A NEW KIND OF WAR
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shifts to the American scene: our domestic politics have become crucial
for the whole West.
American profits are not the Golden Fleece-they are a technique
for accomplishing two purposes: to expand and perfect capital facilities,
and to distribute consumption income unequally, according to property
ownership rather than work. However one may feel about the latter,
it is probably inconsequential so long as the overall system actually
functions to produce and grow. To take away the luxuries of our
privileged groups would perhaps so dishearten them that the whole
system would flounder, as they are in control of it. Let them keep
their high-living habits, the country can afford them and they create
a style of life that entertains a whole nation of television-viewers. What
the country cannot afford is that their paper-hunger should make them
so shortsighted as to allow less-than-full production.
If
they benefit
most from a system, then they have most to gain when it hums and
most to lose if it is bested by the enemy. I don't know why they are
having so much trouble comprehending this obvious fact.
The final problem is how to engage in total social and economic
competition and still avoid totalitarianism; indeed, such avoidance is
the very purpose of the engagement. There are two ways that totalitarian–
ism could come to America. We have thus far in our public debate
concerned ourselves only with the first, the imposition of Soviet will.
The second avenue of escape from freedom is more truly possible: that
is the very real chance that with their higher organization for national
purpose, and our lack of it, the Communists will become so powerful
in their own right and so compelling a force to the rest of the world
that in a panic of late realization we will remold ourselves in their
image, in order as quickly as possible to become as powerful as they.
It will take time and imagination to learn to organize ourselves ade–
quately while providing for the highest possible measure of free par–
ticipation in bureaucratic industrialism. Our chance to organize with–
out excessive autocracy is
now.
If
we have to organize for power in
a hurry, the delicacies of freedom will be dispensed with as extra
ballast.
Let's state the final problem in a positive fashion. It would seem
that the remaining issue for the human race, now that it has decided
not to be poor any longer, is freedom. The issue is not the simple, con–
venient one of capitalism versus Communism. It is not the issue of
freedom, in the sense of lack of organization, as against slavery, mean–
ing merely a bureaucratically dominated society. Because when we--
