When the cat is not just away, but gone forever...

For all the folks who give little weight to historical “what ifs,” the thought experiment of envisioning how twentieth century history might have gone differently is a pointless one. Recent events, however, have me reprising a scenario in which the Russian Revolution of 1917 failed or never took place and being rewarded with some provocative conclusions about how world (“globalized”) capitalism has evolved now that the U.S.S.R. has in fact collapsed. Before I present this view, however, let me dispense with, out of hand, what I would imagine to be a conservative view of how things might have gone. For this, we need not go very far; the example of Communist China, with its far shorter life span, will do nicely.

What the Chinese call the “liberation” that took place under Mao Zedong in 1950 lasted a little more than two decades before a communist regime(n) was replaced by the almost maniacal capitalism the nation is now in the throes of, far shorter than the Soviet Union’s run of more than seven decades, the biggest part of the twentieth century. Conservatives, I would imagine, will argue that had the Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek continued to rule, the disruptions of the fifties, sixties would never have taken place, and China would have quickly evolved into the capitalist powerhouse it now is. For why this view is sheer nonsense, the term “liberation” is worth analyzing a bit. Up until 1950, China was a conglomerate of what the Western powers like to euphemistically call “spheres of influence.” Had there not been a revolution, that reality would no doubt have continued. Whatever one may think of China’s various manifestations since 1950, one incontrovertible reality is that it is the Chinese and the Chinese alone who came to control their nation’s fate. One need only recall the lengthy debate here in the U.S., following the expulsion of Chiang to Taiwan about “who lost China?” as if it was ours to lose. The perceived loss of China played no small role in throwing our country into the madness of McCarthyism for a good part of the 1950s.

Nevertheless, conservatives likely fantasize that a thriving Nationalist China would soon have emerged from the ruins of World War II and centuries of domination by the U.S., England and others of the European powers. I should say here that this is a point upon which one can only speculate. I have never seen such a conservative argument made directly in print, nor can we know if such an argument, if and when made, could be delivered with a straight face.
I would argue here that regardless of what thinks of the merits or horrors of the two great revolutions that took place in the twentieth century, the mere fact of their existence forced capitalism to reforms that might otherwise never have taken place. After the European and American military expeditions to Russia failed to thwart its revolution, and the Red Army under Trotsky finally dispatched the White Army in the early 1920s, capitalist ruling classes in all of the advanced nations could never go to bed without fearing that they would be awakened by the sound of their own working classes rising. That fear is now gone. There may be some lingering mice roaring in the Caribbean, South America or Asia, but, for the foreseeable future at least, it seems the great Marxist Utopian vision has been relegated to the “ash heap of history.” (Ronald Reagan’s [or one of his better educated speechwriter’s] play on Leon Trotsky’s having earlier damned capitalists to the “dustbin of history.”)

Before extending my argument any further, let me anticipate here another myth of conservative historiography that would have things just rosy on our planet had the Russian revolution never occurred. There is the small matter of World War II and the estimated 60-70 million lives that it cost. Conservative history is like a set of Russian nesting matrushka dolls with lots of embedded mythology. This construct renders it a lot more difficult to take on any one event or historical manifestation without dealing with the almost interminable nested “axioms” of the faith. “How,” one of their axiomatic arguments goes, (if their response is to be consistent with others of their arguments), “can you even entertain the notion that the world is a better place as a result of the Russian revolution, when it gave us the two most evil men in history, Hitler and Stalin, who, in turn, gave us WWII?”

Although given the dimensions of the human tragedies that the twentieth century witnessed, one must guard against glibness, I will nevertheless confess to wondering how the mere 37 million casualties of World War I, (“the Great War, the “war to end all wars”) could be explained away had not a second world war rendered it a prelude to even greater disaster. How explain the blood bath fought between good White Christian capitalist nations without any Evil Empire to blame? Had we been spared the greater horrors that were to come just twenty-five years later into the 20th century, would the earlier war so easily been written off as an aberration or suppressed in collective memory?

Faced with a communist threat, one of the ways world capitalism found it easier to sleep at night was to allow and encourage Fascism to flourish. With thugs like Franco, Mussolini and Hitler “cleansing” their societies in Europe and supposedly modernized post-Meiji Shinto Japan in Asia using a Son god to the same end, a real “axis” of evil protected the gates against other Russian-style uprisings in the still-born nation states of the world that had never quite gotten the trick of evolving into liberal democracies. For, in spite of Marx and Engels’ belief that revolutions would first be successful in advanced England or Germany, events would prove that theirs was an ideology most effectively shaped into a weapon in largely peasant societies with still living memories of virtual enslavement. None of this precluded Western sages from asserting, by a not quite elegant twist of logic, (and it is a permanent fixture in Western historical writing), that it is Communism’s fault that Fascism came into existence. Rather than take on that disingenuous argument here, it may be more productive to focus some historical hindsight on events here in the U.S. during the period between the two world wars.

Here, in the new world, a young democracy that no foreign army had placed foot in since the War of 1812, protected from foreign enemies by two vast oceans, where its own imperial expansion had involved the facile genocide of stone age aboriginals and a new navy’s adventurism in the far offshore Pacific and sleepy Caribbean, fascism did not find so fertile a soil as in class-bound, blood-drenched and war-weary Europe. Thus, while Germany, Italy and Japan kept their working classes under control by forcing them into uniform and fully employing them in the creation of death machines on a scale the world had never seen, the U.S. had the luxury, at least for a while, of keeping a small army and pacifying its workers with a New Deal. Unlike Europe, U.S. rulers, though confronted by millions of unemployed, an increasingly angry working class, did not need to fret about a vast empire on our borders threatening from without and potentially causing havoc within. In short, the U.S. could attempt reform.

(To be continued.)