PARTISAN REVIEW
77
"did not
need
a cold war as the only way of avoiding a depression"
(p.504).
The Third World is not made up of ex-oolonies only, and hence
any balance sheet of exploitation based on that partial accounting does
not speak to either of the issues involved: 1) American imperialism is
based on market expansion, not colonialism, and the record of America's
economic relationship with the Third World disproves Harrington; and
2) capitalism must be judged against its theoretical and moral promise
to improve
all
elements in the marketplace. Surely by now we all have
read Gunnar Myrdal, Thomas Balogh and Harry Magdoff. And granted
the corporations concentrate more in Europe than elsewhere: that does
not refute the fact of the American empire. It would seem to pose a
problem only for those who are hung-up on Lenin. The issue is the
nature and dynamic of the American empire,
not
the validity of Lenin's
thesis.
For similar reasons, I am very uneasy with Harrington's statement
about America not needing a cold war to avoid a depression.
If
he is
speaking theoretically, then I agree with him. One can theorize that
America could have become a continental-sized Sweden (and wish it
had), though to build that model we would have to begin changing
reality along about 1865. But if he means that American capitalism
as
it existed
did not need a cold war, then we part company. Just as we
do over his assertion that American capitalism (or neo-capitalism)
has
built
a welfare state. I cannot, for example, agree that America has a
welfare state in any meaningful sense when the benefits are so intimately
related to the dynamics of imperial expansion - to say nothing of the
limited and uneven nature of the welfare (here I would begin by citing
Harrington's magnificent book on poverty). It would be closer to the
truth, meaning reality, to say that America's twentieth-century metro–
politan rulers had reluctantly accepted enough of the concept and mea–
sures of a welfare state to muddle through the patchwork creation of a
survival
state.
But the point in connection with foreign policy is that Harrington's
remark about not needing a cold war is like arguing that the late nine–
teenth-eentury agriculturalists did not need market expansion leading to
imperialism to solve their problems. Agreed. Then the question be–
comes, if America did not need the cold war, why did it opt for that
choice? Of course there are reasons why the United States did not go
another route. But we revisionists are concerned with why it did. And
I do not answer that question solely in terms of the fear of a depression.
I have written about the euphoric sense of power generated by a mono-
