John Kenneth Galbraith's "Age of Uncertainty: Weekend in Vermont" (Pt. 3)

Continuing with John Kenneth Galbraith's 1977 documentary series, The Age of Uncertainty, Episode 15, Weekend in Vermont Part 3:

This is the third of three segments featuring conversations with a group that includes:

• Soviet expert on the US Georgi Arbatov
• German liberal Ralf Dahrendorf
• Then-Washington Post owner Katherine Graham
• Former British Conservative Prime Minister Edward Heath
• Jack Jones (Bristish trade unionists)
• Kukrit Pramoj who was Prime Minister of Thailand 1975-6
• Historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
• Canadian stress expert Hans Selye
• British Secretary of State for Education and Science and then-Labour MP Shirley Williams.
• Tom Winship of the Boston Globe

It is also the concluding episode of the documentary. It's focus is on nuclear arms control. In kicking of the conversation, Galbraith says, "Arbatov has persuaded me that we're wicked, and everybody else has persuaded me that the Soviets are wicked."

Since this discussion includes the US Secretary of State and a senior Soviet official discussing nuclear arms talks, this is, as Galbraith suggests in his opening, an actual view of high-level diplomacy between the two superpowers. Unfortunately, the companion volume does not include transcripts of these discussions or summarize them directly.

There are a lot of bad things about Henry Kissinger and his record. And some very constructive things. But it is notable in his discussion of Soviet-American relations was on the basis of a "realist" outlook, not the kind of militaristic zealotry associated with the neoconservatives. We catch a glimpse of the heat Kissinger was getting from the rightwingers at around 14:00 where he talks about the term "detente", which had already become a synonym for "appeasement" and cowardice for the Reagan wing of the Republican Party. And also for those neoconservatives who still at that time considered themselves "Henry Jackson Democrats."

During the Ford Administration in which he still served at the time these discussions were filmed, Kissinger was eventually effectively sidelined in foreign policy matters to a significant degree by two young men who were already showing their talents as political-bureaucratic operators, White House Chief of Staff Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy Dick Cheney. Few of us realized until much later how much more toxic those two men were than Henry Kissinger. And that's saying a lot!

I notice around 44:00 that Heath mentions as a commonly known fact that Israel had nuclear weapons, although he did couch it in a bit of diplomatic obscurity.

In the previous two episodes, the other participants treat Georgi Arbatov as something like the carrier of a dangerous disease. So I assume this last episode's discussion of nuclear weapons proliferation was the main point of inviting him. Here everyone treats him respectfully and takes what he says seriously, or at least as diplomatically important. This was an area where Arbatov spoke for a powerful country.

We now think of 1976-7 as the middle of the Cold War. But I recalled as I was watching this last episode that during that time, it was not unusual to hear the current state of relations between the US and the Soviet Union as detente, and not as Cold War. But with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and the Carter Administration's decision to make that a major issue, the "Cold War" terminology quickly became current again.

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John Kenneth Galbraith's "Age of Uncertainty: Weekend in Vermont" (Pt 2)

Continuing with John Kenneth Galbraith's 1977 documentary series, The Age of Uncertainty, Episode 14, Weekend in Vermont Part 2:

This is the second of three segments featuring conversations with a group that includes:

• Soviet expert on the US Georgi Arbatov
• German liberal Ralf Dahrendorf
• Then-Washington Post owner Katherine Graham
• Former British Conservative Prime Minister Edward Heath
• Jack Jones (Bristish trade unionists)
• Kukrit Pramoj who was Prime Minister of Thailand 1975-6
• Historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
• Canadian stress expert Hans Selye
• British Secretary of State for Education and Science and then-Labour MP Shirley Williams.
• Tom Winship of the Boston Globe

The dinner discussion here begins with the concept of "industrial democracy," which was then a current priority for Western European social democratic parties. It's a reminder of how today's social democrats in Europe have knuckled under so much to neoliberal "free market" ideology. Consumerism also comes into the discussion. Tom Winship rather grumpily introduces the question of how the mass media should contribute to the development of the individual and of democratic institutions, which leads to how democracies should handle "state secrets." Georgi Arbatov's portion of the broadcast version of this discussion were awkward. The bulk of the episode is taken up with discussion on the press.

Then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger shows up fashionably late at around 22:00. Those who remember the time that Kissinger was in office may find this segment a bit creepy, as I did.

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John Kenneth Galbraith's "Age of Uncertainty: Weekend in Vermont (Pt 1)"

Continuing with John Kenneth Galbraith's 1977 documentary series, The Age of Uncertainty, Episode 13, Weekend in Vermont Part 2:

This and the final two segments of the TV documentary feature conversations with a group of mostly white guys with two white female guest and one Asian guy, including:

• Soviet expert on the US Georgi Arbatov
• German liberal Ralf Dahrendorf
• Then-Washington Post owner Katherine Graham
• Former British Conservative Prime Minister Edward Heath
• Jack Jones (Bristish trade unionists)
• Kukrit Pramoj who was Prime Minister of Thailand 1975-6
• Historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
• Canadian stress expert Hans Selye
• British Secretary of State for Education and Science and then-Labour MP Shirley Williams.
• Tom Winship of the Boston Globe

In this segment, they discuss the present-day nature of work, education and Third World development. This segment provides a reminder of how much the Arab oil boycott of 1973 and rising power of OPEC had impressed on the world the potential collective power of oil producing nations.

Galbraith himself facilitates the conversations but his contributions on-screen are minimized in these last three segments.

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John Kenneth Galbraith's "Age of Uncertainty: Democracy Leadership Commitment"

Continuing with John Kenneth Galbraith's 1977 documentary series, The Age of Uncertainty, Episode 12, Democracy Leadership Commitment:

In the companion volume, Galbraith concludes with a reminder about "the truth ... that this small planet cannot survive a nuclear exchange":

We do not yet confront this truth. Asked if we want life for our children and grandchildren, we affirm that we do. Asked about nuclear war, the greatest threat to that life, we regularly dismiss it from mind. Man has learned to live with the thought of his own mortality. And he now has accommodated to the thought that all may die, that his children and grandchildren will not exist. It's a capacity for accommodation at which we can only marvel. I suspect that our minds accept the thought but do not embrace the reality. The act of imagination is too great or too awful. Our minds can extend to a war in some distant jungle and set in motion the actions that reject it. But not yet to the nuclear holocaust.

A commitment to this reality is now the supreme test of our politics. None should accept the easy evasion that the decision is not ours. The Russians are no less perceptive, no less life"enhancing, no more inclined to a death wish than we. Their experience of the death and devastation of war is far more comprehensive than ours. We must believe, for it is true, that they are as willing as we are to commit themselves to this reality, to the existence of this threat to all life and to its elimination.

That, indeed, is the highest purpose of politics in both countries, one that far transcends the differences in economic or political systems. For after the first exchange of missiles, as Khrushchev was moved to warn the world, the ashes of Communism and the ashes of capitalism will be indistinguishable. Not even the most passionate ideologue will be able to speak of the difference, for he too will be dead. In an age when so much is uncertain, there is one certainty: This truth we must confront. [my emphasis]

It's real grounds for optimism about the human future that a full-scale nuclear exchange between the US and the Soviet Union was avoided. It was the assumption at the time that any use of nuclear weapons by one of the superpowers against the other would surely lead to a full-scale nuclear exchange.

The nuclear danger is far from over. This is something of which I'm reminded every time people whose judgment I respect say that climate change is the biggest challenge we face today. I still see the danger of nuclear war as a more urgent challenge.

But Galbraith's reflection on how difficult it was for people to grasp the nuclear danger in its true dimensions and urgency is also relevant to our difficulty today in coming to terms with climate change and its real effects and its alarming trajectory. (See: Justin Gillis, Heat-Trapping Gas Passes Milestone, Raising Fears New York Times 05/10/2013)

On climate change, Al Gore recently wrote 400 ppm Al's Journal 05/10/2013):

Our food systems, our cities, our people and our very way of life developed within a stable range of climatic conditions on Earth. Without immediate and decisive action, these favorable conditions on Earth could become a memory if we continue to make the climate crisis worse day after day after day.

With any great challenge comes great opportunity. We have the rare privilege to rise to an occasion of global magnitude. To do so, our communities, our businesses, our universities, and our governments need to work in harmony to stop the climate crisis. We must summon the very best of the human spirit and draw on our courage, our ingenuity, our intellect, and our determination to confront this crisis. Make no mistake, this crisis will demand no less than our very best. I am optimistic because we have risen to meet the greatest challenges of our past.

So please, take this day and the milestone it represents to reflect on the fragility of our civilization and and the planetary ecosystem on which it depends. Rededicate yourself to the task of saving our future. Talk to your neighbors, call your legislator, let your voice be heard. We must take immediate action to solve this crisis. Not tomorrow, not next week, not next year. Now.

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John Kenneth Galbraith's "Age of Uncertainty: The Metropolis"

Continuing with John Kenneth Galbraith's 1977 documentary series, The Age of Uncertainty, Episode 11, The Metropolis:

As the title implies, this segment deals with urbanization.

In the book, Galbraith makes this point, one that we don't hear much these days:

As a legacy of classical liberalism there is a marked unwillingness to socialize design, to specify overall architectural styles to which the subordinate units must conform. It is an unjust interference with property rights and personal preference. But there is no place where the substitution of social for classical liberal expression is more urgent and where, paradoxically, the result serves better the classical utilitarian goal of the greatest good for the greatest number.

The interference with property rights is real. One solution lies in extending the public ownership of urban land. This too accords with the inherently social character of the city and the inescapably socialist character of housing. I've long wondered why European socialists or American liberals, when gathering on occasions of high ceremony to affirm their faith , give so little attention to the public ownership of urban land. For no other form of property is the public case so clear.

He also makes this historical point about the evolution of cities:

With the Industrial Revolution the Industrial City became synonymous with the city. In consequence, the very connotation of the word city changed. Before 1776, the word had an overtone of grandeur. Dick Whittington's first glimpse of London was of the promised land. Dr. Johnson was even more affirmative : "No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford." The American Republic was launched in Philadelphia, then the second largest city in the English-speaking world. It was regarded by all as beautifully planned and admirably built, and what was then built is so regarded today. This was near the end of urban beauty; soon thereafter a reference to a city became a reference to something not grand, not beautiful, not even solid but something mean, ill-built and dirty. The Industrial City became the characteristic city, and all cities came to be thought somewhat sordid.

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John Kenneth Galbraith's "The Age of Uncertainty: Land and People"

Continuing with John Kenneth Galbraith's 1977 documentary series, The Age of Uncertainty, Episode 10, Land and People:

In the corresponding chapter of the companion volume, Galbraith looks at economic lessons from Singapore:

The Singapore government's contribution is to make pragmatic use of all ideas and refuse to be the captive of any one. Is Adam Smith alive in Singapore? The answer is : Very much. There can be few places in the world where pecuniary self-interest is pursued more diligently and with more visible satisfaction in the material result.

Is Keynes there? The answer is also yes. Public outlays are balanced as a matter of course against the availability of workers and the current and prospective capacity of the economy.

The post-Keynesian view of inflation - a view which I have long urged - is also treated with respect in Singapore. Wage settlements are controlled, again as a matter of course, to minimize inflation and to keep Singapore's manufacturing competitive in world markets. When others talk of the need for an incomes policy, Singapore economists, businessmen and union leaders are known to yawn. They've had one for years.

Is there planning, even socialism in Singapore? Have the Webbs, Franklin Roosevelt, Clement Attlee been here? Would Enoch Powell and Barry Goldwater be distressed? The answer again is yes. If housing, harbor works, transportation and industrial sites are needed , the government provides. Public apartment blocks control the horizon. Self-interest serves well as a motivation. But it is recognized in Singapore that it does not serve all purposes. And it serves best within a framework of systematic and deliberate planning.

Also in this chapter, he discusses the issues of "overpopulation," migration and immigration:

The other remedy [besides birth control] for overpopulation is for the people to go. This, for centuries, has been the primary solution. It continues to be so. In the last thirty years the need for readjustment between land and people has set in motion great migrations within and into Europe and within the United States. It has attracted only a fraction of the respectable discussion that has been evoked by birth control. That is because the redistribution of people has been from the poor countries or communities to the rich. The rich have not responded with warmth to this remedy. More often, in a mood of some righteousness, they have sought to erect barriers to the tide. They have not wanted to think that a redistribution of population, however logical and effective, is the right answer to the equilibrium of poverty. [my emphasis]

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John Kenneth Galbraith's "Age of Uncertainty: The Big Corporation"

Continuing with John Kenneth Galbraith's 1977 documentary series, The Age of Uncertainty, Episode 9, The Big Corporation:

The functioning of corporations and their effect on economics and politics is the topic of some of Galbraith's most interesting work. In the companion volume, he writes, "Because corporations differ, no single enterprise fully exemplifies corporate history and personality. All, when studied, revert, except in unguarded moments, to their myth. The exercise of power so central to corporate personality is at least partly concealed."

He uses a fictional corporation, the Unified Global Enterprises (UGE) to discuss the functioning of the corporations. He includes the important Berle-Means study on corporate power:

In 1932, the two noted Columbia University professors, Adolf A. Berle and Gardiner C. Means, studied the control of the two hundred largest nonfinancial corporations in the United States. Nearly half, they discovered, were controlled by their management. No power remained with the owners to hire or fire the managers; the management appointed the directors who represented the stockholders. The directors did not appoint the managers.

He eventually switches his discussion from the fictional UGE to the Phillips electronics corporation:

Philips ... is a creature of its technostructure. In this respect, too, all corporations are alike. Whether in Eindhoven, New York or Houston the quality of the corporate performance depends not on individual brilliance but on organizational competence- on the success in choosing and combining the efforts of the men, and the rare woman, who fill the rings.

These men of the technostructure are the new and universal priesthood. Their religion is business success; their test of virtue is growth and profit. Their bible is the computer printout; their communion bench is the committee room. The sales force carries their message to the world, and a message is what it is often called. Alcohol is under interdict as an intoxicant but allowed as an adjunct of communion and as an instrument of friendly persuasion. Recreation is for regeneration of the business spirit, for a widened range of business contacts. Sex is for better sleep. The Jesuits of this austere faith are the graduates of the Harvard Business School.

Galbraith posed the problem of the multinational corporation in a form that is different from how advocates of neoliberal ideology today would prefer to see it posed:

The large corporation is here to stay. Those who would break it up and confine its operations within national boundaries are at war with history and circumstance. People want large tasks performed - oil recovered from the North Sea, automobiles made by the million to use it. Large tasks require large organizations. That is how it is.

Nor can the individual decisions of corporations be too extensively second-guessed. There can and must be rules; but within the rules there must be freedom to decide. More than an individual, an organization , if it is to develop and be effective, must have autonomy and ability to act. The one thing worse than a wicked corporation is an incompetent one. The one thing as bad as a wrong decision is a decision that is greatly delayed.

The ultimate answer for the multinational corporation is multinational authority - government that is coordinate in scope with the corporations being regulated. The decline in national identity is paving the way for this solution. There is no danger, however, that it will come too soon. In Europe international authority is distantly in sight. Elsewhere it is not.

It's not so much the words that the advocates of the neoliberal ideologues would find objectionable. It's the democratic substance of what Galbraith is talking about: "Meanwhile for national governments and national corporations the only answer is a strong framework of rules that align the exercise of corporate power with the public purpose." Because in the neoliberal ideology, the only "public purpose" that deserves serious consideration is identical with "the exercise of corporate power."

The following is also an important Galbraithian point:

The modern corporation also exercises power in and by way of government. This too is agreed. Its payments to politicians and public officials are believed by no one except the recipients to be acts of philanthropy or affection. And less mentioned but more important is the naturally advantageous relationship between the modern corporation and the public bureaucracy - between those who build cars and those who build highways, between those who make fighter aircraft and those who guide the Air Force. Between the modern corporation and the modern state there is a deeply symbiotic relationship based on shared power and shared reward.

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John Kenneth Galbraith's "Age of Uncertainty: The Fatal Competition", the Cold War

Continuing with John Kenneth Galbraith's 1977 documentary series, The Age of Uncertainty, Episode 8, The Fatal Competition, this one dealing with the Cold War:

Galbraith himself was in Germany in the days following the end of the Second World War in Europe. In the companion volume, he says the following about that period:

Soldiers, businessmen, civil servants, diplomats, assorted idlers and black marketeers were gathered in the city [Berlin] for the tasks of the occupation. By 1946, two parties were taking form: one party wanted very much to get along with the Russians. They - I should say we, for I was among them - saw little hope for a world in which there was conflict between the two powers. [I.e., if there were conflict between the US and the USSR, there would be little hope for the world.] There were things to encourage us. When we met socially with the Russians, we learned how grim had been their experience with war, how passionate was their fear of another. Some of our senior army people were similarly moved. They had experienced war and wanted no more of it. We had as symbolic allies our enlisted men. They were meeting regularly with their Russian counterparts for the sale and exchange of merchandise; the market was in the shadow of the Brandenburg Gate which stands between East and West Berlin. Thus they showed that trade was above ideology, that when the armed representatives of capitalism met the armed might of Communism, the natural tendency was not to fight but to do a little business.

There was a second party. It regarded our hopes as ridiculously soft-headed. (There is an interesting point here: political wisdom is thought always to lie with the hard, impervious head and the tough, unyielding mind. One wonders why.) Some members of this group were only concerned to show how tough and hence how intelligent they were. But some, the Foreign Service Officers especially, spoke out of a genuine knowledge of Stalin and the great purges and a genuine concern for his intentions. Also the Soviet activities in Eastern Europe left no room for doubt. It was easy to assume that these would be the same in Western Europe as well.

Present too were the pathologically belligerent, those who even more than the poor are always with us. And there were a few for whom the war had been an exciting thing, a blessed ·escape from dull jobs, dull wives, deadly routine. Better another war than going back to Toledo, Ohio, or Nashua, New Hampshire. [my emphasis]

And, he observes, "On occasion, the debate became rather intense."

Galbraith was not adverse to noting the existence and influence of what President Eisenhower famously called the military-industrial complex:

The Air Force, in particular, had expanded wonderfully in power, prestige, men and airplanes [during the Second World War]. And a whole new industry had come into existence to provide the equipment and technology and share the gains. There followed a very simple, very practical point, far too obvious to be ignored. If there were a continuing menace, these gains would be continued. If not, they would be lost. The Soviets, not the French, not the British, not the Germans, were obvious candidates to be the new menace.

No one - certainly not many - argued that the gains of war should be preserved by the invention of a new menace . This is not the kind of thing that is said openly; the world has little to fear from forthrightly cynical men. Not many admitted this motivation even to themselves. Personal interest always wears the disguise of public purpose, and no one is more easily persuaded of the validity or righteousness of a public cause than the person who stands personally to gain therefrom . Those who perceive the underlying role of self-interest often hesitate to cite it. Nothing so interrupts the flow of polite conversation and so badly repays an invitation to drink and dine. [my emphasis]

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John Kenneth Galbraith's "The Age of Uncertainty:"

Continuing with John Kenneth Galbraith's 1977 documentary series, The Age of Uncertainty, Episode 7, The Mandarin Revolution, which deals with the Great Depression and John Maynard Keynes:

Brad DeLong has made available a class lecture of his of 09/29/2009, John Maynard Keynes:

For the litterati [sic] it is Keynes of Bloomsbury—his loves, enthusiasms, acts of patronage, and wit—who is the most interesting. For economists like myself, it is Keynes the academic who is the real Keynes: he was the founder of the half-science half-witchcraft discipline of macroeconomics. For those interested in the political and economic history of the twentieth century, it is Keynes the author and politician who is primary. In either case, John Maynard Keynes is the man who has the best claim to be the architect of our modern world—whether it is how our central banks think about economic policy, what our governments believe that they must try to do, the institutions through which they work, or the habit of thought that views the economy not as Adam Smith's "system of natural liberty" but as a complicated machine that needs adjustment and governance by trained professional technocrats, all of these trace large parts of their roots to the words and deeds of John Maynard Keynes.

Galbraith relates some of the havoc caused by the gold standard in the 1920s. When Winston Churchill became Chancellor of the Exchequer, he convinced Parliament that Britain should go back on the gold standard. Keynes warned that there would be unpleasant consequences. But, as Galbraith explains in the companion volume:

Why the mistake? To go back to the old rate of exchange of pounds for gold and dollars was to show that British financial management was again as solid, as reliable, as in the nineteenth century. It proved that the war had changed nothing. It was a thought to which Winston Churchill, historian and professional custodian of the British past, was highly susceptible. Also, bnly a few people partic;ipate in such decisions, and the instinct is strongly conformist. The man of greatest public prestige states his position at a meeting; the others hasten to praise his wisdom. Those who have a reputation for dissent, like Keynes, are not invited . They a re not responsible, serious, effective. It follows that financial decisions, like those on foreign policy, are carefully orchestrated to protect error.

Galbraith in 1977 already knew what Paul Krugman learned more recently through his own experience as a pundit and economist who was saying things the Very Serious People didn't want to hear: that it's generally better for one's reputation to be conventionally wrong than to be unconventionally right. And Keynes was right in that instance. Galbraith:

Asthe mines of the Ruhr came back into production after 1924, world prices of coal fell. To meet this competition with the more expensive pound, the British coal-owners proposed a three-point program: longer hours in the pits, abolition of the minimum wage, lower wages for all. (Let Enoch Powell, Ronald Reagan and Milton Friedman take comfort; there was a day when such actions could be urged. Who knows, maybe their sun will shine again.) A Royal Commission agreed that the lower wage was necessary. The miners refused; the owners then locked them out. On the fourth of May, 1926, the transport, printing, iron and steel, electricity and gas and most of the building-trades unions came out in support of the miners. This, with some slight exaggeration, was called the General Strike. For quite a few workers it didn't make too much difference; they were already on the dole, for unemployment, the other remedy, was by then well advanced. In these years unemployment ranged between ten and twelve percent of the British labor force.

The General Strike lasted only nine days. Those who had most ardently applauded the return to gold were the first to see the strike as a threat to constitutional government, a manifestation of anarchy. Churchill took an especially principled stand. The miners remained on strike through most of 1926 but were eventually defeated. Keynes's judgment was redeemed but he was not forgiven. It had happened again: when the men of great reputation are wrong, it is the worst of personal tactics to be right. [my emphasis]

And, of course, the sun of austerity, of austericide economics, is shining once again in the current North Atlantic depression. And Galbraith relates that the historical predecessor of the austerity obsession of German Chancellor Angela "Frau Fritz" Merkel, Heinrich Brüning, was one of "the most devoted exponents of" austericide during the Great Depression:

Bruning's remedial action in 1931 was especially memorable. Wages were cut; prices were cut; salaries were cut; taxes were raised. All this was done at a time when around a quarter of all German industrial workers were unemployed. Not many have wanted to ask the question .which some millions of German workers did ask themselves. If this is democracy, can Hitler be worse? Andrew Mellon, Hoover's Secretary of the Treasury, had a similar proposal: "Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers ..." After Mellon was finished, there would, it is true, be no way left but up.

In 1977, it was still widely assumed that not even conservatives would be so foolish as to again embrace such a view in a depression. But today we have conservatives like Frau Fritz and David Cameron, the French Socialist François Hollande and the American Democrat Barack Obama all following the same Herbert Hoover/Heinrich Brüning austerity policies. It didn't work out happily then, and it's not working out very well now. We can still hope the consequences for democratic governance won't be as drastic in our time as back then.

Galbraith also relates something of his biographical relationship to Keynes' ideas. Keynes' work offered the possibility of meaningful reform to mitigate the effects of depression in a major way without revolutionary change:

It was the young who were captured. Economists are economical, among other things, of ideas. It is still so. They make those they acquire as graduate students do for a lifetime. Change in economics comes only with the changing generations. The great economists of that day read and reviewed Keynes and uniformly found him wrong.

But so influential was Keynes among the young at Harvard that in later years an association of alumni was formed to combat his influence. They threatened to cease financial support to the university unless his ideas were repressed or expunged, although it is not clear that many had given much before. Conservatives regularly extend their faith to the management of their personal resources. I was singled out for attack as the Crown Prince of "Keynesism." I was greatly pleased and hoped that my friends would be properly resentful.

That was Keynes. You came to him out of conservatism, your desire for peaceful change. And by urging his ideas you won a reputation for being a radical.

That part is not so different today, either. As Arlo Guthrie once put it, "Some things change, you know. Some things don't."

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John Kenneth Galbraith's "The Age of Uncertainty: The Rise and Fall of Money"

Continuing with the posts featuring John Kenneth Galbraith's 1977 documentary and book, The Age of Uncertainty, Episode 6 The Rise and Fall of Money:

Here Galbraith gives us a brief history of money. In the companion volume, he devotes a section to Andrew Jackson's successful fight with the Bank of the United States, the chief institution of the Money Power, i.e., concentrated wealth:

[Bank of the US President Nicholas] Biddle lacked the tact that the rich and successful have since developed greatly and which has perhaps become second nature. On public occasions he compared his power as President of the Second Bank of the United States with that of the President of the United States. When asked by a Senate committee if he had ever abused his financial power, he praised his own restraint. Although very few of the small banks "might not have been destroyed" by his discipline, "none has ever been injured." This allowed Jackson to thunder back: "The President of the Bank has told us that most of the State banks exist by its forbearance."

The historic showdown came in 1832. Early that year the friends of the Bank in Congress led by Henry Clay - Clay was also from the frontier but the forces of civilization had worked their way - renewed the charter of the Bank. Jackson responded with a stinging veto. The presidential election was then fought on the issue. Biddle had the money, and he had been generous with loans to congressmen, senators and the press. ... Andrew Jackson had the votes. He won, and the Second Bank of the United States was defeated. Biddle then got it a Pennsylvania charter but power is often a onetime thing. Very soon he went broke. The smaller local banks were to remain free from serious restraint in many of the states for a century. [my emphasis]

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John Kenneth Galbraith's "Age of Uncertainty: Lenin and The Great Ungluing"

Today's episode of John Kenneth Galbraith's 1977 The Age of Uncertainty is Episode 5 Lenin and The Great Ungluing, which deals with the First World War and its aftermath:

Galbraith in the companion book notes, "No subject known to history, not even the reasons for the long decline of Rome (the more interesting question is how it lasted so long), has been so much debated as the causes of World War I."

But that doesn't stop him from offering his own observations. This is an important one. He takes issue with Marxist theories of imperialism that held capitalism to be especially prone to generating wars, and the First World War more specifically:

The better explanation lies in the traditional territorial attitudes of predominantly rural societies. Their governments, at least in that time, were dangerously belligerent - more so, Marx notwithstanding, than those of the capitalist world.

Ever since the beginning of historical experience, land and men had been the basis of both wealth and military power; the two went together. The wealth of a prince had always been in proportion to the extent and quality of the land be controlled. For varying with the extent and quality of the land were the number, and perhaps also the quality, of the peasantry it supported and therewith of the soldiers he could muster. Thus his military power. Thus the territorial imperative, the belief that nothing should stand in the way of acquisition or defense of territory.

In 1914, the belief in land and men- this territorial imperative - was part of the deepest instinct of the old ruling houses. It was a factor as between France and Germany. Had Germany won, something more of France would have been added to Alsace and Lorraine. Between the Hapsburgs and the Romanovs, and in the Balkans, it was mortal. It was for this reason that the rulers eyed each other with suspicion; each believed that his neighbor wanted the territory that was decisive for wealth and power. [my emphasis]

He also spends some time to discuss Lenin's leadership, including the following:

Marx, no one could doubt, was a revolutionary; the free-flowing beard, piercing eye, exceptionally untidy appearance were all in keeping. It may, indeed, be Marx who has given us our mental image of how a revolutionary should look. Far more than Marx, Lenin was a revolutionary. Marx wrote; Lenin led . He remains the revolutionary colossus who stands astride a whole age, the point of reference still for the long, slowly moving lines beside the Kremlin Wall. With his high for ehead greatly accented by the bald dome above, his neat mustache, dark, quiet suit and something very near a VanDyck beard, he looked like the head of a firm of chartered accountants. Leon Trotsky, with his fi erce and glittering eye and much less disciplined beard, was a man of far more satisfactory aspect.

Once quite a few years ago a Soviet historian visited Harvard. He was an old man and had served in Budenny's cavalry during the Revolution. He had known Lenin well and told with amused pride that Lenin had once paid him a high compliment; he was, Lenin had said, the world's only known case of a cavalryman with brains. I asked him the source of Lenin's leadership - a man so tidy, looking so much like a clerk. He replied: "When Lenin spoke, we marched."

Galbraith also relates this anecdote, which he presents as like apocryphal, talking about the time Lenin spent at the library in the British Museum while in exile: "Years later [after the Boshevik Revolution], according to legend, it occurred to someone to ask one of the library attendants if he remembered Lenin. He did, a most diligent little man. The librarian wondered whatever had become of him."

He also discusses the vexatious issue of the adjustments made by capitalist countries in their method of rule after the First World War:

In the West the war ended, Germany was defeated but the glue seemed to hold. In Germany Friedrich Ebert, a Social Democrat, became President. Rosa Luxembourg and Karl Liebknecht led a militant minority whose view of revolution was as Lenin's. But the moderate opposition in Germany, the counterpart of the Mensheviks, was far stronger than in Russia. Gustav Noske, a Social Democrat, became Minister of Defense and put down their revolt. Luxembourg and Liebknecht were both killed by anti-Communists. But in the Western countries too, the United States partly excepted , there was a quiet revolution, one that deserves the name.

In all European countries the old coalition of capitalists and traditional rulers [aristocratic landowners, more or less] was at an end. There would still be a ruling coalition; it would be of business interests, large and small, and the trade unions and their parties. Sometimes these joined in power. More often they traded it back and forth, increasingly sharing it with yet other groups. So it was in Britain, France and the British Dominions. And so, with the passage of time, it would be in the United States. It was a prospect that Marx did not foresee.

Tags: age of uncertainty, colonialism, john kenneth galbraith, lenin, world war i

John Kenneth Galbaith's "Age of Uncertainty: The Colonial Idea"

Today's episode of John Kenneth Galbraith's 1977 The Age of Uncertainty is Episode 4 The Colonial Idea:

Galbraith makes this comment on the state of the colonial enterprise, broadly conceived, in the companion volume:

Does the colonial experience belong forever to history? The United States has badly burned fingers; the effort to govern indirectly and shape political development in distant lands will henceforth surely be viewed with caution. And it is not only the United States that has had this pain. The Soviet Union, in the years following World War II, sought to extend its influence in Yugoslavia, China, Egypt, Indonesia and Ghana. Contemplating the results, it can hardly feel pleased. When Ben Bella, a Soviet acolyte, was deposed in Algeria, a Russian newspaper correspondent said to me rather sadly, "They used our tanks. Well, at least they didn't use our advisers." The Chinese, in their turn, became the bitter enemies of the Russians. Once again "The Blame of those ye better." One hopes that there is now a volume of Kipling in the Kremlin.

Tags: age of uncertainty, colonialism, john kenneth galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith's "The Age of Uncertainty: Karl Marx The Massive Dissent"

Today we have Episode three of John Kenneth Galbraith's 1977 The Age of Uncertainty, Karl Marx The Massive Dissent.

I previously used this video in "Karl Marx" in 2013 04/10/2013.

The liberal philosopher John Gray recently did an essay on Marx in The Real Karl Marx New York Review of Books 60:8(05/09/2013 edition), a review of Jonathan Sperber's Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life (2013). This is an intriguing observation of Gray's:

Marx's admiration for Darwin is well known. A common legend has it that Marx offered to dedicate Capital to Darwin. Sperber describes this as “a myth that has been repeatedly refuted but seems virtually ineradicable,” since it was Edward Aveling, the lover of Marx’s daughter Eleanor, who unsuccessfully approached Darwin for permission to dedicate a popular volume he had written on evolution. But there can be no doubt that Marx welcomed Darwin’s work, seeing it (as Sperber puts it) as "another intellectual blow struck in favor of materialism and atheism."

Less well known are Marx’s deep differences with Darwin. If Marx viewed Trémaux’s work as "a very important improvement on Darwin," it was because "progress, which in Darwin is purely accidental, is here necessary on the basis of the periods of development of the body of the earth." Virtually every follower of Darwin at the time believed he had given a scientific demonstration of progress in nature; but though Darwin himself sometimes wavered on the point, that was never his fundamental view. Darwin’s theory of natural selection says nothing about any kind of betterment—as Darwin once noted, when judged from their own standpoint bees are an improvement on human beings—and it is testimony to Marx’s penetrating intelligence that, unlike the great majority of those who promoted the idea of evolution, he understood this absence of the idea of progress in Darwinism. Yet he was just as emotionally incapable as they were of accepting the contingent world that Darwin had uncovered.

Galbraith in the companion volume has an interesting anecdote relating to Hegel, one of the major influences on Marx - or rather to Hegel's reputation:

The romantic years were now at an end; the years of Hegel began. Not only was Berlin a far more serious place than Bonn but Marx was now surrounded by the disciples of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. These young men, the young Hegelians, took themselves and their scholarly mission very seriously indeed. Recurrently in history intellectuals have been so impressed with their unique vision of truth that they have seen themselves fated to change how all men think. This was one of those moments.

What is not so easy to describe is the change the young intellectuals sought. Hegel is not a very accessible figure for the Anglo-Saxon or American mind; certainly I have never found him so. Once, years ago, I was greatly comforted by a story told me by Arthur Goodhart, the Oxford law professor and onetime Master of University College. It concerned a night in 1940 when, as a member of the Home Guard, he was deployed with a fellow professor, a distinguished philosopher at the university, to guard a small private airstrip near Oxford.

They may well have been the two most improbable soldiers in the annals of British military history. But they marched back and forth in a light mist, one with a rifle of Crimean vintage more or less, the other with a fowling piece. Occasionally, being professors, they stopped to converse. Toward dawn, during one of these pauses, Goodhart's fellow soldier lit his pipe and said, "I say, Arthur, do you suppose those wretched fellows aren't coming? I did so want a shot at them. I've always detested Hegel."

Tags: age of uncertainty, john kenneth galbraith, karl marx

John Kenneth Galbraith's "The Age of Uncertainty: The Manners and Morals of High Capitalism"

Continuing with the post featuring John Kenneth Galbraith's 1977 documentary and book, The Age of Uncertainty, Episode 2, The Manners and Morals of High Capitalism:

In this episode, Galbraith brings his not inconsiderable wit and critical capacity to the Gilded Age and the robber barons who ruled it. He also deals with the closely related doctrine of Social Darwinism.

In the book, Galbraith says this about the Social Darwinist doctrine:

No one at this happy gathering seems to have worried about a small but obvious point, which is how the Social Darwinists would bridge the generation gap. In those years John D. Rockefeller had himself formulated the doctrine for a Sunday school class in an exceptionally engaging way: "The American Beauty rose," he had explained to the young,"can be produced in the splendor and fragrance which bring cheer to its beholder only by sacrificing the early buds which grow up around it." The same sacrifices occurred in business and accounted, pro tanto, for the splendor of a Rockefeller. "This is not an evil tendency in business. It is merely the working-out of a law of nature and a law of God." The question, of course, was whether this same law of nature and of God would also explain the purely inherited splendor of John D., Jr. , or yet later of John D. III, Nelson, Laurance, Winthrop and David. Surely, on the contrary, a Rockefeller inheritance, even more than a handout to the poor, would cool the struggle to survive, devastate the moral and physical tone of the legatees and justify a confiscatory inheritance tax that would save their efforts for society. A nasty problem.

No one should imagine that Spencer and Sumner are relics purely of the past. They still restrain the hand of the well-to-do individual when he is approached by a beggar. Perhaps it will damage the man's morale. Their doctrines still lurk in the inner cells of the Rockefeller consciousness. Or maybe only in those of their speech writers. Speaking in Dallas on September 12, 1975, to a convocation of committed conservatives, Vice President Nelson Rockefeller warned against the continuing dangers of compassion:

One of the problems in this country is that we have this Judeo-Christian heritage of wanting to help those in need. And this, when added to some political instincts, sometimes causes people to promise more than they can deliver. [my emphasis]

Notice that the latter quote is from Nelson Rockefeller in 1975; and Rockefeller was the archetypal liberal Republican.

Galbraith sardonic description of the minister Henry Ward Beecher is priceless:

His reconciliation involved a distinction between theology and religion. Theology, like the animal kingdom, was evolutionary. Such change did not contradict the Holy Writ. Religion was enduring. Its truths did not change. Darwin and Spencer belonged to theology; the Bible was religion. So there was no conflict between natural selection and the Holy Scripture. I do not understand this distinction, and it is fairly certain that neither Beecher nor his congregation did either. But it sounded exceptionally good.

Beecher had other good news for his affluent flock. God particularly loved sinners, for He greatly enjoyed redeeming them. So, by implication, one could go out of an occasional evening and sin. The ensuing repentance and redemption would then do wonders for God's morale. Beecher thereupon proceeded to follow his own advice. Robert Shaplen, the author of the definitive study of Beecher's private and litigious life and later one of the most authoritative reporters on Vietnam and the Vietnam war, has shown how faithful he was in this regard . Besides comforting his rich parishioners on the legitimacy of their wealth, Beecher comforted their wives - some of them at least - by taking them to bed. Eventually one, Elizabeth Tilton , was assailed by the thought that even though Beecher was being redeemed, her case was not so clear. So she confessed not to God as intended but to her husband, and he sued Beecher. The jury disagreed on Beecher's guilt. No one who has since looked at the evidence has had any similar doubt.

Speaking of Herbert Spencer, the British scientist and author of the Social Darwinist classic Social Statics, Galbraith writes, "Earlier on, I mentioned that Beecher had told Spencer of his hope that they would meet again in heaven. There must be many, and I am one, who would prefer not to meet either."

But the best part of this segment is his description of the economist and social critic Thorstein Veblen, which begins in the documentary around 30:00, in which he calls Veblen "the preeminent critic of the manners and morals of the great American capitalists." Galbraith is conventionally considered to have been working in the "structuralist" economics tradition of Veblen. Why it's called "structuralist," I've yet to discern.

In the book, Galbraith writes:

The rich have regularly invited the resentment of the less rich or the poor. Why should they have so much? What virtue justifies their higher income and station? This attack the rich can always stand. It proceeds from envy, and this affirms their superiority.

The Veblen weapon was far more refined; it was ridicule presented as the most somber and careful science. All primitive tribes had their festivals, rituals and orgies, some of them exceptionally depraved. Likewise the rich. Their social observances and rituals might be different in form and detail but their purpose was the same - self-advertisement, exhibitionism. And for every exhibitionist mannerism or enjoyment of the rich, Veblen came up with some deplorable barbarian counterpart. The Vanderbilts bound up their women in corsets, thus proving they were purely objects of enjoyment and display. The Papuan chief carved up the faces or breasts of his wives to the same end. The rich gathered for elegant dinners and entertainments. The counterpart ritual of the aboriginal community was the potlatch or orgy. Veblen could do wonders even with a walking stick:

The walking-stick serves the purpose of an advertisement that the bearer's hands are employed otherwise than in useful effort, and it therefore has utili ty as an evidence of leisure. But it is also a weapon and it meets a felt need of barba rian man on that ground. The handling of so tangible and primitive a means of offense is very comforting to anyone who is gifted with even a moderate share of ferocity.

Galbraith concludes that chapter of the book with this memorable observation:

My own thought is that if men are sufficiently concerned to acquire money, their behavior will reflect that preoccupation and be much the same, whatever the time or place. Out of moral sense, caution or conscience- conscience being, as Mencken once said, "the inner voice which warns us that someone may be looking" - most, it may be expected, will remain within the law. But a largely stable minority will be impelled to step over the line into forthright rascality.

The rascality will not vary much as to form from one period to the next. Popular opinion and popular fiction to the contrary, this is not a line of work that attracts the highly innovative mind. The man who is admired for the ingenuity of his larceny is almost always rediscovering some earlier form of fraud. The basic forms are all known, have all been practiced.

The manners of capitalism improve. The morals may not. But, equally, they do not get worse.

Tags: age of uncertainty, john kenneth galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith, "The Age of Uncertainty: The Prophets and Promise of Classical Capitalism"

John Kenneth Galbraith did a 15-episode TV documentary series in 1977 called The Age of Uncertainty, with a companion book volume of the same name.

The episodes are currently available on YouTube, so I'm going to post them here, one per day.

Staring with, of course, The Age of Uncertainty Episode 1 - The Prophets and Promise of Classical Capitalism:

Much of this episode is devoted to the founders of economics, Adam Smith and David Ricardo.

He prepared the book's text based on the essays he wrote from which the TV script was prepared. So the text has additional material not included in the TV broadcast.

In the book's first chapter, he writes:

On one of the last pages of his last and most famous book John Maynard Keynes - by wide agreement the most influential economist of this century - observed that" ... the ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist." This was written in 1935. Thinking then of the oratory of Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels and Julius Streicher which was at the time in full tide, and of Alfred Rosenberg and Houston Stewart Chamberlain from whose writings they drew their racial doctrines, he added: "Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back." Then came his affirmation: "... the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas."

But he characteristically proceeds to qualify Keynes' observation: "... we had best not close our eyes too completely to the idea of vested interest. People have an enduring tendency to protect what they have, justify what they want to have. And their tendency is to see as right the ideas that serve such purpose. Ideas may be superior to vested interest. They are also very often the children of vested interest."

Writing of pre-Revolutionary France, he also makes this useful point:

People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage. Intellectual myopia, often called stupidity, is no doubt a reason. But the privileged feel also that their privileges, however egregious they may seem to others, are a solemn, basic, God-given right. The sensitivity of the poor to injustice is a trivial thing compared with that of the rich. So it was in the Ancien Régime. When reform from the top became impossible, revolution from the bottom became inevitable.

Tags: age of uncertainty, john kenneth galbraith

The various uses of scary quotations

A classic from the days when the "reds" were Communists, not Republicans

It's not often for me that a Bush speech inspires some actual reflection. But something keeps nagging me about the conservative fondness for the idea that the Bad Guys of History somehow expose their secret evilness in writing and that if you just read the appropriate passages you've discovered the inner workings of their dangerous minds.

It made me think of what we can safely say is an obscure book, Toward Soviet America (1932) by William Z. Foster. Foster was one of the leaders of the US Communist Party (CP) for decades. In 1932, he was their Presidential candidate and got a million or so votes, the CP's highwater mark in its history for electoral influence in the United States. In 1961, some conservative group republished it, and it actually got more circulation in that version than the original ever did. If the current Wikipedia entry is correct, the House Un-American Activities Committe (HUAC) published it themselves.

It contains passages of purple prose like, "The capitalist class, like an insatiable blood-sucker, hangs to the body of the toiling masses and can be dislodged only by force." (p. 130) That one has a certain so-bad-it's-good kitschy literary quality about it. Or, "The Negro masses will make the very best fighters for the revolution." (p. 225) I'm sure that scared a few white folks in 1961 who thought integration of the public schools would be the end of civilization.

That was an example of this conservative thing about discovering the hidden truth. The idea in the 1961 republication was to show the secret Real Goal of the Commies. Because by then, what was left of the CP had stopped using some of the, uh, less mainstream formulations of 1932.

But there's something a little odd in this notion. If the point was to show how sneaky and devious the conniving Communists were, why should we think that what they published in 1932 was the true story? It could be seen as kind of a "testimony against interest", I guess.

But mainly, for rightwingers to be obsessing over this little book in 1961, when the influence of the CP was all but non-existent, was just an excercise in "fear itself".

Still, as a period piece, Foster's book has its own historical value. His first chapter is a general indictment of capitalism. It includes this prediction:

One day, despite the disbelief of the capitalists and of their still more cynical Social Fascist lackeys, the American workers will demonstrate that they, like the Russians, have the intelligence, courage and organization to carry through the revolution. The American capitalist class, like that of other countries, is living on the brink of a volcano which, sooner than it dreams, is going to explode. George Bernard Shaw is right: the time will surely come when the victorious toilers will build a monument to Lenin in New York. (p. 67)

I'm pretty sure there was never a monument erected to Lenin in New York.

The 1932 edition, without conservative commentary

That "Social Fascist" phrase comes from the position of the Soviet-led Communist International (Comintern) at the time which rejected cooperation with Social Democratic (Socialist) parties, on the theory that the "general crisis of capitalism" represented by the Great Depression would bring more support to Communist Parties that took very uncompromising stands.

Since the Socialist Party was also a minor force in American politics, I'm guessing that this book's passages about Social Fascism would have sounded like gibberish to most Americans then. But Foster was targeting the segment of the public that did have some familiarity with the labor movement and radical parties.

In Sinclair Lewis' wonderful 1935 novel It Can't Happen Here, there is a Communist character who constantly argues with a Socialist character. They keep it up until they are both shipped to the same concentration camp, where they continue to blame each other's party for things having gotten to that state.

The second chapter praises the Soviet Union as a model to be emulated. While the USSR wasn't terribly popular among Americans generally in 1932 - the US still didn't have diplomatic relations with the USSR - his praise for Soviet economic achievements didn't sound quite so hollow as they do to a reader today. The details of virtually everything in the history of the Soviet Union are subject to dispute. But it was widely perceived in the rest of the world that the USSR was avoiding the devastating effects of the Great Depression.

The Russian workers and peasants, it is true, are still poor. This poverty is their heritage from Czarism and capitalism. But with control of the industries and the land, with capitalist exploitation and robbery stopped, with rapidly developing Socialist industries and farms, they have the solid basis for such a prosperity as no working class in the world has ever even remotely approached. The rapidity with which this prosperity will develop and its great depth and breadth will soon astound the world. Capitalists everywhere understand this. They sense the revolutionizing effect it will have upon the millions of workers in their countries who, in the growing crisis of the capitalist system, are falling deeper and deeper into poverty and starvation. This is the basic reason why the capitalists are redoubling their efforts to develop war against the Soviet Union. (p. 108)

Whatever the price paid by the Soviet people, the USSR did manage to industrialize itself at a very rapid pace.

Agriculture was another story. To put it mildly, the following specimen of historical analysis has not held up well:

IF SOCIALISM proceeds with great speed in industry, it goes still faster in agriculture. The vast development of the productive forces and the reorganization generally that is taking place with almost lightning speed in Russian agriculture is something altogether new in the world. During the 30 days from Jan. 20 to Feb. 20, 1930, one-third of all the peasants entered the collective farms in the monster organization campaign, raising the total of collectivized homesteads from 4,300,000 to 14,000,000 at one stroke. Anna Louise Strong thus describes this tremendous movement: "Can one give a smooth account of an earthquake? The storm of collectivization that I found on the Lower Volga in late November, 1929, was as elemental as an earthquake, as a tidal wave, as a whirlwind."

Agriculture was always the Achilles heel of the Soviet economy. John Kenneth Galbraith described matters at that time as follows in The Age of Uncertainty (1977):

The effects of the Great Depression spread, and they spread around the world. The richer the country, the more advanced its industry, the worse, in general, the slump. Only Russia was untouched, although this was not an unqualified case for the Soviet system. The time had come for that further stage of the revolution that Lenin saw to be necessary so agriculture was being collectivized. This stage was infinitely more bloody than the first. What was called suffering in the West would have seemed like a miracle of economic affluence in Russia. Stalin himself was later to tell Churchill that these years were the most painful of his life. When Stalin was pained by the pain of others, it was pain indeed.

Foster's praise for Soviet policies on religion was sure to raise the hackles of even very reform-minded American voters:

In the U.S.S.R., as part of the general cultural revolution, religion is being liquidated. Religion, which Marx called, "the opium of the people," has been a basic part of every system of exploitation that has afflicted humanity chattel slavery, feudalism, capitalism. It has sanctified every war and every tyrant, no matter how murderous and reactionary. Its glib phrases about morality, brotherly love and immortality are the covers behind which the most terrible deeds in history have been done. Religion is the sworn enemy of liberty, education, science.

Such a monstrous system of dupery and exploitation is totally foreign to a Socialist society; firstly, because there is no exploited class to be demoralized by religion; secondly, because its childish tissue of superstition is impossible in a society founded upon Marxian materialism; and thirdly, because its slavish moral system is out of place, the new Communist moral code developing naturally upon the basis of the new modes of production and exchange.(p. 118)

It's worth noting that Soviet policies on religion were at least partly due to the particular role played by the Russian Orthodox hierarchy in support of the Czar and his system. European anticlericalism in general arose in a context very different from the situation of church in the United States. The same was true in Latin America.

In theory, a Marxist government would have no reason to discriminate against religion or religious individuals as such. Marx's own suggestion on a programmatic statement on freedom of religion in his 1875 Kritik des Gothaer Programms (Critique of the Gotha Program) is somewhat ambigious, though memorable:

Wollte man zu dieser Zeit des Kulturkampfes dem Liberalismus seine alten Stichworte zu Gemüt führen, so konnte es doch nur in dieser Form geschehen: Jeder muß seine religiöse wie seine leibliche Notdurft verrichten können, ohne daß die Polizei ihre Nase hineinsteckt. Aber die Arbeiterpartei mußte doch bei dieser Gelegenheit ihr Bewußtsein darüber aussprechen, daß die bürgerliche „Gewissensfreiheit" nichts ist außer der Duldung aller möglichen Sorten religiöser Gewissensfreiheit, und daß sie vielmehr die Gewissen vom religiösen Spuk zu befreien strebt. Man beliebt aber das „bürgerliche" Niveau nicht zu überschreiten.

[Everyone should be able to attend his religious as well as his bodily needs without the police sticking their noses in. But the Workers' party ought, at any rate in this connection, to have expressed its awareness of the fact that bourgeois "freedom of conscience" is nothing but the toleration of all possible kinds of religious freedom of conscience, and that for its part it endeavours rather to liberate the conscience from the witchery of religion. But one chooses not to transgress the "bourgeois" level.]

Since neoconservatives owe an important part of their intellectual perspective to Troskyism, it's interesting to note Foster's 1932 position on that strain of Marxist thought:

The capitalist arguments that "it is impossible" also found their echoes within the Communist party of the Soviet Union, where they reflected the despair of the defeated and declining capitalist remnants in the U.S.S.R. Their outspoken representative was Trotzky. He formulated theories that it was impossible to build Socialism in one country that first the world revolution was necessary; that the Party was degenerating and surrendering to a rapid growth of capitalist elements in city and country; that the Socialist industry development was destined to go on in a declining curve of new production; that the Soviet Union had abandoned the world revolution, etc. The logic of his position would have led to the precipitation of abortive and fatal Communist revolts abroad and disastrous civil war at home against the great middle masses of peasants. All this would have surely defeated the revolution. (pp. 125-6)

Here was Foster's explanation of a key Marxist-Leninist concept:

The dictatorship of the proletariat, unlike the capitalist dictatorship, makes no pretenses of being an all-class democracy, a democracy of both exploiters and exploited. It is frankly a democracy - of the toiling masses, directed against the exploiters. Its freedom is only for useful producers, not for social parasites. Lenin, writing before the Russian revolution, says: "Together with an immense expansion of democracy for the first time becoming democracy of the poor, democracy of the people and not democracy of the rich folk - the dictatorship of the proletariat will produce a whole series of restrictions of liberty in the case of the oppressors, exploiters and capitalists." (p. 134)

The third chapter is devoted to explaining why mainstream attempts to fix the problems of the system were failing and doomed to fail:

The fact is that American capitalism, like world capitalism in general, is rotten at the heart. The present great economic world crisis began in the United States. (p. 153)

Actually, it began with the collapse of the Creditanstalt in Vienna, but that's another story.

It's interesting to see the section on capitalist planning. Though he derides this whole concept as a fascist tendency, something like this is actually what major capitalist economies adopted, in the form of the New Deal in the US and with social-democratic approaches in Europe:

Capitalist "planning" is a step still further into State capitalism. The capitalist government, as the instrument of the ruling class, always has as its main function the furtherance of capitalist industry and the increase of profits at the expense of the workers, and it more and more directly intervenes in industry, hut never was this intervention so direct and far-reaching as the capitalist "planners" now propose. The movement for capitalist "planning" is an effort to hasten the process of monopolization with still more vigorous aid of the government. It also tends in the general direction of Fascism. (p. 163)

He treats his readers to more explanation of "Social Fascism":

Throughout the capitalist world the trend of the exploiters is towards Fascism; that is, to push through their offensive against the working class by policies of extreme demagogy and violence. The speed of the development of Fascism and the forms that it takes in the various countries depend upon the extent to which the capitalist crisis has progressed. Fascism develops along two main channels; that is, open Fascism and Social Fascism. (p. 173)

He did have a talent for the purple prose:

The world Social Democracy is not better than a strike-breaking, wage-cutting, dole-slashing tool of the employers. (p. 189)

Here he reflects the Comintern position on conditions in Germany. A position that turned out to be a huge miscalculation.

In Germany the Social Fascist leaders [he means the Social Democratic Party, the SPD] are clearing the way for Fascism through their theory and practice of "the lesser evil.' With the argument that the starvation capitalist system is a "lesser evil" than the dictatorship of the proletariat they support the Bruening government, with its wholesale wagecuts, suppression of the workers' rights and program of gradual fasciszation. Under the name of Socialism they call upon the workers to vote for the monarchist, von Hindenburg. In many places they join hands with the Hitlerites and police for armed attacks on the Communists. To the Social Fascists the major danger is the Communist revolution; to defeat this the end justifies the means. (p. 191)

I don't believe I've ever encountered the word "fasciszation" before. But he wasn't entirely wrong about the Bruening government. During the last couple of years of the Weimar Republic (1930-32), Germany was operating as a semi-democracy.

The SPD's support for Hindenburg as President also didn't work out so well. But it was a far more sensible choice in 1932 than Foster makes it sound here. And his argument that the SPD saw the Communists as a greater danger than the Nazis is just not correct. The Communists in Germany (KPD) were refusing to cooperate with the SPD because the KPD was gambling that if Hitler came to power that revulsion against him would be so strong that they could take power in a German version of the Bolshevik Revolution. It didn't work out that way.

The following passage gives a hint of how loosely the term "fascist" was used at that time. And not only by the CP. I suspect that's part of the reason why "fascist" has lost all meaning in the normal American political vocabulary to the point that it just means "bad", e.g., "Islamofascism".

Of such demagogues the Fascists are outstanding examples. Before Mussolini seized power his program was extremely "radical," containing demands for a republic, suppression of all chambers of commerce and stock companies, confiscation of church properties, nationalization of the war industries, etc., all of which he completely repudiated in practice. At the present time Hitler is trying to carry out the same Mussolini strategy, to deceive the German masses with pretenses of radicalism as a screen for the naked capitalist dictatorship and exploitation he has in store for them. The new-found radicalism of the Roosevelts, Pinchots, LaFollettes, Murphys, Father Coxes, etc., is of essentially the same stripe in this country, so much empty demagogy to win a mass following of the discontented. (p. 194)

In the fourth chapter, "The Revolutionary Way Out of the Crisis", he included several parts that surely still disturbed HUAC and their admirers in 1961.

Although the CP never attempted any kind of violent insurrection, Foster's 1932 program was pretty explicit on his view that the revolution he was advocating could only be achieved through violence:

The capitalists will not give up of their own accord; nor can they be talked, bought or voted out of power. To believe otherwise would be a deadly fatalism, disarming and paralyzing the workers in their struggle. No ruling class ever surrendered to a rising subject class without a last ditch open fight. To put an end to the capitalist system will require a consciously revolutionary act by the great toiling masses, led by the Communist party; that is, the conquest of the State power, the destruction of the State machine created by the ruling class, and the organization of the proletarian dictatorship. The lessons of history allow of no other conclusion.

It is the historical task of the proletariat to put a last end to war. Nevertheless, the working class cannot itself come into power without civil war. This is not due to the choice of the toilers ; it is because the ruling class will never permit itself to be ousted without such a fight. "Force," says Marx, "is the midwife of every old society when it is pregnant with the new one ; force is the instrument and the means by which social movements hack their way through and break up the fossilized political forms." (p. 213-4)

To put this in some historical context, Foster's 1932 book was directed toward the segment of the labor movement that were militant enough and politicized enough to find the Communists an attractive alternative. And anyone who was involved in union organizing in those days knew they could wind up having to deal with hostile cops, National Guard, gun thugs or mobsters. That's just the way things were. For his target audience, the point he makes in those two paragraphs probably seemed very obvious.

The situation in Germany teaches the same lessons. The German bourgeoisie, fearing the revolution, are developing Fascism to drown it in blood. The Reichstag is only a democratic sham to hide the almost naked Fascist dictatorship. (p. 216)

Uh, no. The Weimar democracy in 1932 was in sad shape. But by the summer of 1933, they really did have a "naked Fascist dictatorship".

I should mention here that German Nazism was commonly referred to then and later as "fascism", as the same basic type of government as Mussolini practiced in Italy. Among scholars who seriously study this stuff, there is a surprising variety of opinion on just which regimes qualify as fascist. Some believe that the National Socialist (Nazi) dictatorship in Germany was distinct enough that it should be put in its own category rather than lumped with other "fascist" regimes.

Communist Party Presidential candidate William Z. Foster, 1932

The extent to which German capitalists supported Hitler's movement is also something that is still studied and debated at some length. While Foster's statement there is more-or-less true, it's not like the German chambers of commerce had a convention and voted to support a Nazi takeover. Most of them would probably have preferred some stodgy conservative. But few representatives of German Big Business were active members of the anti-Nazi Wiederstand (resistance) in later years, either.

One of the distinctive things about the CP was that they did give a great deal of emphasis, then and later, to what they called "the Negro question":

The Negroes also constitute a great potentially revolutionary force. Comprising about 12,000,000, they are the poorest of the poor. They are made up of the most impoverished farmers, the lowest paid workers in the industries and in domestic service. They are the most bitterly exploited and persecuted element of the whole population. There is no section which has to confront such terrible economic, political, and social conditions. At his every turn the Negro faces a system of the rankest discrimination and exploitation. His outrageous position in society is a blazing indictment and exposure of the sham American capitalist democracy. (p. 224)

The following was largely day-dreaming in the American context as a practical matter:

In measuring the potential forces for and against the revolution, naturally the question of the role to be played by the army and navy is one of fundamental importance; for, in the final showdown, it is upon them that the bourgeoisie relies to maintain its control. If it loses the armed forces, then all is lost. Here, certainly, the revolution will recruit powerful forces, with fatal effects to capitalism. The armed forces are not impervious to Communism simply because they have patriotic propaganda dinned into their ears and are subjected to a rigid discipline. The great bulk of these forces originate in proletarian or farmer families and they eventually respond to the sufferings and miseries of their close relatives. Especially is all this true of conscript armies. Besides, they have their own deep grievances in the service. Experience teaches that such worker-peasant forces are very unreliable for the bourgeoisie. (p. 228)

Foster outlined the major policy points that the CP was emphasizing at that time as follows:

1. UNEMPLOYMENT AND SOCIAL INSURANCE AT THE EXPENSE OF THE STATE AND EMPLOYERS.
2. Against Hoover's wage-cutting policy.
3. Emergency relief, without restrictions by the government and banks, for the poor farmers, exemption of poor farmers from taxes, and from forced collection of debts.
4. Equal rights for the Negroes, and self-determination for the Black Belt.
5. Against capitalist terror; against all forms of suppression of the political rights of the workers.
6. Against imperialist war; for defense of the Chinese people and of the Soviet Union. (pp. 247-8)

Again, "capitalist terror" would have had immediate meaning for labor activists at the time. But it's pretty doubtful how many peole were especially concerned with "defense of the Chinese people and of the Soviet Union".

He also called for equal pay for women:

The Party makes special demands for women workers, including equal pay with men, special protection in industry, maternity insurance, etc., and it incorporates them in its immediate program in given struggles. For the ex-service men it demands the full payment of the bonus ; for those now in the army and navy service better wages, food, housing, etc. It demands the repeal of the 18th Amendment and the Volstead Act.(p. 251)

The "special protection" notion for women has largely been discarded these days. But when the Equal Rights Amendment was first adopted by the Republican Party in 1944, New Dealers and labor activists suspected it of being some business attempt to disadvantage female workers by removing such special protections.

The final chapter was devoted to Foster's vision for the "Soviet States of America". Given our current experience with crassly partisan justice at the national level, this point really does not sound that appealing:

The Soviet court system will be simple, speedy and direct. The judges, chosen by the corresponding Soviets, will be responsible to them. The Supreme Court, instead of being dictatorial and virtually legislative, as in the United States, will be purely juridical and entirely under the control of the C.E.C. The civil and criminal codes will be simplified, the aim being to proceed directly and quickly to a correct decision. In the acute stages of the revolutionary struggle special courts to fight the counter-revolution will probably be necessary. The pest of lawyers will be abolished. The courts will be class-courts, definitely warring against the class enemies of the toilers. They will make no hypocrisy like capitalist courts, which, while pretending to deal out equal justice to all classes, in reality are instruments of the capitalist State for the repression and exploitation of the toiling masses. (p. 273)

To clarify, he proceeds directly to explain:

The American Soviet government will be the dictatorship of the proletariat. (p. 273)

And Foster didn't really envision a competitive party system:

The leader of the revolution in all its stages is the Communist party. With its main base among the industrial workers, the Party makes a bloc with the revolutionary farmers and impoverished city petty bourgeoisie, drawing under its general leadership such revolutionary groups and organizations as these classes may have. Under the dictatorship all the capitalist parties Republican, Democratic, Progressive, Socialist, etc. will be liquidated, the Communist party functioning alone as the Party of the toiling masses. Likewise, will be dissolved all other organizations that are political props of the bourgeois rule, including chambers of commerce, employers' associations, rotary clubs, American Legion, Y.M.C.A., and such fraternal orders as the Masons, Odd Fellows, Elks, Knights of Columbus, etc. (p. 275)

You can see how this might be alarming to those worried about the "Communist menace", even though it was never much of a "menace" in the United States.

Speaking of menaces, this is another bit of purple prose:

In reality, the capitalists, with their program of mass poverty, exploitation and war, are a menace to the human race. (p. 284)

Foster is known for having played a significant part in reviving the tradition of black nationalism. And the CP had a proposal in their program that probably sounded almost as weird and/or unlikely then as it does now to establish a "Negro nation" in the American South:

Accordingly, the right of self-determination will apply to Negroes in the American Soviet system. In the so-called Black Belt of the South, where the Negroes are in the majority, they will have the fullest right to govern themselves and also such white minorities as may live in this section. The same principle will apply to all the colonial and semi-colonial peoples now dominated by American imperialism in Cuba, the Philippines, Central and South America, etc. (p. 304)

Whatever positive karma the CP accumulated for itself in its criticisms of racism and racial discrimination was surely mitigated by its advocacy of a separate nation for African-Americans, because the concept conceded a lot to the advocates of racial segregation.

Tom Tancredo fans would still be able to get worked up over this one:

And logically, foreign-born workers, now denied the right to vote and ruthlessly deported, will enjoy the fullest rights of citizenship. (p. 304)

He does put in a mildly good word for religious freedom in this passage:

Among the elementary measures the American Soviet government will adopt to further the cultural revolution are the following; the schools, colleges and universities will be coordinated and grouped under the National Department of Education and its state and local branches. The studies will be revolutionized, being cleansed of religious, patriotic and other features of the bourgeois ideology. The students will be taught on the basis of Marxian dialectical materialism, internationalism and the general ethics of the new Socialist society. Present obsolete methods of teaching will be superseded by a scientific pedagogy.

The churches will remain free to continue their services, but their special tax and other privileges will be liquidated. Their buildings will revert to the State. Religious schools will be abolished and organized religious training for minors prohibited. Freedom will be established for anti-religious propaganda. (p. 316)

The Christian fundamentalist branch of the home schooling movement think that something like Foster's vision of public education has come to pass: revolutionary studies, teaching against patriotism, a National Department of Education. (Well, we do have one of those now.)

The following has also partly come to pass, though in the form of Rubert Murdoch and Timmy Russert than what Foster envisioned:

The press, the motion picture, the radio, the theatre, will be taken over by the government. They will be cleansed of their present trash of sex, crime, sensationalism and general babbitry, and developed into institutions of real education and art; into purveyors of the interesting, dramatic, and amusing in life. The press will, through workers' correspondents on the Russian lines, become the actual voice of the people, not simply the forum of professional writers. (p. 317)

And, in the too-good-to-be-true category:

In the new Russian prisons, for example, the prisoners have the right to marry and to live with their families; they are taught useful trades and are paid full union wages for their work; there are no guards or walls or bars; the discipline is organized entirely by the prisoners themselves. The prisoners are also allowed freely to visit their friends in other towns. (p. 322)

Ron Paul fans would presumably be propelled into spasms of teeth-gnashing by reading something like this:

A Communist world will be a unified, organized world. The economic system will be one great organization, based upon the principle of planning now dawning in the U.S.S.R. The American Soviet government will be an important section in this world organization. In such a society there will be no tariffs or the many other barriers erected by capitalism against a free world interchange of goods. The raw material supplies of the world will be at the disposition of the peoples of the world. Politically, the world will be organized. (p. 326)

More samples of Fosterian purple prose:

There will be no place for the present narrow patriotism, the bigoted nationalist chauvinism that serves so well the capitalist warmakers. (p. 327)

The world capitalist system is in decay. All the king's horses and all the king's men cannot save it. Its general crisis deepens; the masses develop revolutionary consciousness ; the international revolutionary storm forces gather. Capitalism, it is true, makes a strong and stubborn resistance. The advance of the revolution is difficult, its pace is slow, and it varies from country to country, but its direction is sure and its movement irresistible. Under the leadership of the Communist International the toilers of the world are organizing to put a final end to the long, long ages of ignorance and slavery, of which capitalist imperialism is the last stage, and to begin building a prosperous and intelligent society commensurate with the levels to which social knowledge and production possibilities have reached. (p. 343)

That paragraph is his conclusion, so I'll conclude here as well.

Tags: age of uncertainty, john kenneth galbraith, karl marx, marxism, toward soviet america, william z foster