PARTISAN REVIEW
79
least implicitly - with the proposition that a majority cannot control or
shape a trend." He disagrees: "... if the Populist minority which stressed
domestic reform had won the active support of their fellow agricul–
turalists, then, despite industrialization and urbanization, American
s0-
ciety would be significantly different.
The fact is that, under capitalism, the economic and social power
of a minority, the owners of the means of production, is so great that
the majority, despite substantial concessions to political democracy, does
not rule. The notion that an essentially agrarian coalition could trans–
form this structure was the great dream of American radicalism in the
nineteenth century - and it played a crucial role in retarding the devel–
opment of a working-class socialist alternative by diverting the attention
of the urban masses to rural utopias. For precisely those factors which
were necessary to the growth of "industrialization and urbanization"–
the concentration of capitlal and finance, the rail network, etc., were
inimical
to
the farmers. On this point, then, I think that Williams has
been seduced by his subjects and should be more Marxist (the scholar–
ly might look up Marx's polemics against Kriege in the eighteen-forties,
one of the most subtle and prescient treatments of this issue ever
written) .
But on the more basic, and politioal, issue of imperialism I find
William Appleman Williams an unwitting, and even unwilling, Leninist.
He argues that America needed a cold war if it were to avoid a de–
pression. But why, then, did the most successful and uniquely endowed
capitalist system in history labor under such a requirement? Why did
it have to expand its market? The only answer would seem to be that
there was some structural drive in that direction. It could not possibly
be offset by expanding to other, less successful, advanced capitalisms be–
cause they would be even more driven to expansion than the United
States. Therefore, not colonialism, but the imperial struggle for markets
and raw materials in the non- or pre-capitalist world would become a
necessity for all capitalist societies. And in one form or another every
serious Marxist theory of imperialism - Kautsky's, Lenin's, Luxem–
bourg's and so on - made that point.
Williams shares the Leninist premise - the structural need for ex–
pansion - and the Leninist conclusion - the theory of imperialism–
but he does not fill in the more specific analysis. (In Lenin's version,
the decrease in the rate, and the increase in the mass, of surplus value
caused by the changes in the organic and technical composition of cap–
ital respectively made the export of surplus a structural imperative.) I
think Lenin wrong.
What has happened is not, of course, a "Swedish" variant of Amer–
ican capitalism. That is obviously an impossibility. Rather, the manifest-
