Revolutionary Russia has the largest army in the world; a secret police, that for ruthless efficiency rivals the German or the Italian; a rigid press censorship; a system of education that, since Stalin ‘reformed’ it, is as authoritarian as Hitler’s; an all-embracing system of military training that is applied to women and children as well as men; a dictator as slavishly adored as the man-gods of Rome and Berlin; a bureaucracy, solidly entrenched as the new ruling class and employing the powers of the State to preserve its privileges and protect its vested interests; an oligarchical party which dominates the entire country and within which there is no freedom even for faithful members. (Most ruling castes are democracies so far as their own members are concerned.
Not so the Russian Communist Party, in which the Central Executive Committee, acting through the Political Department, can override or altogether liquidate any district organization whatsoever.) No opposition is permitted in Russia. But where opposition is made illegal, it automatically goes underground and becomes conspiracy. Hence the treason trials and purges of 1936 and 1937. Large-scale manipulations of the social structure are pushed through against the wishes of the people concerned and with the utmost ruthlessness. (Several million peasants were deliberately starved to death in 1933 by the Soviet planners.) Ruthlessness begets resentment; resentment must be kept down by force. As usual the chief result of violence is the necessity to use more violence. Such then is Soviet planning—well-intentioned, but making use of evil means that are producing results utterly unlike those which the original makers of the revolution intended to produce.
In the bourgeois democratic countries the need for using intrinsically good means to achieve desirable ends is more clearly realized than in Russia. But even in these countries enormous mistakes have been made in the past and still greater, still more dangerous mistakes are in process of being committed to-day. Most of these mistakes are due to the fact that, though professing belief in our ideal postulates, the rulers and people of these countries are, to some extent and quite incompatibly, also militarists and nationalists. The English and the French, it is true, are sated militarists whose chief desire is to live a quiet life, holding fast to what they seized in their unregenerate days of imperial highway-robbery. Confronted by rivals who want to do now what they were doing from the beginning of the eighteenth to the end of the nineteenth century, they profess and doubtless genuinely feel a profound moral indignation. Meanwhile, they have begun to address themselves, reluctantly but with determination, to the task of beating the Fascist powers at their own game.
Like the Fascist states, they are preparing for war. But modern war cannot be waged or even prepared except by a highly centralized executive wielding absolute power over a docile people. Most of the planning which is going on in the democratic countries is planning designed to transform these countries into the likeness of totalitarian communities organized for slaughter and rapine. Hitherto this transformation has proceeded fairly slowly. Belief in our ideal postulates has acted as a brake on fascization, which has had to advance gradually and behind a smoke-screen. But if war is declared, or even if the threat of war becomes more serious than at present, the process will become open and rapid. ‘The defence of democracy against Fascism’ entails inevitably the transformation of democracy into Fascism.
Most of the essays in large-scale planning attempted by the democratic powers have been dictated by the desire to achieve military efficiency. Thus, the attempt to co-ordinate the British Empire into a self-sufficient economic unit was a piece of planning mainly dictated by military considerations. Still more specifically military in character have been the plans applied to the armament industries, not only in Great Britain, but also in France and the other democratic countries, for the purpose of increasing production. Like the Fascist plans for heightening military efficiency such essays in planning are bound to make matters worse, not better. By transforming the British Empire from a Free Trade area into a private property protected by tariff walls, the governments concerned have made it absolutely certain that foreign hostility to the Empire shall be greatly increased. While the English possessed undisputed command of the sea, they conciliated world opinion by leaving the doors of their colonies wide open to foreign trade. Now that command of the sea has been lost, those doors are closed. In other words, England invites the world’s hostility at the very moment when it has ceased to be in a position to defy that hostility. Greater folly could scarcely be imagined. But those who think in terms of militarism inevitably commit such follies.
Consider the second case. Rearmament at the present rate and on the present enormous scale must have one of two results. Either there will be general war within a very short time; for si vis bellum, para bellum. Or, if war is postponed for a few years, the present rate of rearmament will have to be slowed down and an economic depression at least as grave as that of 1929 will descend upon the world. Economic depression will create unrest; unrest will speed up the fascization of the democratic countries; the fascization of the democratic countries will increase the present probability of war to an absolute certainty. So much for planning undertaken for specifically military purposes.
Many pieces of planning, however, have not been specifically military in character. They have been devised by governments primarily for the purpose of counteracting the effects of economic depression. But, unfortunately, under the present dispensation, such plans must be conceived and carried out in the context of militarism and nationalism. This context imparts to every plan in the international field a quality that, however good the intentions of the planners, is essentially militaristic. (Here it is worth while to enunciate a general truth, which the older anthropologists, such as Frazer, completely failed to grasp—the truth that a given habit, rite, tradition takes on its peculiar significance from its context. Two peoples may have what is, according to Frazerian ideas, the same custom; but this does not mean that the custom in question will signify the same thing to these two peoples. If the contexts in which this ‘identical’ custom is placed happen to be different—as in fact they generally are—then it will carry widely different significances for the two peoples. Applying this generalization to our particular problem, we see that a non-militaristic plan carried out in a militaristic context is likely to have a significance and results quite different from the significance and results of the same plan in a non-militaristic context.)
Owing to the fact that even the democratic peoples are to some extent militarists and devotees of the idolatry of exclusive nationalism, almost all the economic planning undertaken by their governments has seemed to foreign observers imperialistic in character and has in fact resulted in a worsening of the international situation. Governments have used tariffs, export bounties, quotas and exchange devaluation as devices for improving the lot of their subjects; in the context of the world as it is to-day, these plans have seemed to other nations acts of deliberate ill-will meriting reprisals in kind. Reprisals have led to counter-reprisals. International exchanges have become more and more difficult. Consequently yet further planning has had to be resorted to by each of the governments concerned for the protection of its own subjects—yet further planning which arouses yet bitterer resentment abroad and so brings war yet a little nearer.
We are confronted here by the great paradox of contemporary planning. Comprehensive planning by individual nations results in international chaos, and the degree of international chaos is in exact proportion to the number, completeness and efficiency of the separate national plans.
During the nineteenth and the first years of the twentieth century economic exchanges between the nations were carried on with remarkable smoothness. National economies were everywhere unplanned. The individuals who carried on international trade were forced in their own interest to conform to the rules of the game, as developed in the City of London. If they failed to conform, they were ruined and that was an end of it. Here we have the converse of the paradox formulated above. National planlessness in economic matters results in international economic co-ordination.
We are on the horns of a dilemma. In every country large numbers of people are suffering privations owing to defects in the economic machine. These people must be helped, and if they are to be helped effectively and permanently, the economic machine must be re-planned. But economic planning undertaken by a national government for the benefit of its own people inevitably disturbs that international economic harmony which is the result of national planlessness. In the process of planning for the benefit of their respective peoples, national governments impede the flow of international trade, enter into new forms of international rivalry and create fresh sources of international discord. During the last few years most of the governments of the world
