32. American Imperialism Drives for World Mastery (l948-1951)
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| Picture taken by Life magazine in 1946 of Bill Foster |
AMERICAN CAPITALIST HEGEMONY
American capitalist predominance has been brought about, first, by the serious weakening economically and politically of the other great powers during the war—Great Britain, Germany, Japan, France, and Italy —and, secondly, by the enormous growth of American productivity during the war and post-war periods—an increase of about 75 percent. The United States, unduly bloated economically, now possesses about two-thirds of the industrial capacity of the capitalist world, it has some three-fourths of the world's gold reserves, and its foreign investments far exceed "the combined investment total of all the other imperialist powers."1 Therefore, this country has become relatively the boss of the capitalist world. But it is a very shaky rule, and the ramshackle edifice is constantly threatened with collapse.
American hegemony over the capitalist world deepens the general crisis of the capitalist system, because it greatly sharpens all the inner contradictions of that system, as well as those between the capitalist and socialist worlds. For example, a severe strain has been placed upon the whole world by the precipitation of the Korean War by the United States, which literally had to slug other capitalist states in order to get them to send even token bodies of troops to the Korean slaughterhouse. Also, the United States, as the capitalist boss, has put Britain, Italy, Belgium, and others under such economic pressure in its arms race against the U.S.S.R. that they are bankrupt. The United States is likewise weakening the general fabric of capitalism by its ruthless penetration of the domestic and foreign markets of the other imperialist powers. It also antagonizes the British, French, Dutch, and Belgian empires by setting up economic and political controls over their colonies and dominions, under a cloud of propaganda to the effect that the former powers use "obsolete" colonial methods. Arrogant Wall Street pressure upon the national independence of other countries, too, is creating a violent anti-American spirit all over the world, which is being reflected in a growing opposition to the United States in the United Nations. But most important of all, the United States, through its dominant position, is pushing the other capitalist countries toward a war which, if it takes place, will very probably destroy world capitalism altogether.
Within the general scope of Wall Street's mad project of trying to conquer the world, a particularly insane policy is the Truman Government's arrogant insistence that all capitalist countries cease trading with the U.S.S.R. and the People's Democracies of Europe and Asia. This boycott policy cannot hurt the latter countries seriously, because among themselves they possess all the raw materials they require. Moreover, their collectivist regimes make it relatively easy for them to do without trade with capitalist countries. The policy can, however, be disastrous for world capitalism. For Great Britain, France, Germany, Japan, and others, not to mention the United States, have an increasingly urgent need for the great potential markets in the boycotted countries. To cut them off from these markets can well generate an economic explosion from overproduction and mass unemployment, which will blow the whole capitalist war alliance to smithereens, and with it American world capitalist hegemony.
One of the most explosive pressures now being generated by U.S. capitalist hegemony is Wall Street's arrogant attempt to deny the peoples of the world their right to set up progressive governments in France and Italy, the establishment of national independence in the Middle East, and the carrying through of the great colonial revolution in Asia. All such people's movements are condemned and combated as Russian "plots" and Communist "infiltration." The ultimate consequences of such a policy will definitely prove disastrous for capitalism. Within the framework of its world capitalist hegemony the United States maintains a sort o£ alliance with its major imperialist rival, Great Britain, which it treats as a minor partner. For all its arrogance, the United States has to make some small concessions to the subordinate capitalist powers, for it could not possibly drive through with its warlike policies, even in the United States itself, without their support. Nevertheless the growing British-American antagonism is the most basic within the capitalist world, and it is now deepening. A split with Great Britain would be disastrous for Wall Street. This fact emphasizes the big role the European countries could play in the peace movement to restrain warlike American imperialism, if pressed by their peoples to do so.
FORCES BEHIND WALL STREET'S WAR DRIVE
The United States, ruled by great monopoly capitalists, cannot rest content even with its present leading position among the capitalist nations. It must also push on for complete mastery of the world; for domination over the world's great socialist sector, as well as its capitalist sector. Wall Street is determined to rule the whole world, cost what it may. It knows very well that to drive ahead for that mastery would involve another great war, and such a war it is cold-bloodedly preparing. This ruthless course is in the very nature of imperialism. The American bourgeoisie is motivated to make this relentless drive for imperialist expansion and universal power by four major pressures, underlying all of which is the insatiable capitalist urge for more and more profits.
First, as a great capitalist, imperialist power, in its determined search for markets, raw materials, strategic military positions, and peoples to exploit, the United States is irresistibly impelled into a policy of aggression, limited only by the opposition it encounters. Such imperialism, most Americans will readily agree, is characteristic of all the other big capitalist countries — Great Britain, Germany, Japan, France, Italy, and others—but however much this thought is disliked by Americans, it is even more true of the United States. For this country, far more powerful economically and more completely dominated by monopolies than any other, is also more aggressive politically. Inevitably it sets a more grandiose imperialist goal for itself than any capitalist power has ever done before—namely, the complete domination of the world.
Second, the United States is also impelled into its aggressive policy of universal domination out of the capitalist fear that the rest of world capitalism is falling to pieces and that it can be saved only if the American capitalists, with their wealth and "know how," take it all over. These capitalists may deny the Marxist-Leninist theory of the general crisis of the capitalist system, but they nevertheless realize that international capitalism is in desperate straits and that drastic measures must be taken if there is to be any real chance to preserve it even temporarily.
Third, the Wall Street capitalists who own and run the United States 2 are frightened in their very bones at the rise of world socialism. Not for a moment do they believe their own lying propaganda, prepared for mass consumption, that socialism is impractical and that the U.S.S.R. is about to collapse. They fear that they see the handwriting on the wall in the historic fact that within a generation 800 million people have broken their capitalist shackles and are now either already living under socialism or on the way to building it. Hence, at any cost, they are resolved to try to crush the U.S.S.R., the European People's Democracies, the great Chinese People's Republic, and all other people's states and movements heading toward socialism.
Fourth, and very important in causing the drive of American imperialism toward war and world conquest, is the central fact that United States industry, on its present capitalist course, needs war in order to remain even temporarily in substantial operation. As we have seen in previous pages of this history, American industry has reached its present enormous development primarily because of the artificial markets created by two world wars—that is, by producing munitions to carry on these wars and by post-war production to make up the commodity shortages and the property destruction wrought by the two wars. And American industries are still being rapidly overextended on the basis of another war.
As the Communist Party has constantly pointed out, there is no ground in the normal national and international capitalist markets for the present high development of the industries. Leon Keyserling, prominent American economist, says that during the next decade we must find new markets at home and abroad for $400 billion worth of commodities or face economic collapse.3 So the capitalists set out to create markets for these enormous surpluses by extensive war preparations, and finally by war itself. This Keynesian policy makes the war drive doubly dangerous. As we will show in Chapter 36, the belief that inflated American industry can be kept in full operation by arms production is a great illusion. This is the road to economic smash-up, as well as to military disaster. But momentarily it is a very profitable one for the big capitalists. "In the pre-war years, 1936-39, the annual net profit of U.S. corporations was $3.4 billions; in 1940-45 it was $8.7 billions; in 1946-50 (cold war and Korea), it was $18.5 billions; in 1951 it is at least $30 billions. From 1940 through 1950, corporations in the United States reported a total net profit of $145 billions." 4 Even more blood money is in store for the exploiters, with the current enormous increase in war preparations. Hence the push toward war and ultimate ruin.
The Communist Party, while warning that crises are inevitable under capitalism, urges the workers, who have created the wealth of America, to seek to absorb much of the present great surpluses of production by raising living standards of the masses, expanding social security, developing education, and giving the people decent housing. The vast productive power of American industry, properly distributed, could enormously improve living conditions in this country. But this course would slash the profits of the employers; hence they resist every effort to absorb the surplus production by improving the conditions of the people. The ruling capitalists prostitute the huge American industrial machine to the destructive purposes of war.
Wall Street's war drive for world conquest is at the same time a drive to establish world fascism—a gigantic effort to strangle the liberties of the peoples, both in the United States and on a world scale. For only by drastic repressive measures could the peace will of the masses possibly be broken and the big capitalists of the United States succeed in precipitating their projected anti-Soviet war and driving toward their contemplated system of American world rule.
The program of world war and fascism, of United States world mastery, is the policy of American monopoly—finance capital—, of its Truman government, and of its two major political parties. There is, however, much hesitation regarding this imperialist war-fascist line in capitalist ranks in this country. Many businessmen are afraid of national bankruptcy from the big munitions expenditures. Other capitalist elements fear disaster in another war and in the drive toward fascism. Especially are these capitalist moods of hesitation and resistance to the war drive to be found in the countries of western Europe.
Such hesitation trends may increase in the United States, and develop into real opposition. But the present noisy pre-election quarrels between Republicans and Democrats in this country are primarily disputes over political-military war strategy and tactics, and sharp rivalries among cliques of capitalists and their political agents as to •who shall control the rich prize of the United States government, which is now spending over $70 billions yearly. They are mainly partisan janglings within the main framework of Wall Street's imperialist policy of world domination. Truman, Taft, Eisenhower, Warren, Stassen, et al, are all warmongers, cut from the same cloth. The democratic masses fighting for peace, while taking advantage of every split in the ranks of the capitalists nationally and internationally, must always realize that the maintenance of world peace depends upon their own mighty action, not upon opposition groups among the capitalists.
THE PEACE WILL OF THE PEOPLES
The drive of Wall Street capital toward war and fascism flagrantly violates the interests and desires of the great democratic people in this country, of our nation. The workers, farmers, Negro people, intellectuals, and others of the toiling masses in this country are democratic and peace-minded. They wish to live in harmony with the peoples of the rest of the world. They have no desire for the imperialist loot, bloody war adventures, and eventual national catastrophe inherent in the expansionist policies of Wall Street. But unfortunately they are not controlling the government nor determining its policies. The big capitalists dominate the United States government and use it to further their own sinister class interests, to the detriment of the interests of the nation.
The democratic masses of the American and world's peoples have repeatedly shown that they are deeply opposed to war—to the war that Wall Street is organizing. This they have done by their support of the vast Stockholm Peace Pledge, with half a billion signatures, by the campaign for a Five-Power Peace Pact, with some 600 million names on it; by the marked anti-militarist spirit among the peoples of Europe (including Germany), Asia (including Japan), Latin America, Africa, and Australia, and of the United States and Canada; by the catastrophic fall in American democratic prestige all over the world as Wall Street's program of imperialist aggression becomes better understood; and by the great peace demonstrations in many parts of the world. In the United States the peace will of the people has been shown by the remarkable demonstrations of the soldiers and the people at the end of the war, which forced a huge slash in the armed forces; by the stubborn popular resistance to military control of the atom-bomb, to the institution of conscription and universal military training, to the sending of a large American army to post-war Europe, and to the threat of employing the atom-bomb in Korea; and by the striking lack of enthusiasm generally for the Korean war. The Gallup poll, in November 1951, reported that 56 per cent of the American people agreed that the Korean war was "utterly useless," and in December it reported 70 per cent of the people as favoring a big power peace conference, although Truman sharply opposed this.
The strong center of the international peace movement of the peoples, now, as before World War II, is the Soviet Union. Today, in the United Nations, Vishinsky fights against the war danger, as Litvinov did in the previous League of Nations, and as Lenin did before the outbreak of the first World War. The great Soviet Union —without capitalists, hence without imperialists—ardently needs and works for peace as an indispensable condition for carrying out the enormous tasks of internal development which it now has under way. It is the strong buttress of peace and democracy all over the world, the real protection for such rebellious but weak countries as Iran, Egypt, Iraq, Burma, etc., etc. The U.S.S.R. has no exploiters, who get rich from the production of munitions and the waging of war, and, besides, its healthy socialist industries need no deadly stimulant of war production to keep them in operation. In the U.S.S.R. the advocacy of war, such as rages feverishly in the American press and radio, has been made a criminal offense. The very social structure of the Soviet Union commits it to peace and against aggression, and its entire foreign and domestic policy structure is built upon this anti-imperialist foundation. During World War II the U.S.S.R. saved world democracy from being destroyed by fascism, and now it is the main force in fighting to preserve world peace.
The Wall Street imperialists, however, in their urgent need for a pretext to justify the contemplated war, picture the peace-loving Soviet Union as a great imperialist menace. They thus stand reality on its head. Their pen-pushers and windjammers are carrying on an immense campaign designed to prove that the peaceful policies of the U.S.S.R. are warlike; that the spontaneous democratic revolutions in Czechoslovakia, Poland, China, and elsewhere are belligerent instigations by the Soviet Union; and that the United States' gigantic war preparations are only defensive.
The Wall Street warmongers have upped the military budget in 1951 by 500 percent over 1950, in the face of Soviet proposals to ban the atomic bomb and to reduce armaments drastically. Yet the instigators of war cry out that the latter is the aggressor. They have surrounded the U.S.S.R. with a world-wide ring of air bases 5—it is as though the Soviets had great bases in Canada, Mexico, and the West Indies—and still the warmongers declare that all this aggression is merely defensive. They are openly arming the whole capitalist world for an all-out attack against the Soviet Union. But they shout that the Russians are about to overwhelm the world with their Red Army. The Wall Street-Truman policy is the pre-war and wartime Munich policy all over again—that is, the development of a general capitalist attack to demolish the U.S.S.R. And all this is being done under the heavy cloak of deceit and hypocrisy that it is only a program of peace and democracy.
THE U.S. PUSHES TOWARD WAR
The American capitalist drive toward a third world war, a war which was already implicit in Wall Street's anti-Soviet policy during World War II, began to take shape immediately in the post-war period. This is the meaning of the "get-tough-with-Russia" policy and of "atom-bomb diplomacy." From the first there was a general brandishing of the bomb, and soon the atom-bomb fanatics began openly to advocate a "preventive war" against the Soviet Union. In the United Nations the U.S.S.R. early confronted a hard-boiled Anglo-American majority, which followed an anti-Soviet policy. The Baruch plan of atomic control, which was designed to keep the bomb in American and out of Russian hands, was presented to the U.S.S.R. on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. All Russian peace proposals were voted down on principle. The influence of the generals in the making of American foreign policy became decisive.
Early in 1947, as the war policy was developing, President Truman enunciated the so-called Truman doctrine. That is, the United States took over the job of shooting to pieces the Greek revolution, a task which the British announced they were unable to accomplish. This unilateral interference in the affairs of Greece, by-passing the U.N. as it did, was an outgrowth of earlier Anglo-American attempts to defeat the People's Democracies of Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, and elsewhere by promoting civil war. As a result, with the help of Tito's treachery, the Greek People's Democracy was defeated and United States capitalism got a powerful foothold on the Adriatic, to the dismay of its ally. Great Britain. In the same aggressive spirit, at about this time, the United States government ordered the French 1 George Marion, and Italian governments, on pain of being cut off the American dole, to oust the Communist parties, the strongest parties in these countries. Try to imagine any socialist government daring to thus interfere in the internal affairs of the United States! All this was in violent contradiction to American democratic traditions.
Another big step in the developing imperialist program of American big business came with the Marshall Plan, announced in June 1947. This proposition called for a Congressional appropriation of $17 billion, presumably to bring about European economic recovery, but actually to facilitate Wall Street's economic and political penetration of the European Continent and to organize the capitalist countries there to wage war against the U.S.S.R. and its democratic neighbors. The toilers had to pay for these imperialist adventures. The Marshall Plan, which expired December 30, 1951, was superseded by the Mutual Security Act of October 1951. This measure, financing the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, has already cost the American people $7 billion, and President Truman proposed that the outlay for it in this fiscal year should be $10 billions. The heart of the entire Truman European policy is an armed and Nazified Germany as the basis for an aggressive war against the Soviet Union and the People's Democracies of Central Europe.
Meanwhile, the United States kept paying close attention to its planned conquest of the Far East. Lined up with the other imperialist countries—Great Britain, France, and Holland—and cynically violating the revolutionary traditions of the American people, the Truman Administration strives to stamp out the revolutionary liberation movements in China, Indo-China, Burma, Indonesia, Malaya, and the Philippines, furnishing vast quantities of war materials to the reactionary forces who are trying to keep intact the threatened colonial system. A crowning infamy in this imperialist program is the setting up of a militarist Japan, a course which violates the wartime agreements of the allied powers. This is the significance of the reactionary Japanese treaty of September
The general regional political framework within which United States big business plans to rule the world is taking shape in such combinations as the Organization of American States (United States and Latin America), the North Atlantic Pact (the capitalist countries of Europe), the Pacific Security Pact (capitalist and colonial countries of the Pacific), and the projected Mediterranean Pact. Presumably these regional groupings are within the scope and control of the United Nations, but in reality they are all completely dominated by the United States. This domination is also true of the United Nations itself, although recently the United States' grip on that organization has been somewhat weakened. On June 25, 1950, the Korean war began with an invasion of North Korea by the troops of the American puppet government of Syngman Rhee. The Wall Street warmongers behind that aggression believed that it would be a simple matter for Rhee's troops to overrun North Korea and open up the way for a big attack against People's China. It was to be the opening wedge for a vast extension of Wall Street influence in Asia. But the story turned out quite differently. All the American military experts were shocked and amazed at the magnificent fighting qualities shown by the North Koreans and later by the Chinese volunteers. Immediately the United States had to run to the aid of its collapsed puppet state. Without consulting Congress, and even before he took the matter up with the United Nations, President Truman rushed the United States into a war which has already cost three million lives of soldiers and civilians and which might easily have provoked a third world war.
What Truman contemptuously called a "police action," turned out to be a full-scale war, and a lost one. The successful stand of the North Korean and Chinese forces against the highly mechanized western armies is of historic significance. These peoples, just emerging from colonialism, have successfully held off the armed capitalist world—a far cry indeed from fifty years ago when, in the Boxer rebellion of 1900, the capitalist powers marched easily and arrogantly to Peking. President Truman and General MacArthur, in their desperation, were ready to use the atom-bomb and to blast Chinese cities, had it not been for the world-wide outcry of protest at the mere announcement of such a possibility and the fear of the world capitalists that it would get them into an even worse mess. The stalemating of the war, almost along the line of the old 38th parallel, constitutes a major defeat for Wall Street's aggressive plans.
Keeping pace with Wall Street's military aggression abroad, there is a feverish campaign at home to militarize the American people. There is a sadistic glorification of the war in Korea, with its brutal "Operation Killer," "Operation Strangler," and the like. Peacetime conscription has been established, the building of a four million-man army is under way, the navy and air force are being enormously expanded, and the traditionally anti-militarist American masses are being regimented. The United States also adds endlessly to its immense string of air bases—it now has about 150 of them in England, France, Greenland, Iceland, Denmark, Norway, Greece, Western Germany, Italy, Turkey, Spain, Yugoslavia, Canada, Latin America, South Africa, Algeria, Morocco, Lybia, Thailand, the Philippines, Japan, Hawaii, Alaska, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Australia, etc., etc. A frantic campaign is also being carried on to frighten and confuse the masses into believing that war is inevitable, because of
"Russian aggression." Already during the six years since the end of the war against Japan, over $ioo billion have been spent in waging the "cold war"; in 1951 alone the military expenditures ran to $50 billion, and in the fiscal year beginning on July 1, 1952, they may mount to over $65 billion. In his budget message of January 21, 1952, President Truman called for the fabulous sum of $85.4 billion, 85 percent of which is for war—past, present, and future. This general arms race is a confession of the strategical failure of the atom-bomb, which was originally believed sufficient to assure world domination for Wall Street.
These aggressive foreign policies and huge military expenditures, coupled with the mass indoctrination of the people by the Truman Administration, constitute imperialist war preparations on a gigantic scale. Only the politically naive can believe them to be defensive measures. What else can possibly be the calculated purpose of the United States in building a ring of air bases around the U.S.S.R. at a cost of many billions? The Wall Street magnates, for whom the government is an obedient instrument, are resolved upon war. Only through war against the U.S.S.R., they are convinced, can they assure the full operation of their industries, perpetuate huge profits for themselves, save the tottering capitalist system, wipe out the threat of socialism, and make themselves the overlords of mankind.
As the United States builds its enormous military establishment— a great army, huge air force, expanded navy, big supply of atom-bombs, and air-naval bases all around the world—the militaristic arrogance of its capitalist leaders grows accordingly. Thus Congress passes the Mutual Security Pact, brazenly appropriating $100 million to develop civil wars in the U.S.S.R. and the People's Democracies. President Truman recklessly declares that agreements with Russia are not worth the paper they are written on, and he demands "the unconditional surrender of Russia as the price of peace." 6 The gangsters of the press increasingly cry out for a "preventive war" against the U.S.S.R.—Collier's (of October 27, 1951) outdoing itself in this shouting for a blood bath, devotes its entire issue to a lurid description of how the United States won the hoped-for-war against the Soviet Union. It is quite clear that the warmongers, unless restrained by the American people, will, when they deem the moment ripe, deliberately create an "incident" and plunge the world into a third great conflagration, under the pretext of waging what they call a preventive or defensive war. They are consciously trying to develop the present tense world situation as the opening phases of a third world war.
At any time during the several tense years of the "cold war" the United States could have had a democratic peace with the U.S.S.R. had it so desired. But peace is the last thing the Wall Street monopolists want. Every prospect of international understanding creates a "peace scare" and sends stocks tobogganing. So the warmongers reject with insults the Soviet Union's rational proposals to establish peaceful international relationships, and they seize upon every pretext to intensify their war preparations. They want war, and only the peace will of the American and other peoples, resolutely expressed by organized resistance, can balk Wall Street's murderous imperialist designs. Popular resistance was decisive in stalling the Korean war, it can also avert the planned third world war.
THE TREND TOWARD FASCISM
American imperialism's program of conquest also implies a drive toward reaction and fascism, because only by means of intense demagogy and terrorism, the characteristic methods of fascism, can the peoples of the United States and the world possibly be compelled to accept the drastic cuts in living standards and civil liberties, and finally the wholesale death, bound up in Wall Street's fight for world domination. Victory for the American capitalist warmongers and imperialists would probably imply a fascist world.
Naturally enough, the United States, in its campaign for war, has as its allies the most reactionary forces throughout the world. Practically everywhere, the more conservative the group, the more ardently it supports Wall Street's anti-Soviet drive. The big capitalists everywhere in the world are the basic allies of the United States, and so are their many subsidized fascist groupings and parties. Then there is the Catholic Church hierarchy which, now in the deepest religious, political, and financial crisis of its history, has committed itself heartily to Wall Street's anti-Soviet crusade, despite its assertions of pacifism and neutrality. What type of society the Vatican would like to establish has been made quite clear by its previous or present aggressive support of the fascist-clerical regimes of Mussolini in Italy, Dollfuss in Austria, Franco in Spain, Petain in France, Peron in Argentina. To sum up its alliance with this reactionary force, the Truman Administration, in October 1951, decided to send an ambassador to the Vatican, thereby crassly violating the basic American policy of the separation of Church and State. More and more aggressively, the top American Catholic churchmen are trying to dictate Vatican policy. American imperialism would also take control over the Church.
Another loyal ally of Wall Street is right-wing Social-Democracy, both here and abroad. The Social-Democratic leaders, long since fully committed to the maintenance of the capitalist system whatever the cost to the workers, are thoroughly decayed politically and are willing to follow the heads of world capitalism, the Wall Street capitalists, wherever they decide—to fascism and war. In Europe and Asia the Social-Democratic leaders lined up with domestic reaction and foreign imperialism in order to block the establishment of people's democratic governments on the road to socialism, in the big post-war revolutionary upheaval. A particularly crass example of their betrayal of socialism was the work of the Labor Government in Great Britain in the post-World War II years. The right-wing Social-Democratic leaders of that government, Attlee, Morrison, Strachey, et al., did not protect the workers' living standards, defend world peace, or work to make Britain a Socialist land. Instead, they supported the entire war aims of American imperialism—the Truman doctrine, Marshall Plan, North Atlantic Pact, Greek and Korean wars, arming of Germany and Japan, and all the rest of it. The opportunist right-wing Socialists are everywhere a ready force for war and fascism.
The essentially fascist content of the foreign policies of Wall Street and its allies is unmistakable. In Great Britain, the United States, while using the late Labor Government as its tool, placed its real reliance upon the ultra-reactionary Winston Churchill and maneuvered for the re-election of his government. In France, to be utilized when the situation warrants, is the notoriously fascist General de Gaulle. In Western Germany, American policy is re-creating the Nazi movement, and avowed followers of Hitler, daily growing bolder, are to be found by the thousands in all kinds of key economic and political positions, with American consent and support. In Italy, the same thing is happening with regard to the old Mussolini gang, which is gradually preparing to try to take over when the reactionary de Gasperi government collapses. All through Eastern Europe the fascist movement—its seedlings and remnants—is rallying instinctively around Wall Street's anti-Soviet drive. The United States itself welcomes reactionaries from these countries, all of them militant supporters of Wall Street's projected anti-Soviet war. To put its further stamp of approval upon fascism, the United States has also sewed up a war alliance with the butcher Franco, who not only murdered the Spanish Republic but was openly a Hitler-Mussolini ally during the war. Under U.S. pressure the post-war governments of Great Britain, France, Italy, and Germany have all been pushed steadily to the right.
In the Far East, the allies and policies of the United States have the same reactionary core. Chiang Kai-shek, the very symbol of reaction throughout the colonial world, is Wall Street's chosen agent wherewith to re-establish a reactionary regime in China. In Indo-China, it is the ultra-reactionary French puppet, Bao Dai, whom Wall Street is supporting. In Malaya and Indonesia, the U.S. is going along hand in hand with the reactionary British and Dutch imperialists and their puppets. In the Philippines, the puppet republic, the State Department's policy sustains the worst enemies of the people. In Pakistan, the deepest reactionaries are the best friends of Wall Street. And the same is true in Japan, where American imperialism's warmest co-operators are Emperor Hirohito and the gang of big industrialists and landlords behind him. In India, the ultra-reactionary internal opposition to Premier Nehru, a Social-Democrat who himself has outlawed the Communists and arrested masses of militant workers, is being cultivated by American influences, because Nehru has not sufficiently supported Wall Street's warlike and grasping policy toward rebellious Asia.
In Latin America, a similar situation prevails. The many dictators who infest that great area are all either outright puppets of the United States or are fully committed to its war-against-Russia policies. In these countries to the south of the Rio Grande, American policy is uniformly against the democratic demands and organizations of the people and in support of the local domination of the landowners, the big capitalists, the Church hierarchy, and other ultra-conservative groupings.
All these reactionary and fascist allies of Wall Street—in Europe, Asia, and Latin America—with Social-Democracy performing the special task of hamstringing the opposition struggle of the workers—are going along with the Wall Street program of eventual fascism and all-out war against the U.S.S.R., under hypocritical slogans of the defense of world peace and democracy. Everywhere Wall Street's real line is the same— to beat down the people's living standards, to strip the masses of their democratic liberties, to remilitarize the capitalist countries, and to deprive them of their national independence. This is the path to fascism as well as to war.
BUILDING A POLICE STATE IN THE UNITED STATES
In the United States proper, the fascist element in Wall Street's war policy is also alarmingly evident. The American people, in their great numbers, are democratic and peace-loving, and they can be dragooned into another world war only by being deceived and terrorized. This pressure is being applied to them now on a scale altogether unique in American history. It is being done mainly under the pretext of fighting communism. Never was the danger of fascism in the United States more acute and menacing than it is at the present time.
The people's democratic rights are being slashed. Wholesale arrests of Communists, smelling of the Palmer raids of 1920, follow one another in rapid succession. Hundreds of foreign-born are picked up for deportation, in order to terrorize the millions of others. The government service is plagued by loyalty tests, and everyone is suspect who has ever publicly supported Franklin D. Roosevelt or read The Nation. The trade unions under the Taft-Hartley Act are systematically being denied rights which they have enjoyed for a hundred years. The war industries are infested by an army of stoolpigeons, hysterically seeking out "reds." The advocacy of socialism, which American left-wingers have practiced freely for a century, has now become a crime. And to advocate peace negotiations is to subject oneself to charges of being a "foreign agent."
Redbaiting has developed into one of the most flourishing and lucrative callings. Subtle, and not so subtle, moods of anti-Semitism, Negro discrimination and Anglo-Saxon superiority are cultivated all over. Senator McCarthy, who has far-reaching capitalist support and is the most dangerous demagogue since Huey Long, denounces and threatens everybody of even a mildly liberal tinge of opinion. And General MacArthur boldly comes out, fascist fashion, with a glorification of war and American world conquest. The Ku Klux Klan takes on a new lease of life in the South. Westbrook Pegler, an authentic bellwether of fascism, demands the arrest of "thousands of New Dealers," 7 and the F.B.I., fingerprinting tens of millions and holding files on vast numbers of people, snoops everywhere and spreads like a poison weed. Thought control laws—Smith, Voorhis, McCarran, and a host more—follow each other in rapid succession into federal, state, and local statute books. Vigilanteism is rampant in many communities. The reactionaries are even trying to condemn as traitors, dupes, and foreign agents all those government figures—Truman, Acheson, Marshall, Jessup, Service, Lattimore, and so on—who co-operated with the U.S.S.R. and People's China, in however niggardly a fashion, when these were military allies of the United States during World War II.
The people are also being frightened with a sensational "spy scare," which has resulted in several convictions,- including the savage death sentences against the two Rosenbergs. This hysteria is being fomented by die fantastic cloak-and-dagger tales of Whittaker Chambers, Elizabeth Bentley, Louis Budenz, and other renegades and stoolpigeons, now being played up by the gutter press and radio. The attempt to involve the Communist Party in this manufactured "plot" is an absurd frame-up, which has already been completely exposed. The current artificial "spy scare" is a calculated part of the warmongers' systematic campaign to terrorize the American people into submitting to their reactionary program.
Every semblance of opposition to the reactionaries, in whatever sphere of our national life, is denounced as Communist. Never in its entire history was the country so browbeaten and mentally strait-jacketed as now. Intimidated citizens have repeatedly refused to sign excerpts from the Declaration of Independence, when presented to them in petition form. The number of liberal dailies can now be counted on one hand, and liberal radio commentators are now a thing of the past. Reactionary political illiterates, like Winchell, Kaltenborn, and Lewis, blather to audiences of millions at fabulous salaries. The movies and television are unblushing propagandists of reaction, and the daily press serves up as news a mess of jingoistic war propaganda, anti-Russian lies, and journalistic filth, sinking more and more into the Pegler level.
The universities and schools are being stripped of all vestiges of liberalism, and the teachers and students, fearful of being labeled as "reds" and fired, are shying away from every controversial question. Justice Douglas, in dissenting from the Supreme Court decision on the notorious Feinberg law of New York, thus describes the deplorable situation created by this law: "Regular loyalty reports on the teachers must be made out. The principals become detectives; the students, the parents, the community become informers." The High Court decision establishes the infamous principle of "guilt by association."
This is fascism in the making, the building of a police state in the United States. Malignant and impetuous forces in its creation are such political ultra-reactionaries as MacArthur, McCarran, and McCarthy. But the main drive toward fascism and war during the post-war period has come from the present Administration, with Truman's get-tough-with-Russia policies, his Korean war, his fake national emergency and frantic war preparations, his loyalty tests and cynical persecution of the Communists, his ditching of the civil rights program for the Negro people, his deliberate sacrifice of the people's living standards through an inflation which he does nothing to curb, his phony peace demagogy, and his snide cultivation of every reactionary tendency in the country.
Between the two big capitalist parties there is a sort of division of labor. The Republican Party serves as the more open champion of reaction, while the Democratic Party, no less reactionary in practice, does its job for the bosses by crippling the natural opposition of labor through dousing it with hypocritical demagogy about peace and democracy. They are twin parties of reaction. Both are controlled by finance capital, and both are applying Wall Street's policies of war and fascism. Neither is a "lesser evil" than the other. When one set of capitalist demagogues—Truman, Taft, etc.—discredit themselves, capitalism knows how to raise up another set—Eisenhower, Kefauver, etc.—to keep bourgeois illusions alive among the toiling masses.
Hardly less responsibility for the present dangerous situation in the United States rests at the doors of those cowardly liberals, Social-Democrats, and top labor leaders who put their tails between their legs and fly before the increasing fascist storm. Besides supporting the war program, the basis of the current reaction, these elements systematically demoralize and undercut the democratic resistance of the masses. All the more credit then to the valiant Communist Party, to the progressive unions, and to those intellectuals who dare to face up to the threatening reaction.
Bearing in mind the democratic traditions and peace will of the American people, American fascism cloaks itself with an elaborate pretense of liberalism and national defense. Unlike the cruder and more outspoken Hitlerism, it masks its doctrines of the "superiority" of the Anglo-American peoples; it hides its growing glorification of war under deep pretenses of peace; and it calls its imperialism "world moral leadership." 8 As Georgi Dimitrov pointed out many years ago, American fascism comes forth hypocritically as the pretended champion of democracy, of equality among nations, of freedom, peace, and independence for all peoples. It makes the most outrageous attacks against the workers' and the Negro people's rights under cover of supporting popular liberties. Wall Street reaction's glittering democratic generalities are only a demagogic facade; they are but so many hypocritical pretensions designed to mislead, confuse, and intimidate the masses. Underlying the thick layer of misrepresentation is the stern reality of American imperialism's march toward war and fascism. This democratic false face of Wall Street reaction makes it all the more difficult for the masses to understand and combat Wall Street.
All this, of course, is only one side of the story. The great working class will be effectively heard from in the growing struggle to save the United States from fascism and war., Although at present traitorously misled by their top union leaders, the workers will find the way to wreck all the reactionary plans of Wall Street. But of this, more in later chapters.
1 Perlo, American Imperialism, pp. 27-28.
2 Rochester, Rulers of America; Allen, World Monopoly and Peace.
3 Jefferson School of Social Science. The Economic Crisis and the Cold War, p. 18, N. Y., 1949.
4 Herbert Aptheker in Masses and Mainstream, May 1951.
5 Bases and Empire, N. Y., 1948.
6 Daily Compass, Oct. 26, 1951.
7 New York Journal-American, June 27, 1951.
8 Herbert Aptheker, America's Racist Laws, N. Y., 1951.
Chapter 33
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