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ARTHUR SCHLESINGER. JR.
ly imperfect and outrageously class-dominated welfare states which ap–
peared in the Western world after World War II did, for all their
inadequacies, raise the level of mass consumption and provide outlets
for the investments of surplus value undreamed of in the Leninist
philosophy. It
is
for that reason that investment and exploitation in the
Third World have been of declining significance for advanced capital–
ism for a generation (the imperial exception of oil being understood).
I do not believe then that the American welfare state is dependent
upon the dynamics of imperial expansion. Its greatest development,
after all, took place after that most famous of markets, China, was
taken out of the capitalist sphere. The source of the American welfare
state is basically the unprecedented development of capitalist technology
in this country, Europe and Japan. That metropolitan elite, alas, has
been more resourceful than the left had anticipated.
It
is also choking
to death on unplanned affluence and provoking global violence, but that
is another story.
And finally, the Williams thesis is pessimistic.
If
American is struc–
turally fated to global wrongdoing then only a mass movement of the
radical left capable of basic transformation of domestic power relation–
ships can make decent international departures ra possibility. Since such
a development is not exactly imminent, the overly rigid analysis of im–
perialism logically leads to quietism. It is to William Appleman Williams's
credit that he rejects the implications of his own position rand insists
upon "the hard, dedicated and effective work involved in building a
social movement." It is because I share that conviction with him that
I hope my criticisms have been not simply trenchant but fraternal
as well.
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
Professor Williams begins that part of his rejoinder addressed
to me with a ringing denial of my suggestion that he regards imperial–
ism as totally reducible to economic motives. Much of the rest of
his
rejoinder constitutes, so far as I can see, a rather methodical, if un–
conscious, verification of my point. His abiding claim, implicit in all
his books and explicit in this rejoinder,
is
that political and strategic
motives - i.e., the desire to secure national power as something dif–
ferent from the desire to enlarge corporate profits - really have no in–
dependent existence; that they are, as Pareto might have said, deriva–
tions rather than residues. Professor Williams thus terms the invocation
of political and strategic grounds for action as, most of the time, "a
rationalization . . . a disguise or mask for other motives." In fact, he
