solution to their dilemma.
Through the instrumentality of the League of Nations which they controlled, France and Britain believed that they could utilize all of the small countries newly formed in Eastern Europe so as to form a cordon sanitaire or health line from Finland to Rumania and thus quarantine the Communist virus. Simultaneously, this alliance of small nations could be used against Germany if need be and to this end huge sums of money were poured into Poland, Czecho-Slovakia, Jugo-Slavia, Rumania and the Baltic countries.
Such a dismal policy was doomed to failure. The very formation of the cordon sanitaire was an admission on the part of France and England that their offensive against Communism had been smashed and that they had been driven to adopt a defensive policy of watchful waiting. Such an admission was tantamount to a confession that France and England were no longer fit to remain the leaders of Europe since they could no longer fulfill their historic task of crushing communism. Communism could never be beaten by merely defensive tactics. If Russian Communism was in fact eventually checked it was not so much owing to the strength of the cordon sanitaire as to the inherent weakness of sprawling, semi-Asiatic Soviet Union combined with the fact that Europe was temporarily stabilized with the aid of American capital.
As a steel ring around Germany, the chain of little States of Eastern Europe was also destined to break. It was chimerical even to dream that these petty principalities could ever take the place of the huge Russian Empire. Perhaps poignant Polish romanticism could imagine it would yet extend from the Baltic to the Black Sea and beat off both Russia and Germany, but surely the cynical attaches to the diplomatic staffs of the various powers knew that these so-called independent states, fragments of former empires, were but puppets for larger powers, incapable of any serious resistance if invaded by either the Germans or the Russians.
The essential fact of the matter was that the Russian Revolution had put an end forever to the old balance of power. England and France, although victorious, now had no Eastern front, no large subservient power with which to encase Germany and squeeze her from the East. No puffing, like that of the frog who wanted to be a cow, could change that drastic situation. No wonder England and France bent all efforts to destroy the bolshevistic regime of Russia so as to be able to renew the old alliance, for without that alliance their whole victory would become a mockery. On the other side, the German rulers were quick to see that by destroying the Eastern Front the Russian Revolution could be made to play right into their hands.
Nor was this the entire situation. As we have seen, the statesmen at Versailles had nothing else to do than with sanctimonious mouthings of the principle of self-determination of peoples, to recarve Eastern Europe into an agglomeration of small states. On the general principle of depriving communism of as much territory as possible, whatever could be hacked away from the old Russian Empire was formed into separate entities: Finland, Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia, or else given to Poland and Rumania. The annihilation of Tsardom and the defeat of the Central European powers in the war had also exploded the Austro-Hungarian Empire into its component parts. Czecho-Slovakia, Austria, and Hungary were made into independent states, while portions of territory went to Jugo-Slavia, Rumania, Poland and Italy. Thus Eastern and Central Europe looked for all the world like an enlarged Balkan peninsula.
No sooner were these petty states formed than they at once began to imitate on a mean scale all the vices of the large-scale imperialist countries. Lithuania grasped a piece of East Prussia; Poland gobbled a slice of Lithuania; Finland began to threaten Swedish possessions and to claim Russian portions of Karelia; Rumania seized all she could of Hungry. Later Hungary and Poland were to grab parts of Slovakia and Ruthenia; a new war had to be fought between Greece and Turkey before boundaries could be definitively delimited; and so on ad nauseam.
Nor were the internal regimes of these miserable states any better. Poles oppressed Ukrainians; Czechs discriminated against Ruthenians; Rumanians ruled Hungarians and Bessarabians with an iron hand; Slovenes, Croatians, and Serbians were constantly at loggerheads; Macedonia was a veritable nest of intrigue and murder; Greece and Turkey engaged in wholesale deportations of each others' peoples; and all of them took it out on the Jew. The whole foul scene was a fitting commentary on that wonderful doctrine….the capitalist self-determination of peoples.
Was there, indeed, any adequate reason why small racial enclaves completely surrounded and dominated for centuries by vastly more numerous nations should be torn from their old subdivision of labor and launched upon a brand new set of tasks, the accomplishment of which would not add one particle of benefit to the world as a whole or to the people of that region itself? If it be said that each group has the right to perpetuate its language, race, religion, and cultural forms in its own way, is the Balkanization of Europe the sole way to reach this result? From the economic point of view, there was far less reason, we may say, for the excision of Bohemia from the German system and the formation of an independent State of Czecho-Slovakia than there was for the secession of the State of North Carolina from the United States in the days prior to the Civil War. At least North Carolina was attempting to become part of another huge entity, the Southern Confederation of States, and did not desire in the least to set itself up independent and isolated from every other State near it, North Carolina fought not to worsen the old, but rather to perpetuate the old balance into the future.
This was not at all the situation with the new little states of Eastern Europe. These entities had all been part of a general European system. For many years, for example, the Germans, relying on the fact that Bohemia was really part of the German economy, had poured their capital into that region, had sent in their foremen and skilled mechanics, had built up that country so that it functioned as an integral part of the whole. There was no need to duplicate factories in Bohemia capable of fulfilling the needs of the market by other factories in Germany and vice-versa. Thus each country could have as its division of labor that which it had been adapted to do best.
Consider now what happened with the tearing away of Czecho-Slovakia from the German economic system and with its being formed into a separate independent state. At once a new government arose that, because it was allied to the enemies of Germany, was forced to set up high tariff walls against German goods and in turn had to face the reprisals of its former co-workers. The Czecho-Slovak State, because it had to think in terms of war with Germany, now had to think also of economic self-sufficiency. It made no difference that formerly it had exchanged Bohemian shoes for Saxon textiles, for example. Bohemia had to set up its own complete industrial system and as much as possible to duplicate that which had been done in Germany; in turn Germany had to build new factories within its territory to compensate it for what it had lost in Bohemia.
Could a more reactionary system have possibly been devised than this, the splitting up of Europe into a swarm of petty units, each striving with all its might to be self-sufficient and independent of the others, tremendously multiplying the costs of the state and military establishments, accentuating the wastes of economic functioning, unable in the least to make any outstanding advance, politically utterly helpless and with no future but extinction? From the economic point of view it would be as sane to smash the huge business corporations and factory firms that have now been built up in every part of the United States and, with holy murmurings about the sanctity of the individual, force them back into the petty individual enterprises that had previously prevailed. Under such a reactionary regime as was created by the Versailles victors it was no wonder that Europe was not able in twenty years following the World War to come up to the standards of production it had reached in 1914!
Perhaps this hopeless weakening of Eastern Europe was precisely the end that French and British imperialists desired to create, perhaps they had no other alternative; at any rate, the formation of these helpless national groupings in the long run was bound to play into the hands of the Germans. After all, all these groupings had traditionally been under the influence of either the Germans or the Russians; never under either British or French influence for any length of time, and besides, they were separated from the Western rulers by all of Central Europe. Their economic helplessness was bound to force them into trade relations with Germany on conditions that could only draw them closer than ever into the German economic system. As soon as French and British gold would cease to flow in their direction, and French armies become unavailable, they would be forced to gravitate into the old German vortex.
These economic tendencies were reinforced by the fear of bolshevism expressed by the rulers of these small countries. Almost all these petty nations had been turned into armed camps under ruthless dictatorships in order to crush the Communist uprisings that had threatened to engulf them at one time or another. The failure of England and France to vanquish Russia burned a deep mark into the consciousness of Balkanized Europe, especially as one could contrast the fate of the British and French forces with the brilliant successes of the German armies over the Russians during the World War. Germany, even in the midst of the most severe fighting on the Western front had been able to destroy the armies of Russia, and to force a drastic "Tilsit" peace upon that unfortunate country. England and France, on the other hand, with the help of the entire world, had been unable to break the back of bolshevism emerging from a completely exhausted and ruined country. What other moral could be drawn than that the real savior of Europe from Bolshevism was a strong German Empire?
If they had to choose between Bolshevism or Germany, all the dictatorial cliques in charge of the countries of Eastern Europe would unhesitatingly choose Berlin for their Capitol. In this respect, too, the Russian Communist Revolution unwittingly played into the hands of the German politicians.
The slow recuperation of Europe following the World War was not due merely to its general exhaustion or to the Balkanization of its Eastern section, but was caused even more fundamentally by great permanent changes in world economy which left Europe relatively in a much worse position than before. These changes in their major outlines were marked by the shift of the economic center of gravity to the United States, by the breaking up of the British Empire, by the rise of Soviet economy, and by the upsurge of Japanese production and the markets of Asia.
The United States emerged from the war equal in production to all of Europe put together. Added to this enormous weight were the branch factories and business operations conducted directly by Americans abroad and their indirect domination through international cartels and syndicates covering the most important resources, raw materials, finished products, and economic services throughout the world. The basis for this leadership of the United States rested upon its enormous natural resources and power, its great food supplies, the ample raw materials at hand, the exceptional equipment and rationalized technique of production, the huge home market, and finally, the tremendous reservoir of capital in its possession. At the same time many countries became practically dependent on the markets of the United States for their very existence. The chief European capitalists felt heavily the tremendous impact of the United States in competition.
The World War and its aftermath greatly weakened capitalism's power to withstand the blows of economic crises which arose only the more violently. Between 1918 and 1929, England, France, Germany, the large as well as the small countries, careened madly from one side to another, from prosperity to crisis, from reaction to revolution. Periods of prosperity or crisis in England no longer corresponded with similar periods in Germany, or those in Germany with events in France, or general conditions in Europe, with those in Asia or in the United States. Each country seemed to function as an independent fragment, dizzily spinning on its own axis towards its inevitable doom. This was the basic pattern in Europe following World War I, while entirely new economic and political equilibria governed America, Europe, the Soviet Union, and Asia.
Comparative statistics illustrate the above conclusions. Conditions in the iron and steel industry are good indices of general business conditions. In 1920, for example, while the U.S. was falling off in iron and steel production from about 37 million tons to 17 million, the United Kingdom was falling from 9 to 4 million tons but Germany was rising from 6 to almost 9 million tons, and France was advancing as well. In 1922, on the other hand, when the U.S. had recovered to 40 million tons, Germany had fallen to 5 million tons, while France was still going up, and England had recovered to about 7 million tons. In 1926 while the U.S. remained at 40 million tons, France had gone to 10 million but England had dropped to 4 million and Germany had risen to 11 million. In 1929, the figures for the U.S. were 42.6 million tons of iron and steel; Germany, 15.5 million; France 10.4 million; the U.K. 7.6 million.(*1)
In the financial sphere, as a result of the redivision of Europe by the Versailles Treaty and the chaos caused by war and revolution, one country after the other experienced drastic currency crises culminating in Germany in 1923 and in France and Italy in 1925, etc. In 1926 wholesale prices stood as follows (counting 1913-1914 as 100): Germany, 134.4; Belgium, 744; France,718; Italy, 603; Poland, 105; United Kingdom, 148.1; Japan 178.9, etc. Thus, in the same year the widest differences were to be noticed in countries in close juxtaposition to each other. By 1929, while prices rose 15% in Belgium, they fell 13% in France, 27% in Italy, 7.2% in the U.K. (*2)
Considering the economic fluctuations from the aspect of their effects upon the income of the people, we note that in 1924 the number of bankruptcies in the U.S. was the lowest of the nine years that followed; in Great Britain, on the other hand, it was the highest, while Germany experienced the most violent fluctuations, ranging from a monthly average of 516 bankruptcies in 1924 to 1,003 in 1926, falling to 475 in 1927 and rising to 821 in 1929. In France the figures showed opposite fluctuations, or 659 in 1925, 122 in 1926, and 689 in 1927.
In France, despite temporary suspensions at various levels, the cost of living, having leaped up during 1925, mounted steadily from 1927 to 1930; In Italy, it took a drastic drop from 1925; In Great Britain, it showed a steady decline; In Germany, it maintained itself at the same level. In France, wages rose above the slowly dropping cost of living; in Great Britain, they had been below the cost of living. In both Germany and Italy also the cost of living dropped gradually; after 1930 wages dropped at terrific speed.(*3)
Thus, we can safely declare that, as a result of the World War and the revolutions continually shaking the capitalist structure, capitalist world economy was nowhere able to return to the relatively stable equilibria and smooth functionings that had existed prior to 1914. It was as though someone had taken a mighty hammer and smashed the social framework of Europe into fragments. It was upon this weakened capitalist structure that the unparalleled severe world economic depression fell in the 1930's.
Financial supremacy also began to shift to the Western Hemisphere. War debts payable to the United States amounted to over $12 billion; private loans abroad payable to American investors amounted to over $15.5 billion more. Soon the greatest part of the world's hoard of gold came to rest on these shores. In spite of every effort on its part to resist the growing hegemony of the United States, Balkanized and exhausted Europe was unable to do so.
As a result of the shifting of the economic center of gravity to the U.S., a most severe struggle took place between Europe and America generally, and between Great Britain and the U.S. especially. The European capitalists felt heavily the tremendous impact of the U.S.. War debts payable to the U.S. amounted to over $12 billion; private loans abroad payable to American capitalists amounted to over $15.5 billion more.
The United States became increasingly the dominant part of world capitalism. Up to the twentieth century, America had served as the instrument for the rejuvenation of Europe, as an enormous outlet for Europe's surplus capital and relative surplus population. Had it not been for the open door of America, class conflicts in Europe would have matured far earlier and would have led to decisive solutions before this time. Thus America's growth postponed the ultimate day of reckoning for Europe.
In this respect the U.S. and Russia functioned as two powerful reservoirs of reaction, each in its own way. Russian Tsarism and the huge Russian army stood ready at the beck and call of the financiers of Europe to crush every democratic and socialist movement in the West. Thus the breakdown of the Russian system became the goal of every democratic movement. On the other hand, the United States, in depriving Europe of its militant characters, in permitting the masses of Europe to believe that salvation was attainable in the "promised land", offered an outlet for the pent-up streams generated by European contradictions and thus prevented eruptions. Under the Russian system, socialism was crushed; under the American system it was dissolved into Liberalism. Both cooperated to save Europe from a workers' rule.
After the War America's doors were shut. There was no longer any escape for Europe's militants. America began to affect Europe not as a liberator releasing Europe's productive forces and relieving her of militant revolutionists but as a huge competitor smashing Europe to pieces.
After the World War, the United States again was called upon to save Europe. This time America was forced into an entirely different technique. It had to throw into the fray the whole might of its reserves to save Europe from the advancing proletarian revolution, to send its army against the Soviets, to liquidate many of its war debts. It made fresh loans to the European capitalists. It practically gave away its war supplies and material then in Europe. It brought into Germany alone $4 billion for the rehabilitation of Europe and for stamping out revolution. These favors, however, were not granted without political payment. The policy making classes of the United States used their favorable position and power to make Europe subservient to their ends and to break up all alliances against America's power. From then it was expected that each country would have to come to America humbly to beg for funds or for support for its continued existence.
In self-defense, European capitalists struggled to resist the impact of American capitalism. Under French and English leadership, an attempt was made to organize a debtors' bloc against "Uncle Shylock". The reactionary French plan of a "United States of Europe" was another such attempt to consolidate the continent. Similarly, many international cartels were formed to meet the growing competition from across the Atlantic; high tariffs were erected to resist the American invasion.
That this resistance of reconstructed Europe was successful to some extent was evidenced by the fact that imports from the U.S. into various European countries fell steadily, especially after the arrival of the world economic depression. The share of imports from the U.S. into the U.K. fell from 18.6% in values in 1925, to 14.7% in 1930, and to about 11% in 1933; Germany in 1923 imported 19.1% of her total imports from the U.S.; in 1927 this had fallen to 14.7%, and in 1933 to 9%. In spite of this resistance Europe continued to lag below its former pre-War strength, both relatively and absolutely. After the coming of the world depression the loss of European markets by America was not due to the fact that other countries won those markets as to the fact that the markets no longer existed, each country curtailing its imports in an extreme effort to obtain self-sufficiency and avoid complete bankruptcy.
The structural changes that took place during and after the World War, had as one of their results the growing disintegration of the British Empire. Emerging from the war with Germany with tremendous material loss, both in goods and in men, handicapped by antiquated industrial technique, and by increased competition, Great Britain, heavily in debt, was utterly unable to regain her former premier position. Revolts in India and in China, the industrialization of other countries, the technological shift to means of production which Great Britain proper did not contain within its own borders, (for example, the shift from coal to oil in modern production), coupled with the breakdown of Europe after the war and the increased tariff rates all around, all these events further combined to reduce the power of Great Britain. Added to this were the resistance labor offered to any drastic decrease in its income and the costly struggle which followed the attempt to lower wages. The British General Strike in 1926, although it lasted but nine days, alone cost Britain nearly a billion dollars.
In the foreign field, in Europe, England was forced to meet the increased competition of a Germany that had thoroughly rebuilt its productive machinery with the aid of American capital. In the Western hemisphere, the pressure of the United States was driving all British goods before it, and even in the Dominions, notably Canada, the influence of the United States was becoming increasingly felt. In Asia, rising Japanese industrialization was putting an end to British profits in textiles and in other trades.
Naturally, the decline of British economic weight could not continue without a relative fall in political position. Japan seized the opportunity to annex to herself a huge portion of Asia; Manchuria, portions of Inner Mongolia, an immense section of Central China, the entire sea coast of China and all important islands pertaining to it, and to make preparations for her next steps in Indo-China and the Indian Ocean. Step by step Britain was being squeezed out of the Far East.
Nor can we ignore the fact that the victory of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union seriously weakened the relative world position of British imperialism. The rapid further industrialization of Russia greatly strengthened that country's hold on the Middle East; in Persia, in Turkey, in Western and Central China and even in India. Through the Communist International and affiliated bodies, Russia was giving mighty body blows to British prestige and preparing for its downfall.
The tottering international position of Great Britain had to be accompanied by drastic changes within the country. Taxes on low incomes were increased; the pay of workers and government officials was cut down; social insurance was reduced; heavy consumption taxes were placed on articles needed by the masses, etc. The Government itself moved steadily away from popular influence; the national Government from above and the Mosley blackshirts from below showed definite Fascist symptoms, in turn mute evidence of the growing disintegration of the British Empire.
All of these innovations brought their own contradictions marked by the rioting in Belfast, Glasgow, and London, the mutiny in the navy, the drifting of labor organizations to the Left, the split with Ireland, the adoption of the Statute of Westminster recognizing the constitutional independence and equality of the Dominions with Great Britain, and similar measures.
This was the picture given the world by the British Empire, the dominant victorious power of Europe, twenty years after the termination of the World War, and the inauguration of the Versailles Peace. Surely such a disintegrating empire could afford no real leadership to a Europe constantly on the verge of internal dissension and civil war. Surely such control as Great Britain and the League of Nations could give was not sufficient to prevent the explosions so imminent on the continent.
While the British Empire was declining, Germany, phoenix-like, was rising from the still warm ashes of the past to ever greater proportions.
Economically, as well as politically, Germany went through three main postwar phrases. The first period from 1913 to 1925, was one of chaos and inflation. Politically, this was marked by the overthrow of the old ruling class and the attempt on the part of capital to check the advance of the militant workers by giving power to the Socialist bureaucracy, Economically, it entailed a terrific impoverishment of the whole population and the destruction of the savings of the middle class. From the point of view of big business, however, this period meant a great growth of the trustification and cartel movements which had been spreading in Germany even before the War, which had been immensely spurred on by the hostilities and which now reached their culmination point.
The cartels established in Germany had been of many kinds, including those regulating prices and fixing uniform trade conditions, quotas of production, apportionments of territories, standardization of products, etc. Prior to the World War, Germany had generally stopped at the cartel and had not advanced to the trust form, the reason being that the manufacturers were still specializing in imitating the goods of other countries, perfecting the inventions produced elsewhere, and winning markets through better sales methods, rather than through superior production. During the War, a complete centralization of all industry had been established by the State. The post-war chaos and inflation enabled big business to buy up practically anything cheap, and to erect at once a tremendous new trust movement based on speculation. This was best illustrated in the great Stinnes Konzern and other vertical combinations.
The basic cause for this unprecedented rise of vertical trustification was not only the currency inflation but the loss of territory under the Versailles Treaty, by which the Reich lost 25% of its coal and 74% of its iron ore. This meant that German business had to utilize far more efficiently than ever before the greatly decreased resources at its disposal. The result was a great development of scientific research and definite stress on the importance of scientific management and planful production in industry.
The second period of German post-war history ranged approximately from 1925 to 1930. It was marked politically by the establishment of the coalition government, the mutual collaboration between the reformist Socialists and the Liberals and Centrists under the Weimar Republic whose President was Hindenburg. The Communist revolutionary movement was now definitely broken. Germany becoming a vast market for foreign capital, absorbed in this period over $4 billion from the United States alone and completely rehabilitated its factories and industrial machinery, thus emerging in more gigantic proportions than ever. At this stage the Versailles Treaty was modified by the Dawes and Young plans, which reduced the unspeakable total of reparations Germany was to pay under the original Versailles Treaty to the merely staggering sum of over thirty-five billion marks. To secure further concessions, Germany also flirted with Russia and signed a treaty of friendly relations with that country.
With the end of inflation, the vertical combinations represented by Stinnes broke down and collapsed. New cartels and a far stronger trustified movement sprang up, instead, this time closely controlled by the government itself. The cartels now entered into a struggle with the cooperatives, which had demanded a social regulation of the cartel whereby the cooperative could maintain its existence. In industry as in trade, a tremendous concentration of capital occurred, leading to the direct entrance of the State into many more important industries. A large increase of public utilities took place, coupled with a trustification of important industries and a consolidation of capital in trade, both through the chain store and department store systems on the one hand, and the large cooperative movement on the other.
Added to these trends in Germany were the peculiarities of her problems of national resources. Practically without petroleum, with her lignite deposits rapidly vanishing, and with but scanty resources in ferrous and non-ferrous metals, the whole problem of conservation had become a matter of the greatest public concern. Deprived of natural resources by the war, the industries turned to ersatz production and synthetic combinations to replace the lack of natural resources. Lacking oil, Germany created synthetic oil from the cracking of coal. The coal industry, therefore, was transformed into a chemical one, which, in turn, became a power industry erected upon the bony structure of steel and based on electrical energy. In all this, there was not the slightest intimation of any desire to return to a freely competitive economic system, nor did the possibility of such a return any longer exist. And with increased rationalization, the individual sank completely into the group. The whole movement in both its technological and organizational aspects was based on cooperative effort and pooled labor.
The third stage of German post-war history coincided with the world crisis of the early thirties which hit Germany with frightful force and led to the victory of the Nazi Party. Nazi totalitarianism was the only hope offered to German capitalism to free itself from utter collapse and bankruptcy. Under the Nazis the already developed trends towards trustification, rationalization, and nationalization became enormously accelerated and were elaborated into a complete system of totalitarian autarchy and state capitalism. By these means the power of the German rulers to strike was enormously enhanced; Germany achieved a momentum hitherto undreamed of.
The titanic world economic depression raging in 1930 brought home to all Europe in a most drastic fashion the vital necessity of solving the basic post-war problems besetting that continent if it was to survive as a creative force. Behind the dark shadow of unemployment and empty factories were both the menace of Communism and the permanent collapse of European competitive power. Torn between the United States on the one side and the Soviet Union on the other, Europe had become self-divided, and was bound to be driven down farther and farther as the tool of this or that greater historical force.
The problems facing the continent of Europe as a whole were basically threefold: First, there was the problem of the economic development of the continent, to enable it to compete with the superior economies of the United States and now also of the Soviet Union. The basic drive obviously for this economic reorganization of Europe could not possibly come either from France or from antiquated nineteenth century England, but only from Germany. The victory of Germany in Europe was bound to be followed by great industrial advances throughout every portion of the continent.
Connected with this economic problem was the political one of the creation of a United States of Europe. Such a United States of Europe had been promised by Communism when the Red Army had marched to the gates of Warsaw and when huge masses of proletarians were ready within the gates of the other European capitals to come to the aid of the Revolution. But with the ebb of the international Communist movement, the sole way open for a United States of Europe was through domination by Germany; certainly neither England nor France could achieve it.
The third most important problem for Europe to solve, especially for a Europe enveloped in a most desperate chronic crisis of unemployment and mass unrest, was the problem of Communism which had threatened once before to envelop it completely and which remained a permanent menace. Here, again, the leadership had to be taken by Germany, not only because Germany was the most industrialized nation, was confronted most acutely with the problem of putting down within her own borders the aspirations of the mightiest working class in Europe, but also because in the international arena Germany alone was able to lead the crusade to destroy the Soviet Union.
So long as the German ruling class was weak and disarmed, there stood before all the rulers of Europe the fear that at some critical date the German workers would take arms in their hands and revolt, joining forces with the Russians. This was no idle dream. Even in 1933, when Hitler had already become the Reich's Chancellor, the Communists and the Socialists were able together to register 14,000,000 votes and to control the principal industrial sections of Germany. The cost of the social insurance and relief measures which were appeasing the populace was rapidly leading capitalist Germany into bankruptcy and could not much longer be continued. And when the country could no longer feed the masses, no one could foretell what would happen.
Even France and England could not but hail the methods of Hitlerism in exterminating all the dangerous organizations of the working class within Germany and in assuming the anti-Communist leadership everywhere. It was the belief of the Chamberlains and the Daladiers that Hitlerism could be induced to continue its attack against the Communists by engaging in war against the Soviet Union. They secretly hoped that in the course of this German-Soviet war not only would the Soviets be overthrown but Germany would become exhausted and both fall an easy prey for further exploitation. These statesmen failed to understand that the task of vanquishing the Soviets was no easy one, that Germany had no intention of becoming exhausted in this process for the benefit of England and of France, and that before she engaged in the struggle against Russia, Germany had first to reach the maximum development of her strength through the formation of a United States of Europe under her control.
The English and French imperialists failed to grasp the simple aphorism that one can not have one's cake and eat it too; one could not possibly urge Germany on to the war against Russia without building up that same Germany to such a strength that she would first thrust aside all efforts to prevent her from dominating Europe and from reducing to subjection the very England and France that were urging her forward!
If England wanted Germany to declare war on Russia, how could she prevent Hitler from rearming to the maximum ability with the maximum speed, from uniting with the other Germans in Austria and elsewhere to establish his reserves, from closing the corridor dividing East Prussia from Germany proper, from demanding the right to move German soldiers to the Eastern border of Poland, from dominating all the eastern border countries from the Baltic to the Black Sea?
The British and French rulers believed they understood well enough the motivation of the Hitler movement in setting up as its chief aim the struggle against international Communism. They believed that this was merely a new way of carrying out the old Pan-Germanic policy of "Drang nach Osten" by carving out a rich imperial territory from Russia and the Near East. They had not learned sufficiently the lessons of their own failures; nor did they conceive that, as punishment for these failures, they were doomed to be pushed into the discard of history as second-rate leaders of second-rate countries.
Having failed themselves in 1919-1921 to destroy the Soviet Union, how could the bankrupt conservatives of the British and French Empires put conditions to the only force they knew could actually achieve what they could not do themselves? Furthermore, how could they be expected to appreciate the irony of history that one of the preconditions for the victory of German Nazism over Communism would be the downfall of the British and French imperialists themselves and that the turning over of the task to Hitler was an admission of the complete failure of Liberal-Pacific-Democracy and the termination of their historic leadership over Europe? British and French diplomats might cheat their nations, they could not cheat history.
Let us pause briefly to underline the lessons of the failure of British and French imperialism to crush Soviet Russia in 1919-1921. The first lesson that had to be learned from the dismal results of the invasion into Russia was that to overthrow the Soviets it was not enough to mobilize only the secondary countries of Europe, but that only the most important industrialized countries working together at full strength could do the job. If she were to win, capitalist Europe had to be led not by far-flung disjointed empires whose chief interests were beyond the seas, nor by countries second-class as measured in terms of industrial power, nor by nations engaged primarily in commerce or financial speculations. Only if headed by the mightiest industrial country of all -- and that country could be no other than Germany -- could Europe possibly meet the test.
Second, the French and British had operated in command of armies composed of independent forces from small countries of a disunited Europe or from allies having their own aims and purposes. Such armies were ridiculously incompetent. It was manifest after their defeats suffered in Russia that the capitalists in order to smash the Soviets would have to unite their forces under one head with one aim and one organization. Who else could achieve this military unity but Germany?
Thirdly, the British and French had tried to destroy bolshevism not by a frontal attack to its heart, Moscow, but by flank attacks through the Baltic, through the Balkans, and through Siberia. Not a haphazard attack only through the flanks, not naval actions which could not touch the interior of the country, but only the most awful direct military avalanche known to history hurled by an immense army at the center of Russia -- Moscow. This combination alone could accomplish the victory. And only Germany could offer this possibility. After the rise to power of Hitler, Germany had wiped out the waste and military inefficiency of democratic pacifism and had thoroughly prepared for precisely this struggle.
Fourthly, the events of 1919-1921 showed that it was fatal to try to attack Russia from the continent while in the rear Europe itself was divided, with a discontented Germany refusing to participate. The great increase of strength of Russia during the decade of 1930-1941 had made it even more plain that not a divided Europe but only a firmly knit United States of Europe could possibly conquer the Soviets. Was it not patent that only Germany could create this United States of Europe embracing all the militaristic little states that had been formed on the borders of Russia and whose sole reason for existence was the struggle against bolshevism?
From the higher capitalist point of view it was becoming increasingly obvious that only through the economic and political organization of Europe under the German aegis could Europe retain its historic initiative and importance and beat back the competition of the United States, the Soviet Union, and Japan, and that only by allowing Germany to take complete military leadership could Europe successfully undertake the struggle against proletarian communism that threatened to engulf capitalism forever. To put it another way, the old profit system in Europe, sick unto death, had to call upon its greatest and most highly developed power to take command in the struggle against Communism and the Soviet Union. No wonder Hitler appeared to his protagonists as a veritable Saint George arming himself against the dragon, as a Siegfried going forth to battle for right and truth.
British and French imperialists well understood that by its decisive action against international communism, Germany was bound to earn the undying gratitude of every tottering and unstable ruling class and would be considered not as a menace but rather as the armed knight fighting the battles for all capital. To continental Europe, Germany's failure to crush communism would spell the end of the leadership of Europe in history, either because of the victory of communism or because of exhaustion, the initiative then passing to America.
Naturally, what Great Britain desired was not only the destruction of the Soviets, but the complete exhaustion of Germany as well. Then capitalism could be re-installed in Russia, and the alliance of Great Britain, France, and Russia to encircle Germany could be recreated. Should Germany, in its coming war, destroy the Soviet Union too quickly, they calculated, then, with the reinstallation of capitalism in Russia, there would be no alternative but for France and England to enter the war against Germany to deprive her of the fruits of victory and to re-establish the old balance of power. Similar calculations prevailed in France.
In order to egg Germany on to war in the East, the Chamberlains were quite willing in a policy of appeasement, to sacrifice Czecho-Slovakia, the Baltic Provinces, and the Polish Corridor. Only when it became plain that Hitler's policy meant the practical extinction of Poland as an ally did French and British statesmen decide to support Polish nationalists to the extent of war.
Had Poland gone along with Germany, she would have been offered the tempting bait of the Ukraine, but in return Poland would have been reduced to utter vassalage. This was a condition the megalomania of Polish chauvinism could not possibly tolerate. The nouveaux-riches and petty nobility of Warsaw had tasted state power too long to give up their independence without a struggle. Their plan was to employ Germany as an ally against Russia and then to unite with England and France in a new partition movement whereby Polish avarice could be satiated at the expense of her neighbors East and West.
Evidently, between Polish megalomania and Hitler messianism there could be little compromise. As French and British leaders were forced by popular pressure to side with Poland, the Nazis were forced to take a new direction in their fight for power. So long as they could separate Russia from England and France, it made little difference to the Nazis which conflict they took on first. If, by offering parts of Europe to Stalin, Russia could be neutralized, the full force of the Nazi war machine could be used against those fools who failed to realize that the savior of Europe was only Hitler.
Thus the war for Poland in turn became a struggle to dissolve the influence of France and of England upon the continent of Europe. World War II was begun. As the stakes of the war were new in the history of the world, so were the methods of the war itself. World War II was to be a new kind of war demonstrating new forms and techniques. It became Total War.
Footnotes
(1) See, National Industrial Conference Board: Chart Np. 239, "Road Maps of Industry" Series October, 1930
Chapter II -- Total War
(2) See, National Industrial Conference Board: Major Forces in World Business Depression
(3) See, League of Nations: World Production and Prices, Appendix III, Table 2 (1932 Series)
The present war is like no other war in history. It ushers in a new level of fighting, the unique features of which we must thoroughly absorb or else perish in ignominious defeat. Superficially, it may appear that World War II is something special in that it has mobilized the entire nation for the struggle. But there is really nothing new in an entire population, rather than a small armed body, going into the fray. It is true that in localized wars of the past, when no great issues were at stake, battles were fought by a mere fraction of the nation, specialized armies that met on a front far from the general life of the people who were left more or less vitally unaffected by the actual physical conflict. But when truly great issues were in the balance, the existence of this or that level of civilization or social achievement, for example, then the entire body politic has always been aroused for the fight.
World War II is most appropriately termed Total War not merely because the total energies of the nation are bent to the struggle, but because for the first time in history, the entire country, totally and each separate portion of it, has been turned into a potential battlefield in which every point in the rear may become at any moment a vital point of the front. Here is the feature of the present war, the brand new relation of front to rear, to use a military expression, on which we must concentrate our attention.
It may help us to grasp the new situation if we were to trace briefly the historic evolution of the relationship of the front to the rear as it has unfolded before us in previous struggles where people have been more or less wholly involved. This evolution contains three distinct principal phases.
The first phase existed in the days of primitive warfare, before the regular State and the Nation, as we understand these concepts, had been developed.
In the days of the invasion of Europe by the primitive hordes of Teutons, Slavs and Huns, it was not uncommon for the entire gens, clan, tribe, or nation to participate in the affair, the women and even the children standing right behind their men ready to take up the arms of those who perished. Here, we might say, there also existed a total participation of the population in the war, and here, too, the front and the rear were indistinguishable, but in the sense that it was all front and no rear.
From this amorphous condition there gradually arose the second phase in this process, antithetical to the first, where there was a sharp separation of the state and its armed forces from the mass of people. In this period the front and the rear were generally acutely demarcated, often the people neither knowing nor caring where the official armies were fighting and dying.
But even when regular states had been strongly established there were numerous climactic occasions when masses of people not previously in the official armed forces were mobilized and hurled into the war at hand. We need give but two examples of the many that appear readily to mind. In the sixteenth century when the security of the commercial classes of England was threatened by the Spanish Armada, the English government called to its aid not only its regular array but the entire private merchant marine of the nation. It was because of this popular mobilization that the Spaniards were so disastrously routed. Again, during the time of the French Revolution, millions of people were thrown into the wars in huge columns that gradually became hardened into invincible armies. Even here, however, in both these two cases, despite the fact that large numbers were called on to perish in battle, there was not only a distinct separation of front from rear but the rear was hardly touched by military operations.
The twentieth century has witnessed the transformation of the relationship of front to rear toward a new synthesis where front and rear have again become indissoluble but on an incomparably higher plane then in primitive days. In its first aspects this transformation geared the entire functioning of the rear, separate and distinct as the rear still remained, to the functioning of the front. In its later aspects "front line" one dimensional fighting gave way to depth fighting of three dimensions in which the entire rear, no matter what its depth, became a part, indeed the principal part, of the front.
By the time of World War I, there had perforce arisen, together with national compulsory military service and our modern complicated division of labor, the prime necessity of coordinating the rear to support the front and of establishing some regulation of the general activities of the entire nation. This process was not completed when World War I came to an end and even in 1918 by no means were the regulation and mobilization of the rear as comprehensive and systematic as at the front under military command.
During the present war we must expect to see perfected the process begun in the last world war, namely, as complete a mobilization and regimentation of the rear as of the front. The nation as a whole must go to war today as one organized unit prepared to support the military front with a complete national plan of industry and economy with each man at his post as though in the army.
But were this the only difference between the present and the previous world war, then we might say it was but a difference in quantity and degree, rather than a difference in quality and kind. The important point we must repeat again and again is that whereas previous national wars all separated front from rear, today the front and the rear form one single indistinguishable area. This salient fact must lead us to entirely different tasks and perspectives.
Today, it is not enough to throw as many people as possible into the divisions of the army and of the navy. Nor is it enough to train a large numbers of workers to make ammunition, guns, airplanes, and similar material necessary for the front. Nor is it enough to train every civilian to be a good soldier ready to go to the front to fight. This was the situation in France and yet France collapsed the moment the front was pierced. No, what must be understood by the nation at its peril, is that in the present war every portion of the rear may become a part of active struggle at any moment, and that the entire civilian population must be trained, not only for civilian duties, not only for military duties at the front in regular stereotyped activities, but for active duty in the rear in new forms of conflict and with new methods. Only by the training of the entire civilian population for struggle in the rear behind the army, a struggle in which the army aids the civilian rather than the civilian aiding the army, can the invader be repulsed. This is the lesson that the French failed to grasp and which the English are learning entirely too late.
How has this new situation come about, that the rear should now become the front and that those in the rear must be trained for military action befitting the rear in an entirely new manner? The answer lies in the new technical developments that have silently and secretly been transforming the mode of military struggle.
First, the terrific striking power of the tanks and armored car divisions has enabled the invading forces to pierce the front line and to enter deep into the rear. Thus military forces must be established at myriad posts behind the front lines, deep in the interior of the country, in order to meet these penetrating thrusts. And around the cadres of military forces there must be grouped the entire civilian population in order quickly to transform the area penetrated into an active military front until at least the front line may be redressed or reserves sent to the threatened spot.
But tanks and armored cars are by no means the chief menace. The principal new situation arises from the airplane. The "front" is a very transient thing at best. Quickly huge armadas of bombing and fighting planes can penetrate to every city of the invaded country and cast their explosives and inflammatory materials into the heart of the populace. Parachute fighters can land to consolidate positions in all the essentially important sections of the country and to paralyze the entire economic and social life of the nation. It is the airplane, above all, that makes every section of the rear into part of the front and makes it impossible for the military to foretell, just where the battles will take place. There is no longer any specialized "theater of war;" the whole land becomes a "theater of war."
Once we grasp this important new development, a fact that has transformed the present war into a struggle entirely unique in the history of the world, we must ask ourselves two questions: First, what is the answer of the invaded country to this new method of invasion, what new tasks are there to be undertaken in the light of this transformation of the rear into the front at so many points? And, second, can democratic countries immersed in the philosophy and politics of Liberalism possibly undertake and realize these new tasks so as to defeat the Nazi-Fascist dictatorships? These are the two questions to which the principal part of this chapter will be confined.
Our thesis is that Liberalism is an outmoded method of action wholly incapable of accomplishing the tasks before it in the present war; it can by no means overtake the Nazi-Fascist nations in the new forms of struggle that are breaking forth. Liberalism is a dead system totally incapable of defending itself or of being defended historically any longer. Unless it is transformed to some new system superior to Fascism, it will go under to Fascism.
Obviously, if the front and the rear have now become one indissoluble unit, a two-fold problem arises in this connection: First, the problem of organizing the rear as efficiently as military science has organized the front; and second, in recognition of the entirely new tasks that the rear must realize, the problem involving the special organization of the rear for the new types of conflicts to be solved.
For hundreds of years military science has been wrestling with the problems of organization of the front, in terms of mobilization, deployment, tactics, strategy, and logistics. Up to now, however, relatively little real attention has been paid to the other similar problems that the rear must solve if all of a sudden it becomes a front, As we shall see, among the capitalist powers it is not the Liberals -- and we hasten to add it cannot be the Liberals -- but rather the Fascists who have begun to pay attention to these new problems with rich results for themselves.
In the army, problems of unity of action, discipline, coordination of efforts of the various divisions of the armed forces, elimination of all other motives save the motive of willingness to die for one's country, strict disinterestedness in the course of performance of duties, all of these matters have been given prime attention and have been more or less solved by the inner routines and methods of the various armies.
In the rear, however, (in a Liberal democratic country, even more so than elsewhere) the very opposite conditions prevail than at the front: there is great disunity of the population, an utter lack of discipline, of coordination, of disinterestedness and of willingness to place the welfare of the people above the selfish interests of this or that private enterprise.
In the army the profit motive has disappeared, all the soldiers share whatever there is in common, whether hardships or victories. In the rear, on the other hand, each special group tries its best to get for itself what it can from the war and to utilize the mass murders at the front for its own benefit. Is it any wonder that when once the invading army penetrates the front and enters the rear that the entire resistance of the people collapses and the victory of the invaders automatically follows? France is a wonderful illustration of such a debacle.
It would make a discussion of this complicated subject much easier were we to consider the rear first, separately from the front, but in the same terms as the military men conceive the front, and then, having established certain first principles, proceed to examine the brand new problems that the imminent transformation of the rear into the front places before the entire population.
Obviously, there can not be a proper mobilization of forces in the rear without a complete registration of all the resources, materials, and men at our disposal, and a proper distribution of these factors in the light of the impending conflict. We must get out of our heads the illusion that we can fight a war in our spare time or without completely transforming the organization or our national economy. There must be a definite allocation of the energies of our nation toward definite tasks and with definite ends. There must be a place for every man, woman, and child, and every one must be in his place.
But how can we properly mobilize our economic powers and reorganize them if we have not placed them under a central purposeful control that has the authority to utilize all forces regardless of the profit system? As it is, especially in democratic liberal nations, each factory is operated more or less as the owner pleases, even when that owner is given orders for national defense. To the manufacturer, the national defense orders are only part of his business; he himself individually still remains the decisive factor in regulating the efficiency and technique of production. He is responsible to no one and is supervised only in the most elementary matters.
If this is true so far as each individual factory is concerned, how much more is it true for the industry as a whole? What authority is there to tell any industry that it is futile or wasteful or that half of the firms in a given industry should go out of business as unnecessary were the newest processes of production introduced universally? Who is to tell the cosmetic industry, say, that a country preparing for war has absolutely no use for such a thoroughly vapid trade now consuming the energies of so many people and using wantonly so much of the nation's resources and materials?
No, under Liberalism the only regulator of production is the market place. So long as there is a possibility of making profit, capital and labor will be poured into the most useless trades and will utilize the most wasteful methods. No question is ever raised of the good of the country as a whole; each person simply asks himself: What is there of profit in it for me?
Does anyone possibly imagine that our country can enter into a life and death struggle with the great fascist powers without a better organization of the rear than this? Do we have to allow "natural and gradual" processes of unlimited competition to determine how many men rather than women shall be employed in the textile industry, or how many workers in all shall be allocated to the shoe industry, or whether the cosmetic trade should be allowed to exist at all, or whether this or that productive process should be developed in New England, or in the Middle West, or in some other region? Instead of a united carefully planned system, such as would exist within the army itself, there reign anarchy and chaos, slightly limited as the conditions become unbearable and compel some change.
Fascism has at least made some beginning in doing what Liberalism is congenitally unable to do. Under the Nazis a steady propaganda campaign has been launched that the German girl is more beautiful without paint and powder on her face and through the powerful pressure of the Nazi Party the cosmetic industry has gone almost completely out of business. Again, under the Nazis, large numbers of people were induced to join one or the other "voluntary" society and to wear the uniform of their respective groups, thus eliminating, to a very considerable extent, the extreme wastefulness due to style changes and whims and fancies that the profit system has injected into the clothing trades in our country. Thus, under Hitler, there has been created a standardization in articles of need and an elimination of waste in consumption far greater than that which existed in the past. Under Liberalism, on the contrary, such a result would be unthinkable so long as anybody could make a tittle of profit by introducing some new fad or whim utterly fantastic in the light of the desperate needs of the hour.
And what must be stressed in connection with all this is the important consideration that the proper economic mobilization of the people in the rear must be accomplished before the war starts. It is silly for anyone to say that the reorganization of the rear is necessary but that it can be postponed to some later date, perhaps after war is declared. Such a person fails to see that today there is no sharp hiatus between peace and war, there is no long drawn-out controversy with all the punctiliousness and form of the quadrille of the eighteenth century. Rather, today, peace is constantly being permeated with war, is indissolubly connected with war, moves imperceptibly towards war, so that all of a sudden the country is at war without even the formality of a declaration being necessary. The quicker the people of America learn that we are at war with Hitlerism now, even though not a single shot may have been fired, the better for all of us. Since the struggle is inevitable, it is criminal to enter it unprepared.
In order for America to win the forthcoming war, it is absolutely necessary to throw the entire surplus product of the country into the form of war materials and supplies of all sorts as well as to increase to the utmost the capacity of the people to produce these necessary materials and supplies, Certain industries will have to be enormously expanded, others sharply contracted, and perhaps entirely new industries created. None of this can be realized unless the nation through the state steps in and assumes complete and authoritative control.
In short, were we even to begin to mobilize our forces and to organize the rear as military science has organized the front, we could not possibly allow private industry to function on the profit system any more than the army could function on such a system. National control according to a given plan needed in the coming struggle demands in the rear the same philosophy as the army demands in the front: the philosophy of the supreme sacrifice of one's personal interests for the good of the country, the complete annihilation of the selfish profit motive, the complete unity for the welfare of all.
How can we possibly achieve such a result under Liberalism whose whole philosophy has traditionally preached that the government is best that governs least, that the government exists for the good of the individual, that free trade and free competition are the cure-alls for all our ills, that every man has inalienable rights among which is the right of keeping his property for himself and of doing with his life that which he pleases regardless of the good of his country, and that the most inalienable of all such rights is the right to make profit?
Hitlerism can never be destroyed by such a philosophy or program of action. Unless we ourselves adopt something better, Hitler will have been right in his designation of us as a people doomed to succumb as utterly unable to meet the new conditions of the twentieth century.
National planning, national purposefulness, national control for the benefit of the entire people, is an absolute necessity during the coming war. Similar proposals were widespread during the industrial depression that raged after 1929, and it must be said that these ideas made considerable headway in all quarters. But whatever hesitation may have existed regarding national planning when the life of the nation was not directly involved, there can be no question about it when the country must engage in a war where the rear must be thoroughly organized and coordinated with the front or go under.
We can only look to Germany or to Russia to see how far ahead in national planning these countries are in comparison to the United States. We may say that their planning is crude and incomplete, we may say that they made many mistakes and committed many blunders, but at least these countries made a beginning, a beginning that has given them an immense superiority over the nations still following the economics of laissez-faire, the politics of individualism, and the ethics of each man for himself, the devil take the hindmost.
A country that cannot control and mobilize properly its economy cannot marshal its entire population for the struggle. It can not efficiently utilize the energies of its population not called to the front. It must throw extraordinary burdens on some, and no burdens at all on others. It must engage large numbers of people in activities utterly fruitless, completely nullify the efforts of others by waste and carelessness, and everywhere allow full development to the one who means to look solely after himself first, last, and all the time.
And what is more, the failure properly to control and to organize the rear is bound to have its repercussions upon the front as well. Soldiers who are drafted and made to serve in the army cannot help but contrast that which they must do and that which the business men and those in control have reserved for themselves. They must be disciplined, they must make the supreme sacrifice and die for their country, while the business man can insist that so long as he pays the required portion of his taxes and makes goods for the war that he be let alone to build up his business for himself and for his family. The soldier must become disgusted at the way the rear is run, he must begin to feel that he and his family are but dupes and pawns for the benefit of selfish business interests in the rear. The whole morale of the army becomes weak, preparing the day for complete defeat and disaster at the front. Let us say plainly: Those who refuse to organize the rear and the social forces behind the army, can not be entrusted with the control of the front and the social forces within the army.
It is not the mass of people, always ready to die in their own defense, who will oppose the necessary reorganization, but only those whose private gain is subserved by the keeping of the old antiquated nineteenth century methods. Such selfish interests would rather lose the war, would rather succumb to Fascism, than to reorganize society to fight it. These elements are the real basis for the Fifth Columns that Fascism has utilized so well in the defeat of those countries which they have so ruthlessly invaded. Industrial magnates who want to keep their selfish control over the resources and materials of the country for their own profit, profiteers who want to utilize the exigencies of the war to make a killing, exploiters who feel this is their chance to rise over the dead bodies of others, such are the types who make up the strength of the Fifth Columns and it is these people who, unfortunately, also make up, through their sons and relatives and friends and connections, the principal bulk of the officers of the army at the front.
There is no question but that the whole-hearted organization of the rear must entrain with it a complete reorganization of the front as well. There cannot be a popular taking over of the country's resources and economy with a complete elimination of the selfish interests who place their profit over the welfare of the country, without a complete change in army morale and in army methods. Up to now the officers in the army have generally felt that the army really belonged to them and that the soldiers were but unthinking pawns in their general scheme of things. But with the tremendous awakening of the nation as a whole and with the far more intimate connection of the front with the rear, of the army with the mass of the general population, this whole antiquated ideology must give way. Unless the army is also brought into this new scheme of things, it, too, must fail in meeting the Fascist attack.
For at least it can be said for Fascism that it has made a gesture in overthrowing the old schema. In the rear it has nationalized this and that important industry and strictly regulated and confined the others not nationalized. The power of the state to take over all property is unquestioned and there is never doubt but that at any moment the state will and does sequester whatever it needs. The importance of the private owner of industry has rapidly diminished. Private ownership, private control, and private profit have been put in the background so far as Fascist ideology and propaganda, at least, are concerned. The mass of people are given to understand that there is no set of individual capitalists who can speculate and make profit out of the war or who can lay plans for the disposal of the people and the resources of the nation on their own hook.
And in the army the same sort of feeling is fostered by the Nazi elements who have striven to put the old army officer -- so supreme in the days of the Kaiser -- in his place. It is not the old army officer but the Nazi Party that has the supreme say and this is translated to mean that the army is not under the control of any special military caste, but is the servant of the entire Reich, of the entire Volk. In short, the Nazis have done all in their power to give the impression to their subjects that this is a People's War.
Herein lies one of the great sources of power of Hitler over his Germans. It only proves once more that the only way for us to beat Hitler is to demonstrate emphatically that it is our struggle and not his that is really the struggle for the people and that America is not in the hands of sixty families and a few billionaire corporations for their own benefit, but is really in the hands of the plain people of this country for the welfare of all. America's way to beat Hitler is not through Liberalism, nor even through Fascism, but only through the genuine transformation of the ideals of our struggle so as to show the people that a truly better economic, political, and social world will result from Hitler's destruction.
The 1940-1941 terrible Battle of England has illustrated in all its horror the utter futility of the old Liberal and Conservative methods of doing things.
If and when it occurs, the fall of England will have to be traced not to the lack of sufficient armed forces or materials, nor even to the lack of planes, but principally to this failure to plan nationally and to organize the rear in the manner of the front. For this we have to blame the entire outmoded leadership of the British nation. Not for one moment have they shown a genuine intention really to take over private property and private industry for the nation's benefit. Let us look at the picture more closely.
Certainly, especially after the debacle in France, all the British leaders must have known that the principal cities of England would be heavily bombed, tens of thousands of homes destroyed, whole cities and towns wiped out, millions made homeless, the entire population permanently huddled in bomb shelters, masses of people unable to reach work on time, unable to get home from work, unable to have warm food and warm shelter when needed, unable to get the proper rest and recreation, their whole life savings gone, the whole complicated economic division of labor which existed in normal times annihilated.
What should a government entering such a war have done? Take the question of housing. First of all, those in charge should have registered all the houses and all the rooms available. Then they should have seen to it that all the houses were available to all the people regardless of class distinctions or status of property. No sooner was a house bombed in a given region when the family without a house applying to the regional office should have received license to enter this or that house nearby And sequester certain rooms for themselves. The poor of the slums might have had to be moved to the castles of the royalty, but this at least would have provided shelter for all and all would have been made to feel that the government really meant to consider the needs of the entire nation. But nothing of the sort was done. When homes were bombed the homeless were either out of luck, or they were taken care of in some governmental institution far from their work or their neighborhood, as though they were outcasts of some sort, while the other families still stayed snug in their homes, though their homes may have contained many empty rooms and many useless house servants. Only slowly and belatedly has a different arrangement been worked out.
Take the question of war clothing and bedding. Tens of thousands of homes were destroyed and the mass of people had to take to the bomb refuges. Was there any decent effort made to provide these shelters with warm blankets and quilts for those rendered destitute? No, each person came with his own luggage, the rich with many warm things, the poor with few, those bombed perhaps with nothing. What was the feeling of those who came with nothing when they saw the others with fine food and fine bedding making themselves quite comfortable, if you please, just as though the world was not tumbling all about their heads? There was no requisitioning of all surplus raiment and surplus bedding for such emergencies. We may rest assured that if this has been changed in any degree it has not been because of official initiative but because of the clamor of the people.
And the shelters themselves have presented a really shameful situation. For the poor there were but open trenches with some corrugated iron supports, with no adequate drainage and no method of keeping warm during the long hours in the winter when rain, mist, fog, snow, and cold must penetrate through and through everyone exposed in the open. Let us remember that people must often evacuate their homes quickly without the opportunity of getting the necessary clothing and bedding needed, or cannot reach their houses in time to extract these things. Let us keep in mind the fearful winters that England customarily gets and we can appreciate the situation of the poor and what dreadful results must be expected.
Nor have the subway and cellar refuges for the poor been any better. There are not enough of them, there has been no conception of heating them, or of supplying them with beds and bedding; they are absolutely useless should gas be used in the war. In short, these holes must become veritable pesthouses for the masses should the bombing be continued steadily as it must be. Contrast these shelters with the underground cabarets and luxurious sleeping quarters that the wealthy have provided for themselves. And should some poor group running from the bombs dive into these shelters -- cover charges are exacted -- then one can imagine what glares and hostile looks emanate from the wealthy patrons at the cattle who have dared to intrude upon their sacred preserves.
And what about food? Is there any reason why those bombed whose homes have been destroyed should live less well and less securely than those who have been more fortunate and have still their jobs, their homes, and their savings? Any ordinary decent government that understood the problem of organizing the rear adequately would have requisitioned the food, seen to it that all got an equal quality and quantity according to their needs. Those bombed would have received even better care than that accorded to ordinary civilians. But no, such is not the case in Britain. The almighty gold pound still prevails in the rear and every selfish pig who has the money can swill himself into a stupor while hundreds of thousands are in desperate fear and misery.
Take the matter of municipal transportation. It would seem that certainly in time of war the government would take steps to maintain production by seeing to it that all the workers could reach work in the best and most efficient manner. It would seem but reasonable to requisition all the cars of a given neighborhood and to allocate them to the workers going to different points, thus relieving the burden upon the buses which, with their routes already disrupted, have to face interminable delays under the periodic bombings. But no, each Briton who has the money and is lucky may drive his own cars to work or get a taxi, if he can; the poor can wait, or walk. Could anything be more chaotic than this method of organizing the rear?
Take the matter of social security. Tens of thousands of homes have been destroyed and for millions their entire life savings and security have disappeared. The people begin to worry what is going to happen to them in the future, Who will pay their rent? How will they get other homes? Will they be forced to go into government institutions provided for them in barrack-like regimentation? They look helplessly to the government for some adequate statement of policy. But none such is issued. What do they expect the government can say, a government that will not even adequately requisition the houses, the food, the clothing and bedding, the shelters, the transportation, and supply the other needs of the masses so vital to life and safety? How can such a government promise to each family a home and security in the future?
We can imagine what are the feelings of the British laborer daily going to work under such onerous conditions, sticking to his job despite the falling bombs while at the same time he knows that his home has been destroyed and his family left entirely insecure and helpless. Must he not suspect that in his country there prevails a class rule as rigid and brutal as the one existing under Hitler? The worker would be a dolt not to ask himself why he should work himself to death when the wealthy are still able to maintain all their privileges. Aping his upper classes, more likely than not the British worker will be tempted to work as little and grab as much as he can.
Is it conceivable that the struggle can be won against Hitler when trade unions stubbornly retain their eight hour day and forty-eight, or forty, or thirty-five hour week, when they resist speeding-up the work, and when they insist on rules limiting overtime and declare strikes and stoppages? The French were soon to learn otherwise: that, indeed, only the complete utilization of all the energies of the nation can possibly reduce Hitlerism to ashes, that labor must work night and day without restraint, and that it is folly to call on certain sections of the population to give their lives in the army while other sections insist on eight hours sleep, and eight hours play, and the right to preserve all their old extravagances as before.
And yet labor is wholly correct to insist on giving as little and getting as much as it can so long as the factories are privately owned with each owner using the war for his own private ends. Why should the worker give up the eight hour day won after so many years of struggle, only to enable the profiteer and private owner of industry to get richer? The sole way to get unity in the rear is to eliminate entirely the profit motive. Only when labor sees that all capital is conscripted for the struggle through nationalization of the factories and through confiscation of all wealth and income over a certain modest level, only when society demands all give their utmost for the benefit of all, will there be obtained that same unity in the rear as manifests itself at the front.
This is the only way in which Hitlerism can be defeated. Otherwise there must continue to exist the friction among the classes that led to the collapse in France and that must lead to disaster in Britain. It is this friction that breeds the Fifth Columns so useful in demoralizing the country fighting Hitler.
As with the laborer, so with the soldier who returns home on leave and sees his family without shelter and bedding, his relatives in fear and misery and totally in the dark about their future. He, too, must question whether a government that prates about democracy, the rights of the people, etc., that calls upon the people to fight Hitler to the death, and has not even the fairness and decency to mobilize the vital means of consumption, to organize the rear in a rational manner so that the nation really can fight -- whether such a government is worthy of continued existence and worth while dying for. A demoralized, chaotic rear can only bring similar demoralization at the front and render Hitler's job all the more easy. The soldier sees that in fact each privileged individual and class in the nation mean to give up none of their privileges even though Hitler triumph.
The British government would not dream of managing the front as it has managed the rear; it would not dare to treat its soldiers as