The United States emerged from World War II with such crushing preponderance of industrial power that no combination of countries matched it. Since industrial strength can prove decisive in a war where the political factor does not intervene, it seems strange at first sight that Big Business has not yet launched the war it projects on the Soviet Union. It is particularly difficult to understand if you view America as homogeneous — as a monolithic force without fissure.
However, if you look at the internal divisions, the separation of the country into opposing classes, then you can see that the colossal power of the U.S. also measures the power of the American working class and therefore the degree of its political explosiveness. The American working class, viewed politically, is like an H-Bomb lodged in the economic base that gives Wall Street its imposing world strength.
In previous articles we saw how the assertion of the will of the American people compelled Wall Street to postpone its war plans immediately following World War II when it had a monopoly on atomic weapons and when the Soviet Union lay weak and devastated after the invasion by German imperialism.
And we have seen how strenuously the capitalist class has tried since 1945 to convince the American people to go to war against the Soviet Union, even plunging the country into an undeclared war in Korea as part of the preparations — again with consequences, above all in America, that has brought about another postponement of World War III.
Besides the domestic reasons, other considerations of a weighty character have forced Wall Street to revise its timetable of war. While it has constructed an interlocking system of military alliances such as the world has never before seen, it has not yet been able to complete the consolidation of its two main bases: Japan and Western Europe.
In both areas, following World War II, American Big Business had the immediate problem of forestalling revolutions, bolstering the native capitalists and restoring the economies ruined by war. Much of this has been accomplished, thanks primarily to the helping hand of the Stalinists and the Social Democrats, but in neither place has rearmament really got under way. In fact it took from 1945 until the victory of Adenauer in the recent election to prepare the base for the rearmament of Germany, the key sector of Europe. The most crucial stage still lies ahead.
In Japan, reports indicate a considerable growth of anti-American sentiment, a desire by the Japanese capitalists to engage in trade with China, and a fear of the consequences of participating in another war. These feelings will not prove easy to overcome even under the terrible pressure of Wall Street's urgent prodding.
Meanwhile in France, the greatest general strike in the nation's history shows that this essential base for the projected war on the USSR is, from the viewpoint of Wall Street, far from secure. Indeed, drained white by the attempt to reconquer Indo-China, shaken by revolutionary fevers, the capitalist France of today scarcely resembles the kind of power Wall Street would consider placing under the additional stress of atomic war, at least for the moment.
The problem of Germany, Japan and France indicates in a dramatic way what Wall Street faces in all the countries brought into its far-reaching military alliances. None of them wants war. Even the various bourgeoisies, who are closest to America's 60 ruling families, shrink at the fearful perspective they are ordered to face. This inertia acts like sand in Wall Street's war machine.
One of the major causes impelling Wall Street to make haste in launching World War III is the development of revolutionary movements abroad. The big corporations feel toward them much as they felt toward unions in the days of the open shop — nip them in the bud. However, the experience in China, Korea, Indo-China, and in fact throughout the colonial world, shows that these elemental forces have gathered such headway that they cannot easily be stopped. They are capable of sustained, tough, exhausting war.
If the conflict were to remain on the strictly military plane, perhaps the United States in combination with the other imperialist powers could beat them down —at the risk of bringing down civilization at the same time and perhaps precipitating the use of atomic missiles that could destroy mankind.
But this counter-revolutionary war constantly risks touching off a force far more potent than military conflict. This force is revolutionary politics on a mass scale. One successful socialist revolution in any major industrial country could cancel out completely Wall Street's industrial supremacy, could in fact, through a political chain reaction, turn it against Wall Street by bringing into play the revolutionary political power of the American workers.
This possibility has long been known in theory. For example, in 1853 —exactly a century ago —Karl Marx observed: "It would be a curious spectacle, that of China sending disorder into the Western World while the Western Powers, by English, French and American war-steamers, are conveying 'order' to Shanghai, Nanking and the mouths of the Great Canal."
This concept recurs in the writings of Trotsky. In the period of the death agony of capitalism, Trotsky was of course able to give it much greater concreteness than Marx could. Here is an example, written in 1928:
[p. 117]
"... It is precisely the international strength of the United States and her irresistible expansion arising from it, that compels her to include the powder magazines of the whole world into the foundations of her structure, i.e., all the antagonisms between the East and the West, the class struggle in Old Europe, the uprisings of the colonial masses, and all wars and revolutions.
"On the one hand, this transforms North American capitalism into the basic counter-revolutionary force of the modern epoch, constantly more interested in the maintenance of 'order' in every corner of the terrestrial globe; and on the other hand, this prepares the ground for a gigantic revolutionary explosion in this already dominant and still expanding world imperialist power. The logic of world relations indicates that the time of this explosion cannot lag very far behind that of the proletarian revolution in Europe." (Third International After Lenin, p. 8)
If we bring Trotsky's metaphor up to date, we can say that Wall Street, in extending the frontier of the United States to the 38th parallel in Korea and up to the Iron Curtain in Europe, has included the atom bombs that can trigger the political H-Bomb represented by the American workers.
Faced with such possible consequences, it might seem that America's 60 ruling families would prefer to retreat, withdrawing from overseas and converting North America into an island fortress. But this is not economically feasible. American capitalism is the heart of a world-wide system. Cut it out of that system and it will soon stop beating.
Besides, to retreat would precipitate a depression that would make the 1929 crash and the stagnation of the Thirties look like a war boom by comparison. That, too, would have most unhappy results politically so far as the giant corporations are concerned, for the American workers, looking at the idle factories — shut down for lack of war orders — would not be long in deciding to put an end to the insanity of capitalism.