The Limits of Credulity; R. Donway

"taking its place as one of the great and hated oppressor na tions." But of course these are not descriptions of the Soviet Union; they are supposed to be descriptions of the United States. Nor are they taken from Albanian tabloids; they are from popular college texts, written by scholars, published by reputable houses. These are the revisionist his torians, and they have succeeded where their students failed: they have brought home the war, both Mr. Donway, a recent graduate of Brown Uni versity, continues to deal as a free lance stu dent and writer with the social implications of certain philosophical issues. Vietnam and its Cold War con text. Our enemies (before we de clared them friends) used to say that America was compelled by economic necessity to move abroad as an imperial power, dominating, subjugating, repressing. Today, that is the going word at Ameri can colleges. . . . during the postwar era the government and key sectors of pri vate capital adopted a common, com plementary strategy that led to state aid to American capitalism not only to maintain and extend its prosperity into the postwar era, hut not the least also to preserve the larger global political-economic structure within which long-term capitalist interests and power might function.

So say the revisionists Joyce and Gabriel Kolko, who obviously re vise history more easily than they revise their sentences. Collectors of Bright New Ideas will recognize the imprint of the 537 538 THE FREEMAN September Antique Left everywhere on these fresh-thinking historians: the Kolkos' indictment is a particu larization of an argument pushed sixty years ago by the Marxists; in The Roots of War, RichardJ. Barnet rehearses the Lenin-Kaut sky debate to determine the degree of necessity in capitalist imperi alism; William Appleman. Wil liams, sometimes called the dean of this historical school, asserts that America's foreign policy has proved Marx correct; David Hor owitz, an editor of Ramparts, pub lished excerpts of his book Corpo rations and the Cold War with Paul Sweezy, among the oldest of the old, old guard, a self-pro claimed Marxist, and the Sweezy of Sweezy v. New Hampshire fame; Sweezy's magazine, Month ly Review, also ran a ten page puff of Gabriel Kolko's Roots of Amer iC'an Foreign Policy and Politics of Wa,r; We Can Be Friends, often cited as the beginning of cold-war revisionism, was written by Carl Marzani, convicted in 1947 for denying prewar affiliations with the Communist Party; Rexford Tugwell is included in the ranks for his book A Chronicle of Jeop ardy; and so on. When Norman Mailer asked Dotson Rader where the New Leftists would end, Ra der said in despair "We are going to end like Gus Hall." In origi nali ty, at least, they already are Gus Hall, and so are their aca demic compradors.

Not that there is anything wrong with old ideas. They just are not new ideas. It would be more honest if the Left admitted, what seems to be true, that it perseveres like the Church, saying what it has always said. There is, after all, a kind of nobility in standing by traditional notions, just as there is a kind of boldness in advancing outrageous hypoth eses. But for the Left to trot out seedy cliches as the latest in dar ing suggestions is simply hypo critical. Whatever else, the staunchest defender of the Apos tle's Creed never called himself in novative for reciting it. Revisionism Like Inflation Always More This wave-of-the-future image probably reached its limit with Walter LaFeber's flight into apoc alyptic literature. In "The Im pact of Revisionism," LaFeber went beyond past and present to shew unto his servants things which must shortly come to pass. And finally this historiography will move into and beyond revision ism as present middle-of-the-roaders accept revisionism in many of its parts, thus allowing the present re visionists . . . to become more re visionist in their view of history.

1973 THE LIMITS OF CREDULITY 539 Unfortunately, LaFeber may be correct. In The New Yark Times Magazine (April 29, 1973), Gaddis Smith portrayed an early revision ist, D. F. Fleming, as having set forth the new moderate position, "a vast improvement over the closed-minded chauvinism of the orthodox position." To be sure, Smith contrasts Fleming's view with the more recent, excessive left-revisionism of Kolko, but that was to be expected on LaFeber's analysis: the liberals will always come a discreet three steps behind (twelve years, in this case), but they will come: they must be "with it," even when it means revolu tion; they must "swing," even when it means the' gibbet. To take another case: in a 1966 letter to the N ew York Review of Books, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., said "Surely the time has come to blow the whistle before the cur rent outburst of revisionism re garding the origins of the Cold War goes much further." But only a year later, he put together the following sentence: "For revision ism is an essential part of the process by which history, through the posing of new problems,and the investigation of new possibil ities,· enlarges its perspectives and enriches its insights." Such liberal reappraisals are a telling victory for revisionism, which in point of fact breaks about as much fresh ground as the Council of Trent.

(Revisionist doctrines on imperi alism go back, through the Marx ists, to J. A. Hobson's Imperial ism, A Study, published in 1902. Or they may be said to go back a bit further: in a burst of histor ical appropriateness, Hobson got many of hig economic ideas from an acquaintance named Mum mery.) A Generation Gap With liberal backing, the dogma of capitalist imperialism, though it is not getting any younger, is getting some of the young; not entirely to the pleasure of older, or more orthodox, advocates. After decades of shelving their under consumed ideas, these uncompro mising ideological retailers had perhaps begun to think of them selves more as curators; they look askance at their brash parvenu customers, so lacking in an appre ciation of well-made theories. Writing in Soc'ial Policy, Harry Magdoff grumbled that "... some popularizers on the Left formulate the issue purely in terms of 'eco nomic necessity' - as if every po litical and military action were in response to an immediate econom ic need, or a telephone call from a corporation executive." Mr. Mag doff is criticizing the heresy of replacing class analysis with elit ist analysis, an old bane.

540 THE FREEMAN September The young, generally less rig orous, seem drawn to elitist theo ries, whether revisionist, liberal, or ultramontane. Perhaps it is be cause elitist analyses can serve as a surrogate for soap operas and fan magazines; they carry the same catharsis of shock and in dignation, the same formula of who -was - seen-doing-what-with whom.C. Wright Mills made a discreet attempt at slaking this desire with The Power Elite (and was chided for it by Paul Sweezy.) But it is the new reporter-histor ians who bode to make a true genre of elitism. Academic anal yses of presidential politics were left in the library dust by Theo dore White's The Making of -the President. David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest showed a similar flare for the insider's anecdote that tells while it sells. And in the Spring, 1973, issue of Foreign Policy, Godfrey Hodgson published an article called "The Establishment," which threatens to reduce even the tone of the en terprise to the level of the gossip column, with lines like "When I talked to him recently in the Ford Foundation's strangely Piranesian headquarters on 42nd Street. "

People and Plots Proper revisionists, of course, are supposed to shun such super ficial historiography. Writers who stress personal associations give the impression that the world is run to suit the whims of a small group of men, whether the favored group is the Council on Foreign Relations, the defense complex, or the prestigious New York law firms. And the more personally en twined they picture their ruling clique, the more its own eccentric assumptions appear to replace ob jective forces as the basis for ac tion. That is why Sweezy char acterizes elitist theories as "his torical voluntarism." By the time one reaches David Halberstam's Great Groton Conspiracy, talk of necessity in America's foreign policy is completely implausible; it's all the fault of that damned school motto. Revisionists reject such tight little-world views. ". . . the im pressions of old school days wear off," says Kolka, "and the respon sibilities of men are measured in the present rather than the past."

After all, the anti determinism of elitist analyses. might tempt one to the clearly counterrevolution ary notion that "all" we need is a group of leaders with different ideas. It is this illusion of the "acci dental" quality of the role of the United States in Vietnam and else where that has led over the past years to a kind of specious liberal ism which believes one simply re1973 THE LIMITS OF CREDULITY 541 places individuals in office with other men, such as a Kennedy or McCarthy ... A leftist who was that soft on de terminism might find himself de nounced as a meliorist like Karl Kautsky, or even as a hired coolie of the pen. Ideological Coordination The "proper" theory of histor ical causality is less direct, almost Malebranchian. Washington, we are told, does not take orders from Wall Street, and certainly Wall Street does not take orders from Washington. "There is no conflict .of interest because the welfare of government and business is, in the largest sense, identical." The har mony of business and politics re sults from ideological coordina tion, not personal subordination.

Association is the product, not the cause, of their harmony. The head of the octopus is not a capitalist, but capitalism itself; businessmen and politicians are, to steal a phrase from Ogden Nash, simply the arms that do the legwork. But despite this sensitivity to elitist voluntarism, the revision ists insist on calling themselves a school of anti determinists. In his introduction to The Origins of the Cold War, Thomas Paterson says "Most revisionists deny that the Cold War was inevitable, and stress alternatives." This is para doxical, but easily proved. The Cold War resulted largely from the class-serving desires of Amer ican leaders; had they sought other ends, things would have been otherwise; for instance, had they sought an accommodation with Russia, they could have had an accommodation with Russia. What we are not reminded of, in this context, is the revisionists' belief that, given its social struc ture, America could not have had leaders who would have willed an other course. The leaders' desires were given by the nature of the economy.

The theory, then, is rather anal ogous to Jonathan Edwards's the ory of determinism. Edwards's dictum was that we can do what we will, but we cannot will what we will; only grace can change the nature of our desires. Similarly, revisionists seem to hold that America's postwar leaders could have done whatever they wanted, but they could not want whatever they wa.nted, at least as a class. The counterpart of Edwards's dictum may be Lenin's cryptic re mark that a capitalist country could be non-imperialist only if it were not capitalist. A nation's ob j ecti ves can be changed only' by the converting grace of revolu tion or radical alteration, "by de priving [the existing system] of 542 THE FREEMAN September access to power and levers for controlling society," in Kolko's words. With that a.s the professorial note, it is not surprising that the cry from the ranks is "Ecrasez l'infame," now enunciated with that cocksure whine that is the laryngeal affliction of the New Left. But they have jumped to their conclusion. All we have been told so far is that the leaders of the social system are those who agree with its principles, which is surely one of sociology's minor surprises. That these leaders should attempt to preserve the system is also less than startling.

The connection that must be made is: how did the goal of preserving a capitalist society lead to imperi alism? Few listeners, it seems, stay to question or even notice the arguments offered on this central point. In better days, they would have been beneath notice. The Economics of Trade As it turns out, this whole gro tesquerie of America's need for expansion hangs on two· slender lines of argument, dealing with the economics of importing and exporting. Of these, the argument from imports is probably the less persuasive today. We are in no mood to hear about the sins of the buyer. We can admit that a total embargo on raw materials would plunge the quality of American life - what would one do without one's morning coffee - but after all we do pay for the stuff (twenty cents a cup; no refills), and if the bean does not get its cut, well, that is the bean's lookout. The argument from exports bet ter symbolizes the revisionists' "cosmic inversion," (to use Hilaire Belloc's phrase), for here they take what appears to be charity and convert it into imperialism.

The argument begins by observing that (1) Ame1"ic'awas booming a,t the end of the war. In 1945, our industrial plant was 65 per cent larger than it had been in 1939, and our gross national product was 100 per cent larger, in con stant dollars. Revisionists conclude that the productive capacity of the United States had grown unpro ductively large, and consequently, in the postwar years, that insti tutionalized form of misery which is capitalism would pour forth more than it knew what to do with. Then (2) exports had been and would be essential to maintaining this boom. After all, a fair amount of this growth had come in re sponse to economic demand from foreign governments involved in the war; the home market might not be able to purchase all the goods that they had bought. There were, yes, the extra savings that 1973 THE LIMITS OF CREDULITY 543 Americans had accumulated dur ing the war when there was little better to do with money, but this would not long take up the slack.

The only solution was to sell abroad. (Often cited as the post war goal was the 1944 figure of 14 billion dollars in exports, more than four times the 1939 figure. Less often cited is the 11 billion dollar chunk of that 14 billion which was shipped under Lend Lease. Since most Lend-Lease was never repaid, this casts some doubt on the truly foreign origins of the wartime demand.) Prime revisionist text on ex ports comes from Will Clayton, Assistant Secretary of State for Economic Affairs, and, we are re minded with a.rched eyebrows, a millionaire. He declared, at a For eign Trade Convention, no less: "We need markets - big markets - around the world in which to buy and sell." A somewhat Cham ber-of-Commerce remark, one might think, especially under the circumstances, but with elocution ary tra.ining, it can be given an air of rapacity. The more common sense interpretation was given to it by Clayton's Deputy, Professor Edward S. Mason of Harvard, when I talked to him recently at his strangely unpiranesian office in Cambridge: "Certainly, the U.S. wanted to re-establish trad ing relationships. But I never heard that we needed desperately to have the European market for our exports."

International Pump-Priming If one did assume the necessity for exports, though, one faced the fact that (3) foreign countries by themselves could not afford to buy American goods. Until their econ omies were rebuilt, they would have Iittle to offer us in trade. The answer conceived was (4) the United States had to loan these governments money. Thus in the first stage, they would buy Ameri can capital goods and agricultural commodities; and once restored they would produce goods to trade for ours, and so maintain our ex ports on the long run. As the heart of an argument de signed to show the imperialist tendencies of capitalism, steps (3) and (4) have rather missed their calling. Quite simply, the loans constituted an international pump priming scheme; they were a bit of inflation designed to link up America's surplus capital goods with Europe's idle labor. Apart from any dispute over the useful ness of pump-priming, we can at least agree that it is not capitalist.

Indeed, the attempt is made to pin opposition to pump-priming on capitalists as a. badge of their simple-mindedness. In a Playboy interview (June, 1968), Professor 544 THE FREEMAN September Galbraith said that Henry Hazlitt, a leading capitalist economist, had over looked "the very elementary point" that pump-priming is car ried out in a situation of idle capi tal and idle labor. For the record, Mr. Hazlitt considers pump-prim ing under exactly these conditions in his book The Fa,ilure of the "New Economics." He finds it un necessary, uncertain, dangerous, and unjust. But capitalist or no, this sce nario for international pump priming contained a further con dition: the United States had to be assured that once it gave for eigners the ability to buy our goods, their governments would give them permission to buy our goods. Cost was no obj ect in de veloping trade, so long as trade did develop, but we were not about to cast our seed money on the ground. In other words, (5) the scheme would work only if debtor governm.ents moved toward a lrois sez-faire, or at least pro-Ameri can, sta,nce,. and to this end our diplomacy was directed.

Thus far the argument can be put together from statements made by members of the Truman Administration. (Though the im portance of the plan has been dis puted by Alfred E. Eckes, Jr., in The Journal of American History, March, 1973.) For the rest, revi sionists merely point out that since we urgently needed coun tries to move to the right, (6) America, had to oppose the as sumption of power by leftist ele ments,. in Conta,li.nm,ent and Change, Carl Oglesby says we needed "access and no revolution in order to have high production." This meant encouraging rightist governments to suppress leftist movements, and thus were we forced by the capitalist system to play a repressive role, directly or through surrogates. Finally, in order to make this politically pal atable, we had to push the fiction that the left was not popular and democratic, but Russian-inspired and totalitarian. This posture nat urally exacerbated relations with the Soviet Union and the Euro pean Left generally.

Like the old Marxist argument, the essential reasoning of the six points can be analyzed in a basic two-step: does the capitalist sys tem produce general surpluses; and what does the capitalist sys tem do when confronted with a surplus? On the first point, revisionists seem little inclined to argue; they prefer to quote testimony or make assertions. For instance, W. A. Williams cites Dean Acheson's re mark: "You don't have a problem of production .... The important thing is markets. We have got to see that what the country pro1973 THE LIMITS OF CREDULITY 545 duces is used and sold." Even less willing to offer evidence, Carl Oglesby says "Our economic sys tem functions in a state of dis equilibri urn. The better it works, the greater the surplus." Capitalist OverProduction To find a genuine argument con necting capitalism and excess pro duction, one must turn to the hard, ingenuous Left, which argues as follows: Since a capitalist's status depends on the amount of capital under his control, he engages in production without reference to the possibility of finding a market.

Paul Sweezy says: Here, then, we can see the ele nlents of what Marx in one place calls "the fundamental contradic tion" of capitalism: production en tirely lacks an objective unless it is directed towards a definite goal in consumption, but capitalism at tempts to expand production with out any reference to the consumption which alone can give it meaning. Obviously, this is not an argument one would want to trot out unless absolutely required to do so; in fact, it is simply an assertion of mania, not worth discussing. It appears, therefore, that the postwar situation is a special gift to the revisionists. The large ex pansion in investment was not the product of irrationality in the business community; it was the product of our effort to win the war. It could hardly be called mal investment, but the plant devel oped (revisionists say) would pro duce more than available markets could consume. It looks as if the revisionists can get their first premise, of an investment beyond demand, without resorting to fool ish psychological theories about the business mentality.

As often happens, though, the evidence adduced by the revision ists (more testimony) proves ex actly the opposite of the conclu sion they want. When Vinson, Clayton, Wallace, and so on, went before committees to support the so-called British loan, they did in deed tell Congressmen that they were looking at the loan's effect on the economy, were much inter ested in it, never let it out of sight. But the effect they were looking at was ~ot the alleviation of surplus; it was the exacerba tion of scarcity. When they actu ally confronted the swollen war time plant, the problem was that it was not big enough for peace time demand. A few, but very few, fields were mentioned at that time as having surplus, and even these references seem blatantly political. When Sec retary Vinson mentioned cotton as being among the goods Britain would want, Senator Bankhead of 546 THE FREEMAN September Alabama asked narrowly if he meant cotton goods or raw cotton.

Another question as to what Brit ain would buy drew the answer "You could be sure of some tobac co," which sounds much like "You could be sure of some pork-bar rel." When used honestly the argu ment from overproduction was based on expectations about the economy, which puts us right back to the argument about the biases of capitalism. Since revisionists have little heart for arguing that point, there remains only the second question: what, under capitalism, would one do with a surplus? The revision ists' answer, that the government would force it down the throats of unwilling consumers, is simply not economics; it is pandering: I dreamed of oppression in my black pajamas. I presume that the capi talist answer is well known: if a businessman produces more of a good than he can sell (sayan Ed sel), the capitalist response is to point out that he has produced more of the good than he can sell.

He can try to increase his sales by advertising to high Heaven; he can try to sell abroad; he can take a loss and cut production; all that is capitaHst. One thing he cannot do is involve the government in restructuring his market. That is just typical liberal intervention ism. Revisionists may reply that it happens in America, which is true, but if it happened in Wil liam Graham Sumner's home town the point would be irrelevant. Others, such as Richard J. Barnet, may try to call it "state capital ism," but the phrase conveys little, since it is a contradiction in terms. This is the pattern: on the rare occasions that revisionists do des cryan evil, they are not looking at capitalism; they are staring straight at the denaturing ele ments of our mixed economy. The evil is blamed on capitalism (it's a capitalist system isn't it); the solution is more intervention, leading to more evils. And the momentum develops. Which is per haps the element of truth in La Feber's analysis: if a liberal will not rethink, he must revise, more and more. If he does rethink, he must rethink his leitmotif "We cannot go back;" he may even have to discover the historical irony, that when we went past cap italism we were going in reverse.