558
DAVID
T.
BAZELON
about everything. In America, to view the power system comparably,
you would have to talk about the state
and
corporate and other property–
power over the economic machine. Weare freer than the Russians
to the extent that our two-party system actually functions to allow
democratic control over the state. We are not freer than they when we
lack democratic control (either directly or through the intermediary of
the state) over the economic power centers. On balance, we are much
freer, and naturally we are nicer people. But we are also weaker, we
have not yet engaged fully in the coming struggle for a higher level
of organization.
It
is the quantum of freedom achieved at that higher
level that is decisive, not the freedom enjoyed by virtue of lack of
organization, because the latter is not durable.
Not since the feudal barons seized and held property by their
own force has there been perfect privacy of property. The bourgeois
system and the national state were concurrent developments, and neces–
sarily so; the national state was required in order to make bourgeois
property tenure feasible, to allow markets to happen, and to ensure the
free exploitation of labor. The state also presided over the seizure
of natural resources. All this indicates the central role of the state
even under genuinely free-enterprise capitalism. The whole point about
the state is that its role in our economy is and must be greater by far–
in kind, not merely degree-than it was even when the continent was
given away.
Now if, in order to fight this new kind of war, we have to
abandon certain features of capitalist property or free enterprise ideology,
then we either do so or we lose. The Second World War could not
have been fought without price controls, material priorities, and the
more or less gently forced cooperation of capital and labor. To the
extent that the "free enterprise" system insists that there shall be no
interference with its blessed workings, then it is still one of the more
dangerous myths loose in the world. On that basis, we would have lost
World War II. On that basis, we might as well give up now-Russia
will walk all over us.
The unwritten rule in current American discourse that no compari–
sons of similarity may be indulged-that the existence of democracy
here and totalitarianism there prescribes only black-and-white appraisals
-is an intolerable intellectual condition for us.
We cannot save the
difference unless we define it precisely.
The beginning is to admit that
our democracy is not perfect, and neither is their totalitarianism. There
are profound forces at work on both of us that start outside, go deeper,
