Civilization and Beyond: Learning from History Part 17

Advances in science and technology have provided mankind with a new stage on which to go through a new act and speak a new piece. What effect will they have on the inst.i.tutions and practices of western civilization? Have they rendered the forms and functions of civilization obsolete? Or can western civilization adapt itself or be adapted to the very difficult situation created by the revolution through which human society is presently pa.s.sing? Can western civilization be reformed to meet the new historical situation created by the great revolution or must it be rejected and replaced?

If the inst.i.tutions and practices of western civilization can be adjusted to meet the demands of the new situation created by the scientific, technological, political and cultural revolution, the reformed social apparatus may function in a new day that is dawning for the human family. If reform proves to be impossible, the apparatus of western civilization must be replaced by a social structure in keeping with the requirements of the new age inaugurated by the innovations introduced into the human culture pattern by the revolution of our time.

There is widespread recognition of the need to keep the structure of a society in harmony with necessary functions and updated to the consequences of probable or possible discovery and invention. This is no mean task as western experience during recent centuries has so clearly demonstrated. Power elites of feudal Europe neither antic.i.p.ated nor prepared for the consequences of the industrial revolution. The result was the smash and clatter of the American and French Revolutions (1776 and 1789) and minor revolutionary shocks through the nineteenth century.

Power elites in western Europe dealt with ma.s.s production and its consequent abundance of goods and services with ma.s.s marketing, social security and other crumbs of affluence scattered among the restless ma.s.ses. But when the trade winds of the scientific and technological revolution blew in the Mexican Revolution of 1910, the Chinese Revolution of 1911 and the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Romanoff dictatorship was still ordering back the tide of social change and the dominant United States oligarchy cold-shouldered the Mexican Revolution, took sixteen years to recognize officially the Russian Soviets and waited twenty-three years after 1949 before they were even on speaking terms with the Chinese Communists.

For two centuries, new ideas, inst.i.tutions and practices have followed discoveries and inventions as regularly as day follows night. The consequent flood of innovations that has swept through the West and across the planet in the past two generations has made drastic social change a matter of the utmost urgency. The only open questions concern the direction of the changes, their rapidity, and the success of the social system in adapting itself to the shattering effects of newly released social forces.

Social change can come with the rush and turmoil of revolution or the studied step-by-considered-step constancy of the conscious improvement of society by society. Two powerful social forces limit gradualness. One is human impatience. The other is the rapidity with which ma.s.ses of people all over the planet are being informed of the good-life potential implicit in present-day western affluence.

Impatience is emotional rather than rational. It is a compound of human urges on one hand and on the other hand of the frustrations built up in individuals and populations attracted by new wants and frustrated by barriers of custom-habit; the carefully constructed apparatus of direction, division and restriction (the State, the Church, the communication media), and the potent cla.s.s forces of the counter-revolution.

In every modern community the media of ma.s.s communication are broadcasting information regarding the widening consumer prospects created by the current revolution in science and technology. In every modern community there are eager, ambitious, hopeful individuals urging their fellow workers and fellow citizens to get moving toward the promised land of peace and plenty. In every community the bureaucracy, representing the more comfortable and secure elements of the population, is asking the less well placed cla.s.s groups to "take it easy," take "one step at a time," and remember that "Rome was not built in a day."

Conservatives, urging law and order under the status quo, have reason on their side. The movement of a technologically oriented community from monopoly capitalism into socialism-communism is without historical precedent and therefore largely experimental. Plans are tentative; there are shortages of materials and particularly of skills based on experience. Costly mistakes are made leading to delay until they can be corrected. The counter-revolution, abundantly financed by the forces of reaction, operates constantly, in critical situations almost always through the military, to preserve the "law and order" which are the prime forces behind its wealth and its power. In an untrod, untested area ignorance is a blank wall until it is pierced by ingenuity and innovation. There are many ways to miss a defined objective and only a few ways to reach it.

Cautious, experienced people, living comfortably, are inclined to let well enough alone. Restless, hopeful idealists are eager to reject, modify, improvise and replace.

Conservatives try to preserve both the structure and the traditional activities of a community on the plea that a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. Liberals (moderates) would preserve the structure but bring its activities up to date. Radicals would sc.r.a.p the old and replace it with a new structure and new activities geared to the new possibilities and the new requirements.

Survival wars from 1914 to 1945 marked not only the end of Britain's planetary domination but the termination of Europe's planetary regency.

The events of the period also loosened the bonds that had held western civilization together.

A social structure which includes imperial nuclei and colonial dependencies is constantly threatened by colonial unrest and revolt.

Colonial revolt, endemic in every civilization, became epidemic after 1943. The path to independence had been blazed by North and South American colonials. It was followed after 1943 by the inhabitants of British, French, Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese colonies in Asia and Africa. The slogan of the independence movement was "self-determination."

Before self-determination can operate there must be a "self" capable of making decisions and carrying them into practice. Identification of the "self," or "nationhood" as it was called in this era, involved bitter domestic struggle, internal reorganization and consolidation. The process was typified in the British Colonies of North America between 1770 and 1789 which produced the United States of North America. Asians and Africans who gained their independence after 1945 faced a double problem: the establishment of nationhood, and regional consolidation.

The British colonies in North America won their independence as a loose confederation of sovereign states. After war's-end in 1783, they were able to form a regional federation: the United States of North America.

Despite their efforts, they were unable to include Canada, which was under strong French influence. British colonials in Asia and Africa after 1943 were less fortunate. After winning their independence as Indians or Burmese, they were unable to take the next step and organize a United States of Southern Asia.

The Bandung Conference (in 1955) of representatives from Asia and African countries failed to realize the hopes of its conveners. After prolonged deliberations it was able to go no further than the "five principles" of self-determination and co-existence, under which the independence of each partic.i.p.ating nation was reaffirmed and each agreed not to interfere in the internal affairs of its neighbors. The conference adjourned without establishing any form of organization or making provision for further meetings.

After the Cuban Revolution in 1959, hopes ran high for the establishment of a bloc of Latin American States, led by the elected president of Brazil, Joao Goulart, that might act as a bulwark against further "yankee aggression" in Latin America. In 1962 a military coup overthrew Goulart, drove him into exile, jailed and disenfranchised his supporters and lined up Brazil, largest and most populous nation of Latin America, solidly behind the Monroe Doctrine of United States supremacy in the Americas, implemented by Washington's burgeoning "Pentagon diplomacy."

African developments were even less fruitful than those in Asia and Latin America. Asians and Latin Americans generally had reached the level of self-identification necessary for statehood and national self-determination. Large parts of Africa living at pre-national levels of tribal identification, devoted their energies to the realization of nationhood. Their const.i.tutions announced their frontiers and proclaimed their sovereignty, but inter-tribal rivalries and personal ambitions turned each new nation into a battle field for prestige and authority, with the military often making the final decisions.

Asians and Africans had won telling victories in their struggle to drive out their former imperial masters. When it came to the affirmative task of organizing responsible regional federations, their failure was dismal. Asia and Africa were regionally disunited. Former colonial people, still monitored by alien representatives of monopoly capitalism, were fragmented by the self-determination struggle into theoretically sovereign nations many of which lacked the experience and the local expertise which are the indispensible prerequisites of self-determination and of fruitful regional federation.

Another aspect of the world revolution produced more tangible results.

The latter half of the nineteenth century brought into being a gra.s.s-roots movement of peoples demanding everything from petty reforms of administrative machinery to planned revolutionary transformations of the established monopoly capitalist structure. This movement crystallized as an anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, pro-socialist national and international struggle. From the publication of the Communist Manifesto in 1848 until the beginnings of socialist construction in 1917, it was a movement of protest against poverty, unemployment, war, waste, inequality, exploitation. After 1917 it became a movement to end imperialism, war and exploitation and subst.i.tute a planet-wide social system that would give every human being a chance to play a meaningful part in utilizing nature, improving society and creating socialist women and men, capable of cooperating for the general welfare of mankind.

The Enlightenment had diminished ignorance, spread information and brought elementary education to the ma.s.ses. Self-government had given people confidence in their ability to make the phrase "we, the people" a working formula for social improvement. The Industrial Revolution had converted millions of superst.i.tious, frustrated peasants into craftsmen and professionals confident in their ability to use nature effectively, to advance their own interests and to improve society. These and secondary social forces laid the foundation for the social revolution that mushroomed across the planet during the opening years of the present century. The occasion for the revolution was four years of destructive war (1914-18) during which two rival gangs of imperialists led their dupes and victims to shed blood and destroy property in a struggle to decide which band of plunderers should exploit natural resources and labor power for its own advantage.

General war presented twentieth century man with a dilemma, an opportunity and a choice. Should he continue the grab-and-keep society that had flowered in Europe and elsewhere during the previous century, with its consequent poverty for the many, unemployment, exploitation and the power-struggle of the empires, or make a revolutionary change? As the stalemated war of 1914-18 with its frightful destruction of life and property continued year after year, the determination in favor of revolutionary change grew and crystalized.

David Lloyd George, Britain's Prime Minister, put the situation into words presented to the Versailles Peace Conference on March 25, 1919: "The whole of Europe is filled with the spirit of revolution.... The whole existing order in its political, social and economic aspects is questioned by the ma.s.ses of the population from one end of Europe to the other." (Memorandum of Lloyd George to the Peace Conference, 1922 Cmd.

1614.)

Lloyd George proved a true prophet. Ma.s.s discontent and the spirit of revolt spread rapidly. Soldiers at the front mutinied. The armies of Tsarist Russia dissolved as the privates and officers alike returned to their homes, determined to stop war, end Romanoff tyranny and build a better life for the Russian people. To gain these results they replaced the Tsarist absolutism by local, regional and nationally elected people's Soviets.

Before the War began in July, 1914, the socialist parties of Europe were divided between moderates who were willing to accept welfare-state reforms and allow the grab-and-keep structure of monopoly capitalism to continue in authority, and revolutionaries who demanded the abolition of capitalist imperialism and its replacement by socialism. European reformist socialists shouldered arms in July, 1914, and shot down their comrades across the frontiers. European revolutionary socialists, led by Lenin in Russia, Liebknecht in Germany and Jaures in France gained in strength as the war proceeded. Liebknecht and Jaures were a.s.sa.s.sinated.

Lenin lived in exile until he went back to Russia and led the revolutionary forces that liquidated Tsarism in the closing months of 1917.

For the first time in the history of western civilization, a proletarian revolutionary force had established its authority over one of the most extensive and populous nations on the planet. For the first time a responsible government threatened to abandon the fundamental a.s.sumptions and principles of western civilization. Could this new "subversive"

government survive in the merciless free-for-all in which western man was engaged? Could it not only survive but build up a social system which contradicted and condemned the underlying precepts of the West? In a word, could socialism be built in one country, surrounded by civilized monopoly capitalist powers?

Historical events have answered these questions in the affirmative. At this writing the Soviet Government has survived continuously for more than half a century. During that period it has transformed economically, politically and culturally backward portions of Europe and Asia into one of the most advanced areas on the planet.

Monopoly capitalist society a.s.sumes that productivity, wealth and fire-power, effectively co-ordinated under competent authority, will guarantee survival and perhaps win supremacy. Beginning its life in one of the backward areas of the planet, the Soviet Union has met all of these tests by converting itself into a first cla.s.s world power. Its productivity is second only to that of the United States. In wealth it stands second among the nations. Its fire power has carried the Soviet Union to victory in civil and international war. Its ruling oligarchy--the Soviet Communist Party--has maintained its authority through the stresses of domestic strife and major international conflict. In terms accepted by the existing free-for-all West, the Soviet Union is an established world power.

Through the first three decades of its existence the Soviet Union was the only government avowedly engaged in building a socialist rival to monopoly capitalism and determined to replace capitalism as the dominant planet-wide social system. After 1943 it was joined by a dozen other European, Asian and American countries, dedicated like the Soviet Union to the task of building socialism. In addition to these dozen countries, several others such as India, Burma, Indonesia, Ceylon, Ghana and Libya, declared their intention of building socialism by legal, and gradual stages. Almost all of the countries busied with socialist construction were in East Europe and Asia. The countries building toward socialism were more widely scattered, but by and large they were Eurasian.

From 1919 to 1943 socialist construction was directed, at least in theory, by the Communist International with headquarters in Moscow--the "general staff of the World Revolution". Under war pressure the Communist International was dissolved in 1943. No equally inclusive international socialist authority has since been established.

World revolution is not confined to the Old World of Africa--Asia--Europe. It is widely prevalent in the Americas where it can claim a certain priority. Outstanding among colonial uprisings of modern times was the rebellion of the British colonies of North America, from 1776 to 1783. Even more widespread was the rebellion of the Spanish, Portuguese and French colonies of Central and South America which spanned most of the nineteenth century and extended on into the twentieth. Russian Bolsheviks held the headlines on revolutionary activity from 1917 to 1943 but it should not be forgotten that one of the most prolonged and thorough-going revolutions of the present century gripped Mexico from 1910 to 1917. At the beginning of this period Mexico was a political semi-dependency of the United States. It was semi-feudal, with a large population of Amerindians and a pre-industrial economy. Foreign capitalists and entrepreneurs, including those from the United States, played a leading role in the country.

Mexico's 1910-1917 revolution was prolonged. It was also radical, up-rooting many aspects of its old social pattern, speeding up the bourgeois revolution, and preparing the way for a Mexican form of populism and a Mexican foretaste of a proletarian revolution, initiated, led and manned by Mexicans.

Mexico's revolution resulted in two important developments that have played a major role in socialist construction. Both contributions appeared in the Mexican Const.i.tution of 1917, adopted eight months before the Russian Bolsheviks seized power in November.

The first contribution was a chapter on the rights of labor. Bourgeois const.i.tutions had emphasized "civil" rights: the right to vote, trial by jury; freedom of speech, press, a.s.sembly; the right to go and come; the right to compensation when private property is taken for public purposes; the right to modify or replace the existing const.i.tution. The Mexican Const.i.tution of 1917 contained a detailed specification of the rights of labor, including proper working conditions, adequate compensation, education, health, social security. The Const.i.tution also contained a crucial property provision: the natural resources of Mexico are the property of the Mexican people and cannot be alienated.

This second provision was inserted in the Mexican Const.i.tution at a time when extensive concessions to develop Mexican resources had been handed out to North American and European capitalists. It was inserted in part because the social ownership and sharing of land and other natural resources has been one of the basic demands of the Socialist--Communist--Anarchist movements from their inception.

Monopoly capitalism depends primarily on the private ownership of the means of production, including natural resources. Capitalist opposition to socialism is not only a matter of theory. In practice the private ownership of natural resources enables the owner to charge rent to any and all users. Natural resources are sharply limited and usually localized. As population grows, demand for living s.p.a.ce is intensified and rents rise. It is not an accident that the stretches of "black earth", of copper, iron, petroleum, the precious metals, and the land occupied by Mexico City, London, New York and other population centers, poured a stream of wealth into the treasuries and augmented the power of their owners.

Effects of the insertion into the Mexican Const.i.tution of the provision making natural resources "the property of the Mexican people" have been far-reaching. One socialist country after another has written into its const.i.tution a provision that its natural wealth is the inalienable heritage of its people. This provision has two important results: it establishes natural resources as part of the public sector of the national economy; it also limits the possibility of handing out concessions to foreign exploiters, private or public.

During the opening years of the present century socialist parties and other forward looking organizations were demanding social ownership of natural resources, public utilities and other social means of production as the next logical step toward a more equitable distribution of wealth and income. There was a possibility that such revolutionary changes could be made under bourgeois law by exercising the right of eminent domain, upon the payment of reasonable compensation to former owners. At least in theory, the democratic majority in any bourgeois country could put an end to private enterprise capitalism and establish socialism by a const.i.tutional amendment, legislative enactment, and a caretaker political apparatus to administer and supervise the transition.

Socialist parties were making "reformist" demands for better working and living conditions and "revolutionary" demands for changes in property and cla.s.s relationships. Increased productivity and growing affluence made it possible for a progressive bourgeois state to meet the reformist demands, establishing a welfare state legally and const.i.tutionally.

Under the bourgeois const.i.tutions generally existing at the beginning of the present century, a popular majority could adopt necessary const.i.tutional amendments, pa.s.s the necessary enabling laws and launch a program of socialist construction.

Such a program was part of the thinking of European and other socialist leaders during the opening years of the present century. Inspired and encouraged by the successes of socialist construction in the Soviet Union and other socialist countries, middle of the road socialists proposed to move gradually and legally from capitalism to socialism.

Conservative socialists who were members of coalition governments in parts of Eurasia, described such welfare states as victories for socialism, despite the fact that they left the essentials of state power in bourgeois hands.

Between 1920 and 1950 the western world found itself in this essentially revolutionary situation: the world-wide revolution in science and technology had opened the way for the human race to turn its back on the limitations and inadequacies of civilization and advance to a new level of culture and human opportunity.

The impact of this revolutionary situation expressed itself at several levels:

1. Much of west and central Europe, important parts of North America, much of Australasia, important parts of East Asia and fringes of Africa had at least two generations of experience with some degree of affluence.

2. Scientifically and technologically maturing societies that had opted for socialism const.i.tutionally and legally were engaged officially in socialist construction. These countries and peoples were located chiefly in Eurasia.

3. Former colonial and client dependencies of the nineteenth century empires struggling for self-determination and statehood were entering a stage of affluence. These countries and peoples were mainly Afro-Asian. Some of them were located in Latin America.