POLITICAL NOTES
479
for growth as has Chiang's dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.* A revolution
today, as Roosevelt and Churchill realize, is likely to take much more
drastic forms, whether for good or ill, than Willkie reckons on.
If
it
were just a question of the United States and the Eastern nations, the
development Willkie and Luce hope for might he theoretically possible.
But there are also Russia, England and the European continent to be
considered, decisive areas in which some kind of collectivism, whether
socialist or totalitarian, seems the most likely perspective. As Hitler's
pre·war exploits on the world market showed, a total economy forces
other nations to imitate it or to lose out; and Luce-Willkie and their
Republican friends presumably do not intend to lose out.
NAZI
ECONOMICS
AGAIN
In the last issue, C. Wright Mills and J.
R.
Stanwell, in
reviewing Neumann's
Beherrwth
and Sweezy's
The Struc–
ture of the Nazi Economy,
argued that these books pre–
sent data disproving the contention advanced previously
in PARTISAN REVIEW by James Burnham and myself that Germany is
no longer a capitalist nation, hut must he described by some such term as
"bureaucratic collectivism." I should like here to submit those hooks to
a more critical scrutiny than Mills and Stanwell did.
The points which Miss Sweezy establishes in her book-with admir–
able conscientiousness, I agree with Stanwell-neither prove nor disprove
that Germany is still capitalist. The Nazis have not extended nationaliza–
tion because it is more opportune for them to maintain private property
forms
while giving them a non-capitalist
content
through State control;
the famous "reprivatization" of former State enterprises took place
mostly in 1936 and later, i.e., after the Nazis had consolidated their grip
on the economy, and thus shows precisely this indifference to the formal
aspect of property relations. That wages have been held down and that
inequalities of income have increased under the Nazis proves that this is
an exploitative society, not that it is capitalist. That big business has
grown bigger at the expense of little business merely indicates (1) that
the war economy can be more efficiently organized that way, and (2) that
the big bourgeoisie are the favored allies of the Nazis. That the petty
bourgeoisie (artisans, shopkeepers, white collar workers) have been
crushed and largely proletarianized, this shows the demagogic nature of
Hitler's "middle-class revolution" but not the survival of capitalist rela-
• The same dangers beset Willkie's domestic liberalism. He has spoken out much
more boldly for the Negroes, for example, than Roosevelt ever did in his most liberal
period. Possibly he recognizes that the South is a colonial area within our own
borders, whose population is kept in poverty and whose resources are only partially
developed by a comprador native ruling class acting for absentee Northern capital.
Freeing the Negro from this imperialistic exploitation is the first step towards relaxing
the stifling grip of absentee capital. But the "Negro Question" is at least as explosive
today as the "Indian Question," and Willkie's policy is daringly adventuristic here
too. Roosevelt cautiously remains silent on both issues, perhaps because he is a more
responsible bourgeois politician than Willkie, perhaps simply-a factor always to be
taken into account- because he is in office while Willkie is not.
