706
R. H. S. CROSSMAN
fashioned nationalization is the prerequisite for the kind of national
planning necessary to achieve a balanced economic development.
Which of these assumptions, the Western or the Eastern, is
justified by the facts? The best judges, surely, are the leaders of the
uncommitted peoples. Though their preference may be for the
Western way of life, they have little doubt who, in the last decade,
has been winning the peaceful competition between East and West.
They can see that, in a Western democracy today, life
is
far freer
and far more comfortable for far more of the citizens than ever
before in the history of the human race. Given a free choice'between
living in capitalist West Germany or Communist East Germany, for
example, a majority of Germans opt for the West. Judged
in
terms
of that individualistic "pursuit of happiness" which the American
founding fathers laid down as the aim of their Republic, Com–
munism is still an inferior way of life compared to that of the
Af–
fluent Societies of the West. But this does not alter the fact that,
in
terms of military power, of industrial develcpment, of technological
advance, of mass literacy and, eventually, of mass consumption too,
the planned Socialist economy, as exemplified in the Communist
States,
is
proving its capacity to outpace and overtake the wealthy
and comfortable Western economies.
What strikes me about the
Revisionists is their parochialism. Their eyes are so firmly fixed on
the mood of the British electorate, the tastes of Western consumers
and the problems of the North Atlantic area that they have scarcely
noticed that the enormous lead held by the West in 1945 is being
narrowed by two factors. The first of these factors is the contrast
between the economic use of resources possible under the planned
economies of the East and the wastefulness of the artificially in–
duced obsolescence which is the motive force of our Affluent Socie–
ties of the West. The second reason why the Communists are over–
hauling us is the fact that whereas, in their planned economies, in–
flation can be brought under control by planned income distribu–
tion, it is still the scourge of our managed Western capitalism.
Reading the writings of the Revisionists, however, one would
hardly be aware that the combination of these two factors
has
al–
ready set in motion a historic shift in the balance of world power
which may well, before the 1960's are out, have demonstrated
in
the
