Civilization and Beyond by Scott Nearing
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Scott Nearing >> Civilization and Beyond
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Effects of the insertion into the Mexican Constitution of the provision
making natural resources "the property of the Mexican people" have been
far-reaching. One socialist country after another has written into its
constitution a provision that its natural wealth is the inalienable
heritage of its people. This provision has two important results: it
establishes natural resources as part of the public sector of the
national economy; it also limits the possibility of handing out
concessions to foreign exploiters, private or public.
During the opening years of the present century socialist parties and
other forward looking organizations were demanding social ownership of
natural resources, public utilities and other social means of production
as the next logical step toward a more equitable distribution of wealth
and income. There was a possibility that such revolutionary changes
could be made under bourgeois law by exercising the right of eminent
domain, upon the payment of reasonable compensation to former owners. At
least in theory, the democratic majority in any bourgeois country could
put an end to private enterprise capitalism and establish socialism by a
constitutional amendment, legislative enactment, and a caretaker
political apparatus to administer and supervise the transition.
Socialist parties were making "reformist" demands for better working
and living conditions and "revolutionary" demands for changes in
property and class relationships. Increased productivity and growing
affluence made it possible for a progressive bourgeois state to meet the
reformist demands, establishing a welfare state legally and
constitutionally.
Under the bourgeois constitutions generally existing at the beginning of
the present century, a popular majority could adopt necessary
constitutional amendments, pass the necessary enabling laws and launch a
program of socialist construction.
Such a program was part of the thinking of European and other socialist
leaders during the opening years of the present century. Inspired and
encouraged by the successes of socialist construction in the Soviet
Union and other socialist countries, middle of the road socialists
proposed to move gradually and legally from capitalism to socialism.
Conservative socialists who were members of coalition governments in
parts of Eurasia, described such welfare states as victories for
socialism, despite the fact that they left the essentials of state power
in bourgeois hands.
Between 1920 and 1950 the western world found itself in this essentially
revolutionary situation: the world-wide revolution in science and
technology had opened the way for the human race to turn its back on the
limitations and inadequacies of civilization and advance to a new level
of culture and human opportunity.
The impact of this revolutionary situation expressed itself at several
levels:
1. Much of west and central Europe, important parts of North
America, much of Australasia, important parts of East Asia
and fringes of Africa had at least two generations of experience
with some degree of affluence.
2. Scientifically and technologically maturing societies that
had opted for socialism constitutionally and legally were
engaged officially in socialist construction. These countries
and peoples were located chiefly in Eurasia.
3. Former colonial and client dependencies of the nineteenth
century empires struggling for self-determination and statehood
were entering a stage of affluence. These countries
and peoples were mainly Afro-Asian. Some of them were
located in Latin America.
4. Countries and peoples still under the political, economic
and cultural umbrella of the formerly dominant empires
were at different stages in the completion of the bourgeois
revolution. Their ruling oligarchies--fascist or neo-fascist--were
stubborn defenders of remnants and fragments of the
nineteenth century bourgeois culture. Their stronghold was
the Atlantic Community.
During the cold war years following 1945 each of these groups was
undergoing the drastic social changes incident to the worldwide
revolution of the period. Meanwhile mini-wars, civil and international,
were fought in the Americas, Africa and Asia. By common consent
conventional weapons were used and atomic weapons were kept in
mothballs.
These experiences were highlighted in British Guyana and Cuba. British
Guyana was a Crown Colony, with a London-appointed Governor and a small
occupying force of British troops with an elected legislative assembly
and a considerable measure of home rule.
Democratic socialists Cheddi and Janet Jagan helped to organize the
Peoples Progressive Party of British Guyana. Twice Jagan won a popular
electoral majority and was established as Prime Minister of the British
Colony. His two periods of administrative responsibility were badgered
and hectored by every reactionary force that could be mobilized inside
and outside British Guyana, from the British appointed governor to the
domestic and foreign business interests and the urban trade unions.
Before a third election British and American governments, business and
labor interests got together. Money was funnelled into the country
through trade union connections. Protests were staged. Riots were
organized. The electoral system under which the Peoples Progressive
Party had won its victories was altered in London and Jagan was replaced
by a system of proportional representation under which the P.P.P. was
defeated and a new regime inaugurated.
Throughout the struggle the Peoples Progressive Party had insisted upon
winning popular majorities as a basis for establishing socialism in the
colony by democratic methods and legal means. Imperialist reactionaries
from Britain's Prime Minister and the President of the United States to
the A.F. of L.-C.I.O. retorted: "No you don't", and backed up their veto
with money, riots and guns. As a consequence of this counter-revolutionary
conspiracy, the Peoples Progressive Party was forced out of office and
an administration favorable to British, United States and native Guyanese
capital was substituted.
A revolt was led by Fidel Castro and his associates against the
Washington-backed Batista regime in Havana, Cuba. When Cuba was seized
by United States armed forces during the Spanish-American War of 1898
much of the island was in the hands of anti-Spanish rebels who were
demanding independence of Spain's imperialist rule. Between 1898 and
1959 seven million Cubans enjoyed technical independence. Actually the
island, located only 90 miles from Florida, was economically a United
States colony and politically a Washington dependency, with United
States armed forces stationed in the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base. After
seizing power in 1959, Castro went to the United States seeking a market
for Cuba's chief export, sugar; a source of food supplies not produced
in Cuba, and the manufactures necessary for the economic and social life
of an essentially agricultural island.
Batista had emptied the Cuban treasury before he fled the island in
1959. Castro therefore needed loans to meet the immediate needs of the
Cuban economy. He also sought to continue arrangements under which the
chief market of Cuban sugar was in the United States. Castro was turned
down cold. All doors, political and economic, were closed to him. As a
revolutionary with left leanings he got the cold shoulder in New York as
well as in Washington.
Faced by economic bankruptcy and political hostility in the West, Castro
turned to the Soviet Union and other socialist countries. They bought
his sugar on long term contracts; provided him with manufactures;
extended loans. Under these economic and political conditions Castro's
Cuba had no choice. Of necessity it became a part of the socialist bloc,
took over the property of Americans and other foreign investors, planned
its economy and announced socialist goals, thus making the island of
Cuba the only outpost of socialist construction in the Americas.
Socialists exercised authority in one country from 1917 until 1943.
Thereafter the land area devoted to building socialism steadily
increased. By the time China threw off imperialist leading strings and
opted for socialist construction in 1949, a third of mankind was living
on territory under nominally socialist control. Most of this territory
was Asian. An important part lay in eastern Europe. Until 1917,
effective control of the planet was held by a half-dozen empires headed
by the British, who exercised authority over a quarter of the human race
living on a quarter of the earth's land area. After 1917 socialism
mushroomed as a potential competing social system, challenging monopoly
capitalism in Europe, replacing it in large sections of Asia and even
threatening to destroy the foundations of western civilization.
"Action and reaction are equal and opposite" is an axiom of physical
science which is also applicable in the social field. The sweep of world
revolution and the growth of socialism-communism after 1945 called into
being an opposing force of counter-revolution. The greater the successes
of socialism, the more ardent and assiduous was the counter drive, aimed
to modify, negate and, if possible, to destroy the revolution and
restore the social system of imperialism-colonialism built by monopoly
capitalism to its prerevolutionary status of planet-wide ascendancy.
Winston Churchill personified this counter revolutionary drive. It was
he who proposed to "strangle the Bolshevik infant in its cradle". The
Peace Conferees, meeting in Versailles, heeded Lloyd George's warning of
March, 1919, and turned their attention to the urgent task of
strangling socialism. Revolutionary beginnings in central Europe were
stamped out. Funds were raised and arms were supplied to the
anti-Bolshevik forces in European Russia and Siberia. At the height of
the counter-Bolshevik crusade there were sixteen armies in Soviet Russia
with the common aim of destroying Bolshevism and restoring the country
to its previous status as one of the pillars of western civilization.
This military phase of the counter-revolution lasted for four years. It
failed. By 1922 the Soviet leaders were able to turn their energies to
the task of rebuilding a devastated country while they planned and
organized a socialist society.
Counter revolutionary forces failed to overthrow the Bolsheviks during
the civil war of 1918-1921. They failed again when the Nazi armies
swarmed into the Soviet Union in June, 1941. The years from 1941 to 1945
cost the Russians perhaps twenty million dead, six million dwelling
units and immense damage to their economy and their social organization.
When the war ended, responsible observers in the West predicted that if
the Soviet power survived, decades must elapse before the country was
back on its feet.
War destruction had played havoc with much of Europe. The Soviet Union
was especially hard hit. Under the Marshall Plan billions of dollars of
United States aid were poured into Britain, France, Belgium and West
Germany. At the same time, the Soviet request for United States loans
was refused categorically by President Truman. Alone and unaided the
Soviet People repaired the extensive damage inflicted by the 1914-18
war, the Russian Civil War and the 1941 military invasion from the West,
and went on with the task of socialist construction which the war had
interrupted. Within five years--by 1950--the Bolsheviks were again on
their feet, going strong, extending substantial aid to China and other
professedly socialist countries and playing a crucial part in the
struggle for disarmament and peace.
At war's end in 1918 the Soviet Union was struggling to draw the first
breath of socialist life. Three decades later, after expelling the
Nazis, the Soviet Union was a sturdy giant of a nation standing head
and shoulders above its nearest European competitors. During the
interval, Soviet Russia was attacked, denounced, boycotted, encircled,
invaded, ostracized as the leading figure in "an international communist
conspiracy". When the policy of intervention and invasion failed, the
counter-revolutionaries turned to cold war.
Whether or not there was a "communist conspiracy" to overthrow
capitalism, there was certainly an organized capitalist conspiracy to
overthrow socialism-communism. Representatives of the chief capitalist
empires made repeated attempts to subsidize anti-Bolshevik forces in the
Soviet Union. From 1918 to 1921 and from 1941 to 1945 they used every
available means, including military invasion, to overthrow the Soviet
Union and stamp out the beginnings of socialist construction in Central
and East Europe.
From the military invasions of the Soviet Union immediately following
war's end in 1918, western spokesmen, led by President Wilson, did their
utmost to subsidize counter-revolution inside the Soviet Union, to send
American and other armed forces into the country, to villify, denounce,
boycott and handicap the Soviet Government. Sixteen years passed
(1917-1933) before Washington extended diplomatic recognition to the
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. President Wilson did his best to
keep the Soviet Union and Mexico, both under the control of
revolutionary governments, out of the League of Nations.
After the 1936-1945 war Washington played the same role with regard to
China, refusing for twenty-two years to recognize Socialist China
diplomatically, leading the drive in the United Nations to exclude China
from membership, although the United Nations Charter specified that
China should be one of the permanent members of the Security Council.
Secretary of State John Foster Dulles justified the policy of
blacklisting and boycotting China by declaring that there was no such
nation as China on the Asian mainland, only 650 million slaves, and that
Chiang Kai Shek's rump government on the island of Formosa was the
"China" specified in the U.N. Charter.
Under the Truman Doctrine announced immediately after war's end in
1945, the United States refused to tolerate any extension of socialism,
whether by revolution from within or by invasion from without any
country. This doctrine was applied to Greece, to Iran, to Guatemala, to
Santo Domingo, to Chile. During the Korean War, which began in June,
1950, one of President Truman's first directives ordered the United
States Seventh (Pacific) Fleet to occupy the waters about Taiwan
(Formosa), which was historically part of China.
In order to implement this anti-communist policy, Washington used a
newly created international secret service, the Central Intelligence
Agency or C.I.A., gave it an initial appropriation of $100,000,000 and
turned it loose to spy, corrupt, undermine and overthrow governments
that refused to accept or follow Washington's leadership.
Between 1815 and 1914 the planet enjoyed a measure of peace and order.
In the three decades between 1914 and 1945, two general wars, a plague
of lesser wars, a general economic depression and a hurricane of
revolutions scourged the planet. Meanwhile, the revolution in science
and technology and its products penetrated almost every crack and cranny
of human society.
Had the changes incidental to these rapid transformations been carefully
planned and supervised, the disturbances in the ecology and the shocks
to human society would have been less disturbing and upsetting. In the
absence of any planet-wide authority, there could be neither general
planning nor general supervision. There were warnings aplenty from
liberals and radicals who were attempting to keep the situation in
perspective, but such utterances failed to reach the great bulk of
mankind.
Disturbing and upsetting products of the revolution in science and
technology--the harnessing of steam, the internal combustion engine, the
air plane, electronics, plastics, and the release of atomic energy--were
used to mutilate, destroy and kill. During the half century that began
in 1910, tens of millions were mobilized, fed, taught, armed, and led to
the slaughter fields by the masters of western civilization in two long
orgies of wholesale destruction and mass murder--1914-18 and 1936-1945.
Energies and techniques that might have brought peace and plenty to the
human family were used to set fire storms that incinerated property
while it degraded humanity to the horrors of mass suicide.
In a very real sense these ghoulish results were the logical outcome of
competitive nationalism armed and equipped with the technology produced
during the two centuries of the great revolution. War is the most
carefully planned, most elaborate and most intensive form of
competition--the decisive climax of a life and death struggle for
survival.
The great revolution had put into human hands almost infinite
possibilities for utilizing nature and improving the social environment.
With foresight, careful planning and skillful manipulation of forces and
trends the cultivatable portions of the planetary land mass might have
been turned into a garden of unending plenty dotted with marvelous city
centers of light and learning.
In order to achieve such results it would have been necessary for the
human family to coordinate its efforts around an agreed division of
labor, share the goods and services produced and move from one level of
affluence to a level of abundance.
Instead of joint efforts to achieve abundance and security, the most
prosperous and most highly developed centers of western civilization
consolidated their authority in sovereign states, surrounded by
forbidding frontiers, armed them with the most destructive agencies that
human imagination and ingenuity could devise, schooled the citizens of
each nation in the suicidal formula: "might makes right; every nation
for itself and woe betide the laggard and the loser."
The logical ideology of such a formula was egomania, suspicion, fear and
hatred. Its outcome was a competitive life and death struggle for wealth
and power, with the nation or a bloc of nations as the units of
competition. The struggle at its highest level involved occasional local
wars and periodical general wars like those of 1914-18 and 1936-45.
Before the great revolution such struggles were waged chiefly with
weapons wielded by human muscle power, supplemented with whatever animal
power was available. Equipped with the products of the technological
revolution, the struggle became a war of machines, powered by the
energies of nature. Retail killing and destruction was replaced by mass
murder and wholesale annihilation.
Given the assumptions, the practices and the institutions of
civilization, the catastrophic losses of the present century could have
been foretold and, with competent leadership and disciplined
followership, could have been averted. But leadership was self-serving,
shortsighted and for the most part untrained, while followership was
split up into national and local segments, each following the suicidal
doctrine of every nation for itself and the devil take the laggards.
Socialists-communists around the earth have spent a wealth of time and
energy during several generations predicting the present revolutionary
upset and preparing for it. They have been derided, denounced and
persecuted for their efforts. Despite bitter opposition they have
prepared for change, they accept change, they welcome it, because in
change they see the only path to improvement and betterment.
They are learning to live with change and even to welcome it because the
time of troubles through which their society is passing is warning them
of the dangers they face. At the same time they are learning, bit by
bit, of the spectacular achievements of the billion human beings in
socialist-communist countries.
The majority of mankind has been unprepared for revolutionary change.
When change came they resented it, maybe resisted it at the outset.
Those who have a vested interest in capitalist imperialism--the real
backbone of the counter-revolution--join and support counter-revolutionary
organizations and take part in counter-revolutionary activities.
Planners and organizers of the counter-revolution have the bourgeois
state generally on their side and enjoy the backing of the bourgeois
establishment, its organizations and its facilities. Since their object
is defense, they have no constructive program. Instead they stumble,
fumble and bungle as their system flounders into one disastrous crisis
after another.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
WESTERN CIVILIZATION ATTEMPTS SUICIDE (1914-1945)
Each bit of handiwork, each artifact, tool and machine is an expression
of man's wish and will. Each transcends nature and is an affirmation
that takes its place in the vast storehouse of human culture.
Cities, the building blocks of civilization, not only transcend nature;
they replace her. Up to a certain point man lived more or less
consciously as a part of nature. Bit by bit and step by step man shifted
from the stream, the glade, the tree and the cave to the hut, the
village, the city, the nation, the empire, the civilization.
Early in this study I wrote of civilization as an experiment: an
aspiration, a creative urge, a concept, a purpose, a unity of thought
and act, a conscious sequence of related actions, a construct of
multiplying complexity.
These terms, by and large, are constructive and, to a degree, creative.
I might have written a parallel series of words associated with
destructiviness. In every social situation construction and destruction
are Siamese twins. One does not appear without the other. The same
forces, the same implements, the same institutions and practices that
construct can be used to destroy.
Through ages, men learned how to establish, maintain and perpetuate
community and organize society. At every stage of the building process
it was necessary to check, to question, to evaluate, unlearn, tear down,
make a new start. Pushing up and tearing or wearing down is implicit in
nature. It is an essential aspect of human society.
Each human being is a living example of production and destruction. Each
generation repeats the affirmation, modifying it little or much in
accord with circumstances.
Modification means purposeful change--partially or wholly abandoning the
old and replacing it with something new. In the course of these changes
the conservative elements in man and in society, voluntarily or under
coercion, give up the old and learn how to use the new. The learning
process is always more or less painful, especially to people past middle
age.
The world-wide revolution resulted from a long-continued related series
of affirmations, punctuated and interrupted by contradictions and
conflicts.
Trends inherent in the world-wide revolution of 1750-1970 suggest a
cycle that reached its high point at the turn of the century and began
its downward course around 1900. The chief European empires were jointly
and severally involved in the bitter struggle for survival and supremacy
from 1870 onward. Until the outbreak of war in 1914, events followed an
irregular course marked by the shifting relationships of Italy and the
increased pressure from Germany for a showdown. The showdown was the war
of 1914-18, continued in a second phase from 1936 to 1945.
Immediate political results of the showdown were victory for one side
and defeat for the other side. Economic, sociological and ideological
consequences were profound and far reaching. We noted some of them in
the previous chapter.
UNESCO's _History of Mankind_ devotes its final volume six to the
twentieth century. The authors note that the chief European powers
emerged from the general war of 1914-18 "weakened in every way: in men
and wealth, in the balance of their economies and the stability of their
political structure and above all in their relation to other powers
rising or beginning to rise in other parts of the world". (Vol. VI p.
10.)
Aside from the victory-defeat relationship which led to political
realignments during the post-war years, the essence of the experience
is to be found in the UNESCO phrase "weakened in every way". Another way
of describing the experience is to state that the participants in this
four year blood bath were "bled white."
It is easy to be specific. In the course of the war sixty million people
were mobilized. Most of these people stopped what they had been doing
until mid-summer of 1914 and began an entirely new line of activity. Up
to that point most of them had been living with their families, in their
neighborhoods, going through a daily routine that included household
cares, production or service work, the conduct of neighborhood affairs,
the maintenance of normal livelihood activities, the upbringing of the
new generation and perhaps most important of all, adaptation to a
rapidly changing social situation.
The changes that took place in the summer of 1914 involved an almost
complete reversal of purpose and direction. Up to that point Europeans
were devoting a considerable proportion of their time to production and
the maintenance of the normal life routine. At that point they left
their homes, exchanged ordinary clothes for uniforms, laid down the
implements of peace, picked up the weapons of war and prepared, under
very expert leadership and direction, a series of mass movements
designed to disrupt the ordinary life routine of other human beings on
the other side of lines drawn on a map, but having little relation to
customary life activity and even less to geography.
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