A NEW KIND OF WAR
555
direct private investment abroad goes overwhelmingly to Canada,
Western Europe, and some oil and mineral countries in South America,
especially Venezuela. The character of our capital outflow has the
effect of extending the period of primitive accumulation in the under–
developed world-and opening the door for Soviet penetration through
more direct and useful offerings.
The baronial structure of American business, along with the system
of dual government in which the Federal power is always at last less
than adequate, is our great weakness in competing with the Soviets in
the newly avid areas. Uncoerced, how much institutional and profit
interest is a big corporation operating in a foreign nation prepared to
sacrifice to the national interest? Just about none- unless the Federal
government underwrites the whole endeavor, which means the corpora–
tion looks to Washington instead of, say, the Indonesian masses for its
profit.
It
is indicative of the
domestic
character of our crisis that
American industry will have to learn how to work more efficiently
with itself and with the government in order to accomplish effective
competitive export of technology-and in so doing may even learn
how to do the same thing back home. Wouldn't that be nice?
While there are obvious political differences between the two
countries, the basic social power in each has much in common:
it
lies in the managerial control of the economy. The managerial class
in Russia, whether in or out of the Communist Party, has considerable
independent significance. The social power of the American managers
is not to be doubted. They have had less official political power than
their Russian counterparts chiefly because they still believe in absolute
limitations on the role of the state.
Of course we much prefer our awareness of the differences be–
tween ourselves and the ·Russians. So the striking similarities flowing
from the commitment to managerialism are little remarked, and in both
Russia and America managerial power is justified by irrelevant no–
tions of property. In Russia they say the people own everything through
the state, and here they say the people own everything through the
private corporation. In each case, the ownership of the people is
merely technical and in fact they own nothing because they control
nothing.
We have too high an opinion of ourselves, and too Iowan opinion
of our enemies, just as if this were an old-style national conflict. But
the cold war is not a conventional contest fought over national bounda–
ries-or, in fact, from behind national boundaries. It
is
total social
