560
DAVID
T.
BAZELON
was done the way it was. Certainly we avoided a Stalinist terror;
there were no six million victims of enforced collectivization, no slave–
labor camps where millions toiled under a five-year life expectancy.
The labor gangs of Irish immigrants who built our railroads lived long
enough to leave progeny prospering throughout the nation. But now the
capital has been accumulated- there it is, the greatest collection of it the
world has ever seen. What now? One system to accumulate it, another
to use it. In each, the role of the state differs. The state facilitated its
accumulation, and now it is charged with the responsibility of pre–
siding over its proper use.
Whether we use or fail to use our productive plant, by revising
01
failing to revise the role of the state in the economy, we meet our fate
domestically. How can we possibly base our policy on the assumption
that the Russian bureaucrats will make enough convenient mistakes to
balance out our misdirection and weakness? Their rate of growth and
utilization of existing capacity are greater than ours, even if not as
good as they say.
If
the seven-year plan takes fourteen years, all that
does is to give us
time-and
what are we going to do with it? We
cannot rely on their actual errors, and certainly not on our dogmatic
ideology ensuring the inevitability of their errors-not in the face of
their actual achievements to date.
It would be wonderful, of course, if Russia eventually mellowed
into something like a consumers' democracy. The fatter and lazier they
become, the better off we will be. But what if they don't become as
fat and lazy as we are, or if they manage to take over the world
be–
fore that happens, or if it just doesn't happen at all to China?
If
one is entitled to hope that the situation will eventually ease
up for the Russian people, then shouldn't we in America also look
forward to a time when the American ruling system, based on old
fortunes and new corporations, will also ease up on its prerogatives
and restrictions and come to deal with our abundance more reasonably?
What really would they lose by it? Just what the Russian rulers would
lose by distributing greater benefits to their masses-power that serves
no useful function, power for its own sake.
The most significant show of strength we could make to the Rus–
sians would be just this full and purposeful use of our productiv6
capacity, including an increased rate of growth. It would change the
entire atmosphere in the negotiation chambers.
Our failure to do so is
the primary American weakness on which the Comm'Unists are counting.
With this issue, the imperatives of the cold war have interlocked with
the necessities of domestic development, and the world political center
