PAIHISAN
REVI~W'
SOl
When the New Left emerged in the sixties it was hostile to what
it regarded as Marxist sectarianism. So euphemisms were used: one was
against the "system," not capitalism or imperialism; the enemy was the
"establishment," not the ruling class; and so on. In the late sixties as
the horror of Vietnam provoked angrier protest, many returned to the
old vocabulary and it became a show of political manhood to declare
oneself "antiimperialist." Unfortunately, in the process these young
people vindicated their early fears, for they adopted a sectarian, some–
what outlived explanation of foreign policy. And the uses to which Wil–
liams has put his thesis may, I fear, encourage this militant imprecision.
In
The Contours of American History,
as I noted before, Williams
describes the Cold War and the containment policy as products of the
expansionist psychology. Specifically, the struggle with Russia was trig–
gered by fear of depression, and containment was predicted on the neo>–
Turner notion that a nation which could not expand had to break down.
Before proceeding to my main point, an important political aside.
I am disturbed that Williams, and all the other revisionist historians of
the Cold War, tend to see America as the actor and Russia as the (in–
nocent) reactor.
It
is of some moment, I believe, that the Soviet dicta–
tor in that period was, according to the persuasive testimony of N. S.
Khrushchev, in the throes of galloping paranoia or that Zhdanov im–
posed a narrow party line on all of Russian life and culture. Moreover,
given the obvious role of Soviet military power in establishing most of
the East European regimes, some of the American hostility to the move
came precisely from that anticolonialist "good side" of the national char–
acter, i.e., the same attitude which made us briefly anti-French in Indo–
china.
But more basically, I do not think that the traditional Leninist
analysis - that capitalism exports capital to colonial lands in order to
stave off domestic crisis and counter the falling rate of profit at home–
holds. And Williams, with his explanation of the Cold War as an anti–
depression maneuver, is still arguing that position. For, as I pointed out
in
Toward a Democratic Left
at some length, Lenin specifically assumed
that it was impossible for capitalism to build a welfare state. But the
period after World War II has, of course, refuted that assumption in
every one of the advanced lands. Capitalism has become neocapitalism,
i.e., planned, statified, welfarist. That has left enormous unresolved
problems but it has also repealed Lenin's law of imperialist motion.
This is hardly to say that capitalism has become philanthropic or
orients toward genuine economic development in the Third World. It
does mean that the economic exploitation of the ex-colonies has, with
the large but not decisive exception of the empire of oil, been less and
less important with each year since World War II. And the great thrust
