122
PARTISAN REVIEW
States by the business classes and the free market. Here Arnold marshals
his arguments with telling force.
If
the undeveloped areas are to be kept in the non-Communist
sector, their economic development must have a socially revolutionary
content and a conscious political direction. The impact of technology
and industrial development disrupts and disorients the petrified social
systems of backward societies. There is neither time nor circumstances
favorable to the slow accumulation of capital and the gradual emergence
of a native entrepreneurial class. Outside technical assistance, piece-meal
private investment, and sporadic forcign loans and grants accelerate the
industrializing process but in a haphazard manner and with no clear view
to the social effects.
The Soviet Union, by contrast, has dcmonstrated that total planning
can speed up the process markedly in a backward society and at the same
time provide a new sense of "social integration." There are now elites of
intellectuals and technicians in every undeveloped country eager to
emulate this example and impose "revolutions from above."
The Western powers have thus far responded to this challenge
timidly and negatively with vague talk of development and technical
aid.
Implicit in this kind of talk there is an assumption that, given the
requisite economic impetus, the social milieu will look after itself. But
this is not so; taken by themselves, market forces do not promote modem
capitalism, any more than they help to strengthen liberal democracy
(or democratic socialism for that matter) ....
Where "bourgeois society" has not prepared the ground for it, the
industrialization drive tends. . .to accentuate the social tensions of a
disintegrating precapitalist milieu.
Here we touch the heart of the matter in all considerations of
coping with the undeveloped countries of the free world. Capitalism in
its nascent form intensifies the gaps between classes, the infusion of
outside capital breeds inflation, the early stages of industrialization re–
quire sacrifices of consumer needs in favor of capital investment, ac–
quaintance with higher material standards arouses consumer demands
that cannot be met and frequently encourages population growth in
already overpopulated countries. This politically explosive complex of
pressures is more likely to end in totalitarian tyranny than in the attain–
ment of wider freedom.
In the course of a brilliant exposition of the interconnections be–
tween social revolution and nationalism, between the peasantry and the
professional revolutionaries, Arnold observes that in the West "there is
